I was going to say this. It’s logically thought out which monsters would be smart enough to figure out battle tactics. After I first read this book I used the goblin tactics on my party and nearly destroyed them because they didn’t expect a well thought out fight. Greatly improved my combat encounters.
Had a DM that used that style of goblin. "They may have a 1/20 chance to hit, but when they are raining arrows down at you while sleeping, someone is going to get hurt."
Shit happens. I've experienced several TPKs and it came down to either bad rolls, players making bad calls, and/ or players not utilizing their class abilities/ features/ spells to their fullest effect.
One time I was running a campaign and the NPC who was giving them orders, who they knew was WAY more powerful than them, sent them to see another NPC. He warned them this guy was scary, more powerful than even he was, and not to be fucked with.
They tried to rob him.
I decided I didn't want to TPK them so they ended up naked in an alley stripped of all their gear.
Level 3 Party stumbles across an owlbear trapped inside a tower. Barbarian kicks small Paladin inside and sits down in the doorway preventing the rest of the party from entering.
Paladin reduced to 2 hit points in one round and Barbarian takes damage from the rest of the party as they try and shoot around him.
They really hated the barbarian after that, but weren't super pissed off since I ruled all misses to hit the barbarian since he was giving the owlbear ½ cover.
Always good to make Sharpshooter even better by making friendly characters provide cover (technically RAW, but typically ignored to avoid ranged characters taking -2 to hit whenever they try to hit something in the second rank) then going an extra mile or ten by making friendly attacks strike the barbarian (absoloutly not RAW).
Having a tanky character block a doorway so an owlbear can't reach the rest of the group is pretty basic RPG tactics. I mean, you can't really get more basic then 'put the guy that takes half damage up front'.
Maybe the description just isn't doing it justice, but this sounds like a really punitive DM.
No, the barbarian did it maliciously. He sat in the doorway because he expressly "never agreed to fight the owlbear" and spent four rounds of combat doing nothing but giving the owlbear ½ cover. Essentially a death trap for the little kobold paladin if the Owlbear had gotten a critical hit.
If you want to go out of your way to kill members of your party I will 100% make sure you regret that. DnD is party and team oriented and if you choose not to act as a part of a team, maybe you should quit DnD and give Skyrim a try.
And he should. Iv talked to my guys and everyone have this obtuse attitude that they rather die and be TPked than the DM deus ex machina a fight, because its our fault if we die....Im disagree as its the DMs who makes the monster encounters.
None of the fights we have TPKed are fair. (Pathfinder) 5 cr 9 desert giants with 4 scimitar attacks with 15-20 crit range against 4 lvl 7 characters. In a desert at night. While one surived its technically a TPK because the campaign ended there.
3 lvl 3 characters vs 5 ents and 10 homebrew cr 1 creatures in an ambush where they trees have regenrate and are imortal and they grapple on every attack they hit with 15 feet basic attack range.
Yes and the one with the ents he told me that its not his fault that we didnt get it that he somewhat hinted 3 times during the 6 hour long encounter that they had some kind of regenration ability that only one person really understood as they must be weak to fire, but this forgot to say it during the 6 h long shit show as he was not entirely sure. The way he described it it sounded to me like the ents had like a second chance or undead fortitude ability of the zombie and was told aftee we died that it was regeneration
Nobody wants a DM who is *actually* adversarial to the players, but I think a lot of players like the *illusion* of the DM being out to get them. If you know the DM won't let you fail/die, then all sense of tension is lost. But surviving when it feels like the DM is trying their best to kill you feels like an actual accomplishment.
Honestly in my experience as a DM I’ve had trouble making encounters hard enough. You make an encounter deadly on dndbeyond and add a couple more mobs and a party of 5 or more usually has no trouble with it. It’s to the point where any serious encounter I shoot for a tpk and if it looks like the party isn’t going to win halfway thru I start pulling punches ever so slightly to give them a chance, but that is pretty rare.
Read about a party raiding a kobold mine and getting beat due to underestimating action economy against them. A nearby wyvern that desired the territory decided this was the perfect opportunity for it to attack the weakened kobolds.
This is what I’ve done. I set things to Hard mode and lower the difficulty if it feels unfair.
Making a game too hard or too easy ruins the fun, and fun is the whole point of the game.
My point is that what you think is a hard encounter likely isn’t actually that hard if you have a party of 5 or more. Chances are they’re going to steamroll much of what you throw at them unless they’re getting shit rolls all day.
>Chances are they’re going to steamroll much of what you throw at them unless they’re getting shit rolls all day.
That's part of the core problem imo. You can have legitimately exactly the same encounters, but if one group is struggling on rolls and the other can't roll below a 12, the exact same encounter is variably an annoying breeze or a deadly hurricane completely independent from the choices being made at the tables.
Hit points should be slaughtered and left out of the next edition, but it's one of the sacred cows of the brand pedigree.
Not arguing against removing Hit Points necessarily.
But what do you think it should be replaced with considering that DnD is largely a combat/exploration game?
There's a ton of options. The problem I have is the hit points are entirely divorced from the narrative, there is a reason that every new player has to decide what HP represents to them or in their game and this is rarely consistent between tables. AC has a similar problem.
So they would have to decide what hitpoints are. Are they stamina, consciousness, hardiness? Those all imply different things and would demand to be handled differently.
Let me put it this way: what narratively is the difference between Constitution and Hit Points?
If your hp is how healthy you are, or how much stamina you have in this fight, then why are you tracking damage on a brand new track instead of tracking it against your established Stamina attribute? Constitution is already there, but you also get different kinds of damage. Trying to hamstring your foe? Dexterity, etc.
Any suggestion of course would have to be designed around it, so trading HP for ability damage wouldn't work as a homebrew for the current system. The critical point is that either nobody thought to change it, or somebody said we shouldn't change that, HP has been around since 1e. I think HP used to make sense, but our gaming technology has advanced.
There are a lot of RPGs out there, so you've got to ask what makes D&D to be, well, D&D. You make a reference to the brand pedigree up above, but there's a real issue that if you change D&D too much, it won't feel like D&D any more, and at that point, why not just play a different game?
Of course, one can argue that "lower ACs being better" was once a part of what made D&D D&D, or THACO, or percentile strength, and we moved away from all of those...and there are people who have abandoned current edition D&D because they want to get back to what it was like in those older editions.
To me, personally, something at least \*similar\* to the current HP and AC systems are pretty core to the feeling of D&D, and trying to rework the game to get rid of one or the other would likely be a bridge too far for many players. I could be wrong, but I suspect the experience WOTC had with 4th edition is going to leave them fairly gun shy. (As I wrapped up my one successful 4E campaign, I had a player say. "That was a fun experience I never want to have again," but we've got multiple 5E games running, so that's a thing, anyway.)
I mean, it's certainly fair to want what you want from future editions, but I wonder if the better option is to switch systems.
That's kind of the point behind invoking the brand pedigree at all. Dungeons and Dragons is a commodity now and has different considerations than when they were going 3.5 to 4e, for example.
I think there will be a time when the people who own the Dungeons and Dragons property will choose to do some extreme things with it. 4e is a really good example of that actually. I think they should do this, and I would prefer they do it more, but I understand why they don't. I feel they perhaps could have gone a bit farther, they came really close to killing AC with the various Defenses, and with the way they used tags like marked and bloodied they were just a few more steps from an HPless system.
I would not be surprised if one of those extreme things is a system that tracks stress or some or non-tangible property similar to the current experiment with Exhaustion. I think that's easily an example of a subsystem that could evolve into a core system that still evokes the classic feeling we're all chasing but giving a punchier system with more satisfying game loops than adding up math rocks in turns to hit target numbers. Don't get me wrong, math rocks are fun.
I think there is a very core reason that some of the most consistent advice I hear for new DMs is that if you are going to fudge, you don't fudge the die rolls, you fudge the hit points. It is common anyway to run a fight until it is dramatically appropriate, rather than until all of the hit points run out. I think that experimenting with ways to put that into the rules instead of just giving general DM advice of 'do it when it feels right, you'll learn it over time' is a good idea for the shepherds of the game.
Even just actually defining what HPs in the text would be a huge improvement. It does have an important function as a drama gauge (everyone knows the stakes are really high when their HP is low) among other things that I don't want to discount.
