D&D 5E Some thoughts after more time with the game...

[Argyle King]

It's been a little while now since I first started playing 5th Edition. As such, I felt like it was a good idea to re-evaluate some of my old opinions, and also to reach out to the community and get some feedback on a few issues which have come up during play.

The first thing that comes to mind when I sit and give further thought to the experience I've gained is that monster AC values seem extremely low. The campaign I'm currently in has just reached level 8, and there are times when most of the party is capable of hitting with single-digit rolls. I don't think that by itself is necessarily bad, but it does sometimes seem odd when compared to the difficult that the party's adversaries have when it comes to hitting some of the party. Now that we're gaining more magic items, this disparity is beginning to quickly grow.

A brief example: The party barbarian is currently rolling +9 to hit (5 from maxed out strength; 3 from proficiency; +1 from a magic weapon.) Most of the enemies we face seem to have AC ranging from 12-15. So that means, the barbarian is, in some cases, relying on rolling a 3 to hit; sometimes needing a 6 against a tougher foe. If he has advantage, rolling tends to be little more than a formality.

In contrast, my character has 19 AC. I'm wearing full plate, and I have the defensive fighting style (I'm a multiclass fighter/wizard.) I didn't have any magic items at the time I started typing this, but I was just now informed that the party gained some magic items from the most recent loot. From the brief details I was given, I'm guessing my AC will jump somewhere into the 20s from magic plate and a ring of protection.

While there are times when combat does still feel dangerous, there are also times when the contrast between what the DM is needing to roll versus what the players are needing to roll seems a bit odd. I think I still need a closer look at the numbers before gauging if this is even a problem at all. If nothing else, it has created a weird sense of 5E combat. Some encounters will be unbelievably lopsided in favor of the players; others will drop a PC early and easily, but it's typically one or the other with little room in between. I don't have a solid grasp of what (if anything) that means yet, but it then leads to noticing other things...

One of those other things is that +N items still seem to be a problem. I love the idea of bounded accuracy, but I am unsure if adding extra boosts of a strictly numerical value risks making the game unbalanced in some situations. Looking back at my own character, I notice that my AC will be 20-something; on top of that, I can cast Shield and make myself harder to hit. Is that atypical or normal for the game? Thinking upon it further, I realize that I put most of that together by accident; I was simply trying to recreate my Skyrim character who was a heavily armored necromancer.

It very likely could be that the group I'm in is doing something wrong with the stacking rules. Does a cloak of protection stack with a ring of protection? Does all of that stack with magic armor?

Another thing I've noticed is that, with the AC of enemies being so low, ranged attacks seem to be much better than engaging in melee. While melee based classes can produce large quantities of damage via multiple attacks, the same thing can be done by arming my skeletal minions with crossbows and having them focus fire, and I can cover most of the battlefield that way rather than only the space right in front of me. I'm also starting to notice that spells such as Witch Bolt cast at higher spell slots reliably hit for a relatively high amount of damage; at range, and with continuing effects. Again, I'm not sure there's even a real problem there; I'm not even suggesting there necessarily is; just an observation of how the game I'm currently in seems to play out.

Speaking of spells, there have also been a few situations which have come up that I'd like to get outside opinions on. The polymorph spell is on the verge of becoming a powerful weapon in our campaign, but in a somewhat unusual way. With the way the spell is worded, a creature reverts back to their normal form if their morphed form is killed. During part of the campaign, a creature had been polymorphed into a small animal and then fed to one of their allies. Eating the polymorphed creature caused it to be killed and revert back to normal form inside of the other creature; which then caused the eating creature to explode/be ripped apart. This has opened up talk of other ideas such as the party using polymorph on themselves and crawling inside of a foe for insta-kills. I'd be interested to get outside opinions on this situation.

Also, when it comes to spells and multiclassing, how is a multiclass cleric praying for spells supposed to work? It appears as though someone could be a level 1 cleric and have 19 levels in a different spellcasting class, but still pray for spells for any level he has spell slots for -which would be all of them. While you'd have less cleric spells per day that you could prepare, you could just pick whatever you feel is best and still greatly boost the power of a character overall. For example, a cleric/wizard could use their handful of cleric spells per day to choose healing spells or something else lacking from their typical list. Is that how it's supposed to work? I don't feel that's necessarily broken; you're still limited by the number of spell slots and how many spells you can prepare per day per class, but it seems like a net gain for very little sacrifice.

So, in closing...

Is AC intentionally that low? If so, does giving a creature better armor significantly change the assumptions of the game or the challenge of an encounter?

Does giving a lot of magic items to the party unbalance the game?

Are there particular items which you've noticed are problematic?

Does Polymorph Salad work as a tactic? What are you're thoughts on that situation, and how might you handle it differently?

