Hi

DD5 is a great game but a lot of things has been lower or change. DD3.5 was too much, too exagerate.

Magic object are too weak, monsters are too weak, we need to boost balor, vampire if we want they can stay alive more than one round ??? we must take balor is ADD 2 to have a good monsters, we take adapt magical objet from ADD2 or DD3.5.

Why opportunity attack ?  a warrior does 3 attcks in 6 second, why a 4th attack ? only because the monster move ???? it s stupid. Advantage and disavantage, why not. but why other DM, and players, we have voted for removal of opportunity attack like we have done in 3.5, removal disavantage / avantage and replace by 1D20 +1D6 avantage or 1D20 -1D6.... And the concentration to lower the power of mage / sorcerer ... it s a stupid. we have removed too. because the mage die without protection and only one protectiona t the time is not enough.

Where is the challenge in DD5 ? Where is the fear of dying in dungeon ? where is the stress to be not healed because the priest has not enought heal spell ?  Now i  go to sleep and i m at max healt point ? WTF ??? DD5 has not difficulty. is that u want you want ? no difficulty, no fear, no stress for new player that live in an easy world....  DD5 is adventure in Carebear world. Don t worry player u won t die, go the monsters are cute and fairplay.

A lot of player or DM leave DD5 to return to ADD2 or Pathfinder. I hope there will be DD6 without all this problem, with real monsters and magical object.

best regarrds   Sorry for my english but i m french

Look, if you don't like 5th Edition, nobody's stopping you from going back and playing a previous edition.

Opportunity attack is in place so that if you move into combat, you can't just walk away without disengaging. Try it some time - start a fight with someone and then turn around and walk away - no dodging, that's disengaging. you're going to get hit. It's a balancing mechanic which stops fighters from moving half forward, hitting, then moving away again without repercussions. If you manage to immobilise an enemy so they can't move, without opportunity attacks you can move forward, hit, then move back and the enemy can do nothing.

Concentration is so a mage can't combine several effects at once which, whilst balanced on their own, would be overpowered if combined (whilst 2 players can combine them, that takes 2 players to do it, so it's not as overpowered as one player doing it).

Advantage, eh, do what you want with it. I think it works.

As for the danger, perhaps your DM is pulling their punches or changing dice rolls to keep you alive? It's very easy to make combat deadly, but most DM's try to make it easier as people are invested in their characters, and killing them off in general combats sucks (dying in an epic boss fight is all good, dying because a bunch of wolves attacked the party sucks).

The world is what the DM creates. If your games have been too easy, with no threat of death, talk to your group. If they all feel the same way, ask the DM for a challenge.

Going back to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition? Ugh... I wish you all the best, but I'll stick to 21st century editions.

Regardless, houserule away. If something doesn't work for you, remove or change it. Reduce death saves or switch to somethhing else. Throw out Healing Word (I'm a big proponent of that). Fewer and less powerful items. Turning Advantage into adding 1d6 to the roll seems largely a wash - the numerical benefit of advantage depends on how much of a chance of success you have in the first place, but getting on average +3.5 to the roll will be fairly comparable. The Concentration thing is weird though: on the one hand you state that mages die without the protection that they can only get from multiple Concentration spells, on the other you argue that 5E is like adventuring in Care Bear World.... No offense, but that doesn't add up. If you simultaneously make changes to make things more difficult for the PCs and other changes to make it easier for them, what's the point?

All that aside, the simplest way to make encounters harder is not to change monsters, but to add more to the encounter. Vampire doesn't survive more than one round? Go with two vampires instead. Or a vampire, a banshee, a couple of wights and some zombies. Challenge Ratings on monsters and Encounter Levels are fairly poor mechanics, but their equivalents in previous editions weren't much better and you really don't have to stick to them. The second simplest way is still not to change monsters, but to play them smart and give them tactical advantages - a goblin camp should be fortified, an evil mage's tower should be warded, and so on.

Again: all the best regardless of what you want to do. It's your game, it should be fun for you. I just feel your group may not be using the most obvious tools at your disposal to make things better. 

Quote from ThorukDuckSlayer >>

Opportunity attack is in place so that if you move into combat, you can't just walk away without disengaging. Try it some time - start a fight with someone and then turn around and walk away - no dodging, that's disengaging. you're going to get hit. It's a balancing mechanic which stops fighters from moving half forward, hitting, then moving away again without repercussions. If you manage to immobilise an enemy so they can't move, without opportunity attacks you can move forward, hit, then move back and the enemy can do nothing.

It also means that tank characters actually have some means of protecting squishier party members.  D&D has always lacked agro-drawing mechanics, so if you were playing a fighter in older editions, your only real means of protecting other party members was by standing in front of them and hoping that the enemy would be kind enough to stop and fight you instead of simply waltzing past you to pound the mage into the consistency of tomato sauce.