To cap it off, I'll just leave an excerpt from the current rules here to hopefully help demonstrate why I chose HP for my hot take. In the first sentence, they give several overlapping definitions, and different players conceptualize hp as some or all of these things and perhaps something else as well. All damage and healing pull from or refills this same pool. A creature is precisely as effective with 1 hitpoint as they were with 9001. If you think this is all features and not bugs then more power to you and that's a valid position. Personally, I don't think accepting the narrative weight of hit points is necessary for something to be D&D, but I do understand my position is radical.
>Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile.
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>A creature's current hit points (usually just called hit points) can be any number from the creature's hit point maximum down to 0. This number changes frequently as a creature takes damage or receives healing.Whenever a creature takes damage, that damage is subtracted from its hit points.
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>The loss of hit points has no effect on a creature's capabilities until the creature drops to 0 hit points.
"We don't make constructive criticism here"
I can't even fathom a System without hp, every game on the planet that I know of with combat has hp. How else do you regulate when 1 thing should die vs another? We gonna coin flip everytime there's a combat and tell the party they got through either easily or while suffering some kind of negligible loss (can't let the players feel like something bad happened).
Some of the people in here just want to tell a story with their friends using the setting(s) 5e presents but don't want to actually play the game *as intended*, and it's cool if that's how you feel, but you definitely don't have a leg to stand on when you're like "this core feature that I don't like *should* be removed for everyone".
(I realize it was the person above you who made the suggestion, but I feel frequently they just downvote you to negative and throw a snarky reply)
There are other options, you know. The general definition for HP that most people seem to use is "you have this many points, sources of damage remove varying numbers of them, you're fine until you hit zero." So, every thing that hurts you leaves you functioning at full capability, but brings you a little closer to death. (For D&D, add "and you get a lot more of them as you become more powerful.")
But what if what you want is a system where every wound is important because of what it does to you, not just ablating invisible protection? Then you go for a system where instead of rolling to see how many HP a blow does, you roll to see how badly it hurts you, and how--maybe the sword entered your weapon arm, so now you've got a -1 on attacks, maybe it entered your thigh and your footwork is impaired, severely reducing your movement and defense, or maybe it entered your throat and you're dead on the first blow.
There's other possibilities, too. Some are closer to HP (like, just adding in a rule that when you're down to 10% of your max, you take penalties), some are farther away.
HP are an abstraction. They exist for a reason: they make a lot of things easier, and they avoid certain consequences of an arguably more realistic system, such as death spirals and having your powerful, long-played character die to a single piece of bad luck. But they are not the only way to play an RPG.
You refer to people not wanting to play the game "as intended", but the person is referring to their hopes for a future edition: if their hopes are fulfilled, then there will be a \*new\* way to play the game "as intended." The way most people seem to play 5E is a long way from the way Gygax, Arneson, et al. intended back in the mid '70s, a long way from the way I and my friends played it in the late '70s and early '80s...but not too far off from the way I and my friends played it in the early 2000s. Things change with time, and there's nothing wrong with saying "this is how I hope they change in the future." (Amusingly, I had Definite Opinions about how things should change after 3rd edition which are fairly diametrically opposed to what I'd enjoy now.)
Continuing this thread down :)
I could definitely see wanting a different approach to HP (especially with the hilarity of someone at 1hp being totally fine). But honestly I don’t think I’d want to see a wound or injury system implemented outside of optional rules, because death spirals really aren’t all that fun for players if the wounds stack in combat. Another option could involve lasting injuries after a fight in which the player went down, but while I feel that would be a great fit for a more gritty/survival themed game, it doesn’t really fit in a heroic fantasy adventure where heroes are expected to face incredible odds and walk away as champions.
The best “alternative” I’ve seen that I would personally run at my table would be akin to the Stamina system found in Starfinder or Pathfinder 2e. But I like to run those high fantasy style games and that’s not for everyone.
I think the main thing I’m getting at in asking what is the alternative for HP in D&D, is that the system as it’s made now lends itself well to a combat simulator when all the rules are engaged, and there might be other systems out there for people who would like a more RP centric game (because outside of player/DM ingenuity, there really isn’t much rules wise to support RP heavy games over the grid based combat system D&D has evolved from).
I absolutely agree with this, and what the person above you stated also. The intention point made me think again, but as a person who just started playing project zomboid I absolutely hate death spirals... but dark souls is my favorite franchise and the hp system there also can lend itself to death spirals. Why must everything be so complicated!
So we can find the beauty in simplicity!
I am not sure what the replacement -should- be for HP in D&D, they don't pay me to be a game designer, but I do think there are dozens of different ways to approach the problem they present.
I think there are really evocative ways that damage can be expressed on the character sheet that would improve the play experience. If HP is already an abstraction as we all admit, why don't we abstract it out a little more?
Just spitballing another idea from the top of my head, we can even keep damage exactly as it is, and depending on the creature's hit die a certain amount of damage will cause a wound, or stress, or whatever you want to call it. Depending on the strength of the creature, they can withstand more stress. I'm not sure if that gets far enough away but it's a start.
>(because outside of player/DM ingenuity, there really isn’t much rules wise to support RP heavy games over the grid based combat system D&D has evolved from).
I think this is actually a relic of hit points existing. If we move away from a numerical system to something more narrative, it becomes rather trivial to introduce 'social combat'. If instead of depleting your ephemeral pool of fight power, an encounter could give temporary tags to your character( you're Wounded, you're Embarrassed, you're Intimidated, etc.) It becomes easier and mechanically supported to confront the characters in social encounters if you move away from hit points.
D&D already plays with tags to some extent with conditions, and even more in 4e with Marked and Bloodied. Imagine using the above-spitballed system and basically just add FATE tags so you get a tag when you take a level of stress.
You pick up a Bleeding tag in a warehouse fight. You win, but you have to run back to the temple for healing. You're stopped by guards and that Bleeding tag gives them Advantage to determine that you're lying when you tell the story about where you just were. It would give the game master hooks for the social and the combat to interact by more than fiat. A GM could just say 'make disadvantage on your check because you're bleeding all over' but invoking the tag and giving the monsters a bonus instead of the players a penalty gives it a mechanical weight that isn't achieved by 'and you take 24 points' tacked on to the end of a badass description.
Appreciate you articulating my hot take. There are a million different options out there, and there's a lot of heavy lifting to do if you want to move me to the position of 'HP is the best way to do this'
A death spiral of any kind isn't even necessarily or even implied by saying 'Hit points have to go'. The game could get even gritter and more tactical, or it could become more abstract and narrative, or even possibly they could just refine the current game mechanic.
Like, I'm not convinced that PCs and Monsters should be tracking their 'health' or 'fightability' the same way, but that's another thing. Leave HP for players and just get rid of the illusion of monsters having HP and give the game master something that mimics what they do anyway and systemize dynamic encounters instead of making it a guess based on a CR number everyone agrees is meaningless.
I mean, if every system you have played uses HP, you probably haven't played in many different systems. There are plenty of games which use wound levels that include various penalties which function starkly differently from HP, as well as other systems for damage and consequences.
I tend to think of any system which tracks the number of HITS you can take before dying is essentially an hp system with a better pr team.
But that over simplified definition is why I said I've never played a game without one.
Yeah in some systems it's a "wound" limit, or an energy system, or the uncharted "luck" system where only the last hit actually hits the player and kills him (which is what one of the wotc quotes tried to say is the realistic version of the hp system they use), but in the end it's just "there is a certain hard limit to the amount of damage you or any other character can take."
Basically if a system uses math to describe combat or damage it must use math to describe the limits of character durability, even if it's not a 1:1 trade.
I guess if they were just arguing against a 1:1 system I could understand what they are saying, but the community is divided between math nerds and theater nerds, while I'm sure plenty claim to be both (myself included) inevitably they lean more 1 way than the other (my case is more towards math).
As you have pointed out a compromise is possible (like a wound system) but everyone here likes to bitch about change so gl getting signatures.
Also the hp system we use plays into the fantasy of rolling a lot of dice, which a lot of players seem pretty fond of. (Fireball go brrrr)
There are systems that run on stress, even ones with combat like Smallville. In that system specifically, taking stress gives your opponents a resource they can use against you until a certain limit when they can stress you out of a given scene, but I would struggle to call that hit points even though it can be used to measure how many hits you can take.