Any other thoughts or opinions are welcome

 

[imabaer]

-Depends on what you're fighting. The creature I've seen at Tier 2 have had 16-19 AC, especially if they're frontliners. DM may need to change his encounters a bit, especially if he's using things like beasts, which have very low AC. Or he just needs to up the CR for encounters. He could also use more casters and spells to target saves instead of AC.

-Yes. CR needs to go up in response. The game is balanced around being low/no magic items.

-It's not really "problematic", but part of your high AC is because of how insanely good plate is. You're wearing the best mundane armor possible and have picked a fighting style to raise AC further.

-That's the GM's discretion to enforce. There's a lot of iffy parts of that plan. How are your players holding the creature still enough to put something in their mouth (if I allowed the plan, it'd be at disadvantage at the very least)? How is a medium size creature swallowing a rat whole (seriously, they're huge)? How is the creature taking damage inside the other creature? It's a little cheesy and is not RAI. As a one or two time thing, I'd be fine with it, but if you're going to start basing fights around this, I'd throw out disadvantages for trying to feed, advantage for saving throws for the creature to avoid the mouth, etc. Or I'd just rule you can't forcefeed anything that's not liquid in combat.

-No, because the character is limited by his spells known. A level 1 cleric only has level 1 cleric spells. You can cast the level 1 spells in higher spell slots, but you won't have something like Prayer of Healing from your cleric list.

 

[Rhenny]

For the most part, AC is low because of Bounded Accuracy. It is completely intentional. They wanted to make HP the variable and keep AC pretty much consistent with armor worn. I like that. It is easier for DM to telegraph how difficult the creature will be to injure because there are really no hidden bonuses derived by level. The idea is that even lower level PCs may be able to encounter and fight a more deadly creature because it has AC that does not make it invulnerable. It kind of explains why dragons and other dastardly creatures don't attack a village or town every day.

It is very easy for a DM to change AC by upgrading armor for armor wearing foes, or even nudge some creatures up 1 or 2 points to reflect battle hardened or unusual specimens. It is a very easy tweak a DM can use to get the "feel" he or she wants for the session/encounter/campaign. Basically, 5e was designed to allow DM to run the game he or she wants. It is easier to add than to take away so things like AC, resistances, immunities are easy to add even when the standard creature/foe has lower AC or no resistance/immunity. The best rule of thumb for a DM is to use the chart in the DM guide to see how adding AC or resistance/immunity might change the effective CR of the creature, but that's all ball parky and just a rough way to guess at the effect in game. (For example, adding resistance like a barbarian's rage effectively doubles the hit points of the creature).

I've found that bounded accuracy is actually pretty elastic. I've given out magical items that give +4 bonuses (like a belt of Giant Strength) and it doesn't seem to wreck the game. I am very careful with magical armor though. But, on the other hand, I also try to challenge players with threats that don't always attack AC, so even the AC 19 or 20 fighter may get hit by a trap that calls for a Dex save or a spell that calls for a Wis save, etc.

For my own sanity and the feel I like, I won't allow similar protection bonuses to stack, but I don't actually recall what the rule is.

Your experience with polymorph spell is very interesting. I'm sure that's not what the designers intended. I'd probably let the PCs get away with that tactic once, but not much more than that. I wonder how much damage stomach acid does to a creature? I think it would be very easy to just say that once a creature is consumed it dies (or at least suffers a boat load of acid damage which might kill the PC because any additional HP damage over the polymorph form applies to the original form). This seems like a DM/table judgment call.

For the most part, 5e is pretty flexible, and the DM has the final word.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Is AC intentionally that low? If so, does giving a creature better armor significantly change the assumptions of the game or the challenge of an encounter?

AC is intentionally detached from level so that the general way of the system is that higher level characters become more likely to succeed on an attack roll than lower level characters were, same with monsters.

As for adjusting CR for changes in AC, that depends on how drastic the change is, but putting most armor-wearing monsters not already in plate armor in plate armor is usually worth about +1 CR (the DMG monster building guidelines have so far felt pretty accurate when I use them to recalculate CR after changing weapon and armor of monsters and NPCs).

Does giving a lot of magic items to the party unbalance the game?

That depends on what you mean by "unbalance." If you mean does it change the potency of the characters in a way that the game math doesn't effectively make irrelevant (i.e. giving all monsters a +1 AC at the level at which PCs are assumed to have +1 weapons), then the answer is "yes" because the game math never makes an assumption as to what quantity or quality of magic items the PCs have.

However, if you mean "does this alter the game in a way that I need to account for or else suffer the game math breaking down" the answer is "No." Magic items are designed so that they don't have a significant enough effect to be worth worrying about re-adjusting for thanks to the attunement limit - the characters with items will be more potent than those without, but only to a limited degree. Also, the assumption of the game math is that magic items are actual bonuses, meaning that they do put you a +1 here or a die there above the baseline, but that is because that's the point of magic items - if the game expected you to counter-balance all those bonuses by adding stuff to the monsters and NPCs, the overall effect is identical to not having any magic items at all, but requires more work.

