Telling a player it will take him 10 or 12 sessions to go from level 5 to level 6 annoys a lot of of them, very much.

Well, mine doesn't take that long (they average 1 level every 4 or so sessions), but if my rate of leveling the PCs did not satisfy the players, I would have a very simple answer for them: One of you DM. You can level us as fast as you want, then.

Add into the adventuring day the time shift that comes when players can teleport across the planes, or even the world. My material plane is split into time zones, it is completely possible for a party to go days experiencing the same 12 hour time period simply by hoping around the world. In fact I built that into an adventure that had them teleporting all over the globe never seeing night time. They suffered serious jet lag, lost track of time and where unable to properly rest due to it. The big bad was using it to try and weaken them for the big fight, ok the DM (me) was using it to weaken them before the big boss fight :). 

I will say as an aside I only ever use milestone leveling so I don’t need to worry about when to “hand out experience” also because my worlds are all sandboxes and I really hate dungeon crawls in the traditional sense, we do a lot of time skips or narration to describe things. 

BigLizard

I totally agree with your comment.  

I found the comment about player death or serious injury/loss of gear interesting.     Coming from an AD&D background, I am accustomed to player death but not sure how younger players would handle it.

I am a firm believer in "a close fight is a good fight."  Otherwise it gets boring for all parties involved.  There needs to be some danger involved.  I don't believe in "consumption of resources over 6-8 encounters for consumption sake."  That's a poor design methodology.

Indeed the narrative should drive the encounters.  And if a "life or death" fight should happen on 2nd or even 1st encounter then the system needs to accommodate that.

But as you said the system design allows players to dominate even when they don't have many resources.

Quote from DenisK >>

 

BigLizard

I totally agree with your comment.  

I found the comment about player death or serious injury/loss of gear interesting.     Coming from an AD&D background, I am accustomed to player death but not sure how younger players would handle it.

I am a firm believer in "a close fight is a good fight."  Otherwise it gets boring for all parties involved.  There needs to be some danger involved.  I don't believe in "consumption of resources over 6-8 encounters for consumption sake."  That's a poor design methodology.

Indeed the narrative should drive the encounters.  And if a "life or death" fight should happen on 2nd or even 1st encounter then the system needs to accommodate that.

But as you said the system design allows players to dominate even when they don't have many resources.

 

 
See I don't agree that there is inherently an issue with DnD 5e. I am running 3 campaigns currently, and have been running 5E for several years now. I have no issue creating encounters for my parties that put them under real danger of death, require them to think and act in the moment in order to survive the encounter, generally with at least 1-2 of them going unconscious and I don't require them to have dealt with 6-8 encounters since the last long rest, in fact generally my party will have a max of 2 encounters in a day, unless they are reaching a climatic moment, or the story calls for it, PC's die in combat when the dice make it happen, I make resurrection harder in my campaign then RAW so the cleric is not guaranteed to revivify a fallen player mid combat, but I will allow a second attempt via a ritual. My players don't get upset or angry at me that I didn't "ask them" if I could kill their character off. it happens, the adventuring world is dark, dangerous and people die. What I do do is make all of this clear in session 0, I make sure players are aware that Death in the game is a real thing.

I use the CR system as a guide to get started, but I also use my experience of how these characters have handled all I have thrown at them up to this point. I gauge and set the encounters to challenge, I meta slightly, if I know the party wizard is always taking a certain spell load out I might every now and again design an encounter to counter this and so make the wizard think about those decisions in future. I will use tactics like flanking, feint attacks and work to isolate members of the party in combat therefore making my players think on their feet about how best to handle this situation. Taking the CR as is and then simply lining those enemies up against your party, yes it will be easy, but making use of the numbers, or doing something interesting with how you approach the combat makes everything trickier, less predictable and far more fun. 

