Is D&D too hard?

[Talakeal]

Recently I have been told by a lot of people (both on the forums and in person) that my campaign's are extremely challenging.

To deflect this, I usually point to the DMG, and how I typically follow the guidelines in it pretty much too the letter, with each adventuring day using up roughly ~80% of the party's resources. If anything I actually softball it a little, as I don't use the part where it says "5% of all encounters should be overwhelming difficult and dealt with by running" or that most encounters should include a few scary moments.

But still, the feeling of challenge is there.

So are the guidelines in the DMG too hard?

If so, what is the right level of challenge? And how do you run an easier game without breaking the system or the setting?

If not, how do you get people more used to the "expected" level of difficulty?


Now, some speculation about what I might be doing wrong:

1: My players do not memorize the monster manual, and I often use customized or reskinned monsters. If my players don't have any information gathering or knowledge abilities, they normally learn their opponent's abilities by doing over the course of the encounter.

2: I often place "optional" monsters in dungeons which are not required to complete the main plot and are in addition to the standard CR budget, but provide additional XP and / or treasure. To most players, they may not seem optional at all.

3: I might just play monsters too smart. I typically allow them to use tactics, prepare for the fight, and make use of the terrain. For example, I remember back in the college gaming club being sad that the other DM always had more players, and one of the guys who was in both games said people came to D&D for big dumb fun, and compared a fight where he had an ancient half shadow half fiendish red dragon with class levels charge in and brawl with the PCs, while I had a standard young adult green dragon use cover, camouflage, deadfall traps, and low level buff spells, and both were able to be of a similar level of difficulty to the party.




We just completed a campaign where we played every other week for almost two years.

So, basically, I have four players:
One of them bitches about basically every encounter and finds someone or something to blame anytime his character fails at something.
One of them is normally fine, but occasionally, usually when encountering a monster that he can't just run up to and trade full attacks with, or when he is wrong about a rule, he explodes, calls people (usually me) names, screams, and threatens to quit the game.
The other two were pretty calm and drama free, but during the last half-dozen sessions or so they started exhibiting the same behavior as the first two, and I don't know it is the other players rubbing off on them, my game driving them to it, or some combination of the above.

Some data about my game(s):

I typically run about six encounters a session.

The players complain that they are forced to spend too much money on consumables, but are still significantly above WBL the entire game.

About once every five sessions they have a close fight where several of the players are down and they are seriously considering retreating to avoid a TPK, but pull through and win in the end.

About once every ten sessions the players will have an encounter where they are unable to achieve their goals the first time. They decide to fall back and regroup / resupply / research / ask for help, the enemy gets away and has to be tracked down, or the enemy incapacitates them on their first encounter.

About once every twenty sessions the party suffers a serious setback; the fail to stop the villain, they are forced to abandon the mission, one of the players dies (and resurrections isn't recoverable), they get their allies killed, or they make a mistake and choose the wrong side.

About once every fifty sessions the group actually suffers a TPK and either starts over or has to resort to a deus ex machina.

[Tvtyrant]

D&D isn't a computer game. Hard here is entirely subjective, you have the power to make the game as easy or hard as the players enjoy.

Your players are not optimizers or particularly tactical, and complain about the difficulty. That means you are making it too hard for them. Some players on here play in ways that would be insufficiently challenges by your games, and they would be too easy for them.

Appeal to charts doesn't help here, the reason to play D&D is that it is flexible.

[Marcloure]

It's unclear what "hard" means in a RPG, but there some that truly require the players to choose the right actions and moves, and that luck be on their side. I wouldn't consider D&D to be one of those, since it's a pretty forgiving RPG that allows unoptimized play.

[AvatarVecna]

WotC is bad at estimating balance on both sides of the screen. I'm not sure pointing to their charts on how tough an adventuring day "should" be is a great argument to be making. The default assumptions of the game (tank, rogue, healbot, blaster) probably hold up well enough against the typical beatstick monsters, but if either side starts building/playing a bit more optimally, or even just a bit weirder, things get thrown off.

[Talakeal]

D&D isn't a computer game. Hard here is entirely subjective, you have the power to make the game as easy or hard as the players enjoy.

Your players are not optimizers or particularly tactical, and complain about the difficulty. That means you are making it too hard for them. Some players on here play in ways that would be insufficiently challenges by your games, and they would be too easy for them.

Appeal to charts doesn't help here, the reason to play D&D is that it is flexible.


WotC is bad at estimating balance on both sides of the screen. I'm not sure pointing to their charts on how tough an adventuring day "should" be is a great argument to be making. The default assumptions of the game (tank, rogue, healbot, blaster) probably hold up well enough against the typical beatstick monsters, but if either side starts building/playing a bit more optimally, or even just a bit weirder, things get thrown off.

Note that it is the outcome I am questioning.

I am not having problems with "4 orcs should be an appropriate challenge for a level 1 party" but rather with the expectations that a standard fight should consume about 20% of the party's resources and a standard adventuring day should consume about 80% of the party's recourses. This is independent of player skill or optimization level.

[Red Fel]

Note that it is the outcome I am questioning.

I am not having problems with "4 orcs should be an appropriate challenge for a level 1 party" but rather with the expectations that a standard fight should consume about 20% of the party's resources and a standard adventuring day should consume about 80% of the party's recourses. This is independent of player skill or optimization level.

It isn't, though.

An inexperienced or un-optimized party could wipe on those 4 orcs. Or they could blow all of their resources and barely eke out a victory. A highly experienced or highly optimized party, with a solid grasp of tactics and clever use of resources and abilities, could steamroll those orcs with relatively little thought.

The fact that the orcs "should" consume a fifth of the party's resources don't mean that they will, and yes that is very dependent on the players' skill and optimization.

[Talakeal]

It isn't, though.

An inexperienced or un-optimized party could wipe on those 4 orcs. Or they could blow all of their resources and barely eke out a victory. A highly experienced or highly optimized party, with a solid grasp of tactics and clever use of resources and abilities, could steamroll those orcs with relatively little thought.

The fact that the orcs "should" consume a fifth of the party's resources don't mean that they will, and yes that is very dependent on the players' skill and optimization.

I agree, hence the "not" in the quoted bit.

What I am asking is if "an encounter that consumed 20% of the party's resources," is an appropriate challenge. Not "will a CR 8 stone giant really use up 20% of the an eighth level parties resources".

[Tvtyrant]

Note that it is the outcome I am questioning.

I am not having problems with "4 orcs should be an appropriate challenge for a level 1 party" but rather with the expectations that a standard fight should consume about 20% of the party's resources and a standard adventuring day should consume about 80% of the party's recourses. This is independent of player skill or optimization level.

Depends on your party though. It is possible your players won't use consumable items of abilities (ie spell slots) for fear of "wasting" them. This lowers their effectiveness dramatically and throws formulas off. Or they panic and use all of their items every fight and are out of resources constantly. The DMG was written with assumptions that don't always hold true.

[Talakeal]

Depends on your party though. It is possible your players won't use consumable items of abilities (ie spell slots) for fear of "wasting" them. This lowers their effectiveness dramatically and throws formulas off. Or they panic and use all of their items every fight and are out of resources constantly. The DMG was written with assumptions that don't always hold true.

HP is a resource too though.

If a party uses no spells and takes double the normal amount of damage (or vice versa) they have still expended the same overall percentage of their party's resources.

[Firechanter]

To deflect this, I usually point to the DMG, and how I typically follow the guidelines in it pretty much too the letter, with each adventuring day using up roughly ~80% of the party's resources.

Well, otoh, the same DMG states that an adventuring day should consist of 4 encounters of EL = APL. So if you're going above that, by throwing more and/or higher-CRed encounters at them, you technically _are_ running the game harder.
Granted, most MMx monsters are little more than speedbumps for a well-built party. In my home group we usually handle about 2x to 3x of the expected allotment between rests. Which of course also results in a quicker leveling pace. And that doesn't even require obscure splatbook optimization - my personal record one day was starting the day as level 9 and going to bed as level 11, in a core-only campaign with no wands available.

So, in short, the CR system simply doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

--

That said, I once had a DM who seemed to run a similar style as you. He'd spent hours and hours on end designing single encounters, building opponents and devising tactics. And of course every single monster used its actions optimally all the time. We got our asses handed to us on a silver platter on a regular basis - about 2 in 5 encounters. And guess what? We were not having fun. We gave it a try for about 6 sessions or so but seized the first opportunity to rotate DMs and switch to something different.
What I learned from this experience is that it's super easy for a DM to frustrate the players. The DM knows exactly what the PCs can do, and that's usually just 1-3 tricks per pony. For every one scenario that a player can prepare for, there are probably three dozen more that he can't, so it's trivially easy to attack their weak spots any time you want to. After a while it just feels arbitrary.

So yeah, call it "big dumb fun" -- I guess many players (including myself) enjoy besting powerful opponents or overwhelming odds by virtue of their abilities and wits. They do not enjoy being bested by smug little buggers playing tricks on them.

[AvatarVecna]

What I am asking is if "an encounter that consumed 20% of the party's resources," is an appropriate challenge. Not "will a CR 8 stone giant really use up 20% of the an eighth level parties resources".

Probably, but it's still so generalized that you need to be careful. Resources aren't split evenly between party members, so keeping it challenging without it become deadly can be...difficult. Because it's just a really obvious resource that literally every class has, let's use HP as an example: if you've got a classic four-person party at level, you're probably looking at 10d4+10d6+10d8+10d10+120 damage to get the whole party to 0, and then another 40 to get them all dead. So "80% of party resources consumed in a day" might be 256 damage...but if you're not careful about spreading that damage evenly between them all after crits, evasion, healing, or what have you, you could very well be looking at "rogue is untouched, but fighter/wizard/cleric are all dead". That's obviously the far end of a spectrum, but the other far end where damage is extremely evenly split is where all four are alive at the end of the day...and that conclusion of "four living-but-heavily-injured characters" doesn't have a ton of room for error. This is least true in the middle levels - at low levels, a random crit outta nowhere can throw all the calcs off, and at high levels, rocket tag is kind of a thing - but even then, it's still true.

[GrayDeath]

THat is a difficult question (and cannot be answered in any one way, as there is no "correct" way to play ANY Rpg except "the way it fits to your group best").

Lets go for 2 assumptions rather unique to D&D and CLones of it.

The first is the "Numbered amount of encounters" a regular Adventuring Day should consist of to "reduce the parties ressources".
THis is very much NOT an universal way to go about it, but pretty much the D&D Classicly run Shtick of "palyers must be very careful with their ressources or the DM will mopp the floor with them", which in my view is a leftover from its beginnings as a wargame.

Now assuming you WANT to paly that way, and are all for thatr type of play, I`lls ay this:

Do not EVER point to anything saying "But here it says a well balanced encounter should take away X ressources from you and that you should have Y per day".

Why? Because thats a GUIDELINE. By people who dont really play their own game a lot/dont udnerstand all their hundreds of extra mosnters, spells and whatnot their game entails.
Now if you apply that to a game only SIMILAR to the game where it didnt fit anyway....you WILL fail at meeting the intended effect more often than not.

Hence even if thats the kind of game you want to paly, my suggestion is simple: Ask your group what kind of challenge they want, and adjust for dumb luck accordingly. Even doing that, you will never truly perfectly match what they want, but youll be much closer than if you simply follow the old recipie of the DMG but in another game.

The second assumption D&D makes is that everything is strongly to exclusively combat focussed, as noncombat ressources (Aside from Spells or optional Social Systems) usually are not "expended".

Hence in Games where you try to emulate something other than classic Dungeon Crawl/Hexcrawls etc you will have to adjust massively.



Now to the original Question:

Original to late 2nd Edition: Yes to barely yes.

3rd Edition: depends on the Optimization on the Table, mostly not if using original Adventures.

4th: Nope.

5th: Maybe, if one overdoes it with ELgendary stuff, otherwise nope.

[Ashtagon]

Consider Tomb of Horrors. If you didn't get a TPK at least twice before the party even properly entered the dungeon, you were considered to be going soft on the PCs.

Yet people had fun.

People forget one of the most important things about D&D: It's not actually a game. You're not supposed to "win". I mean, you can, but it's not the primary goal of D&D.

It's actually a toy. The "win condition" is to have fun and enjoy a social experience with friends, not to beat the monsters.

So, did you have fun being with your friends? If you did, then congratulations; you won at D&D.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I have one, all important question to ask you in response: how many of the assumptions that the designers made about game play does your group follow? The further you stray from that baseline, the less reliable the given metrics become.

Party of 4
Warrior, mage, priest, thief
artillery mage
buffer/healer cleric
skulking backstabber thief
tough-as-nails, dumb-as-a-brick warrior
WBL and readily available magic items

The more of these fall through, the less reliable CR, among other things, gets. A skilled GM can compensate for any or even all of these things being different than expected, and I'm not saying you're not skilled enough to do it, but pointing at the book and saying "see, four encounters per day," rings more than a little hollow if that is the only or one of only a few of the other presumptions the game makes you're sticking to.

All that out of the way, heck no. Not past about level 5 or so, anyway.

Up until level 5~7 or so, the dice play a -major- role in -everything- the PCs do. It's part of why I don't like to play or GM for that level range. When the RNG can spike you like a game-winning touchdown ball at pretty much any time, it doesn't matter how competently you play. It's not -hard- it's just random.

After that point, you should have picked up -some- ability to avoid things you can't handle and excell at things you can to the point that the dice aren't everything. You can still get spiked but it's no longer at dangerously high odds and becomes less so with each level.

Mind, that's at bare minimum competence presumed by the designer's guidelines. Top-tier optimizers can get to okay-ish chances at the lowest levels and become... difficult to GM for in later levels, to the point of the game actually breaking down when you hit 9th level spells.

The resource managment portion of the game can throw things off for some players. If you nova the first encounter of the day and still have to go through three more, the last is going to be way tougher than it has to be.


Finally, there's the one simple fact others upthread have pointed out: none of this is prescripted code. You can and should make adjustments until you reach a point that's fun for you and your players. If it's too difficult for your players, soften up unless that would make the game too boring for you. If you're already playing with kid gloves and they're still complaining, try and help them figure out how to perform better. Either way, something's gotta give.

