First, the published adventures are based on CR. If the encounters are too weak, yes, I could buff them...but the point of me paying them quite a bit of money is that I don't have to.
Second, I'm meant to be using the CR to figure out what a balanced encounter looks like. If the CR system doesn't churn out good encounters because the monsters are too weak...then the CR system isn't fit for purpose. At the moment, it just tells me that Monster X is more powerful than Monster Y but less powerful than Monster Y. Fine... But then I have to playtest the encounters, tweak them and generally become intimately familiar with the monsters...again, I'm paying for WotC to do that for me.
Thirdly, if you're not familiar with the game, adjusting things are actually really hard work and people want to play the game, not sit there with a calculator.
The CR system, in theory, is fine. They just need to adjust it to work on premises that are actually true to life (like, not the 6-8 encounter day) and produces actually challenging (but not impossible) encounters. It can do that...but not with creatures being given the ratings they are or using the current calculations.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Are they? I can't say I've been keeping on top of them, but I compared a couple of Statblocks last year and from what I could see, they actually seemed weaker. I mean, I hope I'm wrong because they do need to be stronger (IMO), but they did seem weaker.
They seem to be generally a bit higher offense (roughly matching the DMG 2014 damage standards without adjustment for attack bonus, which winds up being a 10-20% damage buff), and creatures with things like resistance to non-magic weapons generally got more hit points and that resistance removed, which generally makes them tougher because resistance to non-magic weapons generally didn't do anything after very low CR. Spellcasting monsters are grossly simplified which generally makes their power more consistent (but also more boring).
I would recommend watching some of the videos posted by those that have recieved advance copies of the MM. There is a list of them in this post 2024-monster-manual-everything-you-want-to-know They very informative.
From what is slowly trickling out on the new Monster Manual, making monsters beefier[...]
Are they? I can't say I've been keeping on top of them, but I compared a couple of Statblocks last year and from what I could see, they actually seemed weaker. I mean, I hope I'm wrong because they do need to be stronger (IMO), but they did seem weaker.
I wouldn't say anything that was released prior to the PHB counts in what I was saying. They definitely amended a lot of things midstream in 5th to try and make things easier from a DM perspective, but the stuff coming out in the last couple of weeks, like what Lia just posted about the MM is what I am referencing.
First, the published adventures are based on CR. If the encounters are too weak, yes, I could buff them...but the point of me paying them quite a bit of money is that I don't have to.
Second, I'm meant to be using the CR to figure out what a balanced encounter looks like. If the CR system doesn't churn out good encounters because the monsters are too weak...then the CR system isn't fit for purpose. At the moment, it just tells me that Monster X is more powerful than Monster Y but less powerful than Monster Y. Fine... But then I have to playtest the encounters, tweak them and generally become intimately familiar with the monsters...again, I'm paying for WotC to do that for me.
Thirdly, if you're not familiar with the game, adjusting things are actually really hard work and people want to play the game, not sit there with a calculator.
The CR system, in theory, is fine. They just need to adjust it to work on premises that are actually true to life (like, not the 6-8 encounter day) and produces actually challenging (but not impossible) encounters. It can do that...but not with creatures being given the ratings they are or using the current calculations.
It can do that, if you're playing with all of those specific restrictions. If you're playing with the magic item limitations, if you're playing with the suggested short rest schemes, etc.
See where I'm taking this post? It's a lot of ifs. That and EVERY version of D&D, 5th isn't immune to this has had this "problem". Everything in the material really is meant to be used as a guide, and modules in 5th are meant to be played in the very specific sandbox that they are founded in. The second you allow homebrew, different interpretations of rules, more magic items, etc then that balance is destroyed.
It's hard to play "the perfect" game of an edition because one, it doesn't exist and if you're trying to use the source material as that guideline with zero wiggle room ultimately the vast majority of people don't find that fun.
First, the published adventures are based on CR. If the encounters are too weak, yes, I could buff them...but the point of me paying them quite a bit of money is that I don't have to.
They aren't creating content to suit all parties/scenarios. They publish a base. It is expected for DMs to be able to adjust to how their campaign has progressed. That is on you not them.
First, the published adventures are based on CR. If the encounters are too weak, yes, I could buff them...but the point of me paying them quite a bit of money is that I don't have to.
They aren't creating content to suit all parties/scenarios. They publish a base. It is expected for DMs to be able to adjust to how their campaign has progressed. That is on you not them.
