I am in the final 3rd of my second 5e campaign (the first was a bastardized version of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, the second is a bastardized version of Descent Into Avernus). In the first campaign, by 5th level, the characters' powers and abilities were completely out of control. The last time I DMd was 2nd edition, so I was doling out magic items like Santa Claus, and I really, really came to regret it. By the end of the campaign, the superheroes heroes were 9th level, and I could not wait to be done.
So, lesson learned. Going into campaign 2, I made the following changes:
-slow level progression
-gritty realism for HP recovery
-'low magic' i.e. magic items, especially powerful one, are few and far between.
This has made the game better, but...they are now 4th level, and already incredibly powerful. Like, really powerful. The offensive cantrips. The endless variations of class/subclass (features and traits). So. Much. Stuff.
I am curious if others have had this same experience, and how they dealt with it. I have been a DM/GM for more than 40 years. I know how to play, how to design, and how to wing it when necessary. I love a lot of things about 5e, but this seems like a feature, not a bug.
I would hesitate to call players incredibly powerful at 4th level.
5th level is definitely a big spike from 4th - probably the biggest spike in the game. The moment you hit 5 is probably the point at which players feel most powerful compared to monsters, whose power curve is steadier than PCs. That said, after giving players a bit of time to flex their new muscles, I tend to push encounter difficulty up again and can usually find a good challenge.
I think T2 is the sweet spot of 5e, with players having all the tools they need to feel badass, but DMs have a ton of tools to adequately challenge players. I would say that Gritty realism is a great tool for certain DMs, as it allows them to match their desired narrative pacing with proper encounter pacing and 'properly' challenge their players.
Part of your struggle might just be adjusting to 5e encounter design. A lot of general experience in another edition or system can sometimes work against you, because you have to unlearn some older habits or notions about how the game 'should' work.
I have only played 5e but agree that I would struggle ot define level 4 characters as overpowered.
I see gritty realism as a way of dealing with the typical adventureing day descibed in the book as 6-8 encounters is rarely what actually happens in adventures outside of dungeon crawls. One encounter a day makes characters not only much more powerful but also brings in lack of balance, Warlocks and Monks are much less powerful as they are the most reliant on short rests, Spell casters become more powerful especially at high levels as they can use high level spell slots every round.
Can you explain your examples:
Offensive Cantrips: At level 4 the most damage an offensive cantip can do is 1d12 (toll the dead) and that only applies if the target is already hurt. 1d10 or 1d8 is more common, this is exactly the same as what they could do at level 1. The only difference is the potential for "adders", a warlock can take an invokation to increase the damage of eldritch blast by their charisma modifier, spells like hunters mark allow you to add a 1d6 for an hour or until you lose concentration. This is typically less than a weapon attack that will typically do 1d8+str/dex or more. As wolf pointed out the big power spike comes at level 5 when the damage of most cantrips doubles.
Endless Variations of class / subclass: This lots of options not more power. It is true that if players are looking ot make the most powerful characters they can a new subclass that is less powerful than existing ones will be ignored and a new subclass that is more powerful will increase the player power. This is really only an issue with a few subclasses that are unbalanced and too powerful/ The Twilight Cleric and the Moon Druid are the main two subclasses that apply here. IMO the Twilight cleric was a mistake in the amount of power they gave it the forum has several suggested nerfs, the moon druid is extremely powerful at levels 2 and 3 but drop off quite quickly as the druid will want to cast more spells than attack in wild-shape. Outside of these two I don't think their is an issue wth anything, A level of hexblade can help several characters but puts them a level behind their main class so it reasonabley balanced, a high level character (say 13+) can improve the party a lot by taking a level of peace cleric and the level 10 feature of chronolurgy wizards as written allows spells like tiny hut to be cast in combat where they were never meant to be but again that is not an issue here.
If a DM runs published adventures with optimized characters or tactics, 5E can feel unbalanced at times. A DM will have more freedom to balance his campaign if it's self design or homebrew the published adventures somehow. Like this the DM will have more control over encounters difficulty, treasure distribution and level progression. Houseruling can also help out, like healing and rest variant for exemple. Making more use of the Exhaustion condition can also help as it's otherwise rarely used, and making dying causing a level of Exhaustion for exemple can also affect balance significantly.