[Seto]

Reading the "details about your specific game": your game doesn't seem "too hard" to me. It doesn't seem that deadly. It's probably challenging, but that's not a bad thing. Lots of players enjoy the challenge and would be happy to play in such a game. Even players who casually complain about difficulty may enjoy the challenge. I would know, because I tend to do that: during in a hard, really tense fight, I tend to not enjoy it that much at the time, and even complain about how "my god, that monster hits so hard, it's unfair, the DM's out to get us", because I'm afraid and stressed I'm gonna lose my character. But once the fight is over, I'm happy about how epic and challenging it was.
If that's not the case for your group, though, and if you genuinely think you should dial it back, I'd go with that third one:

3: I might just play monsters too smart. I typically allow them to use tactics, prepare for the fight, and make use of the terrain. For example, I remember back in the college gaming club being sad that the other DM always had more players, and one of the guys who was in both games said people came to D&D for big dumb fun, and compared a fight where he had an ancient half shadow half fiendish red dragon with class levels charge in and brawl with the PCs, while I had a standard young adult green dragon use cover, camouflage, deadfall traps, and low level buff spells, and both were able to be of a similar level of difficulty to the party.
Yup, that's probably it. Monsters of the same CR are not equal in difficulty, and a monster may not even be equal to itself depending on how it's played. As a DM, I notice that the more effort I put into building my fights, the harder (and also more dramatically tense) they tend to be. If I think a lot about how to build a boss fight, if I prepare tactics, etc., the way you do, the fight is harder. If I just roll a random encounter and pull the monster straight out of the book without analyzing its stats block and playing to its strength, PCs usually steamroll the fight.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Okay, just read your campaign notes. You're swinging just a little high, by the sound of it, (6 per day plus an occasional bonus encounter) but it sounds a lot like your players are just whiny if they're only hitting a major setback twice a year and a TPK half as often.

You -could- cut the encounters per day and ease off on the tactical accumen of your NPCs if it won't make the game boring for you. I'm concerned about the first two playerse you described, tbqh. The first seems like a simple discussion about his complaints but the second sounds like a real problem and I'd hazard their behavior -is- a major cause of the others starting to follow suite rather than anything to do with the game itself.

I can only see it getting worse if you don't -do- something. Getting guy one to knock of the whining shouldn't be -that- hard but I'd seriously consider giving guy 2 the boot if he can't get those outbursts under control. In any case you should probably have as frank a discussion with the group as you're comfortable with about how they're enjoying the game, what they really want from it, and where they're willing to compromise on that. You absolutely -have- to address the problem behavior though.

[Talakeal]

Again, I don't have trouble meeting the difficulty metrics, this is more of a "postmodern" question about whether the metrics themselves are flawed.

For example, last year the wizard player came to me and said the game was too hard because he ends every adventuring day with only about 20% of his spells remaining, and that means I am cutting it close. I responded by saying something along the lines of "Good, that is exactly what I am shooting for!", which he (and several forum-goers) took as me just dismissing his concerns about the fundamental nature of the challenge I am shooting for, and now I seem to be having a similar conversation here, just the other way around.


Okay, just read your campaign notes. You're swinging just a little high, by the sound of it, (6 per day plus an occasional bonus encounter) but it sounds a lot like your players are just whiny if they're only hitting a major setback twice a year and a TPK half as often.

You -could- cut the encounters per day and ease off on the tactical accumen of your NPCs if it won't make the game boring for you. I'm concerned about the first two playerse you described, tbqh. The first seems like a simple discussion about his complaints but the second sounds like a real problem and I'd hazard their behavior -is- a major cause of the others starting to follow suite rather than anything to do with the game itself.

I can only see it getting worse if you don't -do- something. Getting guy one to knock of the whining shouldn't be -that- hard but I'd seriously consider giving guy 2 the boot if he can't get those outbursts under control. In any case you should probably have as frank a discussion with the group as you're comfortable with about how they're enjoying the game, what they really want from it, and where they're willing to compromise on that. You absolutely -have- to address the problem behavior though.

Agreed.

At this point I am taking a break from GMing, so I am going to see how it plays out with someone else in the chair while I process everything I have learned.

I also found out today that two of the players in question were on mood altering prescription medication during their outbursts, so that problem might solve itself.




Well, otoh, the same DMG states that an adventuring day should consist of 4 encounters of EL = APL. So if you're going above that, by throwing more and/or higher-CRed encounters at them, you technically _are_ running the game harder.
Granted, most MMx monsters are little more than speedbumps for a well-built party. In my home group we usually handle about 2x to 3x of the expected allotment between rests. Which of course also results in a quicker leveling pace. And that doesn't even require obscure splatbook optimization - my personal record one day was starting the day as level 9 and going to bed as level 11, in a core-only campaign with no wands available.

So, in short, the CR system simply doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

--

That said, I once had a DM who seemed to run a similar style as you. He'd spent hours and hours on end designing single encounters, building opponents and devising tactics. And of course every single monster used its actions optimally all the time. We got our asses handed to us on a silver platter on a regular basis - about 2 in 5 encounters. And guess what? We were not having fun. We gave it a try for about 6 sessions or so but seized the first opportunity to rotate DMs and switch to something different.
What I learned from this experience is that it's super easy for a DM to frustrate the players. The DM knows exactly what the PCs can do, and that's usually just 1-3 tricks per pony. For every one scenario that a player can prepare for, there are probably three dozen more that he can't, so it's trivially easy to attack their weak spots any time you want to. After a while it just feels arbitrary.

So yeah, call it "big dumb fun" -- I guess many players (including myself) enjoy besting powerful opponents or overwhelming odds by virtue of their abilities and wits. They do not enjoy being bested by smug little buggers playing tricks on them.


Note that it isn't about the PCs actually getting their butt-kicked, the PCs still win in the end and go through their ~80% party resources in an adventuring day.

I was just thinking that it might feel harder to actually deal with weaker monsters that use smart tactics vs. a big bruiser that just charges in and deals huge damage.

[Calthropstu]

I have guaged my players strengths and weaknesses in my Saturday campaign. I have a long history of throwing extremely challenging encounters.

An example: A phasmadaemon created a completely illusionary fortress and filled it with derghodaemon shock troops.

The dhergodaemons weren't too big a deal except for the fact they could get full round attacks through walls that don't exist in a long running combat. And the phasmadaemon could strike with spells thrpughout the combat. It took a lot of effort for the party to survive it and the giddiness when they finally took down the phasmadaemon was palpable.

That's why many of us play... The struggle to defeat enemies that requires serious thought and effort, the final great blow that finishes that horrible enemy that has frustrated the party for so long, the moment your character stands in triumph and reaps the impressive rewards.

[Firechanter]

Maybe your style of encounters leads to frustration due to lacking sense of achievement. Okay, they win, yes, but only with huge effort (80% resources*), and then for all that trouble, all they have achieved was neutralizing some goblins or whatever. That doesn't even earn them bragging rights.

Imagine being in the PC's shoes, as they return to town after a hard adventuring day:
Barkeep: "Whoa, you look pretty beat up, what ever happened to you?"
Party: "Goblins."
B: "What, Goblins did that to you? Are you messing with me?"
P: "Yah well, they were really nasty Goblins and they used the terrain to their advantage."
B: "Riiiight, the terrain. Uh-huh."
P: "We did kill them eventually!"
B: "And do you want a medal for Goblin-slaying now? Tell you what, here's a cup of warm milk on the house for everyone. Also, I have a cellar full of rats, that might be more up your alley."

Now imagine the same scene, except the party killed a band of Trolls or Fire Giants or whatever sounds tough at their level. I don't think I need to spell it out, but the Barkeep's reaction would be different.
So, regardless of whether any such scenes ever play out at your table -- something like that is probably going on inside your players' heads. Hence they get mopey.

--

*) come to think of it, strictly speaking "80% of resources" cannot mean "80% of HP _and_ 80% of spells", much less "and 80% of consumables". After all, HP need to be restored, and that will probably require more magic resources (like the next day's spell slots). Sure, casting Cure spells in downtime is practically free, but keep in mind that if restoring those HP takes, say, 40% of another day's spell slots, that adventuring day actually cost them 120% of their daily resources. Ofc I don't know if you handle it that way or not, just wanted to get the thought out.

[Talakeal]

Come to think of it, strictly speaking "80% of resources" cannot mean "80% of HP _and_ 80% of spells", much less "and 80% of consumables". After all, HP need to be restored, and that will probably require more magic resources (like the next day's spell slots). Sure, casting Cure spells in downtime is practically free, but keep in mind that if restoring those HP takes, say, 40% of another day's spell slots, that adventuring day actually cost them 120% of their daily resources. Ofc I don't know if you handle it that way or not, just wanted to get the thought out.

I do not count consumables.

The DMG defines resources as "Hit points, spells, magic item charges, etc."

Logically speaking, it would have to include HP, other wise the CR system would just throw up its hands in defeat the first time someone made a party that didn't include any casters (or casters that never get spell slots / don't get spell slots until mid-level).

[Saintheart]

Again, I don't have trouble meeting the difficulty metrics, this is more of a "postmodern" question about whether the metrics themselves are flaws.

The metrics are flawed. Videogame mechanics and design in this area run rings around the average TTRPG and have done so for decades, mainly because video games sell an experience and RPGs for the most part sell a group of rules.

The most obvious contradiction can be illustrated by juxtaposing two canards of encounter "design":

a. 80% of a party's resources should be used up per day. Thus, 4 encounters chew 20% of resources each.
b. 30% of encounters should be either outright easy or easy if handled right (DMG).

If an encounter is easy, i.e. involves the party hitting more often and not having to dig deep into its resources, why should it cost 20% of your daily resources? In particular, an encounter that's easy if handled right surely should use less than 20% of a party's resources because once the party identifies the weak spot or the load bearing boss, the resource usage should drop pretty significantly.

"But I fix that by pushing the resource cost on the other daily encounters higher, i.e. making the other encounters harder, so I still chew up 80% of their resources per day." That's penny wise and pound foolish thinking, because if you stick hard and fast to that rule, eventually your players look at their daily resource balances and start realising that easy encounters during a day are actually a harbinger of doom, because if they get an easy encounter that only chews 5% of their resources, later that day they will be facing an encounter that's going to hit them for a good 35% of their resources. Which is problematic, because typically the encounters that heavily chew party resources are also the encounters most likely to get their characters killed.

And the reason that sucks is because it is destructive of the illusion of character progression, which is the primary impetus for people to keep playing past a DM's (generally) second-rate one-man theatre show for an audience of four to six.

If you realise on a gut level that your levelling is meaningless because the DM is just going to keep the difficulty level at a point that you never actually get that much more powerful - you are always burning up 80% of your resources - then it removes a big sense of the reward for fighting all those horrible things trying to bring your hitpoint count to negative integers.

"But that brings out the best in my players, they have to think and come up with better and better strategies to win, their bloody deaths teach them how to play better, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger!" I hope a bus tries to make you stronger. Dice are mathematically objective but in reality unfair. There is no reasoning with them. A large part of the reason we have all those rules adding modifiers to the roll is to introduce the illusion of fairness: that if you do persevere, that if you do think and fight efficiently, that if you invest your XPs in the right places, you will manage to cheat the dice a few times. And most people need overt indicators that they're getting better. That illusion is as important as the suspension of disbelief when reading a novel. When they don't have that, quite apart from chemical mood stabilisers and rubbish personalities, the result is a feeling of powerlessness. Which, as Yoda once said, leads to frustration. And frustration leads to rage. And long posts on GITP from DMs about how their players aren't engaging with them despite the fact the DM is following the DMG guidelines to the letter.

Try introducing some meaningful as opposed to mathematically-derived texture into the difficulty ratings of battles, by which I mean, a couple of fights against formerly-formidable opponents which are cakewalks and which don't result in an increase on the difficulty or cost of future encounters in that day. This will involve moving away from the DMG guidelines, but the guidelines, as said, are slightly more expensive toilet paper.

[Talakeal]

The metrics are flawed. Videogame mechanics and design in this area run rings around the average TTRPG and have done so for decades, mainly because video games sell an experience and RPGs for the most part sell a group of rules.

...snip...

But don't video games do the exact same thing? Start off easy and then ramp up the difficulty as the players develop skills and learn the rules?

IMO progression and narrative goals are accomplishments in and of themselves; beating up an army of demons and saving the world certainly feels more "powerful" to me even if it uses up the same percentage of my resources as beating up a group of goblins and saving a sheep farm did at level one.

[Pex]

I judge difficulty based on how often PCs drop to death's door and/or killed. It's not a set ratio of drops per combat but an impressionable feeling. There are obvious ratios. If a PC drops every combat it's hard but not necessarily too hard. It's a warning sign where circumstances matter. If it's two or more PCs it's too hard. If you're losing count how often a PC is killed it's not even a game any more. BBEG fights don't count in terms of dropping. If no PC drops great, but a PC or more than one PC dropping is not unusual. If a PC is killed every BBEG fight that's still a problem. Those are the extremes. Lesser ratios are still hard until some subjective point is reached where the difficulty is just right the risk of dropping makes victory sweet, but if it does happen you recover and it's all part of the fun. PCs deaths are memorable because it's rare.

That's the DM side of it presuming general player competency and no ill will intention meant about the DM though "killer DMs" who enjoy PC drops and deaths do exist. On the player side new players do earn their own personal experience points so to speak learning how to play so eventually it becomes easier. At some point they're no longer new players and have general competency. However, there are players who can't or won't learn thus the game is always too hard for them. I knew a 5E paladin player who hardly ever went into melee and instead insisted on using a crossbow. When he deigned to go into melee he would not smite unless another player told him to. D&D is not hard, but it could be hard for a particular player. It's not the game for them.

[Aotrs Commander]

But don't video games do the exact same thing? Start off easy and then ramp up the difficulty as the players develop skills and learn the rules?

No, CRPGs usually do the exact opposite, start off hard (because you have frack-all resources) and get compartiviely easier as you go along, for the most part, occasional boss-fight notwithstanding.

(Pathfinder Kingmaker cerainly did, throwing in a horrendous amount of immune-to-weapon-damage swarms as part of the first sidequest, to the point where I knew they were coming but was unprepared even so for the sheer number...)