And who's happy with it? Very few. Creating and continuing a system that's rubbish is not excused because there's some variation in how people okay the game. Their premises are set on some of the very few assumptions that no one actually adheres to - including WotC. A graded system in which every encounter needs to be off the charts is a bad system.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
As a person who has worked with numbers a LOT, I have a few points I wish to make:
1) The CR system is a pipe dream. There is NO way to balance a system as intricate as D&D. None. Full stop. Example: A Banshee (as of 2014) is a CR 4 Undead creature with a ton of Resistances and Immunities and a wail attack that can drop multiple PCs to 0 HP if they blow their Save. It can also detect creatures up to 5 MILES away and is incorporeal so if it wants to catch you, it will. So, a party with an average level of 4 (to match the Banshee) is likely to get slaughtered by one CR4 enemy. I use this example because it happened in my last campaign.
2) Quoted from the 2014 DMG: "When putting together an encounter or adventure, especially at lower levels, exercise caution when using monsters whose challenge rating is higher than the party’s average level. Such a creature might deal enough damage with a single action to take out adventurers of a lower level. For example, an ogre has a challenge rating of 2, but it can kill a 1st-level wizard with a single blow.
In addition, some monsters have features that might be difficult or impossible for lower-level characters to overcome. For example, a rakshasa has a challenge rating of 13 and is immune to spells of 6th level and lower. Spellcasters of 12th level or lower have no spells higher than 6th level, meaning that they won’t be able to affect the rakshasa with their magic, putting the adventurers at a serious disadvantage. Such an encounter would be significantly tougher for the party than the monster’s challenge rating might suggest."
'Exercise caution.' Great advice...but HOW exactly? Take an encounter with a CR 6 enemy that puts half the party to sleep and that's a tough fight. But what if the party is made up of all Elves who cannot be put to sleep against their will? This is a hint of a sliver of how complex D&D can be. It's no wonder that the franchise (and TTRPG in general) is short of DMs. For a newcomer this is HARD.
1. There isn't a way to perfectly balance every encounter in a scientific manner with a 100% accuracy, no. But no one's arguing that it should. The fact is though, that for a system that is defining CR X to be a medium difficulty encounter for a party who are of level X and facing 6-8 encounters a day, then if a single encounter involving a CR 4 creature is likely (as in, not just a fluke from the dice or from poor decisions or even unpredictable decisions, or just a one-off, but is actually likely to happen) to result in a TPK...then the system is doing a bad job. I've not checked the Banshee for the specific case, but in general...if it's saying it should be relatively easy but it generally turns out hard (or vice versa), then it needs to be altered. It sounds like it's not accounting for the Banshee's abilities, which makes the Banshee much more powerful than the CR suggests.
My experience, and those of most people who have talked about it, has been that the CR overestimates the difficulty of an encounter. Presumably, it's because it assumes 6-8 encounters between long rests...which not even WotC in their published adventures comes even close to. Usually, it's like...two.
'Exercise caution.' Great advice...but HOW exactly?
That's the problem with how CR is set up currently. It's supposed to take out the "you just have to have the feel for how difficult a creature is", but then it tells me I have to know how difficult it is, because the CR system doesn't tell me how difficult an encounter will be beyond "this one is more dangerous than that one, but less dangerous than this one". Your example is one of the easier things for DMs to overcome. I have a party full of Elves? Ok, so my Night Hag isn't going to e anke to put them to sleep...but that's a minor aspect, it'll be ok...but the Vampire will struggle because I was counting on it being able to [conditions]charmed;Charm[/conditions] them...hmmm. It's building the encounters that it struggles with.
What they need to do is reassess their assumption of 6-8 encounters per day, and adjust it to more realistic expectations, maybe 2-4. They also need to make it account for abilities and provide ways to assess them.
Unfortunately, they seem to have gone the opposite way in the name of streamlining, and made it harder to account for the encounter makeup (for example, in the '14 DMG, they provided a calculation to account for the ratio of enemies to allies (it ups the difficulty of there are more enemies than allies, and vice versa), but they've now removed that aspect.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I agree that is trying to streamline the process, which they think will make it easier, they're making it harder.
Also, new DMs may still struggle under the current system, no matter how 'smooth' they try to make it. One of my concerns is that the new MM will include 'abilities' rather than 'spells' so they can't be counter spelled. I've read posts calling for the banning of Counter Spell and I think they're nuts. Why take away one of the few ways the PCs have to counter an enemy?