This has made the game better, but...they are now 4th level, and already incredibly powerful. Like, really powerful. The offensive cantrips. The endless variations of class/subclass (features and traits). So. Much. Stuff.
I guess my question would be, "incredibly powerful" compared to what?
What are you throwing at them, that they can deal with too easily?
Also, as other pointed out above, at 4th level their cantrips should be doing the exact same amount of damage they did at 1st level, bar the occasional warlock invocation (I can't think of any subclass features that buff them off the top of my head), so I'm curious why you singled them out specifically. Like, 4th level is arguably when cantrips feel their weakest relative to other damage options
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I am curious if others have had this same experience, and how they dealt with it. I have been a DM/GM for more than 40 years. I know how to play, how to design, and how to wing it when necessary. I love a lot of things about 5e, but this seems like a feature, not a bug.
The phrase "zero to hero" is used to describe earlier editions of D&D. 5E is more like "hero to superhero."
The PHB introduces tiers of play. It says Levels 1 to 4 are "apprentice adventurers", levels 5 to 10 are just adventurers, levels 11 to 16 are "special even among adventurers." I think I'd push them all up one tier.
5E characters can take a lot. Even after 4 years I am still surprised sometimes by how much I can throw at a group of PCs.
However, there is one particular situation where PCs might feel overpowered - solo monsters. TO challenge a party, at any level, you must use multiple, mixed foes (melers and archers and skirmishers). The action economy means solo monsters get pwned really quickly, regardless of how powerful they are.
A solo monster is the equivalent of a solo player. They are focused on doing one thing, and classes not vulnerable to that will crush them. Flying archers crush melee combatants, but get taken out by ranged attackers.
Invisible melee fighters do really well except against casters.
Caster types crush archer types, but get killed by melee characters up close and personal
The core problem is that standard difficulty assumptions correspond to a way very few people actually play. Sure, a level 9 party beats up a CR 9 monster trivially but... so what? A typical CR 9 is something like a fire giant and that's hardly an epic monster, so just use several of them.
I am in the final 3rd of my second 5e campaign (the first was a bastardized version of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, the second is a bastardized version of Descent Into Avernus). In the first campaign, by 5th level, the characters' powers and abilities were completely out of control. The last time I DMd was 2nd edition, so I was doling out magic items like Santa Claus, and I really, really came to regret it. By the end of the campaign, the superheroes heroes were 9th level, and I could not wait to be done.
So, lesson learned. Going into campaign 2, I made the following changes:
-slow level progression
-gritty realism for HP recovery
-'low magic' i.e. magic items, especially powerful one, are few and far between.
This has made the game better, but...they are now 4th level, and already incredibly powerful. Like, really powerful. The offensive cantrips. The endless variations of class/subclass (features and traits). So. Much. Stuff.
I am curious if others have had this same experience, and how they dealt with it. I have been a DM/GM for more than 40 years. I know how to play, how to design, and how to wing it when necessary. I love a lot of things about 5e, but this seems like a feature, not a bug.
This post is extremely sus. Namely:
The only mechanism by which cantrips scale at level 4 is that full casters learn 1 additional cantrip, which requires them to monoclass at level 4, but you also reference multiclassing. So which is it?
Also, with the sole exception of Eldritch Blast (due to the Agonizing Blast invocation), there are no damaging cantrips that can do anything but underperform weapons at level 4.
Also, if you're using gritty realism, you're trying to get your spellcasters to use their cantrips more and their leveled spells less. That's part of the point.
You reference multiclassing, but the number of mixed builds you can make at level four that are better than monoclassing are few and far between.
I'm gonna need an example of an overpowered PC at level four to understand where you're coming from. Don't forget to include what we're including the PC to - this'll go easiest if you provide an example party (you can spam the same PC 4 times if you want, to make it easier) and an example enemy for them to face, and don't forget to list how late in your adventuring week this is happening - day 1? day 2?
Every single edition there are folks who complain that the new edition is not balanced. Why? Because D&D has never been a game about balance, not since its inception. With the myriad ways to build characters and parties, Wizards (and formally TSR) simply cannot balance everything against infinite options. Balance is the DM’s job, not really Wizards’.
