D&D 5E Separating challenge and complexity in monster design

[ProgBard]

What were your conclusions based on your group's experience steamrolling Big Bad Evil Guys? And what level range / player experience level? I'm curious if by "calibrate" do you mainly mean boosting the defenses/hit points?

Answers, plus some assorted thoughts:

1. I run for a big table - seven, sometimes eight players: valor bard, paladin, battle master, arcane trickster, bear totem barbarian, moon druid, war cleric, and sometimes dragon sorcerer. No one will be shocked by now to learn that 5e's challenge math wanders well off the map with big parties.
2. Most are first-time players, but one is by admission a recovering powergamer. They were 8th level in their last big boss-fight; they're 9th level now, and gearing up for their next one.
3. I don't really adjust AC/HP, though I will use higher-CR statblocks for at least some of the minions in a battle. I never use solo monsters - always boss + minions, or several different types of creatures working together. The last fight where they really started to get worried about burning resources was a few levels back (5? 6? Now I don't recall), and it involved an 18-level warlock, a flesh golem, a mi-go, and two vampire spawn. It worked in part because they had to divide resources to pursue several goals: while the warlock and her minions were trying to kill the party, the mi-go was trying to fly off with a powerful Maguffin that they needed to prevent getting into the hands of the other bad guys, and the fight was going on in two levels of a tower, making it difficult to coordinate efforts.
4. The last big fight was against a ridiculous number of opponents, but lots of those were mooks (1 HD cultists) - they like the feeling of mowing down lots of foes, and I'm inclined to accomodate (especially since even a mook can get in a hit once in a while). There was also another high-level warlock, a necromancer, an ogre, a Far Realm horror (basically a giant octopus with a black dragon wyrmling's breath weapon), and assorted cult fanatics, kuo-toa, thugs, and pactsworn champions (veterans with a couple of warlock spells). I threw in some of those (and increased the numbers) when the party decided they were going to use the silver horn of Valhalla they'd just found and summoned almost the maximum number of berserkers. Having that support made a huge difference, obviously, but the players also made good strategic choices, like sending in the barbarian to take out the necromancer quick, who got cornered and taken down before she could start raising some of the fallen cultists as zombies.
5. (The good news - for a diabolical DM's version of good, anyway - is that the next fight's going to be tougher, and the horn of Valhalla won't have had enough time to reset. I had assumed they were going to save it for this fight, but they didn't, so that's not a resource that's available to them now. It will be interesting to see how much they wish they'd kept it in reserve when this plays out.)
6. It may be relevant to know that I don't try and design every fight as a drain on the PCs' resources - some are there because it's fun to have a battle as part of the evening's play. I still rely on pretty tough monsters for those, sometimes with minions as well. Three or four CR 5-6 creatures are a good choice for this kind of thing; I think if I wanted to make the fight more challenging, I'd increase the number of foes, not hit dice or AC.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=6803722]ProgBard[/MENTION] Thanks for your thorough answer. I'm always curious to hear about how folks' tabletop experiences line up with expected vs. actual challenge. So you don't change the monster stat blocks, so much as you change how you design the encounters (more monsters of higher CR), is that right? Has changing things at the encounter design level been sufficient to challenge your large party?

 

[pemerton]

I don't think it's any stunning revelation that the game's success depends greatly (but not solely) on the skill of the DM. The DMG strongly implies this if not outright states it. The DM is expected to improvise and to know and use the tools provided (the rules) as necessary to pursue and achieve the goals of play. No DM is going to get it exactly "right" every time - that is an unrealistic expectation. We learn by doing - and making mistakes - and hopefully over time the DM's rulings become fair and consistent according to that particular group's standards. If we obsess over getting "balance" right, we risk letting the "perfect" be the enemy of the "good enough for now."

OK, but none of this is an argument against the potential utility of guidelines, which at least would reduce or remove some of the need to reverse-engineer the system in real time!

 

[iserith]

OK, but none of this is an argument against the potential utility of guidelines, which at least would reduce or remove some of the need to reverse-engineer the system in real time!

I'm not arguing against guidelines. I'm content with the guidelines we already have. When you run D&D 5e, what sorts of improvised actions are your players doing that give you trouble?

 

[pemerton]

I'm not arguing against guidelines. I'm content with the guidelines we already have. When you run D&D 5e, what sorts of improvised actions are your players doing that give you trouble?

As I think you know, I don't 5e. I was respondng to [MENTION=6803722]ProgBard[/MENTION]'s comment (posts 41, 43) that guidelines would help (and [MENTION=6804638]NotActuallyTim[/MENTION] has said similar things). I thought you had denied that (eg post 39). If I misunderstood you in that respect, I apologise.

 

[Manbearcat]

The game goes to a lot of effort to establish: an action economy (eg some monsters have multi-attack; some clases have extra attack; fighters get action surge; etc); different allocations of damage (a fighter can choose damage as a fighting style, or AC, or "to hit" with ranged weapons; using a shield to boost AC takes higher-damage weapons off the table; spells have a range of rather arcane damage expressions which presumably were put there for a reason; etc); different trade-offs for condition infliction (eg the basic shove attack precludes dealing damage; monks have to use a limited resource to stun foes; etc).

<snip>

Are players expected to speak simply in character, describing their actions in "naturalistic" terms? I think the rulebook suggests so. Personally I feel this can give magic-users something of an advantage, as they can "naturalistically" talk about using their spells, which give them discrete and pre-established packets of effect defined in mechanical as well as "naturalistic" terms; whereas the martial types have to declare mechancially "blind", as it were, and then find out how it will be adjudicated.