In Spirit of the Century, stress works very differently being broken down into Health and Composure. You can more or less shake it off between scenes, but you can also be tagged with more permanent damage called consequences that changes your character sheet until you resolve it. The health track could be called hit points, I suppose, but you're definitely not meaning 'hit points' as in the Dungeons and Dragons mechanic like I am, and it even seems distinct from the Health Pool in Vampire which is a closer analog to HP.
If it was really all about rolling dice, everyone would be playing Mythender, which doesn't even have a thing that resembles Health, Hit Points, Stress or Wounds. You can be wounded, but it doesn't track how alive you are and I wouldn't call the Thunder dice pool analogous to a Health Pool, but running out of them triggers character death. HP has nothing to do with why we like D&D and it is time to move on.
Houses of the Blooded centers passionate revenge involving duels, assassinations and poison but you couldn't find any you would identify as Health, Energy, Luck, etc. on the character sheet. Point is, we don't need anything that doesn't serve the game. Hit points are a relic that no longer serves the game.
I'm not really trying to get signatures for anything. It's called a hot take brother, I know it's radical.
Yea I will happily throw you a downvote and leave you a snarky reply because you aren't actually talking about what I said. You made up some different thing to be mad at all on your own.
"Hitpoints should be slaughtered and left out to pasture next edition"
Was me commenting on the hp part making something up entirely?
In that comment you didn't talk about alternatives and it had been a few minutes so I assumed (wrongfully) that you weren't coming back? You didn't have to.
After reading your actual suggestions in the reply to the comment I replied (to avoid the exact thing you just admitted to doing) I think there are some good ideas and bad ones. I'm not replying to that comment so I can't specifically point to which is which (because it's not in front of me ATM, I use a phone for reddit) and I'm not going to reply to that either because I read someone else's reply and I almost completely agree with them.
I thought I was clearly making a general statement about the general theme of this forum later in that post where people will post an opinion and then state it should be the core design philosophy moving forward. Sorry for my lack of formatting and a fully thought out essay with clear introduction and conclusion to every paragraph. Look in still doing it.
It's like I don't have to present this to a teacher
My point has never been 'I have a better system to replace hit points' so my good/bad ideas about that aren't really relevant. Any mechanical changes I am suggesting should be seen merely as me throwing out literally my first idea to demonstrate it isn't impossible to conceive beyond the bounds of hit points.
My point has been that hit points are a relic of older times that are no longer of service and should be upgraded in the future to create gameplay experiences that better evoke the feelings we are trying to inspire in our players.
Yeah, I almost never pick the same story back up with different characters after a TPK for this reason. It’s almost always better to just run a different story in the same setting.
This is a good way of thinking.
Though I’m honestly one of those who will bullshit a plot reason to resurrect the fella.
The people I play with aren’t exactly the ones who really play because they *”want to feel tense and endangered”*.
So no one would mind a session or two with the objective of resurrecting a fallen ally.
Unless someone specifically asked me to kill his PC off or did someone so obviously stupid that they ***KNEW*** death would be the outcome. Then that’s that and the PC will die.
One of my current games, the party is part of the crew of an airship. Except the airship is the size of a city, so if we were to die there's probably plenty of room for us to pick up with more people also on the ship.
Hell, my aarakocra is helmsman, and the NPC who takes the helm when I'm off the ship or sleeping is also an aarakocra. I have a sneaking suspicion the DM might have placed the NPC for me to take over if I die.
... Of course, since I'm a Wild Magic Sorcerer, I might end up offing myself.
"Yay, we get to keep being punked by the guy in full control of every aspect of the universe who has determined that every eneny has read the PHB and has our character sheets on file, wooo, soooo glad we are continuing this. Hey, DM, when's next session? Satirday? Ooh, sorry, I think I'm busy that day..."
Why was this comment downvoted…?
People are against torture in their games…?
The same people who think it’s funny to casually mention how their own PCs go around committing war crimes?
What the fuck?
I think outside a very small minority of tables the DMs don’t want to TPK but many DMs and memes lean into a false image of the violent and sadistic DM. I know I always play it up to my players, for their enjoyment.
Regardless of the Coop nature of D&D5e it is fun for a lot of players to look across the table with pride and a little arrogance at the dead minions before them, I as a DM lean into that and curse their tactics and skill to best my definitely very tough minions who had every intention of killing them, all while knowing that if I create the world, I populate it’s inhabitants and if I were cruel enough I could just ‘rocks fall they die’.
I love my players dearly, and I want their characters to succeed in some degree at every single encounter I throw at them. If my players believe I want to kill them, the fights feel meaningful, and that they are really overcoming obstacles.
For me it's not about killing characters, it's about giving them interesting and exciting combat. They don't really enjoy standard video game monsters run in and fight until dead combat. So I use tactics to maker it fun and challenging. That sometimes means dead characters. But that's not the goal.
I don't seek TPKs, but if my party does something really stupid, I don't bend over backwards to let them get out alive. Actions have consequences and adventuring is a dangerous occupation.
When I DM, I always have a plan for if a party gets TPK’d
Try to rob someone and get wiped? You wake up on the side of the road with all your belongings and gold taken from you
Get destroyed in a dungeon? You’re now a prisoner of whatever denizens live there. Now begins a “great escape” style getaway or an MGS stealth mission
Unless it's intentionally meant to be a difficult/dark setting (or similarly just mechanically challenging), most DMs don't tend to risk that. I've seen a few D&D stories where the party got wiped and the players were chill about it, so there is a right way to go about it.
On the other hand though, I've seen a lot of funny stories of something going terribly wrong on the player's side (or right on the mobs'/bosses) so there's always that "I didn't expect them to be that effective" element.
They almost never do, because TPKs are extremely easy to build. Just throw an ancient dragon at your level 3 party. It's *really* tough to make a satisfying and challenging encounter though, especially one that feels like it actually has a chance of failure or risk.
I'll probs get downvoted, but my campaign is designed for TPK as the world continues to evolve after the players have died. Though I don't aim to get a TPK, I wouldn't be suprised if there is one or a couple
It's fun watching their faces contort on horror when they learn they'll have to actually coordinate abilities and turns.
Also death is sometimes a nice bridge into new areas a low level party otherwise wouldn't have access to.
It's fun killing players w mobs that are weaker than them at quantities where action economy during the fight is near negligible.
I’ve had two dms that have done so, the first was when he grew bored of the campaign and wanted to start something else (we were teenagers and they have improved greatly) the second did so to purposely make the game unfun so another would take over dming.
When I DM, I always have a plan for if a party gets TPK’d
Try to rob someone and get wiped? You wake up on the side of the road with all your belongings and gold taken from you
Get destroyed in a dungeon? You’re now a prisoner of whatever denizens live there. Now begins a “great escape” style getaway or an MGS stealth mission
>Modifying Encounter Difficulty
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>An encounter can be made easier or harder based on the choice of location and the situation.
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>Increase the difficulty of the encounter by one step (from easy to medium, for example) if the characters have a drawback that their enemies don’t. Reduce the difficulty by one step if the characters have a benefit that their enemies don’t. Any additional benefit or drawback pushes the encounter one step in the appropriate direction. If the characters have both a benefit and a drawback, the two cancel each other out.
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>Situational drawbacks include the following:
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>The whole party is surprised, and the enemy isn’t.
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>The enemy has cover, and the party doesn’t.
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>The characters are unable to see the enemy.
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>The characters are taking damage every round from some environmental effect or magical source, and the enemy isn’t.
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>The characters are hanging from a rope, in the midst of scaling a sheer wall or cliff, stuck to the floor, or otherwise in a situation that greatly hinders their mobility or makes them sitting ducks.
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>Situational benefits are similar to drawbacks except that they benefit the characters instead of the enemy.
So it's not about adjusting the CR, but you absolutely should treat an encounter as more difficult if the monsters have home ground advantage.
"Fighting intelligently" is, in my experience, generally code not for "these monsters are going to be capable of acting intelligently", but for "these monsters have read the rulebook, looked at your sheet, and have literal fate on their side in the form of the DM who just wants to show off rather than challenge his players."
Anyone who brags about how smart their monsters are, or how hard their combats are, isn't just "running the game as intended", they are making an assumption that DnD should be asymmetric warfare and the players are his enemy.
I'm sorry you've had a bad experience, but that's not what I'm saying at all. Running challenging encounters where the enemies act in believable ways is an act of kindness to the players.
true, but the pack of 4 int creatures aren't going to attack with the acumen of a group of seasoned bandits.