I do not run long dungeon crawls at all, I personally find them dull as anything to run, yes there are dungeons, I mean at the end of the day a trip through a forest is just a dungeon with no walls or ceiling, but it isn't a case of deal with room A, rest 8 hours

I will also put time limit on in game events sometimes so my players understand they can't just rest for 8 hours now and deal with that bad guy tomorrow. I don't experience any of the issues that are being called out here maybe it's how I set up my encounters, but my players often feel on edge and will talk about a close battle that, but for a couple of clutch decisions, could have gone against them. 

I will also add that I will often throw my players into situations they are not meant to survive at all by going toe to toe with the enemy, in those moments I expect them to realise that this is an encounter they need to escape alive rather then fight out to the death. For every campaign I am running at least one of these moments a player has been able to have a fantastic last moment holding the line and sacrificing their own life to save the rest of the party.

I have run both XP and Milestone campaigns, but I always give the bulk of XP for roleplaying, figuring things out etc then I do for random combat. I prefer milestone leveling because it lets me level the characters up at moments in the story that make sense. It helps me break the campaign up into chunks, this stuff will all happen at level 7 etc. I see table top RPG's as a way to tell a story, and that is regardless of system. 5e is, I believe one of the best systems for that in a high fantasy setting, I have never cared about pages and pages of rules and mechanics, hence i really dislike pathfinder as a system, and I used to spend years running it. If all you and your players want to do is slash your way through a narrative collecting XP like DnD is a form of Wow, or Diablo, then there is nothing wrong with that, but there are very clever ways as a DM that you can still make life hard for your players without having to throw encounter after encounter at them, feel free to use the random encounter tables to throw stuff at them. I very rarely use them myself mid system, if I do use them it might be to come up with the things the party will come across while travelling in an area, I will then flavour and adjust them to suit the actual party. 





 

See I don't agree that there is inherently an issue with DnD 5e. 

The issue is not with 5e per se, but with the fact that the guidelines given in the DMG for how to build encounters and their labels of "easy," "hard," and "deadly" are misleading, confusing many DMs who have not read the fine print (that these categories assume 6-8 encounters 'per day'). How many threads are there on this very forum from DMs asking about this very thing, that they can't seem to challenge their party when using the DMG guidelines? Therefore, the guidelines as presented to the DM are clearly an issue -- and since the difficulty of encounters is  extremely important in the table's ability to enjoy a gaming session, I would say that any issues with the encounter-building guidelines are therefore also a larger more general issue with 5e itself.

Additionally, it is clearly a flaw in 5e that the designers, when building their encounter design system for DMs, made what now appear to be wildly incorrect assumptions about how people play the game of D&D, specifically, how many encounters players tend to get involved in over the course of an "adventuring day."

I use the CR system as a guide to get started, but I also use my experience of how these characters have handled all I have thrown at them up to this point.

This sentence proves there is an issue -- you are admitting yourself, while defending 5e as not having an issue, that you don't use the 5e system to build your encounters but had to home-brew your own. I'm not trying to be adversarial here -- I do the same thing. Because I very quickly came to realize that the 5e encounter-building system was nigh-useless to me as a DM, since my party does not meet its "6 enc/day" assumptions. I think you're right to do this -- but to say on the one hand, there is no issue with 5e, and then in the very next "breath" as it were, say "but I don't use the 5e encounter building system" is rather self-contradictory. If there were no issues with 5e, you'd not have had to homebrew your own encounter-design system.

Nobody is saying 5e is fatally flawed because of the encounter design system in the DMG -- but given that many DMs have tried to use it and been severely disappointed with the outcome (again, just look at the many threads on this topic here) is evidence enough that this is at least "an issue" for 5e.

Quote from BigLizard >>

See I don't agree that there is inherently an issue with DnD 5e. I am running 3 campaigns currently, and have been running 5E for several years now. I have no issue creating encounters for my parties that put them under real danger of death.