At many tables I think this also generates some pressure on players of martial PCs to shift the focus of play to a domain where they can wheel out their own pre-determined packets of effects, namely, combat (with its action economy, damage rules, etc). Like "I cast a Charm Person spell", "I attack with my sword" is not just a contribution to the basic conversation of the game but also a mechanically significant move that invokes its own distinct resolution procedures over which the player has at least a modicum of control, via PC build plus the details of the action declaration.

Putting these parts of those two posts together because they're pretty central to the point. I think the martial-types having to declare "naturalitstic moves" from a mechanically "blind" position is a particularly astute observation. The Wizard's moves are broad, "face-up" moves whereby the codified mechanics and the "naturalistic" terminology are integrated. If a martial-type is trying something unorthodox, they can infer neither the breadth nor the inherent odds of their potential moves because there is nothing "face-up", there is no integration of codified mechanics and "naturalistic" terminology... because neither exist...until the moment of adjudication.

To put it in Texas Hold 'Em terms, both the Wizard and the martial-type have their 2 hole cards. However, when "the flop" (3 community cards) is placed on the table, the spellcaster is looking at their number/suit before calling/checking/raising/folding, while the martial-type has to declare his move blind.

5e is not Dungeon World. It has way too much steeped system machinery (both in precision specifically and in breadth generally) that pushes back against a Dungeon World conception. It has way too little in the way of focused GMing tenets (this is purposeful). It can be played neither coherently nor functionally as Dungeon World, yet I see a GMing inclination on these boards toward trying to sort of adlib through the (intentional) open-endedness of 5e's adjudication procedures and its comparatively heavy machinery and force a sort of sloppy Dungeon World experience (trading GM force for Dungeon World's agenda, principles, and GM moves) out of 5e.

Consequently, when a 5e martial-type player wants to declare something unorthodox, they must orient themselves toward system machinery to some degree (more than a little). Action economy matters. Odds of success matter. The mechanical artifact component of breadth/scope of outcome afforded by success matters. Opportunity cost matters (significantly when it comes to situations that are likely to be over in the scope of a few moves from any given participant).

In Dungeon World, a player of a martial character and the GM trivially focus on the fiction (as the game was devised to do so) when describing and adjudicating moves. There is no action economy. There is no intersection of precision and abstraction. There are no concerns for downstream 2nd and 3rd order mechanical interactions. There are no real concerns for intra-party balance or challenge-based balance. There is a simple procedure for both GM and player and simple, abstract (yet robust) resolution mechanics to follow. The same procedure applies for a Wizard or another spellcaster as it does for a martial character.

System-wise, 5e pushes toward a rulings-not-rules, old-school-world-explorationey, hex-crawl...with some loosely integrated indie-tech. Product-wise, WotC pushes big setting APs out as product for GMs who want to run a group of players through a metaplot. That net seems to catch the Pathfinder players, the AD&D 2e setting tourism players, and the OSR (which is what I'm fairly sure is the combination they were looking for...and new players by proxie of them).

 

[ProgBard]

@ProgBard Thanks for your thorough answer. I'm always curious to hear about how folks' tabletop experiences line up with expected vs. actual challenge. So you don't change the monster stat blocks, so much as you change how you design the encounters (more monsters of higher CR), is that right? Has changing things at the encounter design level been sufficient to challenge your large party?

Most welcome! To be clear, I tinker with stablocks all the time, either because I want a new monster and it's easier to modify an existing one than start from scratch (my penanggalan is essentially a nasty, souped-up vampire spawn) or because I want a specific sort of variant - one which may end up with higher AC and HP as part of its concept, but not exactly as ends in themselves. So for e.g., I wouldn't normally think along the lines of "I'd like ogres here, but they'll be double-HD ogres with shields," but I might decide I want to use an Ogre Champion or an Ogre Boss that is, among other things, a bit tougher on a couple of axes. That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but, well, the distinction matters to me.

I would say that I've been pleased with the results of using encounter design as a challenge factor more than direct monster redesign. I'm still learning (and with the party rising in level, it's a moving target!), but I'm not getting the sense that anyone is feeling either bored or overwhelmed, so it's all to the good so far. The best thing I've learned so far is that I haven't pushed them to breaking yet, so I can still be a little tougher on them than I think I can, which is useful to know.

Two other things bear mentioning:

1. I'm not terribly dligent about the math of encounter design, so all of this is me working in a kind of test-and-see mode. I'm also not really that interested in the math of "balanced" encounters, because really what I want is for the party to be running into thematically-appropriate foes. If I had early levels to do over again, I'd lean on this idea more and be less afraid to throw truly nasty foes at them in service of the idea that the wolrd is not calibrated for your level; some threats you're going to have to learn to run away from. I think, if anything, that would've made the higher levels, where they're crushing their foes beneath their armored heels, more satisfying.

2. We use a battle mat (gridless) and minis, and there's something to be said for the psychological effect of seeing thirty enemy pawns laid out, even if the result is going to be the PCs mowing a lot of them down like paper. For one, just the shear "Dear gods, what did we get ourselves into?" of that right before the initiative rolls is going to carry the frisson of challenge all on its own; for another, as long as the players don't know exactly what everything on the board can do, they're going to be dealing with that uncertainty as they go into the fight. (It helps that I don't think any of my gang are read-the-MM types, but even if they were, my aforementioned tinkering would likely keep everyone off-balance in their expectations, knowing that there's no guarantee that, say, all these cultists are the same.) My point being, I think challenge in this context is a headology thing as much as it's a math thing. The thing they take away from the session is not, "Oh, that fight was too easy," it's, "You shoulda seen all the bad guys we had to kill."