There seems to be a bit of confusion about what I have been saying. In 5th edition D&D, I have yet to be in or run a game that went beyond Tier 1. I have a 4th level Battle Master Fighter and a 2nd Level Warlock of the Fiend. I ran a game with a Gensai Cleric, a Tabaxi Rogue, a Tiefling Sorcerer, and a second Tabaxi joined later as a multi-class Rogue/Fighter. The game was fun, other than that the Tabaxi Rogue was Chaotic Neutral and insisting on spending all her time stealing things in the capital city of a very lawful nation. None of the player character actually ever picked a sub-class, but I am pretty sure we did make it to 4th level before I had to quit running the game due to health issues.
I wasn't even using D&D Beyond at that point. The encounters were mostly homebrew twists on standard monsters, like a set of zombies chained together in a line, or an Ettin the party encounter singing a duet with itself.
I talked about some of the things I had done to keep the party alive, and I got stomped on hard here in the forums. I was told I was depriving my players of their precious agency because death is after all, a choice you make by playing in a game involving dice.
I don't have a clue how the game works outside of Tier 1, my experience with previous games didn't really have Tiers as such, and while we did play some pretty high end stuff none of it really applies to the current system. I remember the days when a Magic User at level 1 could cast only one spell per day, had to memorize that spell in advance, and would probably die from being hit with a dagger. I also remember when the Fighter could tank easily, because it was assumed that monsters wouldn't just wander past a threat. There had to be a healer, who spent all of their time casting heals, and it took weeks of downtime to recover to full hit points.
Back then, Gary Gygax considered D&D his own personal property, and anything he dreamed up and published in Dragon magazine was as official as anything in the Player's Handbook. That made the man twice as bad as Jeremy Crawford, who only helped co-develop the current rules.
The initial post is about a party consisting of these characters, and they can't be less than 3rd level since they have sub-classes.
None of those are tanks, only one is a full caster, and the Ranger has nothing but Cure Wounds three times per day. I doubt they would all live through a single Deadly encounter, nor more than one Hard encounter. It's a question if they could survive three Medium encounters in the same day. Once one of the characters dies, it would take direct DM intervention to bring that character back into play, and people convinced me that doing so is the wrong way to go about things.
There is one, and only one, essential role that has to be filled in a party, and that is the Healer. When a Ranger is your healer, you can work around that, so long as you never run an encounter with a difficulty greater than medium, and never have more than 4 monsters per encounter. They will need a Long Rest between each and every encounter. Potions don't heal enough in combat to matter unless they are of a rarity very much higher than the Tier then are used in.
In a mathematical sense, the most effective strategy for the Ranger is to do as much damage in combat as possible, and save Cure Wounds (It's your only direct heal) for when one of the other damage dealers goes to zero hit points, then cast it just once, and go back to doing damage. The tank is actually the least important member of the party to heal. If they are at all well built, they won't need much healing, and if not, the party is doomed anyway. In D&D the best defense is to as much damage as possible so there aren't as many enemies doing damage to the party. Focus fire at all times, and make sure anything that goes down stays that way.
I have played in many games with no dedicated healers. A few healing potions to shove down unconscious players throats maybe. But in one campaign we got to level 15 without a dedicated healer and the DM did not go easy on us, what he did do was ensure that in the game there where ways to resurrect dead players, so NPC clerics who could resurrect for a price, or at a higher level a magic item that gave the ability to hold a resurrection spell. That had to be found, and earned.
This myth that a party has to have a healer is just that a myth. What we did know as a party is that we needed to be prepared to withdraw if we where taking too much damage.
I always keep as a rule an unconscious character cannot drink a potion, period. SO they do not want to drop to zero and it keeps them up with keeping the Ranger's Cure Wounds as a hit the fan need spell. If the player ask later after they did not take the spell if they can swap out spells I would let them to keep the group feeling good.
As for drinking a potion, I use it as half movement. Which probably breaks the game some but I feel like it never has broke it too much.
But just have potion dealers in different towns, not as a commodity, but just available. Maybe in some towns have them be a shady black markey dealer or they need to work to find who would sell them.
An interesting option I might try, the pouring a potion into an unconscious character I allow because it makes sense. The player isn't dead, and potions are magic, you absorb medication through your tongue for instance so you can imagine that the healing potion triggers through the tongue then gives enough to trigger the character to gulp the rest down.
Who is being sarcastic? It says right in my signature that there is no wrong way to play D&D. I said nothing about low-challenge encounters, I was talking about Medium.
“I like to work with my players and help them. Silly of me. Probably a mistake.” Sorry if I misinterpreted that, but it sounded pretty sarcastic to me.
You said that you ran 3 deadly encounters per long rest, that one character died at first level, one other died at 2nd or 3rd level, and that was with plenty of healing. Then you said that it felt about right. I honestly wonder why so few characters died. A Deadly encounter is defined as one in which the odds are good that you will get a TPK. A Hard encounter is one where at least one member of the party will probably die. Medium assumes that the only thing the player characters will lose is some resources.
If I were to run 3 deadly encounters per day at a group of Tier 1 player characters who only had a Ranger for heals... I guess they would have fun making new characters.
Theory doesn’t always work out in practice. In practice, I’ve found Deadly encounters to be rarely truly deadly, and Medium encounters to be fairly trivial. And I’ve run multiple long campaigns with the 3 Deadly per short rest rule. Some have had a little more death, others a little less, but it always comes out about right.