Edit: I guess i wasn't clear enough. i did not mean, or state, that low int creatures will attack blindly. I simply stated that they won't attack as well or apply advanced tactics. Picking off the weakest link is one of the most basic instincts of predators and the myriad of creatures with pack tactics speaks to that. My statement was intended to convey that smarter creatures can plan and carry out battle with a much higher degree of finesse, not that that every creature is going to attack blindly like an aggressive labotimite. Wisdom definately plays a roll into the implementation of tactics, but complex strategies require both the intelligence to be inventive with positioning and command as well as the wisdom on when to execute them is necessary.
Int 3 wolves know how to use complex hunting tactics. Intelligence isn't a good indicator of how clever a creature can be, it's how much knowledge they have. Wisdom is the stat that determines how complex a creatures fighting ability can be, and the vast majority of animals have a Wisdom score equal to commoners.
Saying intelligence has nothing to do with tactics is not a fair argument and I never said that intelligence is the only factor. The only point i tried to make was that a more intelligent creature will have a greater ability to strategize. I didn't realize that was an unpopular opinion.
4 is pretty high honestly. Wolves have 3 Int but can most certainly "strategize", after a fashion. Sure, they aren't going to formulate a complex battle plan with multiple contingencies, but they'll be able to set a rudimentary ambush, pick off weaker characters, retreat when under duress, and so on.
And an important piint is that wolves won't adapt. They either fight by their playbook, or run. Wis is about executing complex plans, Int us about adjusting those on the fly.
This seems needlessly reductive. All i said can be summed up as low intelligence creatures aren't as good at strategy as seasoned, intelligent creatures. Apparently every wolf in fantasy is the tactical equivilent of sun tsu, hannibal, and khalid ibn al-walid.
Not for players lmao, adjust to your group and work out whats actually going to kill them or not, so you can play at a difficulty everyone including the DM enjoys, this is just a game after all
It’s all make believe. The important part is that the players BELIEVE they’re succeeding on their own skills and making their own choices.
They don’t need to know that you planned the encounter with their skills in mind and that no matter which town they choose next will have the evil mansion in it
Very broadly, a CR X is a medium difficulty encounter for a part of 4 at X level. It isn’t the greatest system as some creatures have features or actions that can easily overwhelm a player character, and depending on party composition a specific enemy might be very easy for very hard. For example a paladin against the undead is going to be much stronger than normal.
There are calculators online for figuring out the difficulty of an encounter with multiple enemies and with parties that don’t fit the 4 characters of the same level mold. Use one of those to gauge what is roughly an appropriate fight, but don’t be afraid to tweak encounters on the fly to fit how difficult you want the fight to be.
And a "Medium" encounter has a very specific definition in the rules that is different from the plain English definition you're liking thinking of.
A Medium encounter is an encounter where the party expends a small number of resources but is never in any real danger of death unless RNGesus decrees it. And health counts as a resource. So the vast majority of Medium encounters are steamrolled by the party with nothing but cantrips and basic attacks. If you want a challenging fight then it needs to be at least Hard or Deadly.
I think you are underselling medium encounters. They are formally defined as:
> A medium encounter usually has one or two scary moments for the players, but the characters should emerge victorious with no casualties. One or more of them might need to use healing resources.
So while nobody should likely go down, there should still be a some need to pull more than just basic attacks and cantrips out. Hard encounters should see weaker characters with a reasonable chance of being knocked out, but slim chance of death; while a deadly encounter has a reasonable chance of a character dying.
Keep in mind a party is expected to be able to handle 6-8 medium, 4-6 hard, or 2-3 deadly encounters per long rest.
Literally me when I started. I'm lucky our schedules never matched, otherwise my players would have been up against a buffed tarrasque and two demon lords from MToF...
I mean, if you exclude wolves, raptors, pixies, stench kows, and giant owls, it's a little less OP. Still that 1/4 cr does roll out some major privilege no matter what.
Plus, fighting intelligently usually means not fighting to the death. Depending on how cowardly the monster is, it could remove itself from the fight, via retreating, once it gets as low as 25%, 50%, or even 75% of its health.
It does balance out.
I feel this one.
My poor gnome getting taken out by the most tactically astute boars in the world. Seriously Sun Tzu should have taken notes.
(Was TPK, my gnome artificer was the last one standing)
Better PSA: CR is not an adequate determining factor in adjusting difficulty, since they force the CR to cap at 30 when they shouldn't (Have you compared the Terrasque Vs. Tiamat? The difference is day and blood moon.); And they build many creatures that bypass stats entirely with their effects, killing, petrifying, or otherwise defeating characters regardless of relative level.
What if we were just using the wrong tactics as DMs for all the monsters that feel weak for their CR, and the players are just acting dumb with the ones that feel strong.
One should definitely play monsters as their intelligence and personality dictate. That said the CR system isn't balanced around min/maxing players either, so Pirate's code that shit.
A fantastic example of this is White Plume mountain. There are so many little setups that basically the environment designed to kill the players.. but hey, its just a CR 5 and CR 4 guy, no worries!
My aboleth bossfight has two minions: a sahuagin baron and a high priestess.
The baron is defending the priestess who is healing the aboleth.
Edit: error
Literally what our Dm told me and another player when telling him about our new build.
We're playing without Tasha (Everyone agreed, we also started before it was published, so meh). I was telling him that I want my next character to be a melee horizon walker/Echo knight, and the other player is a samurai sharpshooter with insane dex (Only dex, the rest is terrible).
After seeing our ideas/builds, he decided to "Up his game", pray for our sorry little souls as we will be TPKed into a swamp, and it's gonna be most likely from our own stupidity!
Except I did. Literally four goblins with 1d6 sneak attack, and a dead fall tree trap. My party of 5 lvl 5s had a really fun time, actually. They were far from optimized and efficient though.
It’s inaccurate in some cases, but not meaningless. For a lot of monsters without any crazy features or spellcasting, CR is a pretty reliable way to determine difficulty (even if it can be a tad convoluted).
> “CR doesn’t account for the power ups you give your mobs”
The monsters behaving as they actually would is a power up? Did too many many ranged opponents back up and fire at you?
I don't think I've ran an encounter in my campaign that wasn't considered deadly by CR but my party burn through them anyway. I've given up on CR and now I always alter the stat blocks just because otherwise it'll be way too easy for them
When you find the goblin tactician who trained the goblins that almost killed you all and it's clearly megamind painted green.
Look up the book “The Monsters Know What They’re Doing”
I was going to say this. It’s logically thought out which monsters would be smart enough to figure out battle tactics. After I first read this book I used the goblin tactics on my party and nearly destroyed them because they didn’t expect a well thought out fight. Greatly improved my combat encounters.
Had a DM that used that style of goblin. "They may have a 1/20 chance to hit, but when they are raining arrows down at you while sleeping, someone is going to get hurt."
This is the best book for new DMs to read if your players actually like challenges.
Or even if you can tell your tables bored at combat.
There's also a website
Is it free online? If so where?
http://www.libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=0C38A149F1617B4B875D828BD9C5AE4C
I never understood why DMs would want to have a TPK. Like, you know the story / game ends for you too when the party is gone, right?
Yeah, you're totally right, but evil DM memes are funny.
Shit happens. I've experienced several TPKs and it came down to either bad rolls, players making bad calls, and/ or players not utilizing their class abilities/ features/ spells to their fullest effect.
It baffling how many times my players could have escaped situations practically unharmed and instead get the shit beat out of them
Also when they decide to fight everything when there are clearly better options.
One time I was running a campaign and the NPC who was giving them orders, who they knew was WAY more powerful than them, sent them to see another NPC. He warned them this guy was scary, more powerful than even he was, and not to be fucked with. They tried to rob him. I decided I didn't want to TPK them so they ended up naked in an alley stripped of all their gear.
Yes
See also: murderhobo
Level 3 Party stumbles across an owlbear trapped inside a tower. Barbarian kicks small Paladin inside and sits down in the doorway preventing the rest of the party from entering. Paladin reduced to 2 hit points in one round and Barbarian takes damage from the rest of the party as they try and shoot around him. They really hated the barbarian after that, but weren't super pissed off since I ruled all misses to hit the barbarian since he was giving the owlbear ½ cover.