From what is slowly trickling out on the new Monster Manual, making monsters beefier[...]
Are they? I can't say I've been keeping on top of them, but I compared a couple of Statblocks last year and from what I could see, they actually seemed weaker. I mean, I hope I'm wrong because they do need to be stronger (IMO), but they did seem weaker.
The streamlining of monsters to remove things such as spellcasting in favor of a few actions that have some magic effects (see Vecna, for example) certainly seems to have weakened monsters.
Oh, don't get me started. What they've been doing with spellcasting on monsters is one of the worst changes. We're losing both verisimilitude and built-in flexibility. Look at the Fomorian Noble- CR 15 and allegedly an archmage-tier wizard and they've got a whopping 5 casts of spells above 1st level to their name per day, with the remaining at will casts being Mage Armor, Mage Hand, and Prestidigitation. And they didn't even give them a spell attack- their generic attack is hitting someone with a magic stick. I shudder to think what liches are gonna look like in the new MM.
Late to the party, and we will have to wait and see what the MM will be like, but with combats on average lasting 3-5 rounds do you need monsters/NPC’s with more than 5 castings per day? I mean, flexibility is nice, and I hope many monsters with have actions, bonus actions, reaction abilities, but if a monster had 15 spell slots and 20 known spells and they are dead in 3 rounds does it really matter?
From what is slowly trickling out on the new Monster Manual, making monsters beefier[...]
Are they? I can't say I've been keeping on top of them, but I compared a couple of Statblocks last year and from what I could see, they actually seemed weaker. I mean, I hope I'm wrong because they do need to be stronger (IMO), but they did seem weaker.
The streamlining of monsters to remove things such as spellcasting in favor of a few actions that have some magic effects (see Vecna, for example) certainly seems to have weakened monsters.
Oh, don't get me started. What they've been doing with spellcasting on monsters is one of the worst changes. We're losing both verisimilitude and built-in flexibility. Look at the Fomorian Noble- CR 15 and allegedly an archmage-tier wizard and they've got a whopping 5 casts of spells above 1st level to their name per day, with the remaining at will casts being Mage Armor, Mage Hand, and Prestidigitation. And they didn't even give them a spell attack- their generic attack is hitting someone with a magic stick. I shudder to think what liches are gonna look like in the new MM.
Late to the party, and we will have to wait and see what the MM will be like, but with combats on average lasting 3-5 rounds do you need monsters/NPC’s with more than 5 castings per day? I mean, flexibility is nice, and I hope many monsters with have actions, bonus actions, reaction abilities, but if a monster had 15 spell slots and 20 known spells and they are dead in 3 rounds does it really matter?
Part of the point to giving them extra spells is so they can function out of combat with verisimilitude. As my example stands, the only out of combat spells these alleged "great mages" have is 1 cast of Fly or Plane Shift self and the Prestidigitation and Mage Hand cantrips. It's fine if all you want to use them for is one-off combat encounters, much less useful if you actually want to use them as real NPCs who cast spells in other contexts. They either get nothing, or they functionally get anything and everything at no cost.
From what is slowly trickling out on the new Monster Manual, making monsters beefier[...]
Are they? I can't say I've been keeping on top of them, but I compared a couple of Statblocks last year and from what I could see, they actually seemed weaker. I mean, I hope I'm wrong because they do need to be stronger (IMO), but they did seem weaker.
The streamlining of monsters to remove things such as spellcasting in favor of a few actions that have some magic effects (see Vecna, for example) certainly seems to have weakened monsters.
Oh, don't get me started. What they've been doing with spellcasting on monsters is one of the worst changes. We're losing both verisimilitude and built-in flexibility. Look at the Fomorian Noble- CR 15 and allegedly an archmage-tier wizard and they've got a whopping 5 casts of spells above 1st level to their name per day, with the remaining at will casts being Mage Armor, Mage Hand, and Prestidigitation. And they didn't even give them a spell attack- their generic attack is hitting someone with a magic stick. I shudder to think what liches are gonna look like in the new MM.
Late to the party, and we will have to wait and see what the MM will be like, but with combats on average lasting 3-5 rounds do you need monsters/NPC’s with more than 5 castings per day? I mean, flexibility is nice, and I hope many monsters with have actions, bonus actions, reaction abilities, but if a monster had 15 spell slots and 20 known spells and they are dead in 3 rounds does it really matter?