I get where you’re coming from, but actual experience tells me what I’m doing works.
Sorry if I’m coming across as harsh. I just want to share what I’ve personally experienced in game.
I have found with my party deadly is never deadly, the ratings are not realistic and need to be tweaked and changed from party to party and game to game, but "deadly" encounters really are not "deadly".
There is one, and only one, essential role that has to be filled in a party, and that is the Healer. When a Ranger is your healer, you can work around that, so long as you never run an encounter with a difficulty greater than medium, and never have more than 4 monsters per encounter. They will need a Long Rest between each and every encounter. Potions don't heal enough in combat to matter unless they are of a rarity very much higher than the Tier then are used in.
What? No, not even close. Everything written above is incorrect in my experience.
I can’t imagine what you’re doing wrong if your players can’t easily clear a medium encounter without in-combat healing AND needing a long rest to recover all resources
When I run a villain, I will use their intelligence to it's fullest effect, and I will be pragmatic in it's application. I've read the Evil Overlord's guide plenty of times. They will have plenty of minions and at least two lieutenants. Given a party of Adventurers at 4th level:
The first target will be the Sorcerer, right up until the point where the Ranger uses a heal.
The Ranger dies next.
The Sorcerer dies next.
The Eldritch Knight dies next.
The Barbarian dies last.
If at any time, the player characters appear to be winning, reinforcements will be standing by.
None of the player characters would ever get within melee range of the Big Bad.
That's my version of a Deadly encounter. With a Hard encounter, I'd only get the Ranger dead. I figure if I haven't killed the Ranger with three Medium encounters in a single game day, I'm probably being a little too forgiving and I'll use higher CR monsters.
When I run a villain, I will use their intelligence to it's fullest effect, and I will be pragmatic in it's application. I've read the Evil Overlord's guide plenty of times. They will have plenty of minions and at least two lieutenants. Given a party of Adventurers at 4th level:
The first target will be the Sorcerer, right up until the point where the Ranger uses a heal.
The Ranger dies next.
The Sorcerer dies next.
The Eldritch Knight dies next.
The Barbarian dies last.
If at any time, the player characters appear to be winning, reinforcements will be standing by.
None of the player characters would ever get within melee range of the Big Bad.
That's my version of a Deadly encounter. With a Hard encounter, I'd only get the Ranger dead. I figure if I haven't killed the Ranger with three Medium encounters in a single game day, I'm probably being a little too forgiving and I'll use higher CR monsters.
Seems like you're building the encounters to solely be challenges, exclusively for the adventuring party. Makes sense if they are the sole focus of the big bad, but it feels (and as each to their own, this isn't a criticicism) like you're making every encounter be a pre-planned attack on the party, with the sole purpose of killing them. It's almost a flip of the usual pattern - the party being the ones making their pre-planned attacks on the enemies. Do you never have encounters which are not orchestrated by a supervillain? Such as a set of guards protecting a ritual site, or wild beasts who are trying to hunt the party? Is every encounter one pre-planned by an evil mastermind to hard counter the party?
I would argue that perhaps if an encounter is tailored to attack the party, it should be increased by one difficulty level. Tactics play a big part, and if the enemies are performing their attack so precisely (even predictign the rangers one healing spell and where they will use it) then it's got to count to a higher difficulty!
Do you have any tips for creating encounters, implementing house rules, or anything that could be useful for me to run the game as they do not have any healing, let alone a dedicated healer?
You don't necessarily need to houserule anything. If the ranger doesn't heal, you can always introduced an NPC healer in the party, drop healing potions frequently, assure that the party can generally take rest uneventful so they can recover, drop permanent magic items that can heal etc.. Also when the party is low on ressources, be careful on the difficulty of encounters you throw at them if they're out of healing options.
When I run a villain, I will use their intelligence to it's fullest effect, and I will be pragmatic in it's application. I've read the Evil Overlord's guide plenty of times. They will have plenty of minions and at least two lieutenants. Given a party of Adventurers at 4th level:
The first target will be the Sorcerer, right up until the point where the Ranger uses a heal.
The Ranger dies next.
The Sorcerer dies next.
The Eldritch Knight dies next.
The Barbarian dies last.
If at any time, the player characters appear to be winning, reinforcements will be standing by.
None of the player characters would ever get within melee range of the Big Bad.
That's my version of a Deadly encounter. With a Hard encounter, I'd only get the Ranger dead. I figure if I haven't killed the Ranger with three Medium encounters in a single game day, I'm probably being a little too forgiving and I'll use higher CR monsters.
Why is the sorceror always the first target, how do you defend that given that different monsters and enemies will have different goals and aims? But also, as a player I would start to figure out your tactics. As a DM it is not you against the players, it is you running the world as you think makes sense. A dragon is going to take the opportunity to attack with its breath attack the enemy that gets close first, it isn’t going to know what each characters class is. A BBEG might be arrogant thinking he is above the threat of the eldritch knight and so let it get close because he feels he is a superior fighter. If the BBEG is as clever as you make out then it should know the ranger can’t do much healing magic, but also what if the sorceror misses its attack in a round and the ranger hits a critical, what if the barbarian gets close and becomes a worry.
It isn’t just about playing the bbeg as an intelligent tactician, it is about playing them as make sense in the moment, the bbeg might be a brute who is strong and powerful but not the best thinker, or sneaky using misdirection and subterfuge.
