D&D 5E (Poll) Combat Difficulty

[FormerlyHemlock]

Since I hardly get to play I like to be challenged, but as a DM I like to challenge my players. 5e has a great feel to it when you are involved in a challenging combat or situation. If I make fights too hard I tend to give the players a leg up to even the playing field, they just have to be willing to take advantage of it.

Welcome to Enworld!

 

[Obryn]

The balance point should be at "challenging." Then you can scale up or down for harder and easier at will.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The balance point should be at "challenging." Then you can scale up or down for harder and easier at will.

That's kind of what the poll was trying to figure out. When you have a challenging encounter, where does it turn out to have been on the difficulty scale?

 

[iserith]

Challenge and difficulty are different things. So while I want every scene of conflict to be a challenge (something we can win or lose), I have no particular preference for the difficulty as long as the challenge is fun, exciting, and memorable and designed well enough for our choices to have a bonafide impact on the challenge's difficulty and outcome.

 

[TarionzCousin]

[-]Insanely hard. At least one PC should die during every combat. I will fudge rolls to kill a character whenever I feel like it.[/-]

Whoops! My players: IGNORE THIS POST! Nothing to see here. Move along.

 

[The_Gneech]

The session I ran last night was specifically crafted to push the bounds of what the party could do, being essentially a series of "difficult" to "deadly" encounters (with no single creature with a CR higher than the party level, but lots of creatures generally), and I learned some very interesting things from it.

First of all, was that the fights got grindy, grindy, grindy. After about five or six turns? Everyone's like "Sheesh, can't either the monsters or us just DIE already?" 5E characters, once they're out of the 1-2 level range, are surprisingly hard to kill, so if you put them up against something equally hard to kill, you end up with both sides just pounding away to no effect.

Second, the 15 minute workday was back. Each encounter was followed by a short rest, and the third encounter made them stop for a long rest. They were out of spells, out of class abilities, out of hit dice, and frankly just fed up, and wouldn't press forward for anything.

In short, it felt like being in the sloggy parts of 3.x/PF again. I wasn't terribly surprised, having read The Alexandrian's history of the 15 minute workday problem, but it was still interesting to see it in action.

So yeah, I won't be doing that again, or at least, not as an extended series of encounters. A big fight like that as an occasional set piece I can see being cool, but for the "bread and butter" encounters, the difficulty needs to skew closer to the 5E standard or you end up fighting all night and feeling like you aren't getting anywhere.

-The Gneech

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

*Deleting--extraneous to subject at hand*

 

[miniaturehoarder]

Would you rather fight 11 hobgoblins (Easy), 16 hobgoblins (Medium), 24 hobgoblins (Hard), or 36+ hobgoblins (Deadly)?

The issue here is the DMG multipliers are only useful in enormous white room situations where all the foes are on the PCs from round one. In any situation where PC have any control over how many foes can attack them, the Encounter multiplier numbers become inaccurate, vastly so when portions of the foes can't even access the PCs in a given round. Add one more check in favor of the PCs if the Striking Cover DMG variant is used as PCs ACs will be high enough over many horde type foes to make it as likely for foes with ranged fire to hit their allies providing cover rather than the PCs.

 

[miniaturehoarder]

The session I ran last night was specifically crafted to push the bounds of what the party could do, being essentially a series of "difficult" to "deadly" encounters (with no single creature with a CR higher than the party level, but lots of creatures generally),

Did the players make any efforts to turn the foes against one another? One of the best things about using numerous and mixed amounts of lesser foes is it encourages players to try and mitigate their foe's numeric advantage rather than just kill everything.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The issue here is the DMG multipliers are only useful in enormous white room situations where all the foes are on the PCs from round one. In any situation where PC have any control over how many foes can attack them, the Encounter multiplier numbers become inaccurate, vastly so when portions of the foes can't even access the PCs in a given round. Add one more check in favor of the PCs if the Striking Cover DMG variant is used as PCs ACs will be high enough over many horde type foes to make it as likely for foes with ranged fire to hit their allies providing cover rather than the PCs.

Yes, which is why ranged foes are an order of magnitude more deadly than melee foes (not "officially", but in reality), and why Deadly encounters on paper often turn out to be quite easy when you run them, unless you have deliberately built them to be deadly in actuality as well as on paper.

It's not just the Encounter multipliers though, it's the whole encounter balancing system. The math behind encounter balancing assumes that the enemy is in full contact with the PCs for the whole time, doing full DPR (modified by to-hit) every round. It ignores stealth/surprise, it explicitly ignores distance and mobility (adding or removing teleportation changes CR not a whit!), it neglects the players' ability to exploit monsters' RP foibles (illusions, or just baiting the enemy into attacking the tankiest fighter by making him by the closest guy to the zombies). All these things are not necessarily bad things, because it's better to have 5E designed to challenge newbies than to tactically murder them over and over until they get the hang of things.

Or in other words, 5E encounter guidelines will give you a ceiling on maximum Deadliness if everything tactical falls apart and you wind up in extended melee with everything simultaneously, but it doesn't give you a floor.