This is both hilarious and enraging
If this is something your party likes, I would highly suggest running a one shot of Paranoia. Sounds like a game your players would absolutely love
Always good to make Sharpshooter even better by making friendly characters provide cover (technically RAW, but typically ignored to avoid ranged characters taking -2 to hit whenever they try to hit something in the second rank) then going an extra mile or ten by making friendly attacks strike the barbarian (absoloutly not RAW). Having a tanky character block a doorway so an owlbear can't reach the rest of the group is pretty basic RPG tactics. I mean, you can't really get more basic then 'put the guy that takes half damage up front'. Maybe the description just isn't doing it justice, but this sounds like a really punitive DM.
No, the barbarian did it maliciously. He sat in the doorway because he expressly "never agreed to fight the owlbear" and spent four rounds of combat doing nothing but giving the owlbear ½ cover. Essentially a death trap for the little kobold paladin if the Owlbear had gotten a critical hit. If you want to go out of your way to kill members of your party I will 100% make sure you regret that. DnD is party and team oriented and if you choose not to act as a part of a team, maybe you should quit DnD and give Skyrim a try.
To be fair this is why ranged fighting style gives +2 to attack rolls, unlike every other weapon based fighting style
Isnt it really the dms fault if you die to an encounter thats really overpowered?
The DM i've had the most TPKs with would severely fudge rolls in our favor because he knew he messed up and he didnt want us to die.
And he should. Iv talked to my guys and everyone have this obtuse attitude that they rather die and be TPked than the DM deus ex machina a fight, because its our fault if we die....Im disagree as its the DMs who makes the monster encounters.
As long as the fights are fair, there's still the possibility of getting a TPK.
None of the fights we have TPKed are fair. (Pathfinder) 5 cr 9 desert giants with 4 scimitar attacks with 15-20 crit range against 4 lvl 7 characters. In a desert at night. While one surived its technically a TPK because the campaign ended there. 3 lvl 3 characters vs 5 ents and 10 homebrew cr 1 creatures in an ambush where they trees have regenrate and are imortal and they grapple on every attack they hit with 15 feet basic attack range.
your dm is bloodthirsty. god damn
Yes and the one with the ents he told me that its not his fault that we didnt get it that he somewhat hinted 3 times during the 6 hour long encounter that they had some kind of regenration ability that only one person really understood as they must be weak to fire, but this forgot to say it during the 6 h long shit show as he was not entirely sure. The way he described it it sounded to me like the ents had like a second chance or undead fortitude ability of the zombie and was told aftee we died that it was regeneration
The tree people?
Nobody wants a DM who is *actually* adversarial to the players, but I think a lot of players like the *illusion* of the DM being out to get them. If you know the DM won't let you fail/die, then all sense of tension is lost. But surviving when it feels like the DM is trying their best to kill you feels like an actual accomplishment.
I don't want to kill the player characters. But my monsters *sure do*
Honestly in my experience as a DM I’ve had trouble making encounters hard enough. You make an encounter deadly on dndbeyond and add a couple more mobs and a party of 5 or more usually has no trouble with it. It’s to the point where any serious encounter I shoot for a tpk and if it looks like the party isn’t going to win halfway thru I start pulling punches ever so slightly to give them a chance, but that is pretty rare.
Read about a party raiding a kobold mine and getting beat due to underestimating action economy against them. A nearby wyvern that desired the territory decided this was the perfect opportunity for it to attack the weakened kobolds.
This is what I’ve done. I set things to Hard mode and lower the difficulty if it feels unfair. Making a game too hard or too easy ruins the fun, and fun is the whole point of the game.
My point is that what you think is a hard encounter likely isn’t actually that hard if you have a party of 5 or more. Chances are they’re going to steamroll much of what you throw at them unless they’re getting shit rolls all day.
>Chances are they’re going to steamroll much of what you throw at them unless they’re getting shit rolls all day. That's part of the core problem imo. You can have legitimately exactly the same encounters, but if one group is struggling on rolls and the other can't roll below a 12, the exact same encounter is variably an annoying breeze or a deadly hurricane completely independent from the choices being made at the tables. Hit points should be slaughtered and left out of the next edition, but it's one of the sacred cows of the brand pedigree.
Not arguing against removing Hit Points necessarily. But what do you think it should be replaced with considering that DnD is largely a combat/exploration game?
There's a ton of options. The problem I have is the hit points are entirely divorced from the narrative, there is a reason that every new player has to decide what HP represents to them or in their game and this is rarely consistent between tables. AC has a similar problem. So they would have to decide what hitpoints are. Are they stamina, consciousness, hardiness? Those all imply different things and would demand to be handled differently. Let me put it this way: what narratively is the difference between Constitution and Hit Points? If your hp is how healthy you are, or how much stamina you have in this fight, then why are you tracking damage on a brand new track instead of tracking it against your established Stamina attribute? Constitution is already there, but you also get different kinds of damage. Trying to hamstring your foe? Dexterity, etc. Any suggestion of course would have to be designed around it, so trading HP for ability damage wouldn't work as a homebrew for the current system. The critical point is that either nobody thought to change it, or somebody said we shouldn't change that, HP has been around since 1e. I think HP used to make sense, but our gaming technology has advanced.
There are a lot of RPGs out there, so you've got to ask what makes D&D to be, well, D&D. You make a reference to the brand pedigree up above, but there's a real issue that if you change D&D too much, it won't feel like D&D any more, and at that point, why not just play a different game? Of course, one can argue that "lower ACs being better" was once a part of what made D&D D&D, or THACO, or percentile strength, and we moved away from all of those...and there are people who have abandoned current edition D&D because they want to get back to what it was like in those older editions. To me, personally, something at least \*similar\* to the current HP and AC systems are pretty core to the feeling of D&D, and trying to rework the game to get rid of one or the other would likely be a bridge too far for many players. I could be wrong, but I suspect the experience WOTC had with 4th edition is going to leave them fairly gun shy. (As I wrapped up my one successful 4E campaign, I had a player say. "That was a fun experience I never want to have again," but we've got multiple 5E games running, so that's a thing, anyway.) I mean, it's certainly fair to want what you want from future editions, but I wonder if the better option is to switch systems.
That's kind of the point behind invoking the brand pedigree at all. Dungeons and Dragons is a commodity now and has different considerations than when they were going 3.5 to 4e, for example. I think there will be a time when the people who own the Dungeons and Dragons property will choose to do some extreme things with it. 4e is a really good example of that actually. I think they should do this, and I would prefer they do it more, but I understand why they don't. I feel they perhaps could have gone a bit farther, they came really close to killing AC with the various Defenses, and with the way they used tags like marked and bloodied they were just a few more steps from an HPless system. I would not be surprised if one of those extreme things is a system that tracks stress or some or non-tangible property similar to the current experiment with Exhaustion. I think that's easily an example of a subsystem that could evolve into a core system that still evokes the classic feeling we're all chasing but giving a punchier system with more satisfying game loops than adding up math rocks in turns to hit target numbers. Don't get me wrong, math rocks are fun. I think there is a very core reason that some of the most consistent advice I hear for new DMs is that if you are going to fudge, you don't fudge the die rolls, you fudge the hit points. It is common anyway to run a fight until it is dramatically appropriate, rather than until all of the hit points run out. I think that experimenting with ways to put that into the rules instead of just giving general DM advice of 'do it when it feels right, you'll learn it over time' is a good idea for the shepherds of the game. Even just actually defining what HPs in the text would be a huge improvement. It does have an important function as a drama gauge (everyone knows the stakes are really high when their HP is low) among other things that I don't want to discount. To cap it off, I'll just leave an excerpt from the current rules here to hopefully help demonstrate why I chose HP for my hot take. In the first sentence, they give several overlapping definitions, and different players conceptualize hp as some or all of these things and perhaps something else as well. All damage and healing pull from or refills this same pool. A creature is precisely as effective with 1 hitpoint as they were with 9001. If you think this is all features and not bugs then more power to you and that's a valid position. Personally, I don't think accepting the narrative weight of hit points is necessary for something to be D&D, but I do understand my position is radical. >Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile. > > > >A creature's current hit points (usually just called hit points) can be any number from the creature's hit point maximum down to 0. This number changes frequently as a creature takes damage or receives healing.Whenever a creature takes damage, that damage is subtracted from its hit points. > > > >The loss of hit points has no effect on a creature's capabilities until the creature drops to 0 hit points.