Another classic example being Pokémon, where not infrequently, the first gym leader was the hardest-fought battle, because you have paff-all to fight him with.

[Talakeal]

No, CRPGs usually do the exact opposite, start off hard (because you have frack-all resources) and get compartiviely easier as you go along, for the most part, occasional boss-fight notwithstanding.

(Pathfinder Kingmaker cerainly did, throwing in a horrendous amount of immune-to-weapon-damage swarms as part of the first sidequest, to the point where I knew they were coming but was unprepared even so for the sheer number...)



Another classic example being Pokémon, where not infrequently, the first gym leader was the hardest-fought battle, because you have paff-all to fight him with.

I was thinking about video games in general; but yeah, CRPGs do tend to buck the trend a bit.

[Bartmanhomer]

D&D varies depending on the type of optimization that you or your team has. It's very difficult to say too be quite honest on how you define hard or difficult.

[Saintheart]

But don't video games do the exact same thing? Start off easy and then ramp up the difficulty as the players develop skills and learn the rules?

They both use progression and increasing difficulty. Video games are a hell of a lot better at it than TTRPGs. And the reason they're a lot better at it is, at its most fundamental, because the video game is the experience. TTRPGs by and large only provide you with rulesets and provide you with virtually no guidance on how to use those rulesets to create a good experience. An analogue I have seen for it is that, at best, the DMG is a level editor, and a badly built one at that.


IMO progression and narrative goals are accomplishments in and of themselves; beating up an army of demons and saving the world certainly feels more "powerful" to me even if it uses up the same percentage of my resources as beating up a group of goblins and saving a sheep farm did at level one.

That's your opinion. The problem being twofold:
(1) It's the opinion of a player.
(2) It may not be shared by the players you are DMing.

[Quertus]

This thread has so much potential, so many possible directions to take things. Let me start with what I think is most important:
this is more of a question about whether the metrics themselves are flaws.

All metrics are flaws. That is, blindly following a recipe without understanding is inherently flawed.

Human social interactions - including things like playing an RPG - are inherently complicated. There is no "one size fits all" solution. You should not try to replicate exact textbook kisses per hour with your SO or exact textbook cuddle times with your kids. Instead, you should aim to understand why certain metrics exist, and attempt to produce counterparts to those metrics that produce the same results for the specifics of your scenario.

Consistently hitting an arbitrary "80% resources consumed" mark? That's terrible in general, and terrible for your group in particular.

It's terrible in general, because it makes the world a grey, unmemorable, low-agency mess. Remember day 27? Oh, was that the day we ended with 19% resources left? No, that was day 43; day 27 was one of the usual 20% days. Bleh. No, I remember the fight where my "not a Frenzied Berserker" ran out of HP, and PSP, and finally dropped, leaving just one man still standing at the end of what otherwise wouldn't have been a terribly memorable or important fight.

It's terrible for your group in particular because a fairly consistent "80% resources consumed" a) was probably higher than they wanted (did they ever seem unhappy going back to town after each fight, not counting the time that you made timing **** them for doing so (which was hilarious)?); b) showed that they lacked agency to control pacing and difficulty / tied into their trust issues & their belief that you just made stuff up to **** with them (to maintain your "intended level of difficulty").

[Kelb_Panthera]

Again, I don't have trouble meeting the difficulty metrics, this is more of a "postmodern" question about whether the metrics themselves are flaws.

They do what they're intended to do decently but people seem to expect more of them than is reasonable and so declare them failures.

CR 5 is only CR 5 if the presumptions of the designers are -accurate- to your table. If, for example, you're being stingy with treasure and the party is mostly martial types then CR 5 might feel more like CR 8, particularly if it's a bruiser type, or even C9+ if it's got an ability they have no ability to deal with. On the other hand, if the party is all over-geared, borderline-TO gish builds then CR 9 might feel more like CR 4.

That said, there are a few shots that strayed well off-target. Virtually all of MM2 is questionable and there are outliers like the infamous "That Damn Crab," but from the 3.5 changeover forward they're really not too far off for the most part.


For example, last year the wizard player came to me and said the game was too hard because he ends every adventuring day with only about 20% of his spells remaining, and that means I am cutting it close. I responded by saying something along the lines of "Good, that is exactly what I am shooting for!", which he (and several forum-goers) took as me just dismissing his concerns about the fundamental nature of the challenge I am shooting for, and now I seem to be having a similar conversation here, just the other way around.

I guess this is where you showed him the DMG guidelines? Different people have different desires and expectations from the game. It's important to discuss them so you're all on the same page or at least know where everyone stands. I'll acknowledge that can be a royal pain-in-the-butt when trying to discuss it with newbs or people who haven't given it much thought.




Agreed.

At this point I am taking a break from GMing, so I am going to see how it plays out with someone else in the chair while I process everything I have learned.

I also found out today that two of the players in question were on mood altering prescription medication during their outbursts, so that problem might solve itself.

That's not a bad idea at all. Getting the opportunity to see things from the other side can be very helpful for understanding the opinions of others.

As for the meds issue... Yeah... Here's hopin' that's sorted now. Ya never do know what's goin' on in someone else's head, I suppose.



Note that it isn't about the PCs actually getting their butt-kicked, the PCs still win in the end and go through their ~80% party resources in an adventuring day.

I was just thinking that it might feel harder to actually deal with weaker monsters that use smart tactics vs. a big bruiser that just charges in and deals huge damage.

Oh yeah. It always feels rougher to deal with smart enemies. I like it because that's just how I'm wired but others can have a rough time of it, particularly if they're less tactically savvy than you are.


Maybe your style of encounters leads to frustration due to lacking sense of achievement. Okay, they win, yes, but only with huge effort (80% resources*), and then for all that trouble, all they have achieved was neutralizing some goblins or whatever. That doesn't even earn them bragging rights.

There might be something to this. This is why I like to do throwback encounters once in a while. I do a 1:1 recreation of an encounter from a few levels back and the players get to enjoy steamrolling something that was once a serious challenge. It also helps to give them a sense of their growth that might otherwise be overlooked if near to all of what they face are "fair" challenges.


Imagine being in the PC's shoes, as they return to town after a hard adventuring day:
Barkeep: "Whoa, you look pretty beat up, what ever happened to you?"
Party: "Goblins."
B: "What, Goblins did that to you? Are you messing with me?"
P: "Yah well, they were really nasty Goblins and they used the terrain to their advantage."
B: "Riiiight, the terrain. Uh-huh."
P: "We did kill them eventually!"
B: "And do you want a medal for Goblin-slaying now? Tell you what, here's a cup of warm milk on the house for everyone. Also, I have a cellar full of rats, that might be more up your alley."

Ahem:

https://news.otakukart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/goblin-slayer-episode-11-1151494-1280x0.jpeg

Do not underestimate goblins.


Now imagine the same scene, except the party killed a band of Trolls or Fire Giants or whatever sounds tough at their level. I don't think I need to spell it out, but the Barkeep's reaction would be different.
So, regardless of whether any such scenes ever play out at your table -- something like that is probably going on inside your players' heads. Hence they get mopey.

Punching above your weight-class always feels nice -if- you know that's what's happening. OP has said that his players aren't super familiar with the MMs. If all they know is the struggle then you have to -tell- them that what they've done is impressive and that just doesn't have the same impact.

If you work in some foreshadowing then you -might- get that sense of accomplishment but you might also get the Players to decide to look for another plot-hook because this one seems suicidal.

I agree in principle but the execution can be tricky is what I'm saying here.




*) come to think of it, strictly speaking "80% of resources" cannot mean "80% of HP _and_ 80% of spells", much less "and 80% of consumables". After all, HP need to be restored, and that will probably require more magic resources (like the next day's spell slots). Sure, casting Cure spells in downtime is practically free, but keep in mind that if restoring those HP takes, say, 40% of another day's spell slots, that adventuring day actually cost them 120% of their daily resources. Ofc I don't know if you handle it that way or not, just wanted to get the thought out.

Single use consumables aren't generally considered when you're eyeballing resource drain for an encounter. It's dailies that you need to worry about.

By class you want to look at the resources important to that class. The warrior is worried about his HP and maybe something liike rage uses or smites. The mage is concerned about his slots and maybe the charges on his metamagic rod.

If you've burned through 80% of -all- the resources that the party has; each character's HPs, all the casters' slots, the charges on their staves and wands, all their rechargeable dailies from class or gear, and their one-use consumables; that's been an absolutely monstrous grind of a day.

[Firechanter]

I judge difficulty based on how often PCs drop to death's door and/or killed. It's not a set ratio of drops per combat but an impressionable feeling. There are obvious ratios.

Talking about flawed metrics.... xD
Sure, PCs going down is a definitive sign that the encounter is pretty hard for them, but do not make the mistake to assume the converse. Sometimes a won encounter appears to have been easy when you just look at the result (nobody dropped, not too many HP lost etc), but that doesn't account for the possibility that maybe you only rocked the encounter because that one die fell in your favour, and if that roll had come up differently, it would have set events in motion that could have even led to a TPK.

Like, reminds me of that one skirmish we once had in PF, level 7 or so, against a bunch of Chuuls and Rorkouns (slime-spitting worms). There were just 3 of us, which generally means there is little margin for error. So on this occasion, one of us is busy getting an overly attached Chuul out of his hair. Meanwhile our Bard makes a little mistake with her movement and exposes herself to a Chuul. The monster does a lot of damage, but fails to Grapple the Bard due to a Nat1. Then the Bard manages to Tumble out of range, barely rolling high enough to avoid an AoO. This happened right in the first round before we could get any buffs up. After that, we get our act together and shred the saucy seafood to Nigiri-sized chunks.
If the Bard had gotten grappled, she would have been paralyzed. If she hadn't managed to tumble, the AoO would have dropped her. Without her buffs, the other PCs would have gotten zerged, grappled, paralyzed, dragged under water, final curtain.

So in short, just looking at the outcome you might think "Easy, just some HP damage", but actually it was on a razor's edge due to one little mistake (made by our least experienced player), and our bacon was saved just by two lucky rolls in a row. Then again, it was a CR11-12 encounter while our APL was just around 5.

[Talakeal]

Consistently hitting an arbitrary "80% resources consumed" mark? That's terrible in general, and terrible for your group in particular.

It's terrible in general, because it makes the world a grey, unmemorable, low-agency mess. Remember day 27? Oh, was that the day we ended with 19% resources left? No, that was day 43; day 27 was one of the usual 20% days. Bleh. No, I remember the fight where my "not a Frenzied Berserker" ran out of HP, and PSP, and finally dropped, leaving just one man still standing at the end of what otherwise wouldn't have been a terribly memorable or important fight.

Of course that is boring, but it won't actually happen.

The 80% mark is an average. Dice change. Tactics change. Environments change. Sometimes the DM makes a mistake or forgets to factor something in. And, some encounters are just more (or less) effective against certain party compositions.

[AvatarVecna]

If I were to take any issue with the "averaging around 20% per fight, and 80% per day", even if the split ends up like...10%, 15%, 25%, and 30%...that has the adventurers resting for the day with about 20% of their resources left. If they get attacked while resting, is it gonna be another 10% they can wipe easy, a 15% that'll put that at risk, a 25% that might well wipe the party, or a 30% that will almost assuredly wipe the party? When they choose to rest is semi-within their control, and in general, I'd probably choose to rest if I fell below...probably about 40%? Maybe a bit lower on spells/consumables, depending on how good the ones I've got left are, but definitely for HP, I'm gonna be kinda nervous going into a fight with less than half health and the cleric going "sorry I'll have more healing tomorrow".

[Fizban]

To deflect this, I usually point to the DMG, and how I typically follow the guidelines in it pretty much too the letter, with each adventuring day using up roughly ~80% of the party's resources. If anything I actually softball it a little, as I don't use the part where it says "5% of all encounters should be overwhelming difficult and dealt with by running" or that most encounters should include a few scary moments.
Huh. Well this could go two ways: either the players feel like they're working too hard to get results with that expenditure rate, or they feel like they should not be expending that much in a day.

So are the guidelines in the DMG too hard?
I think they're pretty spot on myself. Red Hand of Doom is a beloved module and lines up well enough.

If so, what is the right level of challenge? And how do you run an easier game without breaking the system or the setting?
That'll depend on what exactly you need to do to make the game feel appropriately easier for these players, and what they're playing. If they want to work less hard, then you'll just have to dial it back- however, if their builds allow them to suddenly increase in competence (eg: the wizard suddenly switches from simple spells to cheese mode), then you'll have to strategically plan for which fights they'll be lazy, and which fights they'll hulk out. This is how a lot of video games function, as well as many tabletop campaigns, and it'd be my first guess.

But, if they're all playing builds which function at the same constant power level (ToB, fixed/limited spell known casters, etc), you can at least keep a constant threat on your end.


1: My players do not memorize the monster manual, and I often use customized or reskinned monsters. If my players don't have any information gathering or knowledge abilities, they normally learn their opponent's abilities by doing over the course of the encounter.
You'll just have to ask if this is an issue, 'cause it's perfectly normal and their reaction is up to them. Even without "memorizing" the monster manual there are plenty of benchmarks they could pick up on, if they were inclined to do so.

2: I often place "optional" monsters in dungeons which are not required to complete the main plot and are in addition to the standard CR budget, but provide additional XP and / or treasure. To most players, they may not seem optional at all.
Yup, good guess there. I'd recommend planning under the assumption they will fight everything, and adjust later if it turns out they skip something.

3: I might just play monsters too smart. I typically allow them to use tactics, prepare for the fight, and make use of the terrain. . . while I had a standard young adult green dragon use cover, camouflage, deadfall traps, and low level buff spells, and both were able to be of a similar level of difficulty to the party.
Yeah, this is the kinda thing that will probably trigger their "its too hard" response. And if you hadn't already given that you're estimating them at the correct resource expenditure, I'd point out that giving monsters advantageous terrain does in fact make those fights harder, as per the DMG. Said fights should give more xp than normal due the monsters' advantage, and traps provide their own xp and count towards overall EL as well. As for the dragon's buffs, if it made for a good match against the party then its fine, but I always point out that the books really don't account for the difference between a char-op'd and vanilla dragon, period.



