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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8959834" data-attributes="member: 86653">Welcome to the club. As others have said, 5E is very much a superhero fantasy game. To get it to do what you want you have two choices: 1) drastically house rule the core game, or; 2) drastically ramp up the monsters.Your players will likely rebel against any and all house rules you introduce to balance the game. If they like 5E, the chances are better than good that they like the unbalanced game. They like the "we always and easily win" game play that 5E provides. One easy solution is a thing called Epic 5. In Epic 5 you stop advancing the PCs at 5th level. That's the level cap. Characters are considered epic level at 5th level. You progress story from there, not character mechanics. Some variants will have you give out feats or the like instead of levels. But that's up to you. This will solve a few of your problems, but not all. And will likely not be received well by your players. Because, again, they likely enjoy the very unbalanced game play you want to fix.So don't include them. Handing out magic items is 100% on the referee. If you run a module that includes a magic item you don't want in your game, don't give it out. If your players have read the module and expect the magic item, that's another problem entirely.Official 5E monsters are laughably bad. There are heaps of 3PP monster books. Look at some of those. Or homebrew your own.5E is designed around 4 players. So unless you're doubling the monsters in all encounters, every fight will be a cakewalk. Most modules are designed around the assumption of 4 players and most encounters are medium difficulty. If you're running those encounters RAW, it's going to be incredibly easy for your 6-7 players to walk all over every encounter. Double the monsters to get a medium encounter for your number of players. Then double the monsters' HP and number of attacks to make that medium encounter a hard or deadly encounter. Don't let the name fool you. "Deadly" in 5E should have been the "medium" default.The #1 problem of 5E. Gritty realism healing is one option. Gritty realism while exploring, normal rules in town is another option. Going more explicitly gamey and only letting the PCs rest after they've have the requisite number of encounters per adventuring day (6-8 medium encounters) is another. The game is explicitly designed to be balanced around those 6-8 medium encounters per long rest. It's a design flaw that allows players to nova and long rest after every fight. And they will...because they can. And they'll whine if you don't let them. Another option is to remove leomund's tiny hut. Another is to keep the world alive even as the PCs try to rest, i.e. the monsters don't all sleep when the PCs do, so they will come and harass the PCs. If they don't sleep somewhere absolutely safe, they will be harassed and not be able to rest, i.e. don't treat the world like a video game and don't let the players treat the world like a video game. Most of these will get a lot of push back from your players. Because, again, they probably like the superhero power fantasy of 5E. So the other way to go is to lean into the superhero power fantasy of 5E, but also adjust things to (mostly) get what you want. Sound paradoxical? It's not. Look at the adventuring day. Take that and use it as your baseline to build one encounter. Give your PCs the ability to short rest as some kind of action, but no more than twice per long rest. Regular action, bonus action, free action, reaction...whatever. This brings your short rest classes up in power to match your long rest classes, but you use the adventuring day to build one encounter thereby drastically ramping up the difficulty (the challenge you want). It sounds like you and your players want different things from the game. 5E suits them, but doesn't seem to suit you. It's not hard to get players to try other systems, especially ones similar to what they're already playing. When this campaign is done, offer to run a different game. Most will jump on board. Some won't. Better to run for a smaller group with a system you enjoy running rather than constantly having to fight the system to get it to do what you want.</blockquote>

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