Now, is the tool Wizards provides to give DMs guidance on balancing - CR - a rather unhelpful nightmare? Yes, and one that is generally less accurate than the already inaccurate systems prior editions had. Balancing a 5e encounter is more art than science, and it takes a bit to get that gut feeling of looking at an encounter and knowing it is the right power level. I know what personally works for me and my general number of encounters per day is using Beyond’s encounter builder and making sure lesser encounters just barely cross the “deadly” threshold, then also increasing monster HP. Different parties with different priorities, different amounts of magical items, different numbers of encounters per long rest, etc. will use different systems.
The trick to 5e, as with every edition, is figuring out the balance that works for you and your group.
I am curious if others have had this same experience, and how they dealt with it. I have been a DM/GM for more than 40 years. I know how to play, how to design, and how to wing it when necessary. I love a lot of things about 5e, but this seems like a feature, not a bug.
The phrase "zero to hero" is used to describe earlier editions of D&D. 5E is more like "hero to superhero."
The PHB introduces tiers of play. It says Levels 1 to 4 are "apprentice adventurers", levels 5 to 10 are just adventurers, levels 11 to 16 are "special even among adventurers." I think I'd push them all up one tier.
5E characters can take a lot. Even after 4 years I am still surprised sometimes by how much I can throw at a group of PCs.
However, there is one particular situation where PCs might feel overpowered - solo monsters. TO challenge a party, at any level, you must use multiple, mixed foes (melers and archers and skirmishers). The action economy means solo monsters get pwned really quickly, regardless of how powerful they are.
I think that about sums it up... to me, 5e very clearly favors the player. Death is rare, and easily mitigated. Unless you're deliberately going out of your way as a DM to be stingy with rewards, players are going to end up with more gold than they know what to do with after their first adventure. CR for monsters has always been unreliable, but aside from giving you a vague idea of what tier of play this particular creature belongs to, it's not much help. Especially compared to older editions, 5e is very easy... honestly, I think most players enjoy that aspect of it, but I understand it's not ideal for everyone.
I think that about sums it up... to me, 5e very clearly favors the player.
It's more accurate to say that the encounter building rules favor the player. If you ignore them, it's totally possible to obliterate the PCs at any tier of play.
I am curious if others have had this same experience, and how they dealt with it. I have been a DM/GM for more than 40 years. I know how to play, how to design, and how to wing it when necessary. I love a lot of things about 5e, but this seems like a feature, not a bug.
The phrase "zero to hero" is used to describe earlier editions of D&D. 5E is more like "hero to superhero."
The PHB introduces tiers of play. It says Levels 1 to 4 are "apprentice adventurers", levels 5 to 10 are just adventurers, levels 11 to 16 are "special even among adventurers." I think I'd push them all up one tier.
5E characters can take a lot. Even after 4 years I am still surprised sometimes by how much I can throw at a group of PCs.
However, there is one particular situation where PCs might feel overpowered - solo monsters. TO challenge a party, at any level, you must use multiple, mixed foes (melers and archers and skirmishers). The action economy means solo monsters get pwned really quickly, regardless of how powerful they are.
Yeah.... no. The 'super hero' (as you put it) characters were much worse in 3.x. Between feats, stacking feats, stats and skills that essentially had no cap, either you never ran games in previous editions or have forgotten. And there is no 5e pun pun.
If you are using CR or even the D&D beyond encounter builder then that is your problem. CR is an okay guideline at lower levels, and gets more busted as you go up (with all due respect to JC, you're wrong). And if you assume that CR is balanced (which it isn't, but let's go with that) against the base game (base meaning no optional rules such as multiclassing, human variant, custom lineage, ect), then when you include those options (especially feats like Sharp Shooter and GWM), the game becomes instantly unbalanced. Which is where the DM comes in who needs to understand that and rebalance their game vs their particular group of players.
I am curious if others have had this same experience, and how they dealt with it. I have been a DM/GM for more than 40 years. I know how to play, how to design, and how to wing it when necessary. I love a lot of things about 5e, but this seems like a feature, not a bug.
In terms of time of play, right there with you (DM of 40+ years across dozens of systems). My opinions differ though.
Back in the basic D&D, AD&D pure spell casters (other than Clerics IMO) were really weak and limited in early levels. I remember carrying 60 darts with my low level wizard/magic user. Saving my sleep spell, and trying not to waste it. I believe that it was because of the complaints of how weak and essentially useless those early casters were that cantrips came about. Both good and bad, it seems that eventually cantrips were powered up to be similar to low level melee attacks with weapons (huge mistake IMO). In that same vein, melee players were complaining that in mid to higher levels of play they were completely outpaced by spellcasters (which considering how far behind spell casters were early, they should have been). Plus, the 'I attack, I attack again' was BORING and they wanted more. So, there came in maneuvers, fighting styles, special attacks for certain weapons, ect....