Only if you only ever play with that monster one time, or have it do the exact same way every time you use it with no variations to accommodate variations in the party.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
They aren't creating content to suit all parties/scenarios. They publish a base. It is expected for DMs to be able to adjust to how their campaign has progressed. That is on you not them.
The problem is that they aren't creating content that's suitable for even an average party after very low levels. Also, because they removed the group size adjustment, fights against multiple opponents are far more dangerous than fights against solo opponents at any given budget.
Since we started with 5e, we have always done 1 to 20 campaigns.
I have had 8 or 9 different ones.
Tier four stuff requires a bunch of things to really make it practical: tracking of all the things and a survival baseline, knowing how to push players into using resources, designing adventures that are something other than “fight a god”, building your stakes up, making sure progression fits, budgeting our your adventures, leaning on more than just combat, running NPC and other critters strategically and tactically, and being prepared for spells to handle things lower levels have to struggle with.
not that those first few were easy, mind you — like anything else, you have to experiment, to learn, to study, to improve.
in my current campaign, the planned “21st” adventure is take on a kingdom of dragons and stop a war that people will lose. It is a peace mission, basically. And there are moments that will determine how the dragons react to these people being sent scattered through the rest of the adventures that lead up to it.
The adventure includes getting there — and dragons who want war trying to stop them from making it. They will fight beings they have never encountered anywhere else, because the dragons have a few “humans”, but mostly they have an army of other six limbed beings. It is a whole thing…
my groups (well, three of the four, at least< I hope) will hit tier four end of this year, early next. I have three tier four adventures laid out/planned out/outlined, in addition to the one I just noted.
one thing that helped me to do them was to start by designing my toughest, penultimate encounter first, and then working backwards. If you can design an encounter that can challenge a 20th level PC set you build out, then you have a good idea of what you will need to do. And the only way to do that is to design them,
I do think they are encouraging more tier 3 and 4 stuff, on purpose. But more than that, they are responding to the complaints about how hard it is to design such stuff, and so making it so that the design process is easier and simpler.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
From what is slowly trickling out on the new Monster Manual, making monsters beefier[...]
Are they? I can't say I've been keeping on top of them, but I compared a couple of Statblocks last year and from what I could see, they actually seemed weaker. I mean, I hope I'm wrong because they do need to be stronger (IMO), but they did seem weaker.
The streamlining of monsters to remove things such as spellcasting in favor of a few actions that have some magic effects (see Vecna, for example) certainly seems to have weakened monsters.
Oh, don't get me started. What they've been doing with spellcasting on monsters is one of the worst changes. We're losing both verisimilitude and built-in flexibility. Look at the Fomorian Noble- CR 15 and allegedly an archmage-tier wizard and they've got a whopping 5 casts of spells above 1st level to their name per day, with the remaining at will casts being Mage Armor, Mage Hand, and Prestidigitation. And they didn't even give them a spell attack- their generic attack is hitting someone with a magic stick. I shudder to think what liches are gonna look like in the new MM.
Late to the party, and we will have to wait and see what the MM will be like, but with combats on average lasting 3-5 rounds do you need monsters/NPC’s with more than 5 castings per day? I mean, flexibility is nice, and I hope many monsters with have actions, bonus actions, reaction abilities, but if a monster had 15 spell slots and 20 known spells and they are dead in 3 rounds does it really matter?
Part of the point to giving them extra spells is so they can function out of combat with verisimilitude. As my example stands, the only out of combat spells these alleged "great mages" have is 1 cast of Fly or Plane Shift self and the Prestidigitation and Mage Hand cantrips. It's fine if all you want to use them for is one-off combat encounters, much less useful if you actually want to use them as real NPCs who cast spells in other contexts. They either get nothing, or they functionally get anything and everything at no cost.
I see your point and I’m fine with giving more flexibility. At the same time, I don’t look at the MM as the source for real NPCs for a bunch of in and out of combat encounters. I see the MM as mainly the place to those combat-centric monsters that you encounter and possibly kill. And any reoccurring BBEG can be modified to fit.
But I’m not a DM regularly, so take my opinion as you will.
And it’s still a wait and see situation to see what WotC has done with such monsters. Just because we’ve seen some stat blocks from previously released material that kind of showed the direction WotC was going doesn’t mean nothing has changed afterward. I’m not expecting big changes but I’m sure there have been some.