Are there particular items which you've noticed are problematic?

Not as of yet, but I am far from having seen every magic item in the book in action.

Does Polymorph Salad work as a tactic? What are you're thoughts on that situation, and how might you handle it differently?

Generally speaking, this tactic wouldn't be so fool-proof; most things don't swallow whole small animals because they would choke and kill themselves in the process - so the small critter is more likely to die in the eating creature's mouth (or on their plate, being stabbed by a fork and/or sliced with a knife) and would thus revert to normal form in a way that allows them to be outside the body of the eating creature.

Also, I'm not at all for the interpretation of the way magic works that brings any kind of physics into the matter as this "the creature expands to normal size, and thus displaces the creature's body" does, because including physics in D&D in a consistent fashion would make the majority of things typical to the game impossible, so I would actually be more likely to say that a polymorphed creature that was eaten and reverts to their normal form inside a creature they don't fit inside would just be instantly and harmlessly expelled (puked up as they changed shape) to a nearby space.

Any other thoughts or opinions are welcome

Your multiclassing worries are solved by understanding the multiclassing rules: You prepare/know spells for each of your classes as if you were only that class and only the level you actually have in that class - a Cleric 1/other stuff 19 prepares cleric spells exactly as if they were only a Cleric 1, which is to say 1+wisdom modifier spells from the cleric list of 1st level only, and their 2 domain spells of 1st level as well.

The spell slots gained from multiclassing can be used to cast these spells at higher levels, but cannot be used to actually prepare or know spells of those higher levels.

 

[iserith]

The first thing that comes to mind when I sit and give further thought to the experience I've gained is that monster AC values seem extremely low. The campaign I'm currently in has just reached level 8, and there are times when most of the party is capable of hitting with single-digit rolls. I don't think that by itself is necessarily bad, but it does sometimes seem odd when compared to the difficult that the party's adversaries have when it comes to hitting some of the party. Now that we're gaining more magic items, this disparity is beginning to quickly grow.

If the challenges your DM is presenting aren't to the difficulty you prefer, you can just ask him or her to increase the difficulty accordingly. What it sounds like is the DM is presenting challenges with a particular difficulty level (perhaps building encounters with a budget and adhering to the CR guidelines) and your party has made decisions with your builds and tactics that are reducing the difficulty. That's a good thing from the perspective that your decisions as players actually matter. But obviously if you have more fun and more exciting, memorable stories are created when the difficulty is higher, then you should talk to the DM about making that happen. It's not hard to do.

I see D&D 5e as more about multiple medium to hard challenges per day rather than fewer, more difficult challenges, however. Each conflict chips away at the party's resources a little bit and it's only toward the end of an adventuring day that, given a lack of certain resources, difficulty rises. That said, how I create challenges depends on what kind of adventure I'm trying to present. Sometimes fewer, more difficult challenges are a better fit.

It very likely could be that the group I'm in is doing something wrong with the stacking rules. Does a cloak of protection stack with a ring of protection? Does all of that stack with magic armor?

I don't recall any specific rules about this, but my inclination is to rule that you apply the highest bonus rather than stack them.

Another thing I've noticed is that, with the AC of enemies being so low, ranged attacks seem to be much better than engaging in melee. While melee based classes can produce large quantities of damage via multiple attacks, the same thing can be done by arming my skeletal minions with crossbows and having them focus fire, and I can cover most of the battlefield that way rather than only the space right in front of me. I'm also starting to notice that spells such as Witch Bolt cast at higher spell slots reliably hit for a relatively high amount of damage; at range, and with continuing effects. Again, I'm not sure there's even a real problem there; I'm not even suggesting there necessarily is; just an observation of how the game I'm currently in seems to play out.

Terrain and enemy tactics can confound ranged attacks. Tracking ammunition can do the same (for a time). Ultimately this just sounds like another instance where the DM could stand to improve his or her design and presentation of challenges in order to bring parity between melee and ranged and get the difficulty everyone prefers.

Speaking of spells, there have also been a few situations which have come up that I'd like to get outside opinions on. The polymorph spell is on the verge of becoming a powerful weapon in our campaign, but in a somewhat unusual way. With the way the spell is worded, a creature reverts back to their normal form if their morphed form is killed. During part of the campaign, a creature had been polymorphed into a small animal and then fed to one of their allies. Eating the polymorphed creature caused it to be killed and revert back to normal form inside of the other creature; which then caused the eating creature to explode/be ripped apart. This has opened up talk of other ideas such as the party using polymorph on themselves and crawling inside of a foe for insta-kills. I'd be interested to get outside opinions on this situation.