And now, they are trying to balance that all again each other, while keeping each classes flavor, and giving them all what they want.
I am not sure what you mean by 5th level they were out of control. They had a lot of options? I do not see where that is a bad thing.
There are several things I do to help challenge players: 1- max out creature hit points 2- give monsters class levels, abilities, feats 3- give leaders legendary actions 4- creatures are not (well, most) mindless things that just blindly attack the tanks until they are all dead
I've run two 5e campaigns to 20th level, and currently running 3 more that the current plan is to take them to 20th level (one of them, even beyond).
There are 2 feats that, for me, do break the game. Sharp Shooter and GWM. They essentially add 3d6 damage to every attack. The ease of getting advantage essentially negates the -5 . There are two ideas I've been toying with to fix them, well 3. 1- Scaling the damage bonus based upon tier of the character. 2- Adding a similar skill for swords (the idea I am playing with is when using a 1-handed weapon getting the -5/+10, add prof bonus to AC (cost a HD to do this), and a special attack based off the weapon) 3- Limiting them to a certain level.
People making the transition from 2e to 5e get kicked in the face with the fact that for instance, spell casters have actual damaging cantrips they can keep using instead of running out of spells and being forced to use a crossbow or something which they sucked at. lol
It's worth remembering that RPGs have to be biased in favor of the PCs, because if you continually have fair fights, you're going to have a game-ending TPK in short order.
However, in my experience 5e is the best balanced version of D&D I've ever played and I've played all of them since AD&D - though mostly AD&D and 5e by this point. I played a fair bit of 2e, some 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder and very little 4e.
Characters in 5e can be made to feel much more powerful with magic items since 5e uses bounded accuracy and smaller modifiers have a bigger effect than in earlier editions. There are also bumps in character power level at level 5, 11, and 17 as they change tiers and gain new abilities. However, in 5e, a large number of low level monsters are a threat even to a level 20 character (if they are on their own) while in 1e, 2e, etc - the level 20 character could usually wade through a hundred low level opponents without being challenged in many cases.
Anyway - some of the things that will make 5e characters feel powerful -
- the method of stat determination - with bounded accuracy having higher stats in everything has an impact
- magic items
- rules misinterpretations - coming from earlier editions it can be easy to miss stuff though in the OPs case, they have played a couple of campaigns so these issues shouldn't come up. However, things like adding proficiency to damage - instead of just to hit. Adding casting stat to cantrip damage (the only exception is Eldritch blast with the Agonizing blast invocation and a couple of level 6ish class archetype features). Cantrips before level 5 are strictly worse than weapon attacks since they don't add the casting stat to damage while the weapons will add strength or dex modifier as appropriate.
- another common reason DMs new to 5e think some classes are unbalanced is the amount of nova damage that a paladin using smite or a rogue sneak attack can do, particularly on a critical hit. After playing a while, I don't find either of these to be an issue but some folks seem to feel these are issues when first encountering them.
- encounter design - single big targets are usually a lot weaker than one would think due to the action economy while a group of opponents with twice as many creatures as are in the party can become a significant threat even if they are individually a lot weaker. The action economy is probably one of the biggest factors in encounter balance. If the encounters are mostly single large creatures against a reasonable sized party, they are going to feel really powerful - but the issue isn't the characters or 5e, it is the encounter design.
P.S. One of the big differences from earlier versions is the restoration of almost all resources on a long rest. Hit points are restored, spell slots etc and this does make the characters feel a bit more powerful than earlier editions because they can keep going day after day without taking a few days off for the cleric to heal everyone up. On the other hand, sitting around for a few days while the cleric healed everyone was usually glossed over anyway since it wasn't much fun to actually play it.
I am in the final 3rd of my second 5e campaign (the first was a bastardized version of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, the second is a bastardized version of Descent Into Avernus). In the first campaign, by 5th level, the characters' powers and abilities were completely out of control. The last time I DMd was 2nd edition, so I was doling out magic items like Santa Claus, and I really, really came to regret it. By the end of the campaign, the
superheroesheroes were 9th level, and I could not wait to be done.So, lesson learned. Going into campaign 2, I made the following changes:
-slow level progression
-gritty realism for HP recovery
-'low magic' i.e. magic items, especially powerful one, are few and far between.
