FallenRX
Adventurer
I remember a while back i made a post about how the adventuring day is based on hit dice, as resources and nothing else, and after thinking about it more and looking into a few matters on this.
Jeremy Crawford asserts that the adventuring day is a maximum but not a minimum here.
So why is the problem people have with the adventuring day? Some fights feel a bit easy than they should, most people think its because the game is balanced around the party being withered down due to the 6-8 adventuring day.
Well that has nothing to do with that, the actual issue is the encounter building rules for fifth edition are broken.
I've come to realize the adventuring day has nothing to do with our issues with encounter balance but encounter building rules themselves.
You see the adventuring day basically is just a gauge of how many fights they can take before they run out of hit dice, thats it, ive talked about this in length in my post here. Where I go into some things about how it is just a measure of how many fights you can take before your you run out of hit dice. And how class balance and resources have less to do with it.
In fact, i will argue monsters are designed with the idea that the players have all of their strongest resources, this is backed up the lead designer of 5e saying this himself
But after experiencing with a different set of encounter building rules, and some points, i've come to realize something.
The actual issue we are having is coming from the fact the encounter building rules in the DMG are nonsense, and simply do not account for the fact that when the party outnumbers a solo monster, the action economy different breaks it.
I when into this more here in this post. but ill give it a bit of an excerpt.
The core issue is, the encounter building rules of 5e are actually busted, they do not account for the action economy different of normal monsters vs the party well at all.
They do for monsters but not quite for players.
This causes whole encounters to basically be a tier of difficulty easier if the party outnumbers a monster by like 3, two tiers of difficulty if outnumbered by 5. Because the action economy kinda makes those fights hyper easier.
Luckily a quick fix for this above sorts out the issue for the monster part, just dont use it for legendary monsters as their action economy can keep up for the most part.(The fix is consider the difficulty of the encounter one tier less if the party outnumbers the monster by 3, if they outnumber it by 5 reduce the difficulty tier by two.)
This adjusts most of the issues but there is still one more critical issue, which is how some fights can just get kinda blown up on bad saves.
Which the issue comes down to, a flaw in monster design...where most monsters do not have saving throws proficiencies.
See according to the rules of the monster design, monsters can have 2 saving throw proficiencies and the CR is unaffected, despite this...no monster has saving throw proficiencies, this is a minor but big important effect on the game, which is big spells like hypnotic pattern that can shut down encounters are way more powerful because most monsters are likely to fail the saving throws since they have no proficiencies, this makes encounters extremely easy to circumvent unless its a legendary monster or one that have resistances, or actually has saves.
This is luckily an easy error to fix as you can just give them proficiency is their best strong save(Dex, Con, Wis) and their best weak save(Str, Int, Cha). you can do this on the fly easily since PB's are on statblocks now, making the game much easier.
The point of what im saying is,
TLDR: The Adventuring day is just a gauge of how many encounters can they take before they run out of hit dice, it has nothing to do with encounter balance or game balance, the actual issues we have with 5e are being caused by bad encounter building rules, and an odd monster design choice making monsters much easier to circumvent if they arent legendary or dont have resistances.
This is also backed up by JC himself saying that the adventuring day doesnt have much to do with balance, and i think it explains the disconnect between us and him. He knows the adventuring day has nothing to do with encounter balance, its just a gauge of how long you can go before you run out of Hit Dice, like it was in 4e.
We think it is the reason our encounters are much easier, and the issue with the game, this is not the case.
This is why they mentioned nothing about adjusting the adventuring day for One DnD, because it has nothing to do with the encounter building issues, but you know what they did announce?
Fixing their monster design, and updating their encounter-building rules. The actual problem.
What are your thoughts on this?
Jeremy Crawford asserts that the adventuring day is a maximum but not a minimum here.
So why is the problem people have with the adventuring day? Some fights feel a bit easy than they should, most people think its because the game is balanced around the party being withered down due to the 6-8 adventuring day.
Well that has nothing to do with that, the actual issue is the encounter building rules for fifth edition are broken.
I've come to realize the adventuring day has nothing to do with our issues with encounter balance but encounter building rules themselves.
You see the adventuring day basically is just a gauge of how many fights they can take before they run out of hit dice, thats it, ive talked about this in length in my post here. Where I go into some things about how it is just a measure of how many fights you can take before your you run out of hit dice. And how class balance and resources have less to do with it.
In fact, i will argue monsters are designed with the idea that the players have all of their strongest resources, this is backed up the lead designer of 5e saying this himself
But after experiencing with a different set of encounter building rules, and some points, i've come to realize something.
