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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gorice" data-source="post: 8991648" data-attributes="member: 7032863">To get back to the OP: while I don't have a high opinion of 5e's encounter-building rules, I think the problems are a lot deeper, and probably insoluble without making big changes to the game. It's also tied to a lot of the issues that make 5e combat, in my years of experience, not very fun. In my experience:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The extreme predictability of most fights (many attack rolls per turn, with damage carefully balanced so that a single attack is rarely decisive, and no results from most attacks other than damage) turns most combats into grinding wars of attrition. The PCs are favoured by design, and any initial advantage tends to tell in the end with this kind of play. And, combat has to favour the PCs, because the losing party usually has no practical way to extricate itself, the stakes for combat tend to default to 'all or nothing', and adventure modules generally assume that the party always wins.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Most actions that do something other than damage aren't worth taking. On the one hand, improvised actions and grapples have a huge opportunity cost, since they mean diverting an action from the all-important damage tally, and are generally only used as DPR modifiers (i.e. to give advantage to attacks) or to fix enemies in place so they can be attacked. On the other hand, movement is fairly 'cheap' -- getting pushed around or knocked down doesn't really cost you anything except a bit of movement. So, what you see from 'martials' are lots of basic attacks with the occasional grapple.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Spell slots and weird magic items (or big rechargeable abilities, in the case of monsters) are the only real wild cards in combat, and they favour the PCs. Monsters don't usually get these, with some notable exceptions, like dragons and banshees, which are otherwise much weaker than their CR would suggest. Instead, monster special abilities tend to be gated behind multiple rolls (e.g. to hit, then save), which makes them unlikely to actually do anything. The general trend is that the party with big spell slots online can pretty reliably blow up an encounter, and the monsters are either without any abilities that compete, or so flimsy that they get little use out of them.</li> </ol>Fixing this of this would mean reworking some or all of the following: the role of attrition; the relative costs of actions and movement (i.e. going back to 4e, or something more freeform); the stakes of combat; the very concept of the railroaded adventure module; the 'swingyness' of individual attacks; the idea of the 'simple' fighter; and caster supremacy (or, long rest vs. short rest balance, if you prefer less polemical terms).That's a lot of sacred cows! I'll eat my hat if they ever fix it.</blockquote>

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