D&D 5E What is Over-Powered?

[Psikerlord#]

If you're the DM, nothing is "overpowered" compared to what you can throw at the party, and you can change the game drastically to make it easier (or more difficult) for your players. If your party isn't tactically minded, they could have a party with every character having "overpowered" builds but nobody being overpowered. On the other hand, they could have mechanically "weak" characters but still laugh at everything you throw at them with a combination of good luck and strong tactical play.

I agree that multiclassing for the sake of minmaxing is a bad idea: even though no builds (that I've seen) utterly break the game, it seems wrong to allow players to multiclass without then having a good RP reason for it. For example, if a wizard wanted to take a level in cleric "because my channel divinity lets me maximize the damage of Chromatic Orb", I'd probably disallow it. If a wizard wanted to take a level in cleric " because he's been a devout worshipper of the god of storms and he's rewarding him for his faithful service", then that's fine. Even if the resulting build is the same, at least one player made an effort to justify it.

For example: to deal with GWM/SS, if you impose disadvantage on the attack roll then if they take the -5 their hit chance is ridiculous. Or a high-AC target that drops their effective to-hit at or below zero: the Shield and Shield of Faith spells come to mind here.

I've only seen crossbow expert come into play once, and when it did it was pretty powerful... However, not having disadvantage for shooting in melee was less of an issue than the fact that the character rolled a +5 to Dex at level 1 so he had two attacks at +7 to hit each and a total of 18 (1d8+1d6+10) damage. Our ranger also hadn't gotten his multiattack yet, and once he got that his damage became competitive with what the CE used to do (before the player left).

Passive perception is a bit wonky, but if you give a clue when a PC detects something with passive perception rather than a full description ("You see a goblin hiding in the woods" compared to "You hear the rustling of leaves off to your side, and see what looks to be a pair of eyes glinting behind some foliage") it can work fine.

To deal with a moon druid (mentioned in every thread about OP builds...), throw situations at them where Wildshape would have to be used in a non-combat role: for example, a sheer cliff where they'd need to turn into a Giant Spider and ferry the rest of the party, or if they need to crawl through the bars of a cage to release the party from a trap.

On the moon druid issue, I find using injuries helps prop up the threat/danger of combats, despite their huge HP pools (albeit I use an expanded injuries & setbacks table, fleshing out the DMG table).

 

[fjw70]

I have been playing just the basic game and it works great. Nothing OP that I have seen.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I have been reading the PHB, and so far I am finding quite a lot to be overpowered. Has anyone felt this way?

Depends on what you mean by overpowered. I have found that it's pretty easy to construct PCs who stomp all over "balanced" encounters in a variety of ways.

I suspect that was a design goal, because players like to win, but out does imply that many, many builds are in some sense overpowered.

 

[Staffan]

"Balanced" encounters aren't supposed to be 50/50 chances for the PCs to win. They're supposed to be near-100%, but with the PCs getting a bit banged up, maybe expending a spell or two, and such. It's not until you've had a couple of those that you're in real danger.

 

[Werebat]

Yeah situation 1 is not a problem, you can always adds more monsters.

It CAN be a problem if the players are savvy and call you on shortchanging them xp (or you give them the standard xp awards for tougher encounters and they rocket up in levels).

A DM dealing with situation 1 can end up having to respond in min/maxing kind, for example mobbing the low level party with a gang of 2nd level Circle of the Moon druids. This can be irritating and unfun for the DM as it forces his hand on encounter creation.

 

[SirAntoine]

"Balanced" encounters aren't supposed to be 50/50 chances for the PCs to win. They're supposed to be near-100%, but with the PCs getting a bit banged up, maybe expending a spell or two, and such. It's not until you've had a couple of those that you're in real danger.

No. The challenge of an encounter is supposed to vary widely. Some encounters will be near-100% chance for the PC's to win, others will even be a 100% chance win because they are just incidental encounters with wandering monsters or when the monsters are injured or badly outnumbered, or much lower level of course. Other encounters will be more difficult, and a 50/50 encounter is about as difficult as the game will get ever if the PC's are going to have a fair chance to win. The final boss fight might be a 50/50 encounter, but even then, 80/20, or 75/25, or 67/33, all give the PC's a very significant chance of losing. If they can run away, that's one thing, but I am talking about the chances of total death or capture. Many encounters should be run away from at the get-go, but the monsters the PC's are expected to fight should be balanced or "tailored" to their power and level.

 

[Herr der Qual]

I don't feel like the first situation and the second situation have a different solution, I deal with these situations by picking monsters/enemies that each have the ability to really mess with at least one of the party members, like if I'm dming a party of five 3rd level characters that has three casters that can do gnarly damage at range and two tanks that are pretty much unbeatable in melee, I'm not going to throw a group of creatures together with no response to that, I'm going to throw them against some creatures that can silence the casters, and some stuff that can stand up to the tanks. If you respond to the strengths of a class with the strengths of their opponent nothing is overpowered but you can overly frustrate your players so, it's a balancing act certainly.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

"Balanced" encounters aren't supposed to be 50/50 chances for the PCs to win. They're supposed to be near-100%, but with the PCs getting a bit banged up, maybe expending a spell or two, and such. It's not until you've had a couple of those that you're in real danger.

By "stomp all over" I mean "could beat essentially unlimited numbers of 'Medium' encounters per hour." Alternately, "can easily beat a 'Deadly' encounter without expending significant resources; typically requires double-Deadly threats in order to feel 'at risk'."

 

[Psikerlord#]

I don't feel like the first situation and the second situation have a different solution, I deal with these situations by picking monsters/enemies that each have the ability to really mess with at least one of the party members, like if I'm dming a party of five 3rd level characters that has three casters that can do gnarly damage at range and two tanks that are pretty much unbeatable in melee, I'm not going to throw a group of creatures together with no response to that, I'm going to throw them against some creatures that can silence the casters, and some stuff that can stand up to the tanks. If you respond to the strengths of a class with the strengths of their opponent nothing is overpowered but you can overly frustrate your players so, it's a balancing act certainly.

This can work but it feels contrived if every encounter just happens to target a party weakness. Good in small doses in my experience.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

No. The challenge of an encounter is supposed to vary widely. Some encounters will be near-100% chance for the PC's to win, others will even be a 100% chance win because they are just incidental encounters with wandering monsters or when the monsters are injured or badly outnumbered, or much lower level of course. Other encounters will be more difficult, and a 50/50 encounter is about as difficult as the game will get ever if the PC's are going to have a fair chance to win. The final boss fight might be a 50/50 encounter, but even then, 80/20, or 75/25, or 67/33, all give the PC's a very significant chance of losing. If they can run away, that's one thing, but I am talking about the chances of total death or capture. Many encounters should be run away from at the get-go, but the monsters the PC's are expected to fight should be balanced or "tailored" to their power and level.

That's the interesting thing: I'm finding that in 5E, my intuition is off, and many encounters that I would expect to be "run away!" adventures actually turn out to be 50/50 situations when I actually game them out. Monsters are weaker than I expect, relative to the official guidelines.

The only way I know to make monsters strong enough to challenge PCs is to turn it into a war game, about using smart tactics and something better than "the allosaur pack charges you at full speed"--turn it into "the allosaur-riding enkidus charge you, hollering warcries and firing arrows from their longbows". Raw stats don't seem to cut it in 5E. The problem with that approach is that I'm still a pretty new DM, and I'm not sure yet when it is appropriate to roleplay enemies with tactical smarts. So far I've been erring on the side of dumb monsters but I think I'm about to unleash the allosaur cavalry next game...