I agree that is trying to streamline the process, which they think will make it easier, they're making it harder.
Also, new DMs may still struggle under the current system, no matter how 'smooth' they try to make it. One of my concerns is that the new MM will include 'abilities' rather than 'spells' so they can't be counter spelled. I've read posts calling for the banning of Counter Spell and I think they're nuts. Why take away one of the few ways the PCs have to counter an enemy?
One of the interesting issues here is that designers often confuse algorithmic complexity with end user complexity. Math and attribute dimensions may look messy but it's very possible to make a calculator that streamlines and guides from this, and maybe that's a better way to "simplicity."
The problem with spellcaster writeups is mostly that they have a bunch of spells that they aren't likely to use, but it's not necessarily obvious to an inexperienced DM. Honestly, you could accomplish the same simplification as they have in the new mage by changing spell lists from "here are 15 known spells" to "here are 5 known spells that are likely to actually be cast in a combat; the DM is free to add additional spells but doing so is unlikely to meaningfully affect challenge"
The problem with spellcaster writeups is mostly that they have a bunch of spells that they aren't likely to use, but it's not necessarily obvious to an inexperienced DM. Honestly, you could accomplish the same simplification as they have in the new mage by changing spell lists from "here are 15 known spells" to "here are 5 known spells that are likely to actually be cast in a combat; the DM is free to add additional spells but doing so is unlikely to meaningfully affect challenge"
What I like about this approach is that it makes it straightforward then to make an intentional choice to add spells that the DM feels are particularly appropriate to the party. And when you do it intentionally it's not the same cognitive load as wondering "what are all these 15 spells and why are they here?"
Or alternately, "These are the 5 spells the caster likely uses; 10 other spells are here to round out the spellcaster but can be changed out at DM discretion to better tailor an encounter."
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There are three problems with that.
First, the published adventures are based on CR. If the encounters are too weak, yes, I could buff them...but the point of me paying them quite a bit of money is that I don't have to.
Second, I'm meant to be using the CR to figure out what a balanced encounter looks like. If the CR system doesn't churn out good encounters because the monsters are too weak...then the CR system isn't fit for purpose. At the moment, it just tells me that Monster X is more powerful than Monster Y but less powerful than Monster Y. Fine... But then I have to playtest the encounters, tweak them and generally become intimately familiar with the monsters...again, I'm paying for WotC to do that for me.
Thirdly, if you're not familiar with the game, adjusting things are actually really hard work and people want to play the game, not sit there with a calculator.
The CR system, in theory, is fine. They just need to adjust it to work on premises that are actually true to life (like, not the 6-8 encounter day) and produces actually challenging (but not impossible) encounters. It can do that...but not with creatures being given the ratings they are or using the current calculations.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
They seem to be generally a bit higher offense (roughly matching the DMG 2014 damage standards without adjustment for attack bonus, which winds up being a 10-20% damage buff), and creatures with things like resistance to non-magic weapons generally got more hit points and that resistance removed, which generally makes them tougher because resistance to non-magic weapons generally didn't do anything after very low CR. Spellcasting monsters are grossly simplified which generally makes their power more consistent (but also more boring).
I would recommend watching some of the videos posted by those that have recieved advance copies of the MM. There is a list of them in this post 2024-monster-manual-everything-you-want-to-know They very informative.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
I wouldn't say anything that was released prior to the PHB counts in what I was saying. They definitely amended a lot of things midstream in 5th to try and make things easier from a DM perspective, but the stuff coming out in the last couple of weeks, like what Lia just posted about the MM is what I am referencing.
It can do that, if you're playing with all of those specific restrictions. If you're playing with the magic item limitations, if you're playing with the suggested short rest schemes, etc.
See where I'm taking this post? It's a lot of ifs. That and EVERY version of D&D, 5th isn't immune to this has had this "problem". Everything in the material really is meant to be used as a guide, and modules in 5th are meant to be played in the very specific sandbox that they are founded in. The second you allow homebrew, different interpretations of rules, more magic items, etc then that balance is destroyed.
It's hard to play "the perfect" game of an edition because one, it doesn't exist and if you're trying to use the source material as that guideline with zero wiggle room ultimately the vast majority of people don't find that fun.
They aren't creating content to suit all parties/scenarios. They publish a base. It is expected for DMs to be able to adjust to how their campaign has progressed. That is on you not them.
