D&D 5E What style of encounter design is 5th going for?

[Argyle King]

I think the point is that 5e (like Mike Mearls) doesn't care how you build your encounters.

If you want to grab a single opponent, that's fine. If you want to carefully construct an encounter out of creatures of multiple levels, that's OK too. You can even send in the baddies in waves, if that meets your fancy. Alternatively, if you want to populate your dungeon level with one day's worth of enemies who are encountered in whatever order, that's a good choice also. Or, if you want to let beasties wander where they may and leave it up to the PCs to decide whether to fight or flee, that's hunky-dory too. The goal here is an inclusive edition that is capable of supporting a variety of styles and tools for designing adventures.

Now, we can criticize whether the 5e tools aren't good enough in one of these areas, but there's no question that the goal is to support all types of encounter designs.

-KS

As long as the goal works, I'm happy.

Though I am curious (and have some concern) about trying to smash two seemingly very conflicting ideals about encounter design into the same system. I also have some concern about how well things work. So far, my impression of 5E is good from the player side of the table. I don't have enough experience from the DM side of things to have an opinion.

Though, I am aware that the people I game with in my home group often seem to be more skilled players than average. At the same time, the performances of creatures during Encounters sessions haven't been impressive. It might be a good idea for me to treat them as a larger party and shift the XP multipliers a step. At a glance, there are a few other adjustments I feel I'd need to make, but I'd like to try running the game and getting more experience before changing things.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I'm still unsure which style 5th is trying for, and the rules aren't always clear either. I know the encounter building rules are still being worked on, but -even considering that I'm looking at a very early version of the rules- a few things turn out rather odd and at times the rules even conflict with themselves.

I think it was a rule of three where I saw a quote that stuck in my mind. "In 5E, the threat doesn't end just because the encounter does."

That, in my experience, is the key difference between 3E and 5E encounters: it's relatively common for a party to get in over their heads, throw down the caltrops, smoke screens, charm persons, etc., and retreat; with the intention of coming back when they've fully prepared to deal with the threat. The streamed videos of the design team playing Phandelver illustrate this style too, I think.

 

[Argyle King]

I think it was a rule of three where I saw a quote that stuck in my mind. "In 5E, the threat doesn't end just because the encounter does."

That, in my experience, is the key difference between 3E and 5E encounters: it's relatively common for a party to get in over their heads, throw down the caltrops, smoke screens, charm persons, etc., and retreat; with the intention of coming back when they've fully prepared to deal with the threat. The streamed videos of the design team playing Phandelver illustrate this style too, I think.

I may check that out. Thus far, that sounds vastly different from my experiences in 5th and also vastly different from the groups I've watched go through the adventure.

 

[Rhenny]

I think it was a rule of three where I saw a quote that stuck in my mind. "In 5E, the threat doesn't end just because the encounter does."

That, in my experience, is the key difference between 3E and 5E encounters: it's relatively common for a party to get in over their heads, throw down the caltrops, smoke screens, charm persons, etc., and retreat; with the intention of coming back when they've fully prepared to deal with the threat. The streamed videos of the design team playing Phandelver illustrate this style too, I think.

I agree. The disengage action makes it much easier to get out of combat. So does split movement

Part of the challenge with 5e is to teach players when to run.

 

[Libramarian]

At some point, Mike Mearls described the encounter-building advice as "make your dungeon with whatever makes sense, then, if you really care, you can go back and find out how tough each fight will be."

Of course, he's been saying stuff like that for years, and the encounter building guidelines in the basic PDF look exactly like 4e's system.

That's actually what it says in the DM rules, pretty much. These are rules to estimate encounter difficulty, NOT rules for generating encounters. A subtle but important distinction. 5e doesn't really have any encounter generation rules. It just says do what you need to for the story and the logic of the setting (then if you want, check the difficulty after).

More help than that is necessary when you're building a lot of encounters at once and you don't know exactly how they connect to the story or setting (eg a classic dungeon). The text suggests a way in which the XP per day table could be adapted to a dungeon generation procedure but leaves a lot of work to the DM.

edit:
Actually although the word "budget" doesn't appear anywhere in the encounter section, it does appear on p. 5, which says "The guidelines later in this document explain how to create encounters using XP budgets, as well as how to adjust an encounter’s difficulty." To me that sounds at odds with how the guidelines are presented later, so I think this issue was in flux amongst the design team.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I agree. The disengage action makes it much easier to get out of combat. So does split movement

Part of the challenge with 5e is to teach players when to run.

Point of order: actually, 5E's disengage action is weaker than the withdraw action in 3.x. (5E allows you 100% movement; 3E allowed 200% movement.) The advantages of 5E's disengage action come from the change toward threatened zones away from threatened squares (note, now you can escape monsters with reach), and of course as you mentioned split movement offers more scope for fighting retreats. And the 1 reaction/round rule. Also, key fact, most monsters/characters can't charge in 5E, so all movement faster than 100% the monster's speed is good enough to escape--unless, of course the monster is willing to risk chasing and relying on round-by-round AOOs to whittle the runner down.

But, ime, the biggest mechanical shifts that push monsters into multi-encounter threats are:

1) More difficult fights. 5E has a less granular 4-step EL system than 3E's 9-step (I believe?) EL system, meaning that there's a big jump from medium to hard, and from hard to deadly. Also, at least in published modules so far, there's been a better than average chance of many medium encounters getting ratcheted up to hard if the PCs aren't smooth about their exploration. All meaning that there's a decent incentive for players to consider whether they really want this fight to happen on these terms; and also incentives for the DM to allow parlay offers/retreats to work.

2) Math rebalancing to curb (not eliminate) the element of rocket tag from combat that was present in 3E. Meaning that, compared to 3E, players usually now have a round or two to get a sense of which direction the combats are going, and time to consider the strategic alternatives instead of always "going for broke".

Note, all the above is a rambling assessment about how my 5E games have played so far compared to 3E; I'm nowhere near ready to make arguments about the general case!