This has made the game better, but...they are now 4th level, and already incredibly powerful. Like, really powerful. The offensive cantrips. The endless variations of class/subclass (features and traits). So. Much. Stuff.
I am curious if others have had this same experience, and how they dealt with it. I have been a DM/GM for more than 40 years. I know how to play, how to design, and how to wing it when necessary. I love a lot of things about 5e, but this seems like a feature, not a bug.
I would hesitate to call players incredibly powerful at 4th level.
5th level is definitely a big spike from 4th - probably the biggest spike in the game. The moment you hit 5 is probably the point at which players feel most powerful compared to monsters, whose power curve is steadier than PCs. That said, after giving players a bit of time to flex their new muscles, I tend to push encounter difficulty up again and can usually find a good challenge.
I think T2 is the sweet spot of 5e, with players having all the tools they need to feel badass, but DMs have a ton of tools to adequately challenge players. I would say that Gritty realism is a great tool for certain DMs, as it allows them to match their desired narrative pacing with proper encounter pacing and 'properly' challenge their players.
Part of your struggle might just be adjusting to 5e encounter design. A lot of general experience in another edition or system can sometimes work against you, because you have to unlearn some older habits or notions about how the game 'should' work.
I have only played 5e but agree that I would struggle ot define level 4 characters as overpowered.
I see gritty realism as a way of dealing with the typical adventureing day descibed in the book as 6-8 encounters is rarely what actually happens in adventures outside of dungeon crawls. One encounter a day makes characters not only much more powerful but also brings in lack of balance, Warlocks and Monks are much less powerful as they are the most reliant on short rests, Spell casters become more powerful especially at high levels as they can use high level spell slots every round.
Can you explain your examples:
Offensive Cantrips: At level 4 the most damage an offensive cantip can do is 1d12 (toll the dead) and that only applies if the target is already hurt. 1d10 or 1d8 is more common, this is exactly the same as what they could do at level 1. The only difference is the potential for "adders", a warlock can take an invokation to increase the damage of eldritch blast by their charisma modifier, spells like hunters mark allow you to add a 1d6 for an hour or until you lose concentration. This is typically less than a weapon attack that will typically do 1d8+str/dex or more. As wolf pointed out the big power spike comes at level 5 when the damage of most cantrips doubles.
Endless Variations of class / subclass: This lots of options not more power. It is true that if players are looking ot make the most powerful characters they can a new subclass that is less powerful than existing ones will be ignored and a new subclass that is more powerful will increase the player power. This is really only an issue with a few subclasses that are unbalanced and too powerful/ The Twilight Cleric and the Moon Druid are the main two subclasses that apply here. IMO the Twilight cleric was a mistake in the amount of power they gave it the forum has several suggested nerfs, the moon druid is extremely powerful at levels 2 and 3 but drop off quite quickly as the druid will want to cast more spells than attack in wild-shape. Outside of these two I don't think their is an issue wth anything, A level of hexblade can help several characters but puts them a level behind their main class so it reasonabley balanced, a high level character (say 13+) can improve the party a lot by taking a level of peace cleric and the level 10 feature of chronolurgy wizards as written allows spells like tiny hut to be cast in combat where they were never meant to be but again that is not an issue here.
Thanks, friends. Good points all around.
If a DM runs published adventures with optimized characters or tactics, 5E can feel unbalanced at times. A DM will have more freedom to balance his campaign if it's self design or homebrew the published adventures somehow. Like this the DM will have more control over encounters difficulty, treasure distribution and level progression. Houseruling can also help out, like healing and rest variant for exemple. Making more use of the Exhaustion condition can also help as it's otherwise rarely used, and making dying causing a level of Exhaustion for exemple can also affect balance significantly.
Every time someone says 5e is unbalanced, I discover that either:
1) They are house ruling.
2) They are playing the monsters really, really STUPID.
3) They are playing a module where the author did not make good choices. Like for example not having the monsters do any thinking whatsoever.
I guess my question would be, "incredibly powerful" compared to what?
What are you throwing at them, that they can deal with too easily?