Anything that isn't a "challenging" encounter isn't worth the trouble when you play online and have a limited amount of time. My games have always been Tier 1 in 5th edition, and played online, without a VTT. When doing exploration, I don't bother with much other than extreme weather conditions where the characters will have to seek shelter, cliffs that need to be climbed or ravines that must be jumped. Social activities rarely involve dice, so I don't bother with them at all.
Pretty much all monsters have simple goals. They want to live, they need to eat, and that means anything that threatens them needs to either be avoided, or it needs to die. Animals will run away, and that's not exactly a challenge to deal with. Evil monsters like to kill things. People who play D&D are nearly always highly intelligent, and I will use tactics I feel will challenge them.
A challenging combat encounter is defined as Hard. That means at least one player character might die. I don't specifically set out to kill all of them, but I'm not making things a challenge if at least one might not end up needing a Raise Dead spell.
The top priority will always be to kill the healer, but it can be hard to pick that one out. The first time a heal is cast, that character gets to be target number one and will stay that way until they go down and can't get back up. Anyone else that casts a heal gets the same treatment. You can't finish a combat when there is a healer around. Usually, I start out with the character who stays at range and is wearing the least amount of armor. Anyone at range who uses area of effect spells gets it first.
Next will be "ranged strikers" people who do great burst damage at range. After that will be melee strikers, and after that, anyone else but the tank. Tanks always sacrifice some of their damage output for defensive abilities, which makes them the easiest to keep busy.
I will almost never have a bad guy be arrogant, because that's another word for foolish. If I run a Dragon against the party, yes, it will know the classes, or at least it will have a good idea of what they are and how to tell which one is which. Dragons live for hundreds if not thousands of years. A Dragon not only will use it's breath weapon on anyone who gets close, it will be flying, so "close" is defined as "inside the area of the breath weapon". They won't bother to land at all while any player character is moving, and they will make sure to breathe on them at least one more time after they are all down.
A strong, powerful but stupid brute isn't a challenge. A sneaky one ought to be, but it's not much fun being killed without warning, and someone who is good at being sneaky fights like an Assassin if they aren't actually one to start with. Hit and run tactics take a lot of time.
These are the lessons I learned when I blundered into the DM Only forum, with the foolish idea that I should be helping the players by avoiding killing them. I used to look for excuses to let them live, like having villains be arrogant enough not to finish people off, animals running away without dragging their kill with them, or ignoring the healers.
Anything that isn't a "challenging" encounter isn't worth the trouble when you play online and have a limited amount of time. My games have always been Tier 1 in 5th edition, and played online, without a VTT. When doing exploration, I don't bother with much other than extreme weather conditions where the characters will have to seek shelter, cliffs that need to be climbed or ravines that must be jumped. Social activities rarely involve dice, so I don't bother with them at all.
Pretty much all monsters have simple goals. They want to live, they need to eat, and that means anything that threatens them needs to either be avoided, or it needs to die. Animals will run away, and that's not exactly a challenge to deal with. Evil monsters like to kill things. People who play D&D are nearly always highly intelligent, and I will use tactics I feel will challenge them.
A challenging combat encounter is defined as Hard. That means at least one player character might die. I don't specifically set out to kill all of them, but I'm not making things a challenge if at least one might not end up needing a Raise Dead spell.
The top priority will always be to kill the healer, but it can be hard to pick that one out. The first time a heal is cast, that character gets to be target number one and will stay that way until they go down and can't get back up. Anyone else that casts a heal gets the same treatment. You can't finish a combat when there is a healer around. Usually, I start out with the character who stays at range and is wearing the least amount of armor. Anyone at range who uses area of effect spells gets it first.
Next will be "ranged strikers" people who do great burst damage at range. After that will be melee strikers, and after that, anyone else but the tank. Tanks always sacrifice some of their damage output for defensive abilities, which makes them the easiest to keep busy.
I will almost never have a bad guy be arrogant, because that's another word for foolish. If I run a Dragon against the party, yes, it will know the classes, or at least it will have a good idea of what they are and how to tell which one is which. Dragons live for hundreds if not thousands of years. A Dragon not only will use it's breath weapon on anyone who gets close, it will be flying, so "close" is defined as "inside the area of the breath weapon". They won't bother to land at all while any player character is moving, and they will make sure to breathe on them at least one more time after they are all down.
A strong, powerful but stupid brute isn't a challenge. A sneaky one ought to be, but it's not much fun being killed without warning, and someone who is good at being sneaky fights like an Assassin if they aren't actually one to start with. Hit and run tactics take a lot of time.
These are the lessons I learned when I blundered into the DM Only forum, with the foolish idea that I should be helping the players by avoiding killing them. I used to look for excuses to let them live, like having villains be arrogant enough not to finish people off, animals running away without dragging their kill with them, or ignoring the healers.
See this is the difference between us and the players we have, my players have just finished the second straight social only session. That is 2 sessions of talking to people, getting information, engaging with them. The conversations are semi real time, the important stuff is said in game as a conversation. One of those sessions was at a party and about 40 min was spent with the players asking about the buffet and taking about the food they ate. Yes we spent 40 mins with me describing made up foods and them talking about what they picked and looking to see what the other NPCs ate. One character spent 5 mins trying to convince an elf NPC to drink some dwarven ale. There was other stuff that happened, a changling attacked someone and the characters arrived at the aftermath, they did some investigation, asked questions, judging by how they are approaching things my guess is that there will be no combat the next session either, and there is a strong possibility the session after that. So that will have been 4 sessions, 12 hours of gameplay purely roleplaying social encounters with some, but not much, dice rolling. I was looking back through discord today as I wrote up the journal, in 3 hours 7 players made a total of 22 dice rolls, and 3 of those was 1 player trying to steal pastries from the buffet.
