D&D 5E So, I figured out why 5e's encounter building is broken(and how to fix it)

[Oofta]

It worked incredibly well in 4e. 5e isn't so massively different that it should result in guaranteed failure to do a similar but not identical thing... which is exactly what the OP is proposing.

PCs in 4E were a lot more homogenous and predictable in my experience. Even then, the rules weren't great; solos never really worked for example. A level 21 party should have at least broken out in a sweat when they took on Lollth instead of it being a cakewalk. But if you followed the standards you knew exactly how much magic people had when and so on.

 

[FallenRX]

I wish there was more official advice on how to judge encounters for bigger parties.

My face to face group has 6 players, so the baseline is not quite where you want it to be.

For my four PC online group three of them have pet type things for action economy purposes which seems to throw off a bunch of calculations.

You can pretty much just use the rules in the DMG,
just change the encounter modifier to 0.75 if the party outnumbers the monsters by 1 or 2
0.5 if the party outnumbers them 4 or more.(This part is actually in the DMG)
It gives you pretty decent results about how difficult an encounter is for the party. That is pretty accurate.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

PCs in 4E were a lot more homogenous and predictable in my experience. Even then, the rules weren't great; solos never really worked for example. A level 21 party should have at least broken out in a sweat when they took on Lollth instead of it being a cakewalk. But if you followed the standards you knew exactly how much magic people had when and so on.

Again--5e isn't THAT much different. Yes, a Fighter "can now do damage"* etc., but the vast, vast, vast majority of characters are going to fall within reasonably predictable ranges. Because most people aren't interested in weirdo tricksy "I literally cannot do damage ever" builds or the like. Things would be looser, but they wouldn't be useless.

And I think you seriously overplay the problems with solos. They were harder to balance than other things, yes. The same is true of 5e--to the point that they had to kludge in getting several "nope, that didn't happen" points (Legendary Resistance) and other such things. If problem A is present either way, but problems B-F all get addressed in one way or another by method 1 and not by method 2...well, you do the math.

*They never couldn't. Roles as straightjackets has always been a pernicious myth. But people cling to it nonetheless, so some lip service to their false beliefs is warranted.

 

[Haplo781]

Again--5e isn't THAT much different. Yes, a Fighter "can now do damage"* etc., but the vast, vast, vast majority of characters are going to fall within reasonably predictable ranges. Because most people aren't interested in weirdo tricksy "I literally cannot do damage ever" builds or the like. Things would be looser, but they wouldn't be useless.

And I think you seriously overplay the problems with solos. They were harder to balance than other things, yes. The same is true of 5e--to the point that they had to kludge in getting several "nope, that didn't happen" points (Legendary Resistance) and other such things. If problem A is present either way, but problems B-F all get addressed in one way or another by method 1 and not by method 2...well, you do the math.

*They never couldn't. Roles as straightjackets has always been a pernicious myth. But people cling to it nonetheless, so some lip service to their false beliefs is warranted.

Anyone who thinks 4e fighters "can't do damage" has never played a 4e fighter.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Anyone who thinks 4e fighters "can't do damage" has never played a 4e fighter.

I agree, but since I am prone to injecting 4e where it is not really appropriate, let us leave it at that and move on.

 

[ad_hoc]

The rules seem to assume 4 person party of newbies with minimal magic. That, and a "deadly" encounter doesn't mean you're going to kill of a PC or two, just that it's fairly likely.

Especially when you have a lot of monsters.

It's a tough balance. A TPK typically ends a campaign.

I get a feel for how deadly the group wants combat to be, and go from there. I don't fudge die rolls (I roll in the open) but I do sometimes use less than optimal tactics or don't use an ability that has recharged. I can always design encounters (even with encounters that are theoretically not deadly) that will kill one or more PCs by adjusting the environment.

AFB but what I remember is that 'deadly' just means that there is a non-trivial chance that a character could die not that it is likely.

I also find people just read 'deadly' and get upset that it doesn't mean what they think it means. And they are right that the categories could be better named but the system still works as intended.

It isn't that it is wrong for a DM to fudge (though I personally don't like it) but it is wrong to blame the game for being too easy because the DM is fudging.

 

[dave2008]

And I think you seriously overplay the problems with solos. They were harder to balance than other things, yes. The same is true of 5e--to the point that they had to kludge in getting several "nope, that didn't happen" points (Legendary Resistance) and other such things. If problem A is present either way, but problems B-F all get addressed in one way or another by method 1 and not by method 2...well, you do the math.