So, basically, I have four players:
One of them bitches about basically every encounter and finds someone or something to blame anytime his character fails at something.
One of them is normally fine, but occasionally, usually when encountering a monster that he can't just run up to and trade full attacks with, or when he is wrong about a rule, he explodes, calls people (usually me) names, screams, and threatens to quit the game.
The other two were pretty calm and drama free, but during the last half-dozen sessions or so they started exhibiting the same behavior as the first two, and I don't know it is the other players rubbing off on them, my game driving them to it, or some combination of the above.
Oh it'll definitely be the combo, it would appear you have two people who'd rather lose their temper than have a frank discussion (unless of course you've had this discussion and failed to change the game when they reasonably voiced concerns). But unless #1 is a habitual complainer in general and #2 has temper issues that are medically out of their control, usually it would be recommended to stop playing with them.

I typically run about six encounters a session.
That is quite high, though speed of play and hours of session vary wildly. It also brings up the question of resource expenditure again, as if they're running 6 encounters per day, they're actually below 20% per encounter- and thus are scrimping to less than 20% in order to manage. If you're running some underleveled fights (which are 10-30% on the table) so 6/day would be fair, but which are then optimized and advantageously terrained to make up for it, then you are indeed pushing harder than the book says.

The players complain that they are forced to spend too much money on consumables, but are still significantly above WBL the entire game.
Easy check, the sidebar on page 54 tells the difference in treasure gained vs wealth expected, which you can subtract to get the expected consumables used. If they're using more than that, then by the book they are using more than expected. That said, if they're staying above WBL in permanent useful items, then it's fine mechanically. But if they feel that expending consumables means they're failing, you should probably rethink your treasure system. It'll mean they'll have less wiggle room, but they might be less annoyed?


About once every five sessions they have a close fight where several of the players are down and they are seriously considering retreating to avoid a TPK, but pull through and win in the end.
About once every ten sessions the players will have an encounter where they are unable to achieve their goals the first time. They decide to fall back and regroup / resupply / research / ask for help, the enemy gets away and has to be tracked down, or the enemy incapacitates them on their first encounter.
About once every twenty sessions the party suffers a serious setback; the fail to stop the villain, they are forced to abandon the mission, one of the players dies (and resurrections isn't recoverable), they get their allies killed, or they make a mistake and choose the wrong side.
About once every fifty sessions the group actually suffers a TPK and either starts over or has to resort to a deus ex machina.
I presume that by 1/50 sessions in a game that lasted about 50 sessions you mean they TPK'd only once? Reasonable for groups that consider it fair, but some people don't think they should ever TPK, which means you just need to walk a tighter rope. I would point out that if they TPK'd due to a fight where the DM made it impossible to retreat, that's on the DM, no matter how justified it is for their foes in-world. Unless the players actively choose to walk into a no-retreat scenario, it's never going to feel fair.

As for 1/5 having multiple downs, you've said that's only 1/30 encounters, which yeah by the DMG is actually way better than normal odds. Though this makes me notice something else: at 6 encounters per session, if those are level average, they're leveling up almost every other session. This game must have gone 1-20. But also, leveling up that fast probably means they barely had time to even use, let alone grow fully accustomed to, a particular level's worth of abilities and foes before rushing off to the next. If you're constantly fighting harder foes without seeing your previous foes crushed under your new comfortable power level, well yeah.


For example, last year the wizard player came to me and said the game was too hard because he ends every adventuring day with only about 20% of his spells remaining, and that means I am cutting it close. I responded by saying something along the lines of "Good, that is exactly what I am shooting for!", which he (and several forum-goers) took as me just dismissing his concerns about the fundamental nature of the challenge I am shooting for, and now I seem to be having a similar conversation here, just the other way around.
Did you also tell them why? 'Cause not telling them why would be pretty dismissive. I'd be more interested in hearing a player explain why they think they should be ending with X higher amount of resources (seriously, would be interesting).

I also found out today that two of the players in question were on mood altering prescription medication during their outbursts, so that problem might solve itself.
Ah.



There's more discussion further down about hitting 80% every day- I would assume that this is hyperbole, and there are days with random/traveling/etc encounters where the party does not burn through "all" their resources. That would indeed be a massive oversight, but you've said it varies.

Regarding their knowledge of whether they're punching above their weight or not: there are mechanics the party can use to figure out how powerful an opponent is so they know this. But in order to do so they'd have to actually use those mechanics. As such, I (possibly to detriment, possibly not) generally make it known when they are. For example: I might point out that the thing they're fighting is the size of an Elephant, which is a CR 7 with 100 hit points, but this breathes fire! Or that it's the kind of thing that eats Elephants for breakfast. Spellcraft and Knoweldge checks that reveal the spell (and thus level of spell) the enemy just cast, or the SLAs they have, also tell the PCs exactly how powerful the thing they're fighting is. Liches are a minimum of 11th level, and I see no particular reason this needs to be behind a skill check if they hear about a Lich- "Yeah that guy's 11th absolute minimum, almost certainly more, with a pile of immunities and defenses." And once they've beat something and aren't likely to fight it again I don't care if they look it up (indeed, I usually do myself on the player side), for proper context. After which I can say "yeah this new thing is X above the last thing," etc.

[Pex]

Talking about flawed metrics.... xD
Sure, PCs going down is a definitive sign that the encounter is pretty hard for them, but do not make the mistake to assume the converse. Sometimes a won encounter appears to have been easy when you just look at the result (nobody dropped, not too many HP lost etc), but that doesn't account for the possibility that maybe you only rocked the encounter because that one die fell in your favour, and if that roll had come up differently, it would have set events in motion that could have even led to a TPK.

Like, reminds me of that one skirmish we once had in PF, level 7 or so, against a bunch of Chuuls and Rorkouns (slime-spitting worms). There were just 3 of us, which generally means there is little margin for error. So on this occasion, one of us is busy getting an overly attached Chuul out of his hair. Meanwhile our Bard makes a little mistake with her movement and exposes herself to a Chuul. The monster does a lot of damage, but fails to Grapple the Bard due to a Nat1. Then the Bard manages to Tumble out of range, barely rolling high enough to avoid an AoO. This happened right in the first round before we could get any buffs up. After that, we get our act together and shred the saucy seafood to Nigiri-sized chunks.
If the Bard had gotten grappled, she would have been paralyzed. If she hadn't managed to tumble, the AoO would have dropped her. Without her buffs, the other PCs would have gotten zerged, grappled, paralyzed, dragged under water, final curtain.

So in short, just looking at the outcome you might think "Easy, just some HP damage", but actually it was on a razor's edge due to one little mistake (made by our least experienced player), and our bacon was saved just by two lucky rolls in a row. Then again, it was a CR11-12 encounter while our APL was just around 5.

That's part of why it's a subjective feeling of drops per combat for a series of combats and not just using one particular combat as a metric. If good player tactics and the occasional good luck means the party tramples through a fight then that only shows that combat is not hard. You could say it is hard and the players are up to the challenge, but it's not hard for those players. Conversely, poor tactics and the occasional bad luck could make for a grueling fight, but that doesn't make the game as a whole hard. The determination is in the pattern of the long term play.

[Talakeal]

That is quite high, though speed of play and hours of session vary wildly. It also brings up the question of resource expenditure again, as if they're running 6 encounters per day, they're actually below 20% per encounter- and thus are scrimping to less than 20% in order to manage. If you're running some underleveled fights (which are 10-30% on the table) so 6/day would be fair, but which are then optimized and advantageously terrained to make up for it, then you are indeed pushing harder than the book says.

Most fights are under leveled. I typically balance for the adventuring day rather than individual fights. When terrain (or other miscellaneous factors like surprise or unknown enemy abilities) are an issue, I factor them into the overall challenge and am usually pretty good at still hitting the 80% per adventuring day average.


Easy check, the sidebar on page 54 tells the difference in treasure gained vs wealth expected, which you can subtract to get the expected consumables used. If they're using more than that, then by the book they are using more than expected. That said, if they're staying above WBL in permanent useful items, then it's fine mechanically. But if they feel that expending consumables means they're failing, you should probably rethink your treasure system. It'll mean they'll have less wiggle room, but they might be less annoyed?

Basically, the players tend to attack all of the optional encounters, and are thus above WBL, but also a bit more resource starved then normal. If they are beaten up going into a fight, they will typically use consumables before hand to make up the difference. The extra treasure they get from optional fights is typically more than they get lose from consumables. This results in them having an overall higher WBL than normal in permanent equipment, but also using more consumables than normal.


Did you also tell them why? 'Cause not telling them why would be pretty dismissive. I'd be more interested in hearing a player explain why they think they should be ending with X higher amount of resources (seriously, would be interesting).


I have told him that is the balance point I am shooting for because the game would snowball into an out of control monte-haul scenario if I made it much easier and I believe that challenge and risk are necessary aspects of an RPG from both a narrative and mechanical level to make it seem real and worthwhile.



As for why he wants it, that is a bit off the beaten path as it involves house rules.

Basically, I allow scrolls to be crafted XP and GP free, but I also use a long rest variant. In effect, this means that he can save unused spell slots from one adventure to another, and he feels like if he ever ends a mission using more scrolls than he creates he is "getting poorer".


As for 1/5 having multiple downs, you've said that's only 1/30 encounters, which yeah by the DMG is actually way better than normal odds. Though this makes me notice something else: at 6 encounters per session, if those are level average, they're leveling up almost every other session. This game must have gone 1-20. But also, leveling up that fast probably means they barely had time to even use, let alone grow fully accustomed to, a particular level's worth of abilities and foes before rushing off to the next. If you're constantly fighting harder foes without seeing your previous foes crushed under your new comfortable power level, well yeah.

When we play by the book D&D, yeah, they tend to level up every other session. Typically I play a variant like E6 or the like where advancement isn't so extreme though.

[Faily]

"It's not rules as much as guidelines."


The important question is: are the players having fun with the level of challenges you present?

If they're not, the guidelines in the DMG are clearly not working for this party, and you need to adjust some.

Don't think of what's in the DMG too much as "it's in the book so I must follow it!", but more as a toolbox. You take what you need and what you like, to create an experience. I know others have stated it in this thread, but one of the big perks of D&D and other RPGs is that it is incredibly flexible to use for play.

[Quertus]

Of course that is boring, but it won't actually happen.

The 80% mark is an average. Dice change. Tactics change. Environments change. Sometimes the DM makes a mistake or forgets to factor something in. And, some encounters are just more (or less) effective against certain party compositions.

Point is, if you are very successful at aiming for "80% resources consumed" difficulty, as you claim, then you are necessarily mashing the encounters (or encounter days) very samey, from a difficulty PoV.

Whereas, if you look at my encounters, they are not nearly so well balanced. Some days, the party uses almost no resources; other days, they burn through over 100% (ie, they supplement resources with consumables, they retreat, or they TPK).

To take an earlier suggestion and expand on it, the characters can really feel like they've grown if they go back through the Goblin Caves - which used to consume 80% of their resources per visit - and come out with over 50% resources remaining.

The existence of variations from day to day - which your player(s) complained was absent (granted, for likely munchkin reasons) - help to differentiate different parts of the campaign in the minds & memories of the players.

Similarly, the difference in difficulty in dealing with recurring foes (which I still haven't gotten a good answer regarding how often your players are facing familiar encounters - especially with what were once "gotcha" monsters) helps demonstrate how the PCs have grown.

[Calthropstu]

Maybe your style of encounters leads to frustration due to lacking sense of achievement. Okay, they win, yes, but only with huge effort (80% resources*), and then for all that trouble, all they have achieved was neutralizing some goblins or whatever. That doesn't even earn them bragging rights.

Imagine being in the PC's shoes, as they return to town after a hard adventuring day:
Barkeep: "Whoa, you look pretty beat up, what ever happened to you?"
Party: "Goblins."
B: "What, Goblins did that to you? Are you messing with me?"
P: "Yah well, they were really nasty Goblins and they used the terrain to their advantage."
B: "Riiiight, the terrain. Uh-huh."
P: "We did kill them eventually!"
B: "And do you want a medal for Goblin-slaying now? Tell you what, here's a cup of warm milk on the house for everyone. Also, I have a cellar full of rats, that might be more up your alley."

Now imagine the same scene, except the party killed a band of Trolls or Fire Giants or whatever sounds tough at their level. I don't think I need to spell it out, but the Barkeep's reaction would be different.
So, regardless of whether any such scenes ever play out at your table -- something like that is probably going on inside your players' heads. Hence they get mopey.

--

*) come to think of it, strictly speaking "80% of resources" cannot mean "80% of HP _and_ 80% of spells", much less "and 80% of consumables". After all, HP need to be restored, and that will probably require more magic resources (like the next day's spell slots). Sure, casting Cure spells in downtime is practically free, but keep in mind that if restoring those HP takes, say, 40% of another day's spell slots, that adventuring day actually cost them 120% of their daily resources. Ofc I don't know if you handle it that way or not, just wanted to get the thought out.

This reminds me of a couple animes. Grimgar of fantasy and ash as well as goblin slayer.

Make no mistake, goblins are nasty when played right. A paizo pfs ap had a trio pf goblin alchemists in the rafters of a warehouse. Their high dex and positioning allowed them cover and their base 21 ac was no joke at that level. When I went through it, we curb stomped them easily.

But then I ran it. What to my party was a 20-25 minute encounter became 2 1/2 hour 15 round blow out. I changed nothing about the writing. I ran it as written. One of the playerswas the guy who ran it for me. Needless to say, the party wasn't happy.

"But those were alchemists" you might say. True, and that is the scariest thing about goblins. THEY CAN TAKE CLASS LEVELS. They are a full pc race. They can have20th level goblin fighters and sorcerers. So for this supposed barkeep to scoff so much, he'd have to be pretty clueless.

[ngilop]

I am not sure if you run a too difficult game.. but I feel your obsessive need to finish the day at 80% resources used for the players probably makes the game feel un-rewarding for them.

[Elkad]

Is it possible they'd just like some non-combat encounters?

Or maybe even just more RP time?