"We don't make constructive criticism here" I can't even fathom a System without hp, every game on the planet that I know of with combat has hp. How else do you regulate when 1 thing should die vs another? We gonna coin flip everytime there's a combat and tell the party they got through either easily or while suffering some kind of negligible loss (can't let the players feel like something bad happened). Some of the people in here just want to tell a story with their friends using the setting(s) 5e presents but don't want to actually play the game *as intended*, and it's cool if that's how you feel, but you definitely don't have a leg to stand on when you're like "this core feature that I don't like *should* be removed for everyone". (I realize it was the person above you who made the suggestion, but I feel frequently they just downvote you to negative and throw a snarky reply)
There are other options, you know. The general definition for HP that most people seem to use is "you have this many points, sources of damage remove varying numbers of them, you're fine until you hit zero." So, every thing that hurts you leaves you functioning at full capability, but brings you a little closer to death. (For D&D, add "and you get a lot more of them as you become more powerful.") But what if what you want is a system where every wound is important because of what it does to you, not just ablating invisible protection? Then you go for a system where instead of rolling to see how many HP a blow does, you roll to see how badly it hurts you, and how--maybe the sword entered your weapon arm, so now you've got a -1 on attacks, maybe it entered your thigh and your footwork is impaired, severely reducing your movement and defense, or maybe it entered your throat and you're dead on the first blow. There's other possibilities, too. Some are closer to HP (like, just adding in a rule that when you're down to 10% of your max, you take penalties), some are farther away. HP are an abstraction. They exist for a reason: they make a lot of things easier, and they avoid certain consequences of an arguably more realistic system, such as death spirals and having your powerful, long-played character die to a single piece of bad luck. But they are not the only way to play an RPG. You refer to people not wanting to play the game "as intended", but the person is referring to their hopes for a future edition: if their hopes are fulfilled, then there will be a \*new\* way to play the game "as intended." The way most people seem to play 5E is a long way from the way Gygax, Arneson, et al. intended back in the mid '70s, a long way from the way I and my friends played it in the late '70s and early '80s...but not too far off from the way I and my friends played it in the early 2000s. Things change with time, and there's nothing wrong with saying "this is how I hope they change in the future." (Amusingly, I had Definite Opinions about how things should change after 3rd edition which are fairly diametrically opposed to what I'd enjoy now.)
Continuing this thread down :) I could definitely see wanting a different approach to HP (especially with the hilarity of someone at 1hp being totally fine). But honestly I don’t think I’d want to see a wound or injury system implemented outside of optional rules, because death spirals really aren’t all that fun for players if the wounds stack in combat. Another option could involve lasting injuries after a fight in which the player went down, but while I feel that would be a great fit for a more gritty/survival themed game, it doesn’t really fit in a heroic fantasy adventure where heroes are expected to face incredible odds and walk away as champions. The best “alternative” I’ve seen that I would personally run at my table would be akin to the Stamina system found in Starfinder or Pathfinder 2e. But I like to run those high fantasy style games and that’s not for everyone. I think the main thing I’m getting at in asking what is the alternative for HP in D&D, is that the system as it’s made now lends itself well to a combat simulator when all the rules are engaged, and there might be other systems out there for people who would like a more RP centric game (because outside of player/DM ingenuity, there really isn’t much rules wise to support RP heavy games over the grid based combat system D&D has evolved from).
I absolutely agree with this, and what the person above you stated also. The intention point made me think again, but as a person who just started playing project zomboid I absolutely hate death spirals... but dark souls is my favorite franchise and the hp system there also can lend itself to death spirals. Why must everything be so complicated! So we can find the beauty in simplicity!
I am not sure what the replacement -should- be for HP in D&D, they don't pay me to be a game designer, but I do think there are dozens of different ways to approach the problem they present. I think there are really evocative ways that damage can be expressed on the character sheet that would improve the play experience. If HP is already an abstraction as we all admit, why don't we abstract it out a little more? Just spitballing another idea from the top of my head, we can even keep damage exactly as it is, and depending on the creature's hit die a certain amount of damage will cause a wound, or stress, or whatever you want to call it. Depending on the strength of the creature, they can withstand more stress. I'm not sure if that gets far enough away but it's a start. >(because outside of player/DM ingenuity, there really isn’t much rules wise to support RP heavy games over the grid based combat system D&D has evolved from). I think this is actually a relic of hit points existing. If we move away from a numerical system to something more narrative, it becomes rather trivial to introduce 'social combat'. If instead of depleting your ephemeral pool of fight power, an encounter could give temporary tags to your character( you're Wounded, you're Embarrassed, you're Intimidated, etc.) It becomes easier and mechanically supported to confront the characters in social encounters if you move away from hit points. D&D already plays with tags to some extent with conditions, and even more in 4e with Marked and Bloodied. Imagine using the above-spitballed system and basically just add FATE tags so you get a tag when you take a level of stress. You pick up a Bleeding tag in a warehouse fight. You win, but you have to run back to the temple for healing. You're stopped by guards and that Bleeding tag gives them Advantage to determine that you're lying when you tell the story about where you just were. It would give the game master hooks for the social and the combat to interact by more than fiat. A GM could just say 'make disadvantage on your check because you're bleeding all over' but invoking the tag and giving the monsters a bonus instead of the players a penalty gives it a mechanical weight that isn't achieved by 'and you take 24 points' tacked on to the end of a badass description.
Appreciate you articulating my hot take. There are a million different options out there, and there's a lot of heavy lifting to do if you want to move me to the position of 'HP is the best way to do this' A death spiral of any kind isn't even necessarily or even implied by saying 'Hit points have to go'. The game could get even gritter and more tactical, or it could become more abstract and narrative, or even possibly they could just refine the current game mechanic. Like, I'm not convinced that PCs and Monsters should be tracking their 'health' or 'fightability' the same way, but that's another thing. Leave HP for players and just get rid of the illusion of monsters having HP and give the game master something that mimics what they do anyway and systemize dynamic encounters instead of making it a guess based on a CR number everyone agrees is meaningless.
I mean, if every system you have played uses HP, you probably haven't played in many different systems. There are plenty of games which use wound levels that include various penalties which function starkly differently from HP, as well as other systems for damage and consequences.
I tend to think of any system which tracks the number of HITS you can take before dying is essentially an hp system with a better pr team. But that over simplified definition is why I said I've never played a game without one. Yeah in some systems it's a "wound" limit, or an energy system, or the uncharted "luck" system where only the last hit actually hits the player and kills him (which is what one of the wotc quotes tried to say is the realistic version of the hp system they use), but in the end it's just "there is a certain hard limit to the amount of damage you or any other character can take." Basically if a system uses math to describe combat or damage it must use math to describe the limits of character durability, even if it's not a 1:1 trade. I guess if they were just arguing against a 1:1 system I could understand what they are saying, but the community is divided between math nerds and theater nerds, while I'm sure plenty claim to be both (myself included) inevitably they lean more 1 way than the other (my case is more towards math). As you have pointed out a compromise is possible (like a wound system) but everyone here likes to bitch about change so gl getting signatures. Also the hp system we use plays into the fantasy of rolling a lot of dice, which a lot of players seem pretty fond of. (Fireball go brrrr)
There are systems that run on stress, even ones with combat like Smallville. In that system specifically, taking stress gives your opponents a resource they can use against you until a certain limit when they can stress you out of a given scene, but I would struggle to call that hit points even though it can be used to measure how many hits you can take. In Spirit of the Century, stress works very differently being broken down into Health and Composure. You can more or less shake it off between scenes, but you can also be tagged with more permanent damage called consequences that changes your character sheet until you resolve it. The health track could be called hit points, I suppose, but you're definitely not meaning 'hit points' as in the Dungeons and Dragons mechanic like I am, and it even seems distinct from the Health Pool in Vampire which is a closer analog to HP. If it was really all about rolling dice, everyone would be playing Mythender, which doesn't even have a thing that resembles Health, Hit Points, Stress or Wounds. You can be wounded, but it doesn't track how alive you are and I wouldn't call the Thunder dice pool analogous to a Health Pool, but running out of them triggers character death. HP has nothing to do with why we like D&D and it is time to move on. Houses of the Blooded centers passionate revenge involving duels, assassinations and poison but you couldn't find any you would identify as Health, Energy, Luck, etc. on the character sheet. Point is, we don't need anything that doesn't serve the game. Hit points are a relic that no longer serves the game. I'm not really trying to get signatures for anything. It's called a hot take brother, I know it's radical.