The actual issue we are having is coming from the fact the encounter building rules in the DMG are nonsense, and simply do not account for the fact that when the party outnumbers a solo monster, the action economy different breaks it.
I when into this more here in this post. but ill give it a bit of an excerpt.
And after adjusting the encounter difficulty appropriately, most of the issues i had, kinda went away.Now this is all fine and sound, and it actually works really well, but there is one fundamental issue with encounter building, one that broke it.
In the DMG, there is guidance on how to deal with multiple monsters, it starts at a 1x modifier and goes up for the multitudes of monsters you add starting at one monster. This seems sound, but it has one fundamental error, that actually breaks the encounter building of the game.
It does not account for action economy, the game tells you to adjust the XP modifier of the monster for each additional monster added to the encounter, but...doesnt account for your party size, and how to adjust it the monster's XP if its outnumbered.
Action economy is king in 5e, because of bounded accuracy, higher level monsters cannot just stat stick their way to tanking everything, they can reasonably be affected/hit by a bigger party, the actual math of the multipliers in the DMG are actually straight up broken and nonsense. A monster is worth less XP in the budget, because since they are outnumbered and out-actioned, they will due to this, likely take significantly more damage before they can act, meaning they less likely chance of doing their average damage expectation in the encounter before dying. This means when outnumbered monsters XP Budget is lowered in the multiplier, The multiplers in the DMG do not go into this or account for this at all. And instead gives you a completely broken methodology that actually does not work, its all complete nonsense, it was a rush job. Action Economy matters for the monsters too, because even if they can do the damage in stats, if they are outnumbered the odds of them having enough turns to do so is lessened. (This does not apply to legendary monsters since legendary actions actually lets them match the action economy.)
This fundamentally breaks 5e's encounter building, this poor multiplier guidelines in the DMG leads to encounters being easier, because its giving actively bad guidance on how to account for monster action economy, Even accounting for an average party of 4, Monsters drop a whole tier of difficulty if accounted for, Medium becomes Easy, Hard becomes Medium.
This is a Critical error in guidance in the DMG's part. And Its why 5e's encounter balancing is broken
Also note that The games current damage expectations from each encounter also lend itself to being easier, because they turned their old Easy difficulty from the playtest too the current medium.
The core issue is, the encounter building rules of 5e are actually busted, they do not account for the action economy different of normal monsters vs the party well at all.
They do for monsters but not quite for players.
This causes whole encounters to basically be a tier of difficulty easier if the party outnumbers a monster by like 3, two tiers of difficulty if outnumbered by 5. Because the action economy kinda makes those fights hyper easier.
Luckily a quick fix for this above sorts out the issue for the monster part, just dont use it for legendary monsters as their action economy can keep up for the most part.(The fix is consider the difficulty of the encounter one tier less if the party outnumbers the monster by 3, if they outnumber it by 5 reduce the difficulty tier by two.)
This adjusts most of the issues but there is still one more critical issue, which is how some fights can just get kinda blown up on bad saves.
Which the issue comes down to, a flaw in monster design...where most monsters do not have saving throws proficiencies.
See according to the rules of the monster design, monsters can have 2 saving throw proficiencies and the CR is unaffected, despite this...no monster has saving throw proficiencies, this is a minor but big important effect on the game, which is big spells like hypnotic pattern that can shut down encounters are way more powerful because most monsters are likely to fail the saving throws since they have no proficiencies, this makes encounters extremely easy to circumvent unless its a legendary monster or one that have resistances, or actually has saves.
This is luckily an easy error to fix as you can just give them proficiency is their best strong save(Dex, Con, Wis) and their best weak save(Str, Int, Cha). you can do this on the fly easily since PB's are on statblocks now, making the game much easier.
The point of what im saying is,
TLDR: The Adventuring day is just a gauge of how many encounters can they take before they run out of hit dice, it has nothing to do with encounter balance or game balance, the actual issues we have with 5e are being caused by bad encounter building rules, and an odd monster design choice making monsters much easier to circumvent if they arent legendary or dont have resistances.
This is also backed up by JC himself saying that the adventuring day doesnt have much to do with balance, and i think it explains the disconnect between us and him. He knows the adventuring day has nothing to do with encounter balance, its just a gauge of how long you can go before you run out of Hit Dice, like it was in 4e.
We think it is the reason our encounters are much easier, and the issue with the game, this is not the case.
This is why they mentioned nothing about adjusting the adventuring day for One DnD, because it has nothing to do with the encounter building issues, but you know what they did announce?
Fixing their monster design, and updating their encounter-building rules. The actual problem.
What are your thoughts on this?