6 encounters in a session seems a very fast pace, unless your sessions are 12 hours long. My sessions are a bit on the short side (3 hours of actual play, plus time spent on greetings, breaks, pizza ordering, etc), but actually completing 2 entire combat encounters in a single session is pretty rare for us once we get past 5th level or so.

[Talakeal]

Is it possible they'd just like some non-combat encounters?

Or maybe even just more RP time?

6 encounters in a session seems a very fast pace, unless your sessions are 12 hours long. My sessions are a bit on the short side (3 hours of actual play, plus time spent on greetings, breaks, pizza ordering, etc), but actually completing 2 entire combat encounters in a single session is pretty rare for us once we get past 5th level or so.

I wish. I actually would prefer a generally less combat intensive game, but I have never had the pleasure of running for a group where the "kick in the door" style was not the preferred method of play.

Not that I actually dislike combat mind you, I would just prefer a game with more of a focus on social encounters and downtime activities.


I am not sure if you run a too difficult game.. but I feel your obsessive need to finish the day at 80% resources used for the players probably makes the game feel un-rewarding for them.

You might be reading a bit too much into it.

This is just the balance point I shoot for when designing adventures, and am practiced enough at doing so that the average adventuring day comes pretty close to that, but there are a lot of individual fluctuations on any given adventuring day, I don't quite see how you get "obsessive need" from that.

I am curious though, about why it might feel unrewarding. For me, rewards come from XP, treasure, and social recognition, and I don't see how resource expenditures really factor into it.




Point is, if you are very successful at aiming for "80% resources consumed" difficulty, as you claim, then you are necessarily mashing the encounters (or encounter days) very samey, from a difficulty PoV.

Whereas, if you look at my encounters, they are not nearly so well balanced. Some days, the party uses almost no resources; other days, they burn through over 100% (ie, they supplement resources with consumables, they retreat, or they TPK).

To take an earlier suggestion and expand on it, the characters can really feel like they've grown if they go back through the Goblin Caves - which used to consume 80% of their resources per visit - and come out with over 50% resources remaining.

The existence of variations from day to day - which your player(s) complained was absent (granted, for likely munchkin reasons) - help to differentiate different parts of the campaign in the minds & memories of the players.

Similarly, the difference in difficulty in dealing with recurring foes (which I still haven't gotten a good answer regarding how often your players are facing familiar encounters - especially with what were once "gotcha" monsters) helps demonstrate how the PCs have grown.

Well, in my most recent game I was running a semi sandbox, and so the players had the option of choosing to go to a dungeon that was balanced for higher or lower level characters, so they could do that.

But as a general rule, my players would run riot if I threw a mission at them where the expected difficulty with significantly higher than normal (or where the difficulty and corresponding rewards were lower level), they are obsessed with balance and fairness and frequently accuse me of running dungeons that are "too hard" as is.

Also, please, for the love of all the is holy, don't bring the "G-word" into this thread.

[Pex]

Point is, if you are very successful at aiming for "80% resources consumed" difficulty, as you claim, then you are necessarily mashing the encounters (or encounter days) very samey, from a difficulty PoV.

Whereas, if you look at my encounters, they are not nearly so well balanced. Some days, the party uses almost no resources; other days, they burn through over 100% (ie, they supplement resources with consumables, they retreat, or they TPK).

To take an earlier suggestion and expand on it, the characters can really feel like they've grown if they go back through the Goblin Caves - which used to consume 80% of their resources per visit - and come out with over 50% resources remaining.

The existence of variations from day to day - which your player(s) complained was absent (granted, for likely munchkin reasons) - help to differentiate different parts of the campaign in the minds & memories of the players.

Similarly, the difference in difficulty in dealing with recurring foes (which I still haven't gotten a good answer regarding how often your players are facing familiar encounters - especially with what were once "gotcha" monsters) helps demonstrate how the PCs have grown.

Definitely helps a lot to face old foes. I remember an old 3E game a combat was such an ordeal fighting a few distrachans. Six or seven levels later the party fights another group of distrachans and we win in 2 rounds without a scratch. Current 5E game when the campaign started at 6th level an ogre or two was the BBEG of a fight. When we were 13th level fighting demons and giants, those same ogres we encounter in our travels run away from us before there is even a fight as flavor text.

Perception is key. Players need those easy fights. A spellcaster player will be happy he only needed to cast Cantrips. A warrior player with Great Weapon Master will be happy to use the -5/+10 part every round and not have an angst decision of whether he needs the accuracy instead or the extra damage means he kills things in one round if not one hit. It's a way to enjoy the combat play of the game for the sake of the combat play with the relief of knowing for this instance there's no real risk or threat. In character the players realize their PCs truly are that bad-donkey.

[weckar]

I do not count consumables.

The DMG defines resources as "Hit points, spells, magic item charges, etc."

Logically speaking, it would have to include HP, other wise the CR system would just throw up its hands in defeat the first time someone made a party that didn't include any casters (or casters that never get spell slots / don't get spell slots until mid-level).
Because it *does*. If your party is not the classic 4 man band of Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard (or characters with a very similar breadth and depth of abilities), the CR system is meaningless.

[Eladrinblade]

In my experience, players are just {scrubbed} "double-plus unsmart". Usually it's the DM who knows the game well, the players are often just there for the social aspect. Even if not, too many players *enjoy* making dumb choices; it's their way of blowing off steam from their regular lives, I think. It's infuriating. D&D is not hard, but it's a gamers game, not a casual one (you have 5e for that).

[ngilop]

I am curious though, about why it might feel unrewarding. For me, rewards come from XP, treasure, and social recognition, and I don't see how resource expenditures really factor into it.




I do believe i found the crux of the issue.

There has to be a risk vs reward matrix of sorts. Well, some people operate on such a principle, you seem to be in the group that do not. What it entails is that the reward one gets should outweigh the risks you put towards the goal of gaining said rewards.

The simple act of getting rewards is meaningless in and of itself for some people. A reward dos not have as much value behind it if it is always given freely. Likewise, if it takes everything you have t gain a reward the value is not as great. Your players seem frustrated that they have to put everything into every fight to get any rewards. They are not upset they have difficult encounters. it is that you make every 'day' to force them to have that 80%, and the knowledge that the next fight (if one were to ever happen) would kill them all. and it is like that every day. Your players' expectations are in contrast to you in your 'rewards are rewards' belief.

I do not think their complaint is "D&D is too hard" but rather "your D&D is too hard because you make everything a struggle to get anything"

[Droid Tony]

Yes, D&D is too hard. In fact, if the DM does anything else except actively alter the game world and game play in favor of the players, D&D is 'too' hard for most players.

A LOT of games do such things as: House Rules that favor the PCs(max hit points is a common one), allow the players to freeze game time to get ready, always let the players 'go' first in an encounter, The DM role plays zero agression from any foe, plot armor and keeping things very simple. This makes things quite easy for the players, but that is why they are done.

Using bland by-the-book foes and giving the players just about all the game related information are another big one to make for a smooth easy game.

And using just about no tatics, terrain, environment, or common sense is another big one.

In such a smooth game, foes just walk up to the PCs to be targets for their fun.

Now, please, please, understand that there is nothing wrong with ANY of this: it's a perfectly fine way to play the game.


For example, lets take a group attacked by some foes like orcs. In the easy smooth game the orcs simply walk over and attack...after the players have gotten ready and acted first, of course. But consider:

A ranged attack: this is just a very simple tactic. The orcs shoot arrows from a good range away. So round one is the players screaming as their characters get hit with arrows from ''they don't know". Right here, this alone is too hard for some players: to have thier character attacked and they had no near automatic way to both know about it and avoid it and even more so prepare against it.

Add in torrent/environment: To even just have the orcs up in trees or any high ground is way too hard for many players. Not to mention if they were on the other side of a river or cliff side or if the PC are say crossing a bridge over a river.

'Two' encounters: Endgame here, as the orcs split up into two or three groups and shoot arrows from more then one direction.

The above ranged orc attack can be very low challange rating wise, but still be way, way, way to hard of an encounter for a lot of players. And the above encounter is still very simple. And it's nowhere even close to an impossible to win encounter......but it's just too hard for many players.

[Talakeal]

I do not think their complaint is "D&D is too hard" but rather "your D&D is too hard because you make everything a struggle to get anything"

That's kind of how this started.

People said my game was too hard, I said I am just following the guidelines in the DMG, and people responded that maybe the DMG doesn't know what it is talking about; hence this thread.

The DMG absolutely says that everything should be a struggle, and actually takes it even further than I do, for example it flat out says that a fight without resource loss on the party of the players isn't a challenge and shouldn't be worth any XP.


They are not upset they have difficult encounters. it is that you make every 'day' to force them to have that 80%, and the knowledge that the next fight (if one were to ever happen) would kill them all. and it is like that every day. Your players' expectations are in contrast to you in your 'rewards are rewards' belief.

That is actually a very good point. I can see it as being sort of a "glass half full" sort of thing, which varies from player to player:

After killing a huge dragon that took everything the party had player one might think:

"Man, that was a super tough dragon. He took everything he had! But in the end, we pulled through! We are such badasses!"

While player two might think:

"Man, that was a super tought dragon. It took everything we had to pull through! Now we have nothing left, and are the weakest and most vulnerable we have ever been!"

[Pex]

That is actually a very good point. I can see it as being sort of a "glass half full" sort of thing, which varies from player to player:

After killing a huge dragon that took everything the party had player one might think:

"Man, that was a super tough dragon. He took everything he had! But in the end, we pulled through! We are such badasses!"

While player two might think:

"Man, that was a super tought dragon. It took everything we had to pull through! Now we have nothing left, and are the weakest and most vulnerable we have ever been!"

The kicker is what happens next. If the party gets to rest up - no more adventuring for the day, no interruption of sleep, start fresh next game day - then you get the former. However, if there will be another fight or otherwise the adventure demands the players keep going for another 30 minutes of real world time play or you will have mission failure then you'll get the latter. It won't matter that hypothetical fight is easy or at least doable given the party's current state or what needs to be done is glorified bookkeeping. The players are mentally exhausted yet the DM demands they continue on else they're doomed. It becomes a frustration, and that is what players will remember - not how awesome they were defeating the dragon.

[Fizban]

The DMG absolutely says that everything should be a struggle,
No, it doesn't go that far. I've been rolling with it, but your expectation of 80% resource expenditure per day is a personally derived result. What the book says is that they should average 20% resources expended per encounter equal to their level- which means they can fight up to four or five in a day (and should stop at four in case they're ambushed etc), but that's it.

Now, it's natural to take that as a standard or even minimum due to the fact that single encounter days are usually pretty obvious and so the players will burn excess resources to make it even easier than the standard ease of EL=level "challenges," and a DM who runs site based dungeons "intelligently" will also push doing as much as possible before resting (because the DM will then boost the dungeon). But as long as there was some threat and they expended appropriate, rather than extravagant, resources, a single encounter day is perfectly reasonable and not at all against the DMG's guidelines. And defeating a single encounter with restraint, ending the day with nearly full resources, is another potential demonstration of power and mastery, as well as a rest: you fought and were ready for more, but it turned out you didn't even need to worry.

This is separate from table 3-2's Encounter Difficulty breakdown. Though there is also the potential for planning EIHP (easy if handled properly) encounters and having the players fail to handle any of them properly and thus rarely seeing a truly easy encounter, the 10% of deliberately underleveled encounters does not necessarily mean they are intended to be combined in the same day.

and actually takes it even further than I do, for example it flat out says that a fight without resource loss on the party of the players isn't a challenge and shouldn't be worth any XP.
And? So they get no xp due to excessively favorable circumstances, but still get treasure and mission completion progress, as well as the feeling of power associated with curb stomping an enemy.

I would further note that single encounters where the PCs expend an extravagent amount of resources should give reduced or even zero xp, as they create for themselves an excessively favorable situation (and in-world it makes sense too, because when you need to learn and maintain the skill of measured resource use, overkill is just dumbing yourself down).

[Talakeal]

No, it doesn't go that far. I've been rolling with it, but your expectation of 80% resource expenditure per day is a personally derived result. What the book says is that they should average 20% resources expended per encounter equal to their level- which means they can fight up to four or five in a day (and should stop at four in case they're ambushed etc), but that's it.

Now, it's natural to take that as a standard or even minimum due to the fact that single encounter days are usually pretty obvious and so the players will burn excess resources to make it even easier than the standard ease of EL=level "challenges," and a DM who runs site based dungeons "intelligently" will also push doing as much as possible before resting (because the DM will then boost the dungeon). But as long as there was some threat and they expended appropriate, rather than extravagant, resources, a single encounter day is perfectly reasonable and not at all against the DMG's guidelines. And defeating a single encounter with restraint, ending the day with nearly full resources, is another potential demonstration of power and mastery, as well as a rest: you fought and were ready for more, but it turned out you didn't even need to worry.

This is separate from table 3-2's Encounter Difficulty breakdown. Though there is also the potential for planning EIHP (easy if handled properly) encounters and having the players fail to handle any of them properly and thus rarely seeing a truly easy encounter, the 10% of deliberately underleveled encounters does not necessarily mean they are intended to be combined in the same day.

I suppose this is technically true, the book does use a lot of fuzzy language like "should" and seems to leave it in the player's hands about whether or not they follow these guidelines.

Which is of course, nonsense. In D&D the tactical choice, from the parties perspective, is to always go nova and then rest after every encounter.

I have always seen it as the DM's responsibility to give the players incentive to follow them, but I suppose that is a bit of reading between the lines.

The 5E is a lot more explicit about how many encounters the DM should place in each day.


And? So they get no xp due to excessively favorable circumstances, but still get treasure and mission completion progress, as well as the feeling of power associated with curb stomping an enemy.

I would further note that single encounters where the PCs expend an extravagent amount of resources should give reduced or even zero xp, as they create for themselves an excessively favorable situation (and in-world it makes sense too, because when you need to learn and maintain the skill of measured resource use, overkill is just dumbing yourself down).


That was specifically in response to someone saying that it is I, not the DMG, that came up with the idea that players should need to expend resources, and I was pointing out that not only does the DMG say that, it actually takes a step further than I ever would by saying that something MUST require resource expenditure to provide XP.