And who's happy with it? Very few. Creating and continuing a system that's rubbish is not excused because there's some variation in how people okay the game. Their premises are set on some of the very few assumptions that no one actually adheres to - including WotC. A graded system in which every encounter needs to be off the charts is a bad system.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
As a person who has worked with numbers a LOT, I have a few points I wish to make:
1) The CR system is a pipe dream. There is NO way to balance a system as intricate as D&D. None. Full stop. Example: A Banshee (as of 2014) is a CR 4 Undead creature with a ton of Resistances and Immunities and a wail attack that can drop multiple PCs to 0 HP if they blow their Save. It can also detect creatures up to 5 MILES away and is incorporeal so if it wants to catch you, it will. So, a party with an average level of 4 (to match the Banshee) is likely to get slaughtered by one CR4 enemy. I use this example because it happened in my last campaign.
2) Quoted from the 2014 DMG: "When putting together an encounter or adventure, especially at lower levels, exercise caution when using monsters whose challenge rating is higher than the party’s average level. Such a creature might deal enough damage with a single action to take out adventurers of a lower level. For example, an ogre has a challenge rating of 2, but it can kill a 1st-level wizard with a single blow.
In addition, some monsters have features that might be difficult or impossible for lower-level characters to overcome. For example, a rakshasa has a challenge rating of 13 and is immune to spells of 6th level and lower. Spellcasters of 12th level or lower have no spells higher than 6th level, meaning that they won’t be able to affect the rakshasa with their magic, putting the adventurers at a serious disadvantage. Such an encounter would be significantly tougher for the party than the monster’s challenge rating might suggest."
'Exercise caution.' Great advice...but HOW exactly? Take an encounter with a CR 6 enemy that puts half the party to sleep and that's a tough fight. But what if the party is made up of all Elves who cannot be put to sleep against their will? This is a hint of a sliver of how complex D&D can be. It's no wonder that the franchise (and TTRPG in general) is short of DMs. For a newcomer this is HARD.
1. There isn't a way to perfectly balance every encounter in a scientific manner with a 100% accuracy, no. But no one's arguing that it should. The fact is though, that for a system that is defining CR X to be a medium difficulty encounter for a party who are of level X and facing 6-8 encounters a day, then if a single encounter involving a CR 4 creature is likely (as in, not just a fluke from the dice or from poor decisions or even unpredictable decisions, or just a one-off, but is actually likely to happen) to result in a TPK...then the system is doing a bad job. I've not checked the Banshee for the specific case, but in general...if it's saying it should be relatively easy but it generally turns out hard (or vice versa), then it needs to be altered. It sounds like it's not accounting for the Banshee's abilities, which makes the Banshee much more powerful than the CR suggests.
My experience, and those of most people who have talked about it, has been that the CR overestimates the difficulty of an encounter. Presumably, it's because it assumes 6-8 encounters between long rests...which not even WotC in their published adventures comes even close to. Usually, it's like...two.
'Exercise caution.' Great advice...but HOW exactly?
That's the problem with how CR is set up currently. It's supposed to take out the "you just have to have the feel for how difficult a creature is", but then it tells me I have to know how difficult it is, because the CR system doesn't tell me how difficult an encounter will be beyond "this one is more dangerous than that one, but less dangerous than this one". Your example is one of the easier things for DMs to overcome. I have a party full of Elves? Ok, so my Night Hag isn't going to e anke to put them to sleep...but that's a minor aspect, it'll be ok...but the Vampire will struggle because I was counting on it being able to [conditions]charmed;Charm[/conditions] them...hmmm. It's building the encounters that it struggles with.
What they need to do is reassess their assumption of 6-8 encounters per day, and adjust it to more realistic expectations, maybe 2-4. They also need to make it account for abilities and provide ways to assess them.
Unfortunately, they seem to have gone the opposite way in the name of streamlining, and made it harder to account for the encounter makeup (for example, in the '14 DMG, they provided a calculation to account for the ratio of enemies to allies (it ups the difficulty of there are more enemies than allies, and vice versa), but they've now removed that aspect.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I agree that is trying to streamline the process, which they think will make it easier, they're making it harder.
Also, new DMs may still struggle under the current system, no matter how 'smooth' they try to make it. One of my concerns is that the new MM will include 'abilities' rather than 'spells' so they can't be counter spelled. I've read posts calling for the banning of Counter Spell and I think they're nuts. Why take away one of the few ways the PCs have to counter an enemy?