IMO, 5e legendary monsters try to tackle the issues 4e solos had and are generally better for it.

IME 4e solo issues:

1. Action economy. This was somewhat solved by MM3 and later solos with "instinctive" actions that allowed a solo one off turn action on initiative count +10. However, 4e monsters were still severely out gunned when it came to the numbers of actions. 5e Legendary actions are an improvement on this concept IMO and typical means a legendary monster can get 2-4 actions in per round.
2. Status conditions. A couple methods were used to combat status conditions, but the eventual generic solution was again instinctive actions. Legendary saves are the 5e response; though effective, I think the 4e response was better as it mitigate the effect without completely eliminating it. LevelUp's "elite recovery" is a good translation of this in 5e.
3. Hit Points. 4e solos was standard monster x4 HP which was to much for many. Many complained 4e solos were a grind because of this + issue #4. 5e "solos" have significantly less HP. A true challenging solo in 4e was level +4-5 which also meant a solo monster had a bit more HP than the whole party. In 5e a true solo is a legendary monster with a CR equal to lvl +8-10 and will have HP typically a but less, some times a lot less, then the whole party.
4. Damage. 4e solos didn't do enough damage (particularly at high levels). The had 4x the HP of a standard monster, by only 2x the actions (typically) and used the same damage by level tables as the standard monsters. So they didn't necessarily do any more damage than a standard monster. 5e improved on this somewhat by pushing solos further out from the PC level (and this higher up the damage tables), but didn't really tackle this problem, particularly at high levels.

Finally, I do want to be clear that I really liked 4e monster design in a lot of ways. However, I like a 4e influenced 5e monsters even better. And with 5e adopting the mythic trait (essentially an improved version of 4e's elite monsters) I think 5e solos have gotten even better.

 

[Oofta]

Again--5e isn't THAT much different. Yes, a Fighter "can now do damage"* etc., but the vast, vast, vast majority of characters are going to fall within reasonably predictable ranges. Because most people aren't interested in weirdo tricksy "I literally cannot do damage ever" builds or the like. Things would be looser, but they wouldn't be useless.

And I think you seriously overplay the problems with solos. They were harder to balance than other things, yes. The same is true of 5e--to the point that they had to kludge in getting several "nope, that didn't happen" points (Legendary Resistance) and other such things. If problem A is present either way, but problems B-F all get addressed in one way or another by method 1 and not by method 2...well, you do the math.

*They never couldn't. Roles as straightjackets has always been a pernicious myth. But people cling to it nonetheless, so some lip service to their false beliefs is warranted.

Solos have never really worked in my experience. In my home game, I threw Lollth, a CR 35 solo brute, at a group of 6 level 21 PCs. The spider queen never stood a chance. So they may have worked for you, in my experience they did not.

I have no problem challenging parties most of the time but any guidelines will always just be a starting point. Oh, and even my "mostly solo" monsters have a sidekick or three.

 

[jgsugden]

It worked incredibly well in 4e. 5e isn't so massively different that it should result in guaranteed failure to do a similar but not identical thing... which is exactly what the OP is proposing.

4E and 5E are massively different. 4E was designed to have uniformity to a ridiculous extent - to the point where people commented that a wizard, fighter, rogue and cleric all felt very similar in play. 5E restored differences, and in doing so made it harder to balance.

 

[Voadam]

I mostly played 4e but I took the 4e monster role concepts and applied them to monsters in my 1e Pathfinder games and a little bit of elite and solo concepts in my 5e games. For elites I generally gave double hp and had their attacks affect two targets instead of one (twin spell effects, two rounds of attacking in one round, two weapon fighting, whatever). For Solo's I generally give hp x the number of party members and have a normal monster's attacks affect multiple people at once (whirlwind attack style melee, turn a single target effect into an area of effect, etc.) and sometimes a reaction style thing to give more dynamic action to the fight.

It worked great in Pathfinder and it has worked well for me in 5e. I did this with a displacer beast, a boss ghost warlock, an ettin, and a boss necromancer that I remember in 5e.

 

[Scribe]

I agree, but since I am prone to injecting 4e where it is not really appropriate, let us leave it at that and move on.