[Fizban]

I suppose this is technically true, the book does use a lot of fuzzy language like "should" and seems to leave it in the player's hands about whether or not they follow these guidelines.
So are you trying to follow the DMG or not? You can't hold up one part to justify something and then blame it for a ruling that wasn't even in there.

Which is of course, nonsense. In D&D the tactical choice, from the parties perspective, is to always go nova and then rest after every encounter.
I have always seen it as the DM's responsibility to give the players incentive to follow them, but I suppose that is a bit of reading between the lines.
And the usual incentive is writing the adventure so that resting every encounter is either tactically unsound or leads to undesireable outcomes other than their personal deaths (aside from the primary pressure of the presumption that the players would find this boring and show up to play in some manner conductive to the DM's game, because tabletop is not a videogame). And as you have already acknowledged, it's likely that your players do not consider optional objectives optional, which means that adventures with otherwise "soft" limits are actually hard limits, and if you wrote them, that's your adventure pushing harder than the players want. Not the DMG.

That was specifically in response to someone saying that it is I, not the DMG, that came up with the idea that players should need to expend resources, and I was pointing out that not only does the DMG say that, it actually takes a step further than I ever would by saying that something MUST require resource expenditure to provide XP.
Looks to me like they were saying that it was your idea to go 80% per day every day, which is not in the DMG. Their specific line is "you make it a struggle to get anything." The second part of their post, which you acknowledged, clarifies this.

And my further response is that your insistence on rewarding xp for any sort of combat incentivizes the same nova tactics you say you want to discourage. If the PCs have a one-sided fight because they burned an entire day's worth of spells on a chump and then went back to sleep, and the DMG explicitly says that favorable/unfavorable circumstances modify xp awards, why wouldn't they get less xp for that? If you give them full xp for going nova, of course it would seem unfair if they got no xp for "flawless," (which is actually "lucksack" or "were never actually at any risk." If you don't want people to play like it's a videogame, then don't give out guaranteed minimum rewards like one. Getting no xp for a "fight" where you were never at risk isn't harsh, it's the only sensible result.

The same solution applies to the "hunting for xp" problem where people will go searching for a random encounter to push them over the level like its a videogame: so don't give them xp for it. Xp comes from practical experience and accomplishment of goals, randomly walking off into the woods to lob a Fireball at a bear furthers no goals and actively reduces your ability to continue with what you're supposed to be doing. So it gives no xp. Because the DM decides what encounters are worth xp- the justification is just gravy.

[Talakeal]

So are you trying to follow the DMG or not? You can't hold up one part to justify something and then blame it for a ruling that wasn't even in there.

I was following the part of the DMG that says an average encounter should consume about 20% of the party's resources and that a party will usually go through four such encounters before needing to rest; which I infer to mean than an average adventuring day should use up ~80% of the party's resources.

I am not following everything in the DMG.


And my further response is that your insistence on rewarding xp for any sort of combat incentivizes the same nova tactics you say you want to discourage. If the PCs have a one-sided fight because they burned an entire day's worth of spells on a chump and then went back to sleep, and the DMG explicitly says that favorable/unfavorable circumstances modify xp awards, why wouldn't they get less xp for that? If you give them full xp for going nova, of course it would seem unfair if they got no xp for "flawless," (which is actually "lucksack" or "were never actually at any risk." If you don't want people to play like it's a videogame, then don't give out guaranteed minimum rewards like one. Getting no xp for a "fight" where you were never at risk isn't harsh, it's the only sensible result.

The same solution applies to the "hunting for xp" problem where people will go searching for a random encounter to push them over the level like its a videogame: so don't give them xp for it. Xp comes from practical experience and accomplishment of goals, randomly walking off into the woods to lob a Fireball at a bear furthers no goals and actively reduces your ability to continue with what you're supposed to be doing. So it gives no xp. Because the DM decides what encounters are worth xp- the justification is just gravy.

I don't actually give XP for combat at all; I use milestone levelling exclusively.

Honestly, if I ever tried giving less XP based on tactics, I am pretty sure my players would riot.

I only brought up the quote about encounters requiring resource expenditure to give CR to show that sometimes the DMG is even more hard-core about enforcing resource expenditure than I am.


And as you have already acknowledged, it's likely that your players do not consider optional objectives optional, which means that adventures with otherwise "soft" limits are actually hard limits, and if you wrote them, that's your adventure pushing harder than the players want. Not the DMG.

Not sure where you are going with this.

I was discussing this as a possible reason why my campaign might seem to hard despite otherwise sticking to the DMG guidelines. Pointing it out and saying that it deviates from the DMG isn't really proving any sort of point of saying anything I didn't already say in the OP.

[Fizban]

Not sure where you are going with this.

I was discussing this as a possible reason why my campaign might seem to hard despite otherwise sticking to the DMG guidelines. Pointing it out and saying that it deviates from the DMG isn't really proving any sort of point of saying anything I didn't already say in the OP.
You responded to another post with "The DMG absolutely says everything should be a struggle," but it does not- the DMG is not a proper defense of an attempt to make all days 80% days, which seems to be what you're going for. Stating that your adventures allow for the players to choose how much they fight on some days would be, but you've said that it's your job to provide incentives for them to choose to push anyway. Which returns to trying to figure out your players' tendencies and desires, which may indicate that they don't see those choices you give them as choices in that department (they always try to do every optional fight etc).

I don't actually give XP for combat at all; I use milestone levelling exclusively.
*RECORD SCRATCH*

Woah woah woah, that is hugely massively important. You've been talking about xp, specifically said that you would never not award xp for a fight, but you aren't using xp at all. We've got people trying to analyze perception of difficulty, one of the major components of which is the reward system, and you're not using like an entire 1/3 of the reward system.

So your players are likely to be feeling they never catch a break because every day they have to fight to the last, and the only rewards they're getting are "progress" and treasure, and as completionists their minds don't track progress gained as much as they do progress lost. No wonder they hate using consumables, treasure is the only reward they get which is directly tied to their performance, the only one they can actually see on their sheet, and having to spend money just to survive.

[Alhallor]

OK I have to ask, are these the same players who don't want to spend any money because they feel like they are wasting it? Are they also sell magical gear they could otherwise use to get more money so they can buy their ultimate magical equipment?

I read through the other posts before but I'm not sure if this has been really asked, did your talk with your players about how you envision your campaign? Because from the stuff I read about your DMing style it seems you enjoy a kinda gritty experience, making fights hard for the players, let the enemy use mean tactics (that are also available to the players I guess but they don't bother using them?)

And it seems like they want a different experience from the game than you and more dumb-fun fights and less "these damn dragon uses hit and run tactics what should we dooo?" That requires more usage of brainpower and more creative thinking which I guess you want them to use but they aren't? Please correct me if I'm wrong there.

I don't GM DnD right know but my players IF they get to battle have different ways to deal with combat. They run away or try not to encounter the enemy in a direct battle, which through their ingenuity they often do. When they absolutely have to fight an enemy they try to prepare as much as possible beforehand so even if they fight something mighty they get away with not as much damage as they should have suffered because of their damage avoiding tactics (even the kinda tank in the party uses this because getting hurt hurts and they try to avoid getting hurt. Surprisingly they still grit their teeth if they have too but damage-avoiding seems kinda realistic because yes… Getting hurt hurts.) And even if they get surprised the first instinct is can we avoid that? And if no they do all in their might to level the playing field and try to get in advantegous positions first before fighting heads on.

From your description your players don't seem to do that and may want to play just plain differently than you prepared for.

I second sitting in the players seat a bit. That helps me immensely trying to know what others want out of the game, because I think someone DM's what he wants out of the game.

[Willie the Duck]

That's kind of how this started.

People said my game was too hard, I said I am just following the guidelines in the DMG, and people responded that maybe the DMG doesn't know what it is talking about; hence this thread.

Go back to these people and ask them what about the game is too hard. We can't help until we know what they think the problem is.

Most of the time when I have run into this issue (regardless of where in the situation I was located-- DM, complaining players, non-complaining players, or bystander) it has come down to DM and Players having different understanding of the actual situations. Often it comes down to every/most fight having the players feel on-the-ropes, whether that is true or not. Do the players feel like their characters can run if things go badly? Do they think they will know when things are going badly soon enough to successfully run? When they feel like they are in a fight, holding their own, and expending a reasonable amount of resources, does that seem clear to them or are they constantly second guessing whether they know how things are going?

D&D isn't 'too hard,' but it is bad at some things, especially related to these kind of issues. Enemies showing no real sign of injury until they drop, combined with opportunity attacks and that enemies can effectively keep up with you (or snipe you with readily-switchable-to ranged weapons) as you retreat conspire to make running when things go bad seem like a really bad idea. This can lead to a stand-your-ground attitude, regardless of how prepared you are for the fight, which unfortunately makes one think that they aren't ready for the fight (or one certainly doesn't know if they are ready for the fight). This, along with a game system (in this case 3e being worse than most editions of the game) not providing a lot of clues as to whether you are underbuilt, built to the level of optimization the game expects, or ridiculous cheeze, tends to make players feel like they are facing worse hardship than perhaps the DM (who knows darn well how close the PCs are to dropping a given opponent) knows to be the case.

[Talakeal]

You responded to another post with "The DMG absolutely says everything should be a struggle," but it does not- the DMG is not a proper defense of an attempt to make all days 80% days, which seems to be what you're going for.

I didn't ever say that.

I said that I learned encounter balance from the 3E DMG about 20 years ago, and have been using the ~80% guideline is the proper balance point ever since. I did not say that I do it every single day, and I was not using the DMG to "justify my actions", merely that it was where I got the idea of the 80% balance point from.


Woah woah woah, that is hugely massively important. You've been talking about xp, specifically said that you would never not award xp for a fight, but you aren't using xp at all. We've got people trying to analyze perception of difficulty, one of the major components of which is the reward system, and you're not using like an entire 1/3 of the reward system.

So your players are likely to be feeling they never catch a break because every day they have to fight to the last, and the only rewards they're getting are "progress" and treasure, and as completionists their minds don't track progress gained as much as they do progress lost. No wonder they hate using consumables, treasure is the only reward they get which is directly tied to their performance, the only one they can actually see on their sheet, and having to spend money just to survive.

They still get XP for completing the dungeon as a whole, just not for each individual encounter; if my players want to sneak past a monster rather than killing it (or something of that nature) I don't think they deserve to be punished for it.

Using consumables shouldn't be ideal. But sometimes it is necessary evil, and as I said my players were still above WBL for the entire campaign and always took more wealth out of the dungeon than they spent on consumables completing it.

Also, putting "progress" in quotes like that says a lot more about you than me or my players.


OK I have to ask, are these the same players who don't want to spend any money because they feel like they are wasting it? Are they also sell magical gear they could otherwise use to get more money so they can buy their ultimate magical equipment?

I read through the other posts before but I'm not sure if this has been really asked, did your talk with your players about how you envision your campaign? Because from the stuff I read about your DMing style it seems you enjoy a kinda gritty experience, making fights hard for the players, let the enemy use mean tactics (that are also available to the players I guess but they don't bother using them?)

And it seems like they want a different experience from the game than you and more dumb-fun fights and less "these damn dragon uses hit and run tactics what should we dooo?" That requires more usage of brainpower and more creative thinking which I guess you want them to use but they aren't? Please correct me if I'm wrong there.

Yes, it is the same group.

I suspect the latter is correct, which is one of the three ideas I had in my OP about why my group feels harder than usual to my players despite sticking to what I feel are the normal CR guidelines.

[King of Nowhere]

Most fights are under leveled. I typically balance for the adventuring day rather than individual fights. When terrain (or other miscellaneous factors like surprise or unknown enemy abilities) are an issue, I factor them into the overall challenge and am usually pretty good at still hitting the 80% per adventuring day average.




Of course that is boring, but it won't actually happen.

The 80% mark is an average. Dice change. Tactics change. Environments change. Sometimes the DM makes a mistake or forgets to factor something in. And, some encounters are just more (or less) effective against certain party compositions.

So... which of those two is accurate? because in two sentences you are telling that there are too many variables to really get to 80%, and then you say that you get close most of the time.

But regardless of that, I think you are putting too much weight to the book. if you have DMed for years, and you read this forum regularly, chances are you're actually more experienced that the people who actually wrote the manual. And those people were writing most for inexperienced players anyway; it is assumed that experienced players will know when to bend the rules and when to skip them entirely.
I've never cared about numbers of encounters and I always went with what feels right for the world. The goblin tribe won't be conveniently divided into 4 easy encounters. After they sent the first group and you dispatch them, either they send every single able-bodied they can into the fray, or they flee. The boss won't send his minions against you one at a time before facing you solo at the end. he will either try to overwhelm with massive force; or, in case he's trying to wear you down, he certainly will try to prevent you from fleeing to rest and come back the next day.
I almost never had a standard adventuring day of 4 encounters. there was generally one big fight as the enemies would pile up everything they had. especially since the party learned teleportation, at which point taking them by attrition is an exercice in futility. Perhaps there were easier encounters, but i didn't even roll those. easy enemies surrendered, or tried to flee, or were killed easily. And it worked well.
Now, I'm not saying you should do as I did. of course everyone is entitled to have a different style.
But I am saying that you could benefit from more spontaneity and less slavish aderhence to a bunch of guidelines that were made by people with less actual experience than you, with premises that do not apply to your table, and that were never intended to be strict in the first place.

As for difficulty, as others said, it's up to the table. Some people enjoy different levels of difficulty. But in my experience, a party with even a fairly low (by this forum standards) optimization will still mop the floor easily with things well above their EL.

[Talakeal]

So... which of those two is accurate? because in two sentences you are telling that there are too many variables to really get to 80%, and then you say that you get close most of the time.