But combat encounters, I use non lethal encounters (ones the party will walk over) all the time to push a story forward, introduce a new enemy type, or tell a narriative about the area. But also to lull my players, if they go several in game days only 1 encounter a day it is amazing how quickly players start burning big ticket things early. How easy it is to get them to use that level 3 spell slot because they haven’t for a few days in game and, we always get a long rest between combats. There is a skill to setting player expectations and then subverting them, using that little bit of meta knowledge to trigger them to make tactical mistakes and then, oh no today is the day you will wish you still here fireball for encounter number 3, instead of wasting it on a “cool moment” to kill some goblins.
It's not really on topic, but I would like to make my comments. When I was a DM, my game went more-or-less fine. I had some trouble with my Chaotic Neutral Rogue doing just exactly what can be expected from that Alignment, as she was both selfish and greedy. The focus of encounters wasn't on challenge so much as on what would be interesting. They didn't have to fight with the Ettin that was singing with itself, they could have avoided them or even made friends with them (The Ettin was killed). They faced Zombies that were chained together and had to fight those, they had to track down some over-sized hummingbirds for feathers but didn't need to kill those and in fact did not. They faced evil cultists, rescued the people of a small village who had been kidnapped, confronted a gang of nasty folks who were trying to get being a Tiefling made illegal, and a bunch of Bandits.
I have a 4th level Battle Master Fighter in a game run by a great fan of Critical Roll. She means well, but her interest is on Tier 3 content, and she's running us through the Lost Mines of Pheldaver. She is fairly experienced as a player, but I don't think she's done much of any DMing before. She uses optional rules like Flanking but she never told me until the last session, she rolls for initiative for each and ever monster we face, and does death saves for all monsters that go down. It takes about 30 minutes to run a single round of combat. She frequently skips someone's turn and then has to go back in time to fix things. She's very stingy with Rests. We have yet to get a formal Short Rest, and we have had about 5 Long Rests for the entire Adventure, where we are only just now on the way to the final location in the Adventure. We spent 7 sessions in which we didn't roll any dice while she dumped an extensive amount of lore on us and sorted out the details of what we ate and drank.
I have a 2nd level Warlock of the Fiend in another game, which has 5 other players, and most of them are also in the other game with me, including the DM, who is mostly running the game because I kept telling her how excited I was about the concept behind my Warlock. She also has the same habit of running amazingly slow and detailed combats, and it took 6 hours over two sessions to kill 3 dire wolves. In that time, I did 11 points of damage in total with my Eldritch Blast. I cast Hex on the same target twice because I forgot it was already Hexed, and other than that, my most significant contribution over those two sessions was getting my watch skipped after telling people over and over how well I could see in the dark, and cooking breakfast after our Long Rest once the wolves went down.
The Dire Wolves were, by the Encounter Builder tool, a Hard encounter. The only reason we lived is that they were played as stupid. They never used their pact tactics, instead they would just chase after whomever had hit them the most recently. One of them was grappled and chose to struggle rather than bite. One player character, the Paladin, went down to zero, and had just made their first death save, which was a success. Our healer stayed out of combat entirely and hid in a tree. She took no actions for either game session until the Paladin when down, and then used some Life Cleric power to heal the Paladin half way and a Healing Word brought him back to full.
I told each of my DMs that I was having fun, but that I felt I was having to work pretty hard for it, and wasn't very happy. I am a Rules Lawyer, with a lot of experience with former versions of the game, and a lot of time. I brush up on 5th edition rules as much as I can, and post far too often in the forums. Both DM's have asked me for my help when they get stuck on a rule, but neither of them ever actually follows my suggestions. One just ignores me, the other just tells me that they don't believe me, and will have to look things up for themselves. I can give Book, Chapter, and Section (page numbers can be difficult to find in D&D Beyond) but I have yet to hear any version of "I looked, and you were right."
So, once again, given the party composition the original poster gave us, in a Tier 1 game, their deaths would be inevitable, even if I only ran "interesting" encounters, because they would still end up fighting some of the things they met. Zombies don't talk much, Bandits tend to want all your stuff, evil cultists will behave in evil ways, and I doubt all four of those characters were Human, so I'm sure some nasty group of people would object to at least one of them. That party is in desperate need of a Druid.
It's not really on topic, but I would like to make my comments. When I was a DM, my game went more-or-less fine. I had some trouble with my Chaotic Neutral Rogue doing just exactly what can be expected from that Alignment, as she was both selfish and greedy. The focus of encounters wasn't on challenge so much as on what would be interesting. They didn't have to fight with the Ettin that was singing with itself, they could have avoided them or even made friends with them (The Ettin was killed). They faced Zombies that were chained together and had to fight those, they had to track down some over-sized hummingbirds for feathers but didn't need to kill those and in fact did not. They faced evil cultists, rescued the people of a small village who had been kidnapped, confronted a gang of nasty folks who were trying to get being a Tiefling made illegal, and a bunch of Bandits.