Late to the party, and we will have to wait and see what the MM will be like, but with combats on average lasting 3-5 rounds do you need monsters/NPC’s with more than 5 castings per day? I mean, flexibility is nice, and I hope many monsters with have actions, bonus actions, reaction abilities, but if a monster had 15 spell slots and 20 known spells and they are dead in 3 rounds does it really matter?
EZD6 by DM Scotty
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Part of the point to giving them extra spells is so they can function out of combat with verisimilitude. As my example stands, the only out of combat spells these alleged "great mages" have is 1 cast of Fly or Plane Shift self and the Prestidigitation and Mage Hand cantrips. It's fine if all you want to use them for is one-off combat encounters, much less useful if you actually want to use them as real NPCs who cast spells in other contexts. They either get nothing, or they functionally get anything and everything at no cost.
Only if you only ever play with that monster one time, or have it do the exact same way every time you use it with no variations to accommodate variations in the party.
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The problem is that they aren't creating content that's suitable for even an average party after very low levels. Also, because they removed the group size adjustment, fights against multiple opponents are far more dangerous than fights against solo opponents at any given budget.
Honestly if they had any desire for people to play in tier 4 they probably would have needed to hard nerf almost all spells 6th+ spell level.
Since we started with 5e, we have always done 1 to 20 campaigns.
I have had 8 or 9 different ones.
Tier four stuff requires a bunch of things to really make it practical: tracking of all the things and a survival baseline, knowing how to push players into using resources, designing adventures that are something other than “fight a god”, building your stakes up, making sure progression fits, budgeting our your adventures, leaning on more than just combat, running NPC and other critters strategically and tactically, and being prepared for spells to handle things lower levels have to struggle with.
not that those first few were easy, mind you — like anything else, you have to experiment, to learn, to study, to improve.
in my current campaign, the planned “21st” adventure is take on a kingdom of dragons and stop a war that people will lose. It is a peace mission, basically. And there are moments that will determine how the dragons react to these people being sent scattered through the rest of the adventures that lead up to it.
The adventure includes getting there — and dragons who want war trying to stop them from making it. They will fight beings they have never encountered anywhere else, because the dragons have a few “humans”, but mostly they have an army of other six limbed beings. It is a whole thing…
my groups (well, three of the four, at least< I hope) will hit tier four end of this year, early next. I have three tier four adventures laid out/planned out/outlined, in addition to the one I just noted.
one thing that helped me to do them was to start by designing my toughest, penultimate encounter first, and then working backwards. If you can design an encounter that can challenge a 20th level PC set you build out, then you have a good idea of what you will need to do. And the only way to do that is to design them,
I do think they are encouraging more tier 3 and 4 stuff, on purpose. But more than that, they are responding to the complaints about how hard it is to design such stuff, and so making it so that the design process is easier and simpler.
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I see your point and I’m fine with giving more flexibility. At the same time, I don’t look at the MM as the source for real NPCs for a bunch of in and out of combat encounters. I see the MM as mainly the place to those combat-centric monsters that you encounter and possibly kill. And any reoccurring BBEG can be modified to fit.
But I’m not a DM regularly, so take my opinion as you will.
And it’s still a wait and see situation to see what WotC has done with such monsters. Just because we’ve seen some stat blocks from previously released material that kind of showed the direction WotC was going doesn’t mean nothing has changed afterward. I’m not expecting big changes but I’m sure there have been some.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
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One of the interesting issues here is that designers often confuse algorithmic complexity with end user complexity. Math and attribute dimensions may look messy but it's very possible to make a calculator that streamlines and guides from this, and maybe that's a better way to "simplicity."
The problem with spellcaster writeups is mostly that they have a bunch of spells that they aren't likely to use, but it's not necessarily obvious to an inexperienced DM. Honestly, you could accomplish the same simplification as they have in the new mage by changing spell lists from "here are 15 known spells" to "here are 5 known spells that are likely to actually be cast in a combat; the DM is free to add additional spells but doing so is unlikely to meaningfully affect challenge"
What I like about this approach is that it makes it straightforward then to make an intentional choice to add spells that the DM feels are particularly appropriate to the party. And when you do it intentionally it's not the same cognitive load as wondering "what are all these 15 spells and why are they here?"
Or alternately, "These are the 5 spells the caster likely uses; 10 other spells are here to round out the spellcaster but can be changed out at DM discretion to better tailor an encounter."