D&D 5E (2024) NPCs, and the poverty of the core books

[Remathilis]

If that's truly the case then perhaps the game has designed PCs to be too powerful relative to their surroundings - and also relative to themselves.

Interesting exercise next time someone can't make a session: have the other players take their characters and (completely outside whatever campaign you're running - this is just for kicks) have 'em throw down against each other in an arena-style setup. See how long the combats last. Maybe it'll give you some insight as to how to fix their glass-cannon-ness without just adding more hit points...or maybe they'll be more resilient than you expect.

Tried it. The Squishies didn't make it one round and the fighters duked it out for a couple. The barbarian won because of high HP and rage resistance.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If that's truly the case then perhaps the game has designed PCs to be too powerful relative to their surroundings - and also relative to themselves.

Interesting exercise next time someone can't make a session: have the other players take their characters and (completely outside whatever campaign you're running - this is just for kicks) have 'em throw down against each other in an arena-style setup. See how long the combats last. Maybe it'll give you some insight as to how to fix their glass-cannon-ness without just adding more hit points...or maybe they'll be more resilient than you expect.

I spent about six months doing that with the 4e rules, after we bounced off it for regular play.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You get the opposite effect: rocket tag where the fight is settled by the initiative die because the antagonist has enough damage to drop a PC in one round, but they themselves are dropped in one. The flight becomes win initiative and nova.

If you want every fight to be a samurai iaijutsu duel or a Wild West shootout at high noon, then be my guest.

Are you doing side initiative? What one PC has the damage to drop another PC reliably in one round, and why do they keep always going first?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Tried it. The Squishies didn't make it one round and the fighters duked it out for a couple. The barbarian won because of high HP and rage resistance.

I've always had a hard time threatening barbarians in combat. Magic damage just doesn't cut it, and they're resistant to everything else.

 

[Minigiant]

Perhaps it would be actually challenging and interesting compared to punching boring HP sacks that cannot actually harm you.

Nah. It's way to predictable.

If that's truly the case then perhaps the game has designed PCs to be too powerful relative to their surroundings - and also relative to themselves

That's all I've been saying.

Think think of it as on the monster end.

In 5e the PCS play and run exactly how you don't want a DM to run a monster nor build an encounter.

 

[ECMO3]

You get the opposite effect: rocket tag where the fight is settled by the initiative die because the antagonist has enough damage to drop a PC in one round, but they themselves are dropped in one. The flight becomes win initiative and nova.

If you want every fight to be a samurai iaijutsu duel or a Wild West shootout at high noon, then be my guest.

But a dropped PC never stays dropped. Healing Word and bonus action poitons of healing basically ensures that even if they don't have things like Relentless Endurance, Death Ward or Contingency.

Poor initiative is easily overcome unless you can down ALL of the PCs in one round

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Are you doing side initiative? What one PC has the damage to drop another PC reliably in one round, and why do they keep always going first?

Right. This idea simply seems not to be based on facts.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure they can be. But as shown by every single WotC adventure those are made with the foe-creation rules, not with the player-facing character building rules.

We know for a fact that PC classes are not an in-world occurrence. Because there are named NPCs in the monster books that don't follow the PC rules but have the same name. First example is Druid in the MM, 4th level casting and no wildshape. The words exist, you can call someone a fighter just as easily as calling them a soldier or a savage, but the classes themselves are not in-game constructs. So another adventuring party has no need to us PC-facing rules. They do as every NPC every published by WotC for 5e does, use the monster creation rules and give them some iconic abilities.

That NPC druid isn't the druid class. It's like the Acolyte background. They are priests and clerics are priests. The "druid" NPC isn't the PC class with a different mechanical representation. It's just something else that is using the same name, like if my paladin called himself a fighter. Is he a fighter class? No, he's a paladin. Is he a fighter? Yes, he fights and calls himself that. That doesn't mean that the fighter class and my paladin are different mechanical representations of the fighter class.

 

[Maxperson]

No.

If the mechanics are not representing portions of the fiction, then they have failed at their job. If you have different mechanical representations for the same fictional circumstance, the game has failed at its job. The game should be coherent, not be fragmented into different ways to represent one thing in the game.

 

[Chaltab]

If the mechanics are not representing portions of the fiction, then they have failed at their job. If you have different mechanical representations for the same fictional circumstance, the game has failed at its job. The game should be coherent, not be fragmented into different ways to represent one thing in the game.

But why tho?

This is where you're losing me. Mechanical consistency is useful, but not at the expense of playability. Representing an NPC the same way as you would a PC of the same level leads to multi-page statistics full of mostly-useless information that isn't going to even be relevant when representing a creature that dies in two or three rounds.