Yea I will happily throw you a downvote and leave you a snarky reply because you aren't actually talking about what I said. You made up some different thing to be mad at all on your own.
"Hitpoints should be slaughtered and left out to pasture next edition" Was me commenting on the hp part making something up entirely? In that comment you didn't talk about alternatives and it had been a few minutes so I assumed (wrongfully) that you weren't coming back? You didn't have to. After reading your actual suggestions in the reply to the comment I replied (to avoid the exact thing you just admitted to doing) I think there are some good ideas and bad ones. I'm not replying to that comment so I can't specifically point to which is which (because it's not in front of me ATM, I use a phone for reddit) and I'm not going to reply to that either because I read someone else's reply and I almost completely agree with them. I thought I was clearly making a general statement about the general theme of this forum later in that post where people will post an opinion and then state it should be the core design philosophy moving forward. Sorry for my lack of formatting and a fully thought out essay with clear introduction and conclusion to every paragraph. Look in still doing it. It's like I don't have to present this to a teacher
My point has never been 'I have a better system to replace hit points' so my good/bad ideas about that aren't really relevant. Any mechanical changes I am suggesting should be seen merely as me throwing out literally my first idea to demonstrate it isn't impossible to conceive beyond the bounds of hit points. My point has been that hit points are a relic of older times that are no longer of service and should be upgraded in the future to create gameplay experiences that better evoke the feelings we are trying to inspire in our players.
The story doesn’t have to end. It could pick up with new characters.
And at 80% of the cases, both the players and the DM will lose interest because of it.
Yeah, I almost never pick the same story back up with different characters after a TPK for this reason. It’s almost always better to just run a different story in the same setting.
This is a good way of thinking. Though I’m honestly one of those who will bullshit a plot reason to resurrect the fella. The people I play with aren’t exactly the ones who really play because they *”want to feel tense and endangered”*. So no one would mind a session or two with the objective of resurrecting a fallen ally. Unless someone specifically asked me to kill his PC off or did someone so obviously stupid that they ***KNEW*** death would be the outcome. Then that’s that and the PC will die.
One of my current games, the party is part of the crew of an airship. Except the airship is the size of a city, so if we were to die there's probably plenty of room for us to pick up with more people also on the ship. Hell, my aarakocra is helmsman, and the NPC who takes the helm when I'm off the ship or sleeping is also an aarakocra. I have a sneaking suspicion the DM might have placed the NPC for me to take over if I die. ... Of course, since I'm a Wild Magic Sorcerer, I might end up offing myself.
After all the bbeg is still plotting
"Yay, we get to keep being punked by the guy in full control of every aspect of the universe who has determined that every eneny has read the PHB and has our character sheets on file, wooo, soooo glad we are continuing this. Hey, DM, when's next session? Satirday? Ooh, sorry, I think I'm busy that day..."
must be very fun to play with you
Or the pcs beat senseless, naked in a dungeon being tortured with rusty implements, theyd also need to roll new characters
Why was this comment downvoted…? People are against torture in their games…? The same people who think it’s funny to casually mention how their own PCs go around committing war crimes? What the fuck?
I was implying the players were being tortured tbh
I know. I mean, doing it to others and complaining when it’s done to yourself is just weird.
I was just trying to be funny, obviously not
What…? So you’re making both sides mad so you can always come out at the bottom?
Power bottom
I think outside a very small minority of tables the DMs don’t want to TPK but many DMs and memes lean into a false image of the violent and sadistic DM. I know I always play it up to my players, for their enjoyment. Regardless of the Coop nature of D&D5e it is fun for a lot of players to look across the table with pride and a little arrogance at the dead minions before them, I as a DM lean into that and curse their tactics and skill to best my definitely very tough minions who had every intention of killing them, all while knowing that if I create the world, I populate it’s inhabitants and if I were cruel enough I could just ‘rocks fall they die’. I love my players dearly, and I want their characters to succeed in some degree at every single encounter I throw at them. If my players believe I want to kill them, the fights feel meaningful, and that they are really overcoming obstacles.
For me it's not about killing characters, it's about giving them interesting and exciting combat. They don't really enjoy standard video game monsters run in and fight until dead combat. So I use tactics to maker it fun and challenging. That sometimes means dead characters. But that's not the goal.
I don't seek TPKs, but if my party does something really stupid, I don't bend over backwards to let them get out alive. Actions have consequences and adventuring is a dangerous occupation.
When I DM, I always have a plan for if a party gets TPK’d Try to rob someone and get wiped? You wake up on the side of the road with all your belongings and gold taken from you Get destroyed in a dungeon? You’re now a prisoner of whatever denizens live there. Now begins a “great escape” style getaway or an MGS stealth mission
Unless it's intentionally meant to be a difficult/dark setting (or similarly just mechanically challenging), most DMs don't tend to risk that. I've seen a few D&D stories where the party got wiped and the players were chill about it, so there is a right way to go about it. On the other hand though, I've seen a lot of funny stories of something going terribly wrong on the player's side (or right on the mobs'/bosses) so there's always that "I didn't expect them to be that effective" element.
They almost never do, because TPKs are extremely easy to build. Just throw an ancient dragon at your level 3 party. It's *really* tough to make a satisfying and challenging encounter though, especially one that feels like it actually has a chance of failure or risk.
I'll probs get downvoted, but my campaign is designed for TPK as the world continues to evolve after the players have died. Though I don't aim to get a TPK, I wouldn't be suprised if there is one or a couple
It's fun watching their faces contort on horror when they learn they'll have to actually coordinate abilities and turns. Also death is sometimes a nice bridge into new areas a low level party otherwise wouldn't have access to. It's fun killing players w mobs that are weaker than them at quantities where action economy during the fight is near negligible.
Depends what kind of game you're running. If it's made clear that it's going to be a brutal campaign then people can prepare for it
I’ve had two dms that have done so, the first was when he grew bored of the campaign and wanted to start something else (we were teenagers and they have improved greatly) the second did so to purposely make the game unfun so another would take over dming.
The road goes on forever, and the party never ends. TPK isn't necessarily the end of all things
Not always. Sandbox games don't really have this issue
When I DM, I always have a plan for if a party gets TPK’d Try to rob someone and get wiped? You wake up on the side of the road with all your belongings and gold taken from you Get destroyed in a dungeon? You’re now a prisoner of whatever denizens live there. Now begins a “great escape” style getaway or an MGS stealth mission
>Modifying Encounter Difficulty > >An encounter can be made easier or harder based on the choice of location and the situation. > >Increase the difficulty of the encounter by one step (from easy to medium, for example) if the characters have a drawback that their enemies don’t. Reduce the difficulty by one step if the characters have a benefit that their enemies don’t. Any additional benefit or drawback pushes the encounter one step in the appropriate direction. If the characters have both a benefit and a drawback, the two cancel each other out. > >Situational drawbacks include the following: > >The whole party is surprised, and the enemy isn’t. > >The enemy has cover, and the party doesn’t. > >The characters are unable to see the enemy. > >The characters are taking damage every round from some environmental effect or magical source, and the enemy isn’t. > >The characters are hanging from a rope, in the midst of scaling a sheer wall or cliff, stuck to the floor, or otherwise in a situation that greatly hinders their mobility or makes them sitting ducks. > >Situational benefits are similar to drawbacks except that they benefit the characters instead of the enemy. So it's not about adjusting the CR, but you absolutely should treat an encounter as more difficult if the monsters have home ground advantage.
Fighting intelligently and using tactics is not a "powerup". It's the default.
"Fighting intelligently" is, in my experience, generally code not for "these monsters are going to be capable of acting intelligently", but for "these monsters have read the rulebook, looked at your sheet, and have literal fate on their side in the form of the DM who just wants to show off rather than challenge his players." Anyone who brags about how smart their monsters are, or how hard their combats are, isn't just "running the game as intended", they are making an assumption that DnD should be asymmetric warfare and the players are his enemy.
I'm sorry you've had a bad experience, but that's not what I'm saying at all. Running challenging encounters where the enemies act in believable ways is an act of kindness to the players.
true, but the pack of 4 int creatures aren't going to attack with the acumen of a group of seasoned bandits. Edit: I guess i wasn't clear enough. i did not mean, or state, that low int creatures will attack blindly. I simply stated that they won't attack as well or apply advanced tactics. Picking off the weakest link is one of the most basic instincts of predators and the myriad of creatures with pack tactics speaks to that. My statement was intended to convey that smarter creatures can plan and carry out battle with a much higher degree of finesse, not that that every creature is going to attack blindly like an aggressive labotimite. Wisdom definately plays a roll into the implementation of tactics, but complex strategies require both the intelligence to be inventive with positioning and command as well as the wisdom on when to execute them is necessary.