I have a 4th level Battle Master Fighter in a game run by a great fan of Critical Roll. She means well, but her interest is on Tier 3 content, and she's running us through the Lost Mines of Pheldaver. She is fairly experienced as a player, but I don't think she's done much of any DMing before. She uses optional rules like Flanking but she never told me until the last session, she rolls for initiative for each and ever monster we face, and does death saves for all monsters that go down. It takes about 30 minutes to run a single round of combat. She frequently skips someone's turn and then has to go back in time to fix things. She's very stingy with Rests. We have yet to get a formal Short Rest, and we have had about 5 Long Rests for the entire Adventure, where we are only just now on the way to the final location in the Adventure. We spent 7 sessions in which we didn't roll any dice while she dumped an extensive amount of lore on us and sorted out the details of what we ate and drank.
I have a 2nd level Warlock of the Fiend in another game, which has 5 other players, and most of them are also in the other game with me, including the DM, who is mostly running the game because I kept telling her how excited I was about the concept behind my Warlock. She also has the same habit of running amazingly slow and detailed combats, and it took 6 hours over two sessions to kill 3 dire wolves. In that time, I did 11 points of damage in total with my Eldritch Blast. I cast Hex on the same target twice because I forgot it was already Hexed, and other than that, my most significant contribution over those two sessions was getting my watch skipped after telling people over and over how well I could see in the dark, and cooking breakfast after our Long Rest once the wolves went down.
The Dire Wolves were, by the Encounter Builder tool, a Hard encounter. The only reason we lived is that they were played as stupid. They never used their pact tactics, instead they would just chase after whomever had hit them the most recently. One of them was grappled and chose to struggle rather than bite. One player character, the Paladin, went down to zero, and had just made their first death save, which was a success. Our healer stayed out of combat entirely and hid in a tree. She took no actions for either game session until the Paladin when down, and then used some Life Cleric power to heal the Paladin half way and a Healing Word brought him back to full.
I told each of my DMs that I was having fun, but that I felt I was having to work pretty hard for it, and wasn't very happy. I am a Rules Lawyer, with a lot of experience with former versions of the game, and a lot of time. I brush up on 5th edition rules as much as I can, and post far too often in the forums. Both DM's have asked me for my help when they get stuck on a rule, but neither of them ever actually follows my suggestions. One just ignores me, the other just tells me that they don't believe me, and will have to look things up for themselves. I can give Book, Chapter, and Section (page numbers can be difficult to find in D&D Beyond) but I have yet to hear any version of "I looked, and you were right."
So, once again, given the party composition the original poster gave us, in a Tier 1 game, their deaths would be inevitable, even if I only ran "interesting" encounters, because they would still end up fighting some of the things they met. Zombies don't talk much, Bandits tend to want all your stuff, evil cultists will behave in evil ways, and I doubt all four of those characters were Human, so I'm sure some nasty group of people would object to at least one of them. That party is in desperate need of a Druid.
I'm not really sure what your point is in here...
Cutting out the critique of the DM's slowness and newness, and their refusal to accept rules they had requested, you're left with a party who were attacked by wolves who weren't run as intelligent beasts, and subsequently didn't die.
6 players at level 2 vs dire wolves as a hard encounter is 3 dire wolves, so each dire wolf has 2 characters to deal with. Playing them as intelligent creatures, I would expect them to retreat if even one of the 3 was brought down, especially if someone managed a critical hit. Certainly the last dire wolf would retreat if its fellows had died. As such, the encounter difficulty (to my mind, your milage may vary) will be lower in reality, as the difficulty guidelines work on the assumption of a fight to the death!
It also falls down to tactics. If the party all hop up the trees and start throwing flaming pinecones at the wolves, the wolves have no chance, and the encounter becomes trivial. If the wolves pick the weakest party member (the one furthest from the group) and work together to drag them off, it becomes much deadlier for that one character and less so for the rest.
But I digress. I guess my point is that a pack of 3 dire wolves vs 6 party members, played intelligently, will not be looking to kill them all, they will be looking to drag one off, and get away without being killed. Each one has that motive, so if one dire wolf goed forward and is promptly turned into a lovely fur cape by a dude in heavy armour with a warhammer, then the other two will think "you know what, no!" and get out of there.
This is the difference between us and the players we have, my players have just finished the second straight social only session. That is 2 sessions of talking to people, getting information, engaging with them. The conversations are semi real time, the important stuff is said in game as a conversation. One of those sessions was at a party and about 40 min was spent with the players asking about the buffet and taking about the food they ate. Yes we spent 40 mins with me describing made up foods and them talking about what they picked and looking to see what the other NPCs ate. One character spent 5 mins trying to convince an elf NPC to drink some dwarven ale. There was other stuff that happened, a changling attacked someone and the characters arrived at the aftermath, they did some investigation, asked questions, judging by how they are approaching things my guess is that there will be no combat the next session either, and there is a strong possibility the session after that. So that will have been 4 sessions, 12 hours of gameplay purely roleplaying social encounters with some, but not much, dice rolling. I was looking back through discord today as I wrote up the journal, in 3 hours 7 players made a total of 22 dice rolls, and 3 of those was 1 player trying to steal pastries from the buffet.
But combat encounters, I use non lethal encounters (ones the party will walk over) all the time to push a story forward, introduce a new enemy type, or tell a narriative about the area. But also to lull my players, if they go several in game days only 1 encounter a day it is amazing how quickly players start burning big ticket things early. How easy it is to get them to use that level 3 spell slot because they haven’t for a few days in game and, we always get a long rest between combats. There is a skill to setting player expectations and then subverting them, using that little bit of meta knowledge to trigger them to make tactical mistakes and then, oh no today is the day you will wish you still here fireball for encounter number 3, instead of wasting it on a “cool moment” to kill some goblins.