There are a few creatures in the Monster Manual that have a Swallow action. This would be a good baseline for deciding the effect on a polymorphed creature that is fed to another creature. A creature that reverts to its normal size might also simply be regurgitated. Only sometimes might it cause damage or death to the creature it is inside. I'd rule on a case-by-case. In some cases, exploding a creature from within is going to be fun, exciting, and memorable. In other cases, not so much.

Other posters before me appear to have addressed your other questions quite well.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

I think low monster AC is a good thing. If single digit rolls wouldn't hit that would mean that the chance to hit is lower than 50%. That means player will fail more often than they succeed. This gets quite frustrating for players. A hit chance of 60-80% seems perfect.

 

[discosoc]

- Monster AC is pretty good, and I feel like the idea is that their high HP pool is supposed to be the primary "defense."

- Player AC is broken once it reaches about 20, for many of the same reasons you mentioned. In fact, my group kind of jokes about how the Paladin only gets critted, because 90% of the time he's only hit on a 20, due to most on-CR encounters having +hit stats in the 4-6 range.

- Your observation about combat being "swingy" (as I call it) is in line with mine as well. There is a *very* fine line between an encounter that's no threat to the party, and one that can easily kill them. AC is, once again, a big contributor to this in that bringing creatures that are capable of doing any kind of harm to the group requires picking creatures that are too-high CR, so when they start hitting, players start losing huge chunks of health in bursts, rather than the steady chunks I think 5e intends. Or, you just cheese out and throw a bunch of breath weapon style attacks at them, bypassing AC and then the CR is back in line.

- Polymorph shouldn't be an issue, unless your game is running some gritty ultra-realistic mode in dealing with spells. It's a magical effect, so the transformation back to normal should also be considered magical in the most fantastic sense. Something like having the person who just swallowed the polymorphed ogre suddenly lurch over and puke the ogre back up when it ends. No damage done, but maybe the person how ate him is stunned or something. If you want to make it gory, where the guy explodes or something, just make sure everything else about magic is in line with it so it doesn't stand out as a selectively realistic depiction of magic.

- Lastly, magic items are capable of being very unbalancing, if handed out like previous editions. Remember that each person is only allowed to be attuned to 3 magic items at a time, which leaves the core +x weapons and armor as the most likely to cause problems. In fact, of those it's really just the magic armor that I'd avoid sense it only makes the previous AC issues mentioned that much worse. 5e is designed to handle magic items a bit more like 1 and 2e, in that each person may only be likely to come across 2 or 3 permanent magic items over the course of the campaign. It's not like 3e or 4e or Pathfinder, where they assume every character will have a magic item in each "slot" like an MMO.

 

[redrick]

I had a plate-mail, defensive style, shield-casting EK in my first D&D campaign. I will not lie, it took some adjusting as a DM, because the kinds of monsters I wanted to run just didn't pose a serious threat to this guy.

Ultimately, I sat down with the MM and made a list of "monsters to mess up the dwarf." These were monsters with attacks that targeted dex and wisdom saves instead of basic AC, monsters with strong ranged or area-of-effect attacks that could bypass the tank in order to hit squishier characters in the back, and highly mobile monsters that could just get around him. (Spider climbing on that high ceiling over the dwarf's head worked.) As I populated dungeons and adventure sites, I just made sure to put some of these bad boys into play.

As for AC in general, it is worth noting that monster HP for CR tends to climb faster than player HP, so monsters might be easy to hit, but they should still be able to take a bit of a beating before they go down.

Oh yeah, and, while I don't have a page reference on rules for you, I would say that AC bonuses stacking should be avoided. +1 to AC is a big deal, so if you are using multiple sources of magic to permanently get your AC into the mid-20s (not including that shield spell), your character will become virtually invulnerable to weapon attacks. Which is kind of boring.

 

[Prism]

As others have said be a little careful with magical armour and protections. The random item tables in the DMG give a bit further insight into the intentional rarity of magic armour. For example, there is as more chance of finding a vorpal sword as there is a set of +2 studded armour or a +2 breastplate or a set of +1 plate mail (these are all on table I which is only recommended for CR 11+ encounters). The chances of finding anything better are very slim (roll a 76 on Table I and then roll a 12 on a D12 to find +3 plate). One oddity is that dwarven plate which gives +2 to AC is more common than basic +2 plate. Rings of protection and magical shields are also pretty rare compared to magical weapons, wands, staves etc.

To put it simply, if you were to roll for magic items its very likely you would never find a decent set of magic plussed armour at all

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I think bounded accuracy is great, but it got taken too far...

in 2e there was a 20ish point swing from AC 10 to -10, and I say 20ish instead of 20 because some big dragons and gods had -12...

5e has about half of that... almost nothing has an AC 10, and almost nothing has better then a 20, even gods and demon lords cap out at 23... meaning a 16 attack stat and +2 prof you don't need a nat 20 to hit anything in the game...