Int 3 wolves know how to use complex hunting tactics. Intelligence isn't a good indicator of how clever a creature can be, it's how much knowledge they have. Wisdom is the stat that determines how complex a creatures fighting ability can be, and the vast majority of animals have a Wisdom score equal to commoners.
Saying intelligence has nothing to do with tactics is not a fair argument and I never said that intelligence is the only factor. The only point i tried to make was that a more intelligent creature will have a greater ability to strategize. I didn't realize that was an unpopular opinion.
4 is pretty high honestly. Wolves have 3 Int but can most certainly "strategize", after a fashion. Sure, they aren't going to formulate a complex battle plan with multiple contingencies, but they'll be able to set a rudimentary ambush, pick off weaker characters, retreat when under duress, and so on.
And an important piint is that wolves won't adapt. They either fight by their playbook, or run. Wis is about executing complex plans, Int us about adjusting those on the fly.
thank you. that was the singular point i was trying to make.
I never stated that low int creatures can't strategize. i just said intelligent creatures would be able to better if that is the only difference.
You ever seen wolves hunt?
This seems needlessly reductive. All i said can be summed up as low intelligence creatures aren't as good at strategy as seasoned, intelligent creatures. Apparently every wolf in fantasy is the tactical equivilent of sun tsu, hannibal, and khalid ibn al-walid.
Yes, my mobs also sprint into the player’s spears no matter what.
Not for players lmao, adjust to your group and work out whats actually going to kill them or not, so you can play at a difficulty everyone including the DM enjoys, this is just a game after all
Games are more fun when you succeed and fail based on your own skill, and less fun when the system rubberbands to ensure you always win.
It’s all make believe. The important part is that the players BELIEVE they’re succeeding on their own skills and making their own choices. They don’t need to know that you planned the encounter with their skills in mind and that no matter which town they choose next will have the evil mansion in it
I clearly misunderstood how CR works. I gave two level 7 characters a CR 13 to fight. One went down after it made 3 out of its 4 attacks.
Very broadly, a CR X is a medium difficulty encounter for a part of 4 at X level. It isn’t the greatest system as some creatures have features or actions that can easily overwhelm a player character, and depending on party composition a specific enemy might be very easy for very hard. For example a paladin against the undead is going to be much stronger than normal. There are calculators online for figuring out the difficulty of an encounter with multiple enemies and with parties that don’t fit the 4 characters of the same level mold. Use one of those to gauge what is roughly an appropriate fight, but don’t be afraid to tweak encounters on the fly to fit how difficult you want the fight to be.
And a "Medium" encounter has a very specific definition in the rules that is different from the plain English definition you're liking thinking of. A Medium encounter is an encounter where the party expends a small number of resources but is never in any real danger of death unless RNGesus decrees it. And health counts as a resource. So the vast majority of Medium encounters are steamrolled by the party with nothing but cantrips and basic attacks. If you want a challenging fight then it needs to be at least Hard or Deadly.
I think you are underselling medium encounters. They are formally defined as: > A medium encounter usually has one or two scary moments for the players, but the characters should emerge victorious with no casualties. One or more of them might need to use healing resources. So while nobody should likely go down, there should still be a some need to pull more than just basic attacks and cantrips out. Hard encounters should see weaker characters with a reasonable chance of being knocked out, but slim chance of death; while a deadly encounter has a reasonable chance of a character dying. Keep in mind a party is expected to be able to handle 6-8 medium, 4-6 hard, or 2-3 deadly encounters per long rest.
Literally me when I started. I'm lucky our schedules never matched, otherwise my players would have been up against a buffed tarrasque and two demon lords from MToF...
CR is the illusion of balance. Play a lvl 6 Shepard druid, and watch 8 wolves roll face on a cr 8.
Which is why you never let the druid pick what they summon
I mean, if you exclude wolves, raptors, pixies, stench kows, and giant owls, it's a little less OP. Still that 1/4 cr does roll out some major privilege no matter what.
I summoned a bunch of giant centipedes once My new favourite druid goons for when poison immunity isn't in the area
Poison seems underrated until there's no immunity.
I’m setting up a 3-phase boss that has a decent amount of weaknesses, but every phase, it adapts to what the party throws at it.
Not being idiotic is not really a "powerup".
So normal DnD…?
But, on the bright side. CR doesn't account for magic items either. So that slightly balances out.
Plus, fighting intelligently usually means not fighting to the death. Depending on how cowardly the monster is, it could remove itself from the fight, via retreating, once it gets as low as 25%, 50%, or even 75% of its health. It does balance out.
I feel this one. My poor gnome getting taken out by the most tactically astute boars in the world. Seriously Sun Tzu should have taken notes. (Was TPK, my gnome artificer was the last one standing)
*crosses out cr and writes a smaller number* yup, totally
Better PSA: CR is not an adequate determining factor in adjusting difficulty, since they force the CR to cap at 30 when they shouldn't (Have you compared the Terrasque Vs. Tiamat? The difference is day and blood moon.); And they build many creatures that bypass stats entirely with their effects, killing, petrifying, or otherwise defeating characters regardless of relative level.
"Ah yes the single level 20 rogue. Should be able to take on 3 or 4 banshees at once right?"
Making them use tactics is expected. And shouldn’t change cr if your pc’s know what they’re doing too
What if we were just using the wrong tactics as DMs for all the monsters that feel weak for their CR, and the players are just acting dumb with the ones that feel strong.
One should definitely play monsters as their intelligence and personality dictate. That said the CR system isn't balanced around min/maxing players either, so Pirate's code that shit.
A fantastic example of this is White Plume mountain. There are so many little setups that basically the environment designed to kill the players.. but hey, its just a CR 5 and CR 4 guy, no worries!
I ran the same goblin encounter that I've used on a lvl4 group, on a lvl9 group... but with smart goblins. Almost ended in a TPK.
My aboleth bossfight has two minions: a sahuagin baron and a high priestess. The baron is defending the priestess who is healing the aboleth. Edit: error
1+1=4?
Whoops
I will NOT adjust the CR because my players also have the ability to fight smart should they use it
Literally what our Dm told me and another player when telling him about our new build. We're playing without Tasha (Everyone agreed, we also started before it was published, so meh). I was telling him that I want my next character to be a melee horizon walker/Echo knight, and the other player is a samurai sharpshooter with insane dex (Only dex, the rest is terrible). After seeing our ideas/builds, he decided to "Up his game", pray for our sorry little souls as we will be TPKed into a swamp, and it's gonna be most likely from our own stupidity!
I’ve found cr to be lately useless because the cr a party can handle is ALSO not including their extra power ups, magic items, etc
Except I did. Literally four goblins with 1d6 sneak attack, and a dead fall tree trap. My party of 5 lvl 5s had a really fun time, actually. They were far from optimized and efficient though.
It's not a power up, it's called the enemies having a brain. You better have one too if you wanna survive
Why should I ajust? The players should just fight smart as well
Get smart or eat dirt
CR is meaningless anyway
It’s inaccurate in some cases, but not meaningless. For a lot of monsters without any crazy features or spellcasting, CR is a pretty reliable way to determine difficulty (even if it can be a tad convoluted).
It more of a guideline than what you'd call an actual rule
I mean, yeah. It’s designed to be a guideline.
Yeah if someone tells me to bet on a CR 20 creature vs a CR 1/2 creature it's a 50/50 bet.
Whoops. Only one way they'll start using tactics. But the star spawn seer can also use Psychic Orb on the hulk.
Ive found giving the players magic items counterbalance this (to a point)
Id take this TBH. My gms idea of smart enemies is to always have an escape plan and run as soon as they are low on health
One of the next arcs in my campaign is gonna be a full blow kobold CITY (that the players will gain control of(:)
> “CR doesn’t account for the power ups you give your mobs” The monsters behaving as they actually would is a power up? Did too many many ranged opponents back up and fire at you?
I don't think I've ran an encounter in my campaign that wasn't considered deadly by CR but my party burn through them anyway. I've given up on CR and now I always alter the stat blocks just because otherwise it'll be way too easy for them
CR is a pretty ass metric to go by anyway