Your players spent 40 minutes of valuable game time talking about the food that they ate???? And two complete sessions simply "talking"?????? Have they noticed the name of the game they are playing? If I am reading this correctly, you are saying that the last four 3 hour sessions have been all chit chat, not a single fight....There is a scene in one of the greatest movies of all time where one person says "talking to that person is like a Martian talking to a fungo bat". I feel like that right now with regard to what your table does and D&D. If it works for your table, and you, well OK. It would NEVER have worked at ANY table I have played or DM'ed at in my entire history of D&D.
Some people embrace it far more as a "Role Playing Game" than as a Combat Simulator. In fact, I've heard many people complain at the one-dimensionality of D&D combat, which suggests that if it is used exclusively as a combat simulator, it's probably sub-par!
Each to their own. As long as the players are happy and the plot progresses (in a political intrigue or murder mystery game, you'll not get far killing things) then it's a good game!
There seems to be a bit of confusion about what I have been saying. In 5th edition D&D, I have yet to be in or run a game that went beyond Tier 1. I have a 4th level Battle Master Fighter and a 2nd Level Warlock of the Fiend. I ran a game with a Gensai Cleric, a Tabaxi Rogue, a Tiefling Sorcerer, and a second Tabaxi joined later as a multi-class Rogue/Fighter. The game was fun, other than that the Tabaxi Rogue was Chaotic Neutral and insisting on spending all her time stealing things in the capital city of a very lawful nation. None of the player character actually ever picked a sub-class, but I am pretty sure we did make it to 4th level before I had to quit running the game due to health issues.
I wasn't even using D&D Beyond at that point. The encounters were mostly homebrew twists on standard monsters, like a set of zombies chained together in a line, or an Ettin the party encounter singing a duet with itself.
I talked about some of the things I had done to keep the party alive, and I got stomped on hard here in the forums. I was told I was depriving my players of their precious agency because death is after all, a choice you make by playing in a game involving dice.
I don't have a clue how the game works outside of Tier 1, my experience with previous games didn't really have Tiers as such, and while we did play some pretty high end stuff none of it really applies to the current system. I remember the days when a Magic User at level 1 could cast only one spell per day, had to memorize that spell in advance, and would probably die from being hit with a dagger. I also remember when the Fighter could tank easily, because it was assumed that monsters wouldn't just wander past a threat. There had to be a healer, who spent all of their time casting heals, and it took weeks of downtime to recover to full hit points.
Back then, Gary Gygax considered D&D his own personal property, and anything he dreamed up and published in Dragon magazine was as official as anything in the Player's Handbook. That made the man twice as bad as Jeremy Crawford, who only helped co-develop the current rules.
The initial post is about a party consisting of these characters, and they can't be less than 3rd level since they have sub-classes.
Fighter-Eldritch Knight
Ranger-Hunter
Barbarian-Totem Warrior (Bear)
Sorceror-Draconic Bloodline
None of those are tanks, only one is a full caster, and the Ranger has nothing but Cure Wounds three times per day. I doubt they would all live through a single Deadly encounter, nor more than one Hard encounter. It's a question if they could survive three Medium encounters in the same day. Once one of the characters dies, it would take direct DM intervention to bring that character back into play, and people convinced me that doing so is the wrong way to go about things.
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I have played in many games with no dedicated healers. A few healing potions to shove down unconscious players throats maybe. But in one campaign we got to level 15 without a dedicated healer and the DM did not go easy on us, what he did do was ensure that in the game there where ways to resurrect dead players, so NPC clerics who could resurrect for a price, or at a higher level a magic item that gave the ability to hold a resurrection spell. That had to be found, and earned.
This myth that a party has to have a healer is just that a myth. What we did know as a party is that we needed to be prepared to withdraw if we where taking too much damage.
An interesting option I might try, the pouring a potion into an unconscious character I allow because it makes sense. The player isn't dead, and potions are magic, you absorb medication through your tongue for instance so you can imagine that the healing potion triggers through the tongue then gives enough to trigger the character to gulp the rest down.
I have found with my party deadly is never deadly, the ratings are not realistic and need to be tweaked and changed from party to party and game to game, but "deadly" encounters really are not "deadly".
Drip feed more healing potions and enable optional rules like Healing Surges from the DMG.
What? No, not even close. Everything written above is incorrect in my experience.
I can’t imagine what you’re doing wrong if your players can’t easily clear a medium encounter without in-combat healing AND needing a long rest to recover all resources
When I run a villain, I will use their intelligence to it's fullest effect, and I will be pragmatic in it's application. I've read the Evil Overlord's guide plenty of times. They will have plenty of minions and at least two lieutenants. Given a party of Adventurers at 4th level:
Eldritch Knight Fighter
Hunter Ranger
Bear Totem Barbarian
Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer
That's my version of a Deadly encounter. With a Hard encounter, I'd only get the Ranger dead. I figure if I haven't killed the Ranger with three Medium encounters in a single game day, I'm probably being a little too forgiving and I'll use higher CR monsters.
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Seems like you're building the encounters to solely be challenges, exclusively for the adventuring party. Makes sense if they are the sole focus of the big bad, but it feels (and as each to their own, this isn't a criticicism) like you're making every encounter be a pre-planned attack on the party, with the sole purpose of killing them. It's almost a flip of the usual pattern - the party being the ones making their pre-planned attacks on the enemies. Do you never have encounters which are not orchestrated by a supervillain? Such as a set of guards protecting a ritual site, or wild beasts who are trying to hunt the party? Is every encounter one pre-planned by an evil mastermind to hard counter the party?