Also, as other pointed out above, at 4th level their cantrips should be doing the exact same amount of damage they did at 1st level, bar the occasional warlock invocation (I can't think of any subclass features that buff them off the top of my head), so I'm curious why you singled them out specifically. Like, 4th level is arguably when cantrips feel their weakest relative to other damage options
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
The phrase "zero to hero" is used to describe earlier editions of D&D. 5E is more like "hero to superhero."
The PHB introduces tiers of play. It says Levels 1 to 4 are "apprentice adventurers", levels 5 to 10 are just adventurers, levels 11 to 16 are "special even among adventurers." I think I'd push them all up one tier.
5E characters can take a lot. Even after 4 years I am still surprised sometimes by how much I can throw at a group of PCs.
However, there is one particular situation where PCs might feel overpowered - solo monsters. TO challenge a party, at any level, you must use multiple, mixed foes (melers and archers and skirmishers). The action economy means solo monsters get pwned really quickly, regardless of how powerful they are.
A solo monster is the equivalent of a solo player. They are focused on doing one thing, and classes not vulnerable to that will crush them. Flying archers crush melee combatants, but get taken out by ranged attackers.
Invisible melee fighters do really well except against casters.
Caster types crush archer types, but get killed by melee characters up close and personal
The core problem is that standard difficulty assumptions correspond to a way very few people actually play. Sure, a level 9 party beats up a CR 9 monster trivially but... so what? A typical CR 9 is something like a fire giant and that's hardly an epic monster, so just use several of them.
This post is extremely sus. Namely:
I'm gonna need an example of an overpowered PC at level four to understand where you're coming from. Don't forget to include what we're including the PC to - this'll go easiest if you provide an example party (you can spam the same PC 4 times if you want, to make it easier) and an example enemy for them to face, and don't forget to list how late in your adventuring week this is happening - day 1? day 2?
Man, getting called sus? That's just mid, bruh.
5e is a cartoon. I'm out. Peace.
@MichaelCreminIV, how many encounters per long rest?
Every single edition there are folks who complain that the new edition is not balanced. Why? Because D&D has never been a game about balance, not since its inception. With the myriad ways to build characters and parties, Wizards (and formally TSR) simply cannot balance everything against infinite options. Balance is the DM’s job, not really Wizards’.
Now, is the tool Wizards provides to give DMs guidance on balancing - CR - a rather unhelpful nightmare? Yes, and one that is generally less accurate than the already inaccurate systems prior editions had. Balancing a 5e encounter is more art than science, and it takes a bit to get that gut feeling of looking at an encounter and knowing it is the right power level. I know what personally works for me and my general number of encounters per day is using Beyond’s encounter builder and making sure lesser encounters just barely cross the “deadly” threshold, then also increasing monster HP. Different parties with different priorities, different amounts of magical items, different numbers of encounters per long rest, etc. will use different systems.
The trick to 5e, as with every edition, is figuring out the balance that works for you and your group.
I think that about sums it up... to me, 5e very clearly favors the player. Death is rare, and easily mitigated. Unless you're deliberately going out of your way as a DM to be stingy with rewards, players are going to end up with more gold than they know what to do with after their first adventure. CR for monsters has always been unreliable, but aside from giving you a vague idea of what tier of play this particular creature belongs to, it's not much help. Especially compared to older editions, 5e is very easy... honestly, I think most players enjoy that aspect of it, but I understand it's not ideal for everyone.
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It's more accurate to say that the encounter building rules favor the player. If you ignore them, it's totally possible to obliterate the PCs at any tier of play.
Yeah.... no. The 'super hero' (as you put it) characters were much worse in 3.x. Between feats, stacking feats, stats and skills that essentially had no cap, either you never ran games in previous editions or have forgotten. And there is no 5e pun pun.
If you are using CR or even the D&D beyond encounter builder then that is your problem. CR is an okay guideline at lower levels, and gets more busted as you go up (with all due respect to JC, you're wrong). And if you assume that CR is balanced (which it isn't, but let's go with that) against the base game (base meaning no optional rules such as multiclassing, human variant, custom lineage, ect), then when you include those options (especially feats like Sharp Shooter and GWM), the game becomes instantly unbalanced. Which is where the DM comes in who needs to understand that and rebalance their game vs their particular group of players.
In terms of time of play, right there with you (DM of 40+ years across dozens of systems). My opinions differ though.