I don't doubt it, your the GM of your game, killing of characters is always within the realm of the GM's god powers, that really isn't being put to question here.  If you run raw 5e however, if you run it by the rules and intended design of the game, killing a 5e character is extremely unlikely in a even modestly competent group especially past 3rd-4th level.  Put the system in the hands of veteran players and the only way anyone is going to die is if the DM breaks RAW or just extremely bad luck, but D&D 5e RAW is designed very specifically to make sure character death is rare and unlikely and its the only threat to the players even at these incredibly unlikely odds.  

There is no level drain, or permanent injuries, no psychology effects or loss of ability scores, there are no instant death effects like traps etc. 

Not true technically. 

Shadow can kill a player by draining Str and it's a CR 1/2 creature, so technically if you follow the RAW, you can accidentaly kill a player relatively quickly.

Wight is a CR 3 and it's life draining ability kills you if you reach 0.

Bodak has a gaze that reduces to 0 instantly

Banshee's wail can accidentaly TPK a party if you throw more than one at them.

All low level monstrers relatively.

Mind Flayer basically autokills anything that is incapacitated and you need to be careful with it's Mind Blast is an Int Save which 80% of parties can fail.

Traps can be deadly if they are containing high level spells. Matt Mercere loves his Power Word Kill traps, so far used twice with 100% success rate xD

But yeah, in general if you want to kill a player playing by RAW then you need to make that decision ie. actively decide that the enemy is targeting the player who is at 0.

I'd like to throw into the mix that the challenge rating and encounter building systems in the DMG are based on the core rules. The rules on multiclassing and feats are optional rules, and I would strongly argue that these are not taken onto account for the CR and encounter building systems as presented in the DMG. If these optional rules are used (and apparently they are considered standard cores rules by most tables, to my dismay and frustration) there will need to be adjustments made to the systems that rely on what a character of level "X" is capable of doing in combat, namely the challenge rating and encounter building systems. As a general rule of thumb, I assume a warrior using a long sword (1d8) with a maxed out attack stat and the dueling fighting style and/or a healing caster that heals 1d8 + a maxed out casting stat. I use these as a guide when determining the "strength" of the party side of the encounter. The book DMG also talks about situations that will effect the tide of the battle. Like how a paladin is better against a big single target and terrible against many medium sized targets, where a character with area of effect damage abilities, wizard, ranger, or sorcerer, is the opposite. 

Quote from FrankReynoldsGaryGygax >>

I'd like to throw into the mix that the challenge rating and encounter building systems in the DMG are based on the core rules. The rules on multiclassing and feats are optional rules, and I would strongly argue that these are not taken onto account for the CR and encounter building systems as presented in the DMG. If these optional rules are used (and apparently they are considered standard cores rules by most tables, to my dismay and frustration) there will need to be adjustments made to the systems that rely on what a character of level "X" is capable of doing in combat, namely the challenge rating and encounter building systems. As a general rule of thumb, I assume a warrior using a long sword (1d8) with a maxed out attack stat and the dueling fighting style and/or a healing caster that heals 1d8 + a maxed out casting stat. I use these as a guide when determining the "strength" of the party side of the encounter. The book DMG also talks about situations that will effect the tide of the battle. Like how a paladin is better against a big single target and terrible against many medium sized targets, where a character with area of effect damage abilities, wizard, ranger, or sorcerer, is the opposite. 

 Neither optional rules nor magic items were accounted for in CR or RAW.

Oh right! I forgot about magic items. 100%.

The is a major difference in how a combat goes when a fighter with a longsword and the dueling fighting style makes two attacks for ((1d8 + 2 + 5)*2) versus a fighter/barbarian with a magic +2 greatsword, the great weapon master feat, and is raging and reckless attacking doing ((2d6 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 10)*2). It's like 2.3 of the other fighter!

And that +2 greatsword also makes the Barbarian 10% more likely to hit.

Quote from Lyxen >>

Quote from IamSposta >>

And that +2 greatsword also makes the Barbarian 10% more likely to hit.

 

Actually, it's worse than this, assuming that he normally hits 50% of the time, a +2 increases his damage output by more than 20%.