I would argue that perhaps if an encounter is tailored to attack the party, it should be increased by one difficulty level. Tactics play a big part, and if the enemies are performing their attack so precisely (even predictign the rangers one healing spell and where they will use it) then it's got to count to a higher difficulty!
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You don't necessarily need to houserule anything. If the ranger doesn't heal, you can always introduced an NPC healer in the party, drop healing potions frequently, assure that the party can generally take rest uneventful so they can recover, drop permanent magic items that can heal etc.. Also when the party is low on ressources, be careful on the difficulty of encounters you throw at them if they're out of healing options.
Why is the sorceror always the first target, how do you defend that given that different monsters and enemies will have different goals and aims? But also, as a player I would start to figure out your tactics. As a DM it is not you against the players, it is you running the world as you think makes sense. A dragon is going to take the opportunity to attack with its breath attack the enemy that gets close first, it isn’t going to know what each characters class is. A BBEG might be arrogant thinking he is above the threat of the eldritch knight and so let it get close because he feels he is a superior fighter. If the BBEG is as clever as you make out then it should know the ranger can’t do much healing magic, but also what if the sorceror misses its attack in a round and the ranger hits a critical, what if the barbarian gets close and becomes a worry.
It isn’t just about playing the bbeg as an intelligent tactician, it is about playing them as make sense in the moment, the bbeg might be a brute who is strong and powerful but not the best thinker, or sneaky using misdirection and subterfuge.
Anything that isn't a "challenging" encounter isn't worth the trouble when you play online and have a limited amount of time. My games have always been Tier 1 in 5th edition, and played online, without a VTT. When doing exploration, I don't bother with much other than extreme weather conditions where the characters will have to seek shelter, cliffs that need to be climbed or ravines that must be jumped. Social activities rarely involve dice, so I don't bother with them at all.
Pretty much all monsters have simple goals. They want to live, they need to eat, and that means anything that threatens them needs to either be avoided, or it needs to die. Animals will run away, and that's not exactly a challenge to deal with. Evil monsters like to kill things. People who play D&D are nearly always highly intelligent, and I will use tactics I feel will challenge them.
A challenging combat encounter is defined as Hard. That means at least one player character might die. I don't specifically set out to kill all of them, but I'm not making things a challenge if at least one might not end up needing a Raise Dead spell.
The top priority will always be to kill the healer, but it can be hard to pick that one out. The first time a heal is cast, that character gets to be target number one and will stay that way until they go down and can't get back up. Anyone else that casts a heal gets the same treatment. You can't finish a combat when there is a healer around. Usually, I start out with the character who stays at range and is wearing the least amount of armor. Anyone at range who uses area of effect spells gets it first.
Next will be "ranged strikers" people who do great burst damage at range. After that will be melee strikers, and after that, anyone else but the tank. Tanks always sacrifice some of their damage output for defensive abilities, which makes them the easiest to keep busy.
I will almost never have a bad guy be arrogant, because that's another word for foolish. If I run a Dragon against the party, yes, it will know the classes, or at least it will have a good idea of what they are and how to tell which one is which. Dragons live for hundreds if not thousands of years. A Dragon not only will use it's breath weapon on anyone who gets close, it will be flying, so "close" is defined as "inside the area of the breath weapon". They won't bother to land at all while any player character is moving, and they will make sure to breathe on them at least one more time after they are all down.
A strong, powerful but stupid brute isn't a challenge. A sneaky one ought to be, but it's not much fun being killed without warning, and someone who is good at being sneaky fights like an Assassin if they aren't actually one to start with. Hit and run tactics take a lot of time.
These are the lessons I learned when I blundered into the DM Only forum, with the foolish idea that I should be helping the players by avoiding killing them. I used to look for excuses to let them live, like having villains be arrogant enough not to finish people off, animals running away without dragging their kill with them, or ignoring the healers.
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See this is the difference between us and the players we have, my players have just finished the second straight social only session. That is 2 sessions of talking to people, getting information, engaging with them. The conversations are semi real time, the important stuff is said in game as a conversation. One of those sessions was at a party and about 40 min was spent with the players asking about the buffet and taking about the food they ate. Yes we spent 40 mins with me describing made up foods and them talking about what they picked and looking to see what the other NPCs ate. One character spent 5 mins trying to convince an elf NPC to drink some dwarven ale. There was other stuff that happened, a changling attacked someone and the characters arrived at the aftermath, they did some investigation, asked questions, judging by how they are approaching things my guess is that there will be no combat the next session either, and there is a strong possibility the session after that. So that will have been 4 sessions, 12 hours of gameplay purely roleplaying social encounters with some, but not much, dice rolling. I was looking back through discord today as I wrote up the journal, in 3 hours 7 players made a total of 22 dice rolls, and 3 of those was 1 player trying to steal pastries from the buffet.
But combat encounters, I use non lethal encounters (ones the party will walk over) all the time to push a story forward, introduce a new enemy type, or tell a narriative about the area. But also to lull my players, if they go several in game days only 1 encounter a day it is amazing how quickly players start burning big ticket things early. How easy it is to get them to use that level 3 spell slot because they haven’t for a few days in game and, we always get a long rest between combats. There is a skill to setting player expectations and then subverting them, using that little bit of meta knowledge to trigger them to make tactical mistakes and then, oh no today is the day you will wish you still here fireball for encounter number 3, instead of wasting it on a “cool moment” to kill some goblins.