Back in the basic D&D, AD&D pure spell casters (other than Clerics IMO) were really weak and limited in early levels. I remember carrying 60 darts with my low level wizard/magic user. Saving my sleep spell, and trying not to waste it. I believe that it was because of the complaints of how weak and essentially useless those early casters were that cantrips came about. Both good and bad, it seems that eventually cantrips were powered up to be similar to low level melee attacks with weapons (huge mistake IMO). In that same vein, melee players were complaining that in mid to higher levels of play they were completely outpaced by spellcasters (which considering how far behind spell casters were early, they should have been). Plus, the 'I attack, I attack again' was BORING and they wanted more. So, there came in maneuvers, fighting styles, special attacks for certain weapons, ect....
And now, they are trying to balance that all again each other, while keeping each classes flavor, and giving them all what they want.
I am not sure what you mean by 5th level they were out of control. They had a lot of options? I do not see where that is a bad thing.
There are several things I do to help challenge players:
1- max out creature hit points
2- give monsters class levels, abilities, feats
3- give leaders legendary actions
4- creatures are not (well, most) mindless things that just blindly attack the tanks until they are all dead
I've run two 5e campaigns to 20th level, and currently running 3 more that the current plan is to take them to 20th level (one of them, even beyond).
There are 2 feats that, for me, do break the game. Sharp Shooter and GWM. They essentially add 3d6 damage to every attack. The ease of getting advantage essentially negates the -5 . There are two ideas I've been toying with to fix them, well 3.
1- Scaling the damage bonus based upon tier of the character.
2- Adding a similar skill for swords (the idea I am playing with is when using a 1-handed weapon getting the -5/+10, add prof bonus to AC (cost a HD to do this), and a special attack based off the weapon)
3- Limiting them to a certain level.
People making the transition from 2e to 5e get kicked in the face with the fact that for instance, spell casters have actual damaging cantrips they can keep using instead of running out of spells and being forced to use a crossbow or something which they sucked at. lol
It's worth remembering that RPGs have to be biased in favor of the PCs, because if you continually have fair fights, you're going to have a game-ending TPK in short order.
I'm not sure the OP is still listening ...
However, in my experience 5e is the best balanced version of D&D I've ever played and I've played all of them since AD&D - though mostly AD&D and 5e by this point. I played a fair bit of 2e, some 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder and very little 4e.
Characters in 5e can be made to feel much more powerful with magic items since 5e uses bounded accuracy and smaller modifiers have a bigger effect than in earlier editions. There are also bumps in character power level at level 5, 11, and 17 as they change tiers and gain new abilities. However, in 5e, a large number of low level monsters are a threat even to a level 20 character (if they are on their own) while in 1e, 2e, etc - the level 20 character could usually wade through a hundred low level opponents without being challenged in many cases.
Anyway - some of the things that will make 5e characters feel powerful -
- the method of stat determination - with bounded accuracy having higher stats in everything has an impact
- magic items
- rules misinterpretations - coming from earlier editions it can be easy to miss stuff though in the OPs case, they have played a couple of campaigns so these issues shouldn't come up. However, things like adding proficiency to damage - instead of just to hit. Adding casting stat to cantrip damage (the only exception is Eldritch blast with the Agonizing blast invocation and a couple of level 6ish class archetype features). Cantrips before level 5 are strictly worse than weapon attacks since they don't add the casting stat to damage while the weapons will add strength or dex modifier as appropriate.
- another common reason DMs new to 5e think some classes are unbalanced is the amount of nova damage that a paladin using smite or a rogue sneak attack can do, particularly on a critical hit. After playing a while, I don't find either of these to be an issue but some folks seem to feel these are issues when first encountering them.
- encounter design - single big targets are usually a lot weaker than one would think due to the action economy while a group of opponents with twice as many creatures as are in the party can become a significant threat even if they are individually a lot weaker. The action economy is probably one of the biggest factors in encounter balance. If the encounters are mostly single large creatures against a reasonable sized party, they are going to feel really powerful - but the issue isn't the characters or 5e, it is the encounter design.
P.S. One of the big differences from earlier versions is the restoration of almost all resources on a long rest. Hit points are restored, spell slots etc and this does make the characters feel a bit more powerful than earlier editions because they can keep going day after day without taking a few days off for the cleric to heal everyone up. On the other hand, sitting around for a few days while the cleric healed everyone was usually glossed over anyway since it wasn't much fun to actually play it.