But regardless of that, I think you are putting too much weight to the book. if you have DMed for years, and you read this forum regularly, chances are you're actually more experienced that the people who actually wrote the manual. And those people were writing most for inexperienced players anyway; it is assumed that experienced players will know when to bend the rules and when to skip them entirely.
I've never cared about numbers of encounters and I always went with what feels right for the world. The goblin tribe won't be conveniently divided into 4 easy encounters. After they sent the first group and you dispatch them, either they send every single able-bodied they can into the fray, or they flee. The boss won't send his minions against you one at a time before facing you solo at the end. he will either try to overwhelm with massive force; or, in case he's trying to wear you down, he certainly will try to prevent you from fleeing to rest and come back the next day.
I almost never had a standard adventuring day of 4 encounters. there was generally one big fight as the enemies would pile up everything they had. especially since the party learned teleportation, at which point taking them by attrition is an exercise in futility. Perhaps there were easier encounters, but i didn't even roll those. easy enemies surrendered, or tried to flee, or were killed easily. And it worked well.
Now, I'm not saying you should do as I did. of course everyone is entitled to have a different style.
But I am saying that you could benefit from more spontaneity and less slavish adherence to a bunch of guidelines that were made by people with less actual experience than you, with premises that do not apply to your table, and that were never intended to be strict in the first place.

As for difficulty, as others said, it's up to the table. Some people enjoy different levels of difficulty. But in my experience, a party with even a fairly low (by this forum standards) optimization will still mop the floor easily with things well above their EL.

I don't see a contradiction there; I am pretty good at estimating the difficulty of encounters and the average resource expenditure of my adventures lands right around 80%, but there is enough variance from day to day that it is only an average.

I personally am a "fiction first" sort of player, and would love to be a bit more loose with the encounter budget for the sake of drama and verisimilitude, but my players demand balance and cry foul if they feel it isn't there.

Its kind of a funny disconnect actually, on Saturday I had someone on this thread accusing me of "neurotic adherence to strict balance guidelines," but I had one of my players complaining to me that he felt like I was "just picking CRs out of a hat and throwing them at the party randomly."


Go back to these people and ask them what about the game is too hard. We can't help until we know what they think the problem is.

Most of the time when I have run into this issue (regardless of where in the situation I was located-- DM, complaining players, non-complaining players, or bystander) it has come down to DM and Players having different understanding of the actual situations. Often it comes down to every/most fight having the players feel on-the-ropes, whether that is true or not. Do the players feel like their characters can run if things go badly? Do they think they will know when things are going badly soon enough to successfully run? When they feel like they are in a fight, holding their own, and expending a reasonable amount of resources, does that seem clear to them or are they constantly second guessing whether they know how things are going?

I do ask them, and they give inconsistent answers.

Pretty consistent complaints are:

1: They can't do a full clear of a dungeon in one go without using consumables, and this bugs them even though they have always still made a net profit and are always above suggested WBL.
2: The wizard uses most of his spells in doing so and doesn't have as many as he would like to make scrolls or sell for profit in town.*

In this particular campaign I let the players call a retreat at any time without consequences, as there are several new players in the group and I am trying to build up their confidence without having to risk accidental TPKs.


*: This is a peculiarity of my particular house rules. I use a long rest variant so players don't have unlimited spells during downtime, but I allow them to save up unused spells or convert them to gold. Players can still purchase or craft items normally without expending spell slots.

[ngilop]

That's kind of how this started.

People said my game was too hard, I said I am just following the guidelines in the DMG, and people responded that maybe the DMG doesn't know what it is talking about; hence this thread.

The DMG absolutely says that everything should be a struggle, and actually takes it even further than I do, for example it flat out says that a fight without resource loss on the party of the players isn't a challenge and shouldn't be worth any XP.



That is actually a very good point. I can see it as being sort of a "glass half full" sort of thing, which varies from player to player:

After killing a huge dragon that took everything the party had player one might think:

"Man, that was a super tough dragon. He took everything he had! But in the end, we pulled through! We are such badasses!"

While player two might think:

"Man, that was a super tought dragon. It took everything we had to pull through! Now we have nothing left, and are the weakest and most vulnerable we have ever been!"

uh.. No that is not at all what I was saying.

What I was trying to get across is NOT that people have different expectations.

it is that YOU are giving achievements but no reward. Also, that you think the two are one in the same.

Example: Somebody has a old '65 mustang they are restoring. they finish restoration (the sense of achievement) but every time there is completion somebody comes over takes the wheels off and smashes it a few times with a sledgehammer. Now they have to do the whole thing over again (no sense of reward)

They work hard to succeed and are getting that sense of achievement from completing it. But you deny them a chance to enjoy that instead they have to struggle all over again the next day becuase you read "80% of resources" and rigidly stick to that with no room for lee way or to let the players have a chance to relax.

[Talakeal]

uh.. No that is not at all what I was saying.

What I was trying to get across is NOT that people have different expectations.

it is that YOU are giving achievements but no reward. Also, that you think the two are one in the same.

Example: Somebody has a old '65 mustang they are restoring. they finish restoration (the sense of achievement) but every time there is completion somebody comes over takes the wheels off and smashes it a few times with a sledgehammer. Now they have to do the whole thing over again (no sense of reward)

They work hard to succeed and are getting that sense of achievement from completing it. But you deny them a chance to enjoy that instead they have to struggle all over again the next day because you read "80% of resources" and rigidly stick to that with no room for lee way or to let the players have a chance to relax.

Ok, I don't think I follow then.

Are you saying that "reward = easier game"? So that the standard "game level" model of increasing challenge over time should be inverted?

I don't follow your smashed car analogy at all; they got XP and treasure from their previous encounter, their characters are more powerful and influential, and whatever story line changes they made to the world in the process of it remain (towns stay saved, princesses remain rescued, evil overlords remain overthrown, etc.).

Now, true, there will always be more adventures; but that doesn't really hold up to your "smashed car" analogy, its more like finishing one car and then deciding to start work on another car because you enjoy restoring cars.



Edit: Also, reading your post again, something occurred to me. Are you under the impression that I don't give the players downtime between adventures?

[ngilop]

I am trying to explain to you that achievement and reward are not the same thing.

Achievement is finishing a goal of some sort

reward is being able to experience the fruits of a particular goal.

You just give them endless achievements at no point do they get rewarded.

my car example is simple. they get the achievement of finishing the goal (completing the restoration) but they never get the reward (being able to drive the car)

Al they ever do is struggle to get to the achievement and they truly never get rewarded for that. You can't say "but you finished blah ad have done blah a dozen times already" that is the point if all you do is struggle every day to get to something it is not a reward. It is an achievement for sure, but never being able to take in it and experience the after effect of hitting that goal you never feel rewarded

another example since the car didn;t make sense to you ( I doubt this will since you feel the words mean the same thing) But, i'll give it a shot.

Somebody wants a pool in their backyard. They dig a hole gets some cement, clay, marble and rocks to put in that hole to a nice fancy swimming pool. It is finished after coming in daily for a few weeks to do all the hard labor. They go "WOO, i finished it, it was rough but i have a nice feeling of accomplishment" But right as they are about to swim someone backs a dumptruck back up to it, fills the pool with dirt rocks and such then drives over it with a steam roller compacting it all down.

[Dimers]

they got XP and treasure from their previous encounter, their characters are more powerful and influential, and whatever story line changes they made to the world in the process of it remain

Not speaking for ngilop, but ... The characters are not more powerful or influential, because whatever they try to do still requires ~80% of their resources. Treading water is not a powerful feeling. And the storyline changes are an accomplishment/achievement, not a reward -- there's not a practical benefit in that for your combat-oriented and uncreative players. Plus, from what you're saying about the breadth of resources you consider going into that 80%, if the players did leverage their story connections for practical dungeoncrawling benefit, they'd face even tougher challenges to maintain parity.

As far as treasure goes, others posters have alluded to your players' various neuroses about using treasure, so apparently that's not very rewarding for them. Not your fault but you still have to factor that in.

Question: With this group, what are your experiences with less challenging and/or more 'monty haul' campaigns? Do the players like it more and complain less? Do they talk about specific emotional benefits of that playstyle?

[Willie the Duck]

I do ask them, and they give inconsistent answers.

Pretty consistent complaints are:

1: They can't do a full clear of a dungeon in one go without using consumables, and this bugs them even though they have always still made a net profit and are always above suggested WBL.
2: The wizard uses most of his spells in doing so and doesn't have as many as he would like to make scrolls or sell for profit in town.*

In this particular campaign I let the players call a retreat at any time without consequences, as there are several new players in the group and I am trying to build up their confidence without having to risk accidental TPKs.

*: This is a peculiarity of my particular house rules. I use a long rest variant so players don't have unlimited spells during downtime, but I allow them to save up unused spells or convert them to gold. Players can still purchase or craft items normally without expending spell slots.

Okay, well then I think we can dispense with over-analysis on the numbers, because it sounds like closer to an expectations issue than anything else. If the players think the game should work such that they can clear a dungeon (completely, leaving no significant treasure behind) in one go (rather than going out and resting, 1. having to figure out how to do so safely and 2. risking the denizens planning countermeasures or leaving with the loot in the meantime), and without expending consumables (which are then used when?), then they clearly want a game with a different challenge tuning than most of us expect. For me, having accomplishing the whole thing so close you can almost taste it is exactly how things should be, because that means you get to make tough decisions, and those decisions matter. That seems like an optimal situation. But clearly your group disagrees. I will say that this rule of having the wizard get to turn unused spells into scrolls for profit does kinda strongly communicate the idea that you are supposed to get out of the dungeon with a reserve (and not just a 'what if you run into one last monster on the way out?' reserve), and that might be messaging-in-contradiction-of-intended-message on your part. Still, overall, I think you are dealing more with differing ideas of normal than anything else.

[Kelb_Panthera]

So... which of those two is accurate? because in two sentences you are telling that there are too many variables to really get to 80%, and then you say that you get close most of the time.

Those aren't contradictory.

There are too many variables to get -exactly- 20% resource burn on any typical encounter and it's actually more entertaining, IMO, for the typical fight of EL = APL that's supposed to drain that 20% to be made up of several foes of a CR < APL. Getting in the ballpark of 20%, give or take a few points, on the other hand, isn't all that difficult. Adjusting up or down as the day progresses to get to within a point or two of 80% by the end of a four encounter day is pretty easy.

The whole thing gets kinda complicated when you further realize that defining 80% of party resources with precision is a fairly non-trivial task. How exactly do you value HP versus spell slots versus item charges versus potions as generic "party resources?" The only thing I can think of is using the magic item formulae to assign a gold value to -every- aspect of the character, including HD derived benefits like skill points and feats as well as ability score points. Just because they're renewable doesn't make them not resources, ya know.

That is to say:

Exactly 80.000% = basically impossible.

Somewhere in the range 78.000% - 82.000% by subjective approximation = eminently doable.


I personally am a "fiction first" sort of player, and would love to be a bit more loose with the encounter budget for the sake of drama and verisimilitude, but my players demand balance and cry foul if they feel it isn't there.

Its kind of a funny disconnect actually, on Saturday I had someone on this thread accusing me of "neurotic adherence to strict balance guidelines," but I had one of my players complaining to me that he felt like I was "just picking CRs out of a hat and throwing them at the party randomly."

At some point you have to realize that at least some of their complaints shouldn't carry any weight since they seem to be prone to whining. The desire to make the game to everyone's liking is commendable but compromise -must- be part of that. There's a line between being willing to compromise and being a doormat.

I forget who the quote comes from but it goes something like "You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. You've got to choose your battles."



I do ask them, and they give inconsistent answers.

Pretty consistent complaints are:

1: They can't do a full clear of a dungeon in one go without using consumables, and this bugs them even though they have always still made a net profit and are always above suggested WBL.
2: The wizard uses most of his spells in doing so and doesn't have as many as he would like to make scrolls or sell for profit in town.*

Okay, 1 is just pure whining. "We won but I don't like the margins" is a BS complaint that should be ignored outright. If things are getting tight and you don't want to burn non-renewable resources, either withdraw or hunker down and take the long-rest to restore your renewable resources.

2 is contradictory to 1. If they have the downtime to make scrolls (1 day/ scroll, minimum) then they have the time to slow down and approach the dungeon in a way that doesn't force consumable use. Especially given this:


In this particular campaign I let the players call a retreat at any time without consequences, as there are several new players in the group and I am trying to build up their confidence without having to risk accidental TPKs.

In any case, a more conservative approach to dungeon delving could solve both of these complaints. I have no sympathy for people who whine about problems of their own making unless they're willing to at least -try- to fix it themselves.


*: This is a peculiarity of my particular house rules. I use a long rest variant so players don't have unlimited spells during downtime, but I allow them to save up unused spells or convert them to gold. Players can still purchase or craft items normally without expending spell slots.

This confuses me though. They never did have unlimited slots during down time. The per-day limit is exactly that; per day. Or at least per full night's rest for arcanists. Is a night's rest not a "long rest" somehow?

I always took the 1/2 price on sales to be a matter of the abstraction of buying and selling gear. You get half because, unless you specify differently, the presumption is that you're selling it to a pawn broker or some similar person who makes it their business to buy up adventurer loot in a market where there are -plenty- of established sellers of good standing while you're just a random nobody. If one of my players wants better than 1/2 then I'll let them roll a few skill checks for as much as an extra 10% or actually try to establish themselves as a competing seller by opening a shop and maybe get full value if they don't mind it taking a good while and dealing with the adventure hooks that come with being a businessman in a high-magic, high-fantasy world.

[Talakeal]

I am trying to explain to you that achievement and reward are not the same thing.

Achievement is finishing a goal of some sort

reward is being able to experience the fruits of a particular goal.

You just give them endless achievements at no point do they get rewarded.

my car example is simple. they get the achievement of finishing the goal (completing the restoration) but they never get the reward (being able to drive the car)

Al they ever do is struggle to get to the achievement and they truly never get rewarded for that. You can't say "but you finished blah ad have done blah a dozen times already" that is the point if all you do is struggle every day to get to something it is not a reward. It is an achievement for sure, but never being able to take in it and experience the after effect of hitting that goal you never feel rewarded

another example since the car didn't make sense to you ( I doubt this will since you feel the words mean the same thing) But, i'll give it a shot.

Somebody wants a pool in their backyard. They dig a hole gets some cement, clay, marble and rocks to put in that hole to a nice fancy swimming pool. It is finished after coming in daily for a few weeks to do all the hard labor. They go "WOO, i finished it, it was rough but i have a nice feeling of accomplishment" But right as they are about to swim someone backs a dumptruck back up to it, fills the pool with dirt rocks and such then drives over it with a steam roller compacting it all down.

Ok, I think I follow now.