It's a good natured laugh. Its been a week.

 

[FallenRX]

Honestly, after experimenting a bit, you can basically just summarize the adjustment as changing the encounter modifier to 0.75 if the party outnumbers the monsters by 1 or 2.
0.5 if the party outnumbers them 3 or more.
Not as precise, but more simplified

 

[MichaelSomething]

4E and 5E are massively different. 4E was designed to have uniformity to a ridiculous extent - to the point where people commented that a wizard, fighter, rogue and cleric all felt very similar in play. 5E restored differences, and in doing so made it harder to balance.

I thought bounded accuracy and cantrips reduced vast differences between PC?

Edit: alternativily, I could have went, "they did make classes different via operating on long or short rest and there are dozens of complaints about that here."

 

[Staffan]

For real.

1 level X monster is a match for 1 level X PC. Elites are a match for 2, solos 5. 4 minions are equal to 1.

Elites, solos, and minions are the things from 4e I miss the most in Pathfinder 2 (the second most are healing surges, and the Stamina variant kinda fixes that).

PF2 only measure creature power on one axis: level. A "solo" is just a higher-level creature. The devs have defended this choice, because they want PCs to be able to fight a level 3 ogre warrior at level 1 and go "Dang, that was tough" and then at level 5 have a fight with four of them that's the same overall difficulty but having each ogre go down like a chump. But I think this is unfortunate, because that means "bosses" hit like a truck, can hardly be damaged, and are near-impervious to any cool things the PCs want to do. I think there's room for monsters that are "wide" – having the same basic numbers as a normal monster, but with enough hp and action economy (either directly or indirectly, such as having AOEs) to pose the same threat as two or more normal monsters.

1. Hit Points. 4e solos was standard monster x4 HP which was to much for many. Many complained 4e solos were a grind because of this + issue #4. 5e "solos" have significantly less HP. A true challenging solo in 4e was level +4-5 which also meant a solo monster had a bit more HP than the whole party. In 5e a true solo is a legendary monster with a CR equal to lvl +8-10 and will have HP typically a but less, some times a lot less, then the whole party.
2. Damage. 4e solos didn't do enough damage (particularly at high levels). The had 4x the HP of a standard monster, by only 2x the actions (typically) and used the same damage by level tables as the standard monsters. So they didn't necessarily do any more damage than a standard monster. 5e improved on this somewhat by pushing solos further out from the PC level (and this higher up the damage tables), but didn't really tackle this problem, particularly at high levels.

I'm thinking these are related in 4e, and maybe should be inverted.

Let's take a very simplified combat against four monsters. Each monster deals X damage per round, and the party when focus-firing can take out one monster each round. So the monsters will deal a total of 10X damage (4X in round 1, 3X in round 2, 2X in round 3, and X in round 4 – somewhat depending on initiative, but we're keeping it simple here).

Now replace the four monsters with a single monster with four times the hit points, so it takes four rounds for the party to beat it down. If the monster also deals 4X damage per round, that means it will deal a total of 16X damage. That's a lot more than 10X, so quadrupling both hp and damage doesn't work. A more appropriate damage level would be 2.5X, which would deal the same overall damage. But we could also have 3X damage per round and 3.33 times the hp, or 4X damage per round and 2.5 times the hp.

Of course, the math isn't as simple as that in reality. The solo is generally less susceptible to AOE magic, but more susceptible to debuffs. But it at least illustrates the point.

 

[Staffan]

Solos have never really worked in my experience. In my home game, I threw Lollth, a CR 35 solo brute, at a group of 6 level 21 PCs. The spider queen never stood a chance. So they may have worked for you, in my experience they did not.

That's why they call her LOLth.

 

[NotAYakk]

4E and 5E are massively different. 4E was designed to have uniformity to a ridiculous extent - to the point where people commented that a wizard, fighter, rogue and cleric all felt very similar in play. 5E restored differences, and in doing so made it harder to balance.

Naw: 5e's daily damage budget is surprisingly uniform.

5e is balanced on the adventuring day, not the encounter.

 

[Haplo781]

people commented that a wizard, fighter, rogue and cleric all felt very similar in play.

People who never played it, sure.