It's not really on topic, but I would like to make my comments. When I was a DM, my game went more-or-less fine. I had some trouble with my Chaotic Neutral Rogue doing just exactly what can be expected from that Alignment, as she was both selfish and greedy. The focus of encounters wasn't on challenge so much as on what would be interesting. They didn't have to fight with the Ettin that was singing with itself, they could have avoided them or even made friends with them (The Ettin was killed). They faced Zombies that were chained together and had to fight those, they had to track down some over-sized hummingbirds for feathers but didn't need to kill those and in fact did not. They faced evil cultists, rescued the people of a small village who had been kidnapped, confronted a gang of nasty folks who were trying to get being a Tiefling made illegal, and a bunch of Bandits.
I have a 4th level Battle Master Fighter in a game run by a great fan of Critical Roll. She means well, but her interest is on Tier 3 content, and she's running us through the Lost Mines of Pheldaver. She is fairly experienced as a player, but I don't think she's done much of any DMing before. She uses optional rules like Flanking but she never told me until the last session, she rolls for initiative for each and ever monster we face, and does death saves for all monsters that go down. It takes about 30 minutes to run a single round of combat. She frequently skips someone's turn and then has to go back in time to fix things. She's very stingy with Rests. We have yet to get a formal Short Rest, and we have had about 5 Long Rests for the entire Adventure, where we are only just now on the way to the final location in the Adventure. We spent 7 sessions in which we didn't roll any dice while she dumped an extensive amount of lore on us and sorted out the details of what we ate and drank.
I have a 2nd level Warlock of the Fiend in another game, which has 5 other players, and most of them are also in the other game with me, including the DM, who is mostly running the game because I kept telling her how excited I was about the concept behind my Warlock. She also has the same habit of running amazingly slow and detailed combats, and it took 6 hours over two sessions to kill 3 dire wolves. In that time, I did 11 points of damage in total with my Eldritch Blast. I cast Hex on the same target twice because I forgot it was already Hexed, and other than that, my most significant contribution over those two sessions was getting my watch skipped after telling people over and over how well I could see in the dark, and cooking breakfast after our Long Rest once the wolves went down.
The Dire Wolves were, by the Encounter Builder tool, a Hard encounter. The only reason we lived is that they were played as stupid. They never used their pact tactics, instead they would just chase after whomever had hit them the most recently. One of them was grappled and chose to struggle rather than bite. One player character, the Paladin, went down to zero, and had just made their first death save, which was a success. Our healer stayed out of combat entirely and hid in a tree. She took no actions for either game session until the Paladin when down, and then used some Life Cleric power to heal the Paladin half way and a Healing Word brought him back to full.
I told each of my DMs that I was having fun, but that I felt I was having to work pretty hard for it, and wasn't very happy. I am a Rules Lawyer, with a lot of experience with former versions of the game, and a lot of time. I brush up on 5th edition rules as much as I can, and post far too often in the forums. Both DM's have asked me for my help when they get stuck on a rule, but neither of them ever actually follows my suggestions. One just ignores me, the other just tells me that they don't believe me, and will have to look things up for themselves. I can give Book, Chapter, and Section (page numbers can be difficult to find in D&D Beyond) but I have yet to hear any version of "I looked, and you were right."
So, once again, given the party composition the original poster gave us, in a Tier 1 game, their deaths would be inevitable, even if I only ran "interesting" encounters, because they would still end up fighting some of the things they met. Zombies don't talk much, Bandits tend to want all your stuff, evil cultists will behave in evil ways, and I doubt all four of those characters were Human, so I'm sure some nasty group of people would object to at least one of them. That party is in desperate need of a Druid.
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I'm not really sure what your point is in here...
Cutting out the critique of the DM's slowness and newness, and their refusal to accept rules they had requested, you're left with a party who were attacked by wolves who weren't run as intelligent beasts, and subsequently didn't die.
6 players at level 2 vs dire wolves as a hard encounter is 3 dire wolves, so each dire wolf has 2 characters to deal with. Playing them as intelligent creatures, I would expect them to retreat if even one of the 3 was brought down, especially if someone managed a critical hit. Certainly the last dire wolf would retreat if its fellows had died. As such, the encounter difficulty (to my mind, your milage may vary) will be lower in reality, as the difficulty guidelines work on the assumption of a fight to the death!
It also falls down to tactics. If the party all hop up the trees and start throwing flaming pinecones at the wolves, the wolves have no chance, and the encounter becomes trivial. If the wolves pick the weakest party member (the one furthest from the group) and work together to drag them off, it becomes much deadlier for that one character and less so for the rest.
But I digress. I guess my point is that a pack of 3 dire wolves vs 6 party members, played intelligently, will not be looking to kill them all, they will be looking to drag one off, and get away without being killed. Each one has that motive, so if one dire wolf goed forward and is promptly turned into a lovely fur cape by a dude in heavy armour with a warhammer, then the other two will think "you know what, no!" and get out of there.
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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Some people embrace it far more as a "Role Playing Game" than as a Combat Simulator. In fact, I've heard many people complain at the one-dimensionality of D&D combat, which suggests that if it is used exclusively as a combat simulator, it's probably sub-par!
Each to their own. As long as the players are happy and the plot progresses (in a political intrigue or murder mystery game, you'll not get far killing things) then it's a good game!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!