 How does that work?

Quote from Lyxen >>

Quote from FrankReynoldsGaryGygax >>

Quote from Lyxen >>

Quote from IamSposta >>

And that +2 greatsword also makes the Barbarian 10% more likely to hit.

 

Actually, it's worse than this, assuming that he normally hits 50% of the time, a +2 increases his damage output by more than 20%.

 How does that work?

 

If you hit 50% of the time, getting a +2 will get you to hit 60% of the time, which is a 20% increase in chance to hit (relative, not absolute), and your damage increases by +2 as well.

So instead of doing (for example) 12 points of damage 50% of the time, so 6 points on average, you will do 14 points 60% of the time, so 8.4 on average, which is an increase of 40% of your average damage.

 Ah. I see. I thought you were talking about something else I saw recently that really blew my mind because of how silly it was. I'm no math wizz (you can tell because I used the word "wizz") but to-hit and damage probability is pretty straight forward stuff.

And how many of these are, actually, when you dig into it, people who are not running the rest of the system as intended, in particular with characters with extremely high stats and incredible equipment for their level ?

Yes, well, that is another whole issue entirely. If you run a powered up party you can't expect the DMG encounter guidelines to apply. But I guess some people do (maybe they don't realize they are "Monty Hall'ing" it).

What the system says is simply: "Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer."

Yes but the formula/tables/charts that they provide are all built assuming that 6-8, which means, as we have seen people mentioning, everyone who doesn't do that has to essentially "homebrew" their way of figuring out what is "hard enough" for a party. Surely the DMG writers could have included some other cases rather than assuming 6-8 as the default and leaving the rest up to us.

Quote from BioWizard >>

What the system says is simply: "Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer."

Yes but the formula/tables/charts that they provide are all built assuming that 6-8, which means, as we have seen people mentioning, everyone who doesn't do that has to essentially "homebrew" their way of figuring out what is "hard enough" for a party. Surely the DMG writers could have included some other cases rather than assuming 6-8 as the default and leaving the rest up to us.

 That's not the case at all. The tables and text literally tell a DM how create an "adventuring day's" worth of combat encounters that consist of anything that is needed. One encounter, two encounters, 20 encounters. It's not home brew to have something other than 6-8 between long rests. Having 6-8 is just kind of a jumping off point.

The way they worded it makes it seem like that should be what an average day looks like, so many people interpret that to mean when they look at every adventuring day, most of them will look like that. It’s a mean/median perception thing. That’s actually one thing I haven’t tried in a long time is actually trying to hit that 8 encounter mark. Maybe I’ll give it a shot one of these days.

But once more, it's not the default. 

It's how the table is set up. The categories of "easy," "medium," "hard," and "deadly" rely on the 6-8 thing being true for these descriptors to have the standard meaning of those words.

If they had, instead, put a # at the top of the list instead of words and said this is how many of each a party could take before needing a rest, and numbered them, say, 8, 6, 4, 2, you'd be right. But they didn't do that -- they called them easy, medium, hard and the like. So yes, they are assuming 6-8 as the default, because only under the 6-8 default is an encounter on that last column actually "deadly."

Just to throw into the mix that 13th Age has rules for when the party "Long Rests" and it's basically after every 4th encounter.  Period.  "Long rest" in this case is a full reset of power the same as the Long Rest in 5e.

I agree that it's probably pretty balanced (and an interesting game approach) to say:

2 encounters -> Short Rest -> 2 encounters -> Short Rest -> 2 encounters -> Long Rest

Just rename "Short Rest" something like "Mini Reset" and "Long Rest" to "Full Reset" and decouple the concept of rests from time in the game world.

It might make a more CRPG feel and maybe drives a train through the more simulationist games but it's probably more balanced.

BioWizard,

Unless one, as a DM, sets their personal defaults from Normal to Deadly. Then the default is 2, and those are still “Deadly”(ish). 😒