 

[James Gasik]

There were a few solos created later in 4e that did some ridiculous things to overcome action economy (immunity to conditions to make controllers worthless, and multiple off turn actions), but the reality is, I'm with Oofta here. Solo monsters couldn't be used as actual solos. They needed minions at the least, if not support monsters. The very last Solo I ever used was a cakewalk- the Cleric dropped a power on it that made it dazed and vulnerable all for 1 turn, the Fighter hit it with a mark and a utility power that gave it a grand total of -7 to hit anyone other than them, while turtling their defenses, the Barbarian used a 7 [W] daily and the Ranger used an action point to use a daily that hits 3 times, an encounter that hits 2 times, and a bonus action attack to hit one additional time- they got a crit in there somewhere, and they had bracers that added damage if they hit at least twice, plus their hunter's mark.

Something like that. The critter was down to like 25% hit points before it's next turn, and the daze prevented it from using it's off-turn attacks. This isn't really anything new, mind. D&D has always had a problem with this, in my experience. I remember reading The Crystal Shard, with three melee guys going after an ancient white dragon and nodding to myself "yeah, as long as they have the hit points to handle the breath weapon, that's about how it would go", after watching several dragons get massacred.

The only real way for a solo to stand up to a party of adventures is with prep time and devious tricks that aren't usually covered by it's stat block, like the dragon in Dragon Mountain that fools the party with a polymorphed kobold disguised as a red dragon (while it hides, polymorphed into a small bird) to let the party waste their first round only to get ambushed from behind, lol.

Or the dragon in Forge of Fury, which happily uses the underground lake to it's advantage to make it difficult for the party to engage it in melee.

I was using "lair actions" years before 5e, like having a white dragon create it's lair with an icy floor over a frozen lake, uneven slippery terrain, weak points it could break with it's tail, as well as stalactites and stalagmites it could shatter to deal some AoE damage (ice shrapnel), and of course, it's escape route, swimming away to it's secondary lair, an underwater cave, where it keeps it's treasure.

Too many DM's I've seen just grab some monsters and think that will make for a challenging encounter; you need to get inside the monster's head, and force the party to engage it on it's turf or what usually happens is one or two characters take a ton of damage, and then the thing is fuming on hit points before it's third turn.

There are exceptions- monsters that can take players out of the combat with some wacky special ability, but those tend to be pretty miserable for the player who gets basically told "no, you're not allowed to play in this encounter", so I find them hard to use.

 

[jgsugden]

People who never played it, sure.

I played it a lot. So many of the abilities were "damage appropriate for the level of ability plus a minor benefit like push, pull, prone, etc..." That edition was a good game system - but it wasn't the same feel as other editions of D&D, and it was not the best design for a fantasy setting. YMMV - but you'd be wrong.

I thought bounded accuracy and cantrips reduced vast differences between PC?

They're meant to provide more balance than we saw in 3E, but they are far less restrictive than the cookie cutter construction of classes in 4E.

Edit: alternativily, I could have went, "they did make classes different via operating on long or short rest and there are dozens of complaints about that here."

Wow. Dozens of complaints for a game with millions of players.

I think there are far more than dozens that 'complain' about it, but often what they don't like is feeling the limitations that 5E puts on PCs. They don't like that a warlock only gets 2 spell slots per SR, or that they get nothing on a SR and the rest of the party is happy to take a lot of SRs because their table honors the rule that prevents multiple LRs within 24 hours. Most of those complaining players tend to be players wih a PC that feels a restriction that is preevtning them from being overpowered, and their objection is to the limitation that keeps PC power levels in check.

 

[dave2008]

Elites, solos, and minions are the things from 4e I miss the most in Pathfinder 2 (the second most are healing surges, and the Stamina variant kinda fixes that).

PF2 only measure creature power on one axis: level. A "solo" is just a higher-level creature. The devs have defended this choice, because they want PCs to be able to fight a level 3 ogre warrior at level 1 and go "Dang, that was tough" and then at level 5 have a fight with four of them that's the same overall difficulty but having each ogre go down like a chump. But I think this is unfortunate, because that means "bosses" hit like a truck, can hardly be damaged, and are near-impervious to any cool things the PCs want to do. I think there's room for monsters that are "wide" – having the same basic numbers as a normal monster, but with enough hp and action economy (either directly or indirectly, such as having AOEs) to pose the same threat as two or more normal monsters.

Absolutely! When PF2 came out I immediately started think about adding "elite" and "solo" monsters. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but I can't remember a reason why it would work.