Reward and achievement do not mean the same thing to me, but most people use the terms "character power progression" and "reward" interchangeably, the DMG certainly does.

Still not sure why your examples involve destroying people's car / pool; wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Always building cars but never driving them, always digging pools but never going for a swim,"?

Could you please give me an example of a campaign structure that you would consider to be properly rewarding?



Not speaking for ngilop, but ... The characters are not more powerful or influential, because whatever they try to do still requires ~80% of their resources. Treading water is not a powerful feeling. And the storyline changes are an accomplishment/achievement, not a reward -- there's not a practical benefit in that for your combat-oriented and uncreative players.

I can't agree with this. The numbers on the character sheet are larger, they have more abilities, from a crunch perspective they are objectively more powerful.

Likewise, it is really hard for me to imagine a player thinking that a group of level 1 characters spending 80% of their resources to rescue a prize pig from some goblins to be every bit as influential as a level 20 party who spent 80% of their resources to defeat the dark lord who has enslaved this world for the past thousand years, liberating all of humanity in this life and the next, and becoming the god-kings of an empire that spans the entire globe.

It is a role playing game, the pieces on the board actually exist in the fiction and represent real things, and high level characters simply have more options (both mechanical and fluffly) to affect them and guide the direction the narrative takes.


Again, aside from inverting the traditional nature of game levels and starting hard and ending easy, how would you actually model such a thing?

Would it be solved by simply occasionally having the players run dungeons far below their level or just have occasional "bar fight" scenes where someone picks a fight without the PCs despite being woefully outclassed?


Plus, from what you're saying about the breadth of resources you consider going into that 80%, if the players did leverage their story connections for practical dungeoncrawling benefit, they'd face even tougher challenges to maintain parity.

Probably not, although it really depends on the scenario and campaign style. In my most recent campaign the players frequently hired mercenaries or talked their allies into helping them and I did not adjust the difficulty of encounters to compensate.


As far as treasure goes, others posters have alluded to your players' various neuroses about using treasure, so apparently that's not very rewarding for them. Not your fault but you still have to factor that in.

Well, I don't know. Its complicated.

They really like treasure, but to the point where it is an obligation. They don't feel good about getting more treasure, but they feel bad about getting less. They feel the need to scour the dungeon for every last copper, and then complain that the dungeon was too long, or they will spend 50g worth of consumables to claim a treasure worth 100g and then complain about how they lost 50g.

Loss aversion I action I suppose.



Question: With this group, what are your experiences with less challenging and/or more 'monty haul' campaigns? Do the players like it more and complain less? Do they talk about specific emotional benefits of that playstyle?

I have not tried it with this particular group; although they do seem to get bored and frustrated by "mop up" fights where the enemy doesn't really have a chance, and they haven't shown much interest in going back and defeating lower level encounters that they missed unless the treasure and XP awards are scaled up to their current level, so I can't imagine they would react too well.

In the past I have both played in and run monty haul campaigns, and it always seems to be that the players have fun for a little while and then get bored and want to play something else. There is also a whole lot of player bitching because of how wacky the world is and how inconsistent and poorly balanced such campaigns usually are. For example, I played in one monty-haul game where the players all had templates and 10x their normal WBL in gear, and were routinely taking on foes twice our CR, but then we came up against an enemy who could cast power word kill and the DM realized that even though we had ludicrously high saving throws nobody had enough raw HP to survive it.



Now, a follow up question for both of you: Is this about difficulty or consistency? Would your arguments be any different if instead of an 80% balance point, I was using a 50% balance point, or 25%, or 10%, or 1%? If so, could you explain what the distinction is? If not, this discussion is only tangentially related to this thread as it is really more about player satisfaction than campaign difficulty.

[Dimers]

Is this about difficulty or consistency? Would your arguments be any different if instead of an 80% balance point, I was using a 50% balance point, or 25%, or 10%, or 1%? If so, could you explain what the distinction is? If not, this discussion is only tangentially related to this thread as it is really more about player satisfaction than campaign difficulty.

*blink blink*

"Too difficult" is meaningless outside player expectations -- what's "too" without personal preference? Campaign difficulty is inherently about player satisfaction. The two can't be separated.

[Talakeal]

*blink blink*

"Too difficult" is meaningless outside player expectations -- what's "too" without personal preference? Campaign difficulty is inherently about player satisfaction. The two can't be separated.

They are connected, but they aren't the same thing.

A player can be dissatisfied with any number of things, most of them completely unrelated to difficulty, and it is also possible to be dissatisfied because a game isn't difficulty enough.



I started this thread to ask about whether or not "80% resource expenditure is a good difficulty benchmark," not about whether having a consistent benchmark for difficulty is a good thing or not. Which is an interesting discussion, its just not really what I was talking about.

[Tvtyrant]

They are connected, but they aren't the same thing.

A player can be dissatisfied with any number of things, most of them completely unrelated to difficulty, and it is also possible to be dissatisfied because a game isn't difficulty enough.



I started this thread to ask about whether or not "80% resource expenditure is a good difficulty benchmark," not about whether having a consistent benchmark for difficulty is a good thing or not. Which is an interesting discussion, its just not really what I was talking about.

They aren't distinct, though. Players are not consistent across groups, so benchmarks aren't either.

In this case 80% clearly is too much, because your group says they don't enjoy it. There are no objective markers for difficulty, the DM and the party are required by the game to dial their expectations to match each other.

Edit: another way you could look at it is based on levels instead of sessions or days. Level up, then two sessions of easy encounters, two of medium, two hard, then level again. Each level feels like a massive increase in power, then enemies become more challenging over time allowing them to become used to their new abilities. Final sessions let you cut loose, then repeat.

[Fizban]

I didn't ever say that.
I said that I learned encounter balance from the 3E DMG about 20 years ago, and have been using the ~80% guideline is the proper balance point ever since. I did not say that I do it every single day, and I was not using the DMG to "justify my actions", merely that it was where I got the idea of the 80% balance point from.
And yet the amount you emphasize it has lead several posters to the conclusion that maybe you are doing it every day, or close enough that the players feel that way. And for the third time, the DMG does not directly justify the DM intentionally aiming for a certain resource expenditure, it never did. It says how much they should spend per encounter, and then essentially does the math for you on how many encounters that means they can handle per day. The decision to push the players towards that point is yours, because you specifically said you don't want them having 15 minute days, and apparently don't consider any other methods of disincentivizing it valid. The DMG expects multiple encounters per day because resting slows down the game, and tells you what appropriately leveled challenges should expend and from that the upper limit you could fit between rests, and that's it.

You keep saying you took your 80% guideline from the book, but you didn't, it's actually your own derived target. It has more nuance than "4 encounters per day," but still lacks the nuance that the players are still the arbiters of when they decide to rest and the fact that not all encounters come in packs of four or 80%. And again, the way you keep repeating your adherence to it strongly suggests you have a blind spot about the situation.

They still get XP for completing the dungeon as a whole, just not for each individual encounter; if my players want to sneak past a monster rather than killing it (or something of that nature) I don't think they deserve to be punished for it.
That's not the definition I've heard- milestone leveling is that the PCs all level up when you tell them to, after "milestones." Regardless, you're still running into a problem mentioned in the DMG, which is that generalizing xp risks making the players dissatisfied. Even if the amount is in fact the sum of the encounters, the players probably don't know that. And if they have to finish a mult-session dungeon before getting xp, that stretches things further. If they do know exactly what xp they should be getting (as you mention below they're aware of some of the CRs you're using), then the obfuscation and delay of xp gain are pretty much pointless.

Using consumables shouldn't be ideal. But sometimes it is necessary evil, and as I said my players were still above WBL for the entire campaign and always took more wealth out of the dungeon than they spent on consumables completing it.
Your perception does not matter. You have players that think your game is to hard, their perception is what matters. If you've figured out what amount of consumables they want to spend (by asking them) and the book says different, that means you're gonna have to deal with your players wanting something different from the book.

Also, putting "progress" in quotes like that says a lot more about you than me or my players.
Does it? I don't know what happened in the campaign or how invested the players normally acted, but "progress" is the most nebulous reward. Xp and treasure are rewards, numbers that go up on your sheet and directly say you can X because Y. Progress only matters so long as the players think it matters, and even worse, progress is expected to be automatic. Even if you have a session with no combat and no looting, it is assumed there will be "progress" of the game in some form. Your xp rewards are obfuscated, the players feel they're spending more consumables than they should and falling behind (whether the book says they are or not), and progress is part of showing up. Even if its only a little bit, each reduction in reward satisfaction makes other problems worse.

Its kind of a funny disconnect actually, on Saturday I had someone on this thread accusing me of "neurotic adherence to strict balance guidelines," but I had one of my players complaining to me that he felt like I was "just picking CRs out of a hat and throwing them at the party randomly." . . .

1: They can't do a full clear of a dungeon in one go without using consumables, and this bugs them even though they have always still made a net profit and are always above suggested WBL.
2: The wizard uses most of his spells in doing so and doesn't have as many as he would like to make scrolls or sell for profit in town.*
In this particular campaign I let the players call a retreat at any time without consequences, as there are several new players in the group and I am trying to build up their confidence without having to risk accidental TPKs.

*: This is a peculiarity of my particular house rules. I use a long rest variant so players don't have unlimited spells during downtime, but I allow them to save up unused spells or convert them to gold. Players can still purchase or craft items normally without expending spell slots.
Yeah, pretty clear your group doesn't like consumables. The houserule for free scrolls may have sounded good, but what it's actually done is make someone feel like they're entitled to an infinite stockpile that increases every day, without actually making them feel better about using said stockpile. This group should probably just abolish consumable mechanics. Doing so might produce a further "save them from themselves" effect where in the absence of consumables they actually stop and rest at the point which feels comfortable to them, potentially reducing two stress factors.



The whole thing gets kinda complicated when you further realize that defining 80% of party resources with precision is a fairly non-trivial task. How exactly do you value HP versus spell slots versus item charges versus potions as generic "party resources?" The only thing I can think of is using the magic item formulae to assign a gold value to -every- aspect of the character, including HD derived benefits like skill points and feats as well as ability score points. Just because they're renewable doesn't make them not resources, ya know.
Spells (of significant effect) are easily counted. Hp is recovered by spells, therefore hp can be easily valued as spell slots (though hp loss, if channeled through the proper preemptive resistances and armored characters, may count for surprisingly few "spells"). Consumables are extra discretionary spending that I consider part of the safety net: you're never really expected to heal up or finish monsters off with wands or use the emergency potion of Water Breathing, but you use them when you need them. They're insurance against bad luck, mistakes, or trying to shoot for the moon. I would only expect consumable use in fights that I've planned such that I expect consumable use- though for groups where hp recovery is always from wands, that would greatly affect the expectations.



I can't agree with this. The numbers on the character sheet are larger, they have more abilities, from a crunch perspective they are objectively more powerful.
"Objective" power means nothing. Most people don't care that they can objectively kill things, because they don't go around randomly killing things. Unless they actually see that previous fights are now easier, they cannot feel more powerful. If those fights are always in greater numbers such that they burn down to nearly nothing anyway, those fights will not feel easier, they will feel like an unending treadmill. For this clearly completionist group that never skips a fight, the DM must deliberately place combats with previously dangerous (and now less dangerous) foes, without a specific resource/challenge/whatever target, to ensure that the players get to demonstrate their new difference in power.

However-

they do seem to get bored and frustrated by "mop up" fights where the enemy doesn't really have a chance, and they haven't shown much interest in going back and defeating lower level encounters that they missed unless the treasure and XP awards are scaled up to their current level, so I can't imagine they would react too well.
This line makes it sound like you have a group which with an extremely narrow idea of what fights they'll find fun. To the point where I'd usually suggest someone like that should try being the DM, because they'll either be happier in control, or find out how impossible their demands are.

There remains one style of game I don't think has been mentioned: Is this a group that wants nothing but 1-2 fight days against equal or overleveled foes at all times? If they don't like "mop-up" and suddenly decide that they're too high level for areas they've apparently left unfinished, but complain not only about using consumables but also even burning through their daily resources, this sounds like a 1 fight per day group.

Which brings us once again back to the fact that as long as they're spending 20% on equal level encounters, they're fine, even if there was only one fight that day. Single fight days are only a problem when the party has a bunch of daily resources they can "nova," which as I mentioned way back at the beginning, can be solved by having them play classes that don't have a bunch of daily resources, even if you're not willing to modify xp appropriately for circumstances.


All of that said: if they're monitoring your CR-use (even though you said they don't have the MMs memorized), then they're never going to be happy. Seriously, if players are whining about your encounters because you didn't use exactly X monsters of CR Y, it doesn't matter what you do. Even if you only use exactly the CR calculations they consider fair, they'll just find something else to complain about. If someone thinks they're better than the DM but insists on playing instead, there is no fix.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Spells (of significant effect) are easily counted. Hp is recovered by spells, therefore hp can be easily valued as spell slots (though hp loss, if channeled through the proper preemptive resistances and armored characters, may count for surprisingly few "spells"). Consumables are extra discretionary spending that I consider part of the safety net: you're never really expected to heal up or finish monsters off with wands or use the emergency potion of Water Breathing, but you use them when you need them. They're insurance against bad luck, mistakes, or trying to shoot for the moon. I would only expect consumable use in fights that I've planned such that I expect consumable use- though for groups where hp recovery is always from wands, that would greatly affect the expectations.

What defines "of significant effect?" The mess of first and second level spells a 12th level cleric burns off for HP restoration? Do they become more significant if they're slots off of a bard? Are they of more or less significance if they had a magic vestment prepared before they were sac'ed?

For that matter, surely they're not weighted simply by the number of total slots rather than their relative power. That is; surely a first level spell and a fifth level spell don't count as the same amount of resource?

How does an artificer fit into this idea when a -huge- portion of his day to day power comes from wands and staves?

You said to count HP with spells as a proxy but different level spells and powers heal different amounts of HP. That doesn't account for HP restoration through item use at all, either.


Don't get me wrong, this whole argument is purely academic since, as I said in my previous quote, you can just eyeball it and do well enough. I wouldn't expect anyone to actually do all the necessary formulation and math to get a precise value but it doesn't change the fact that details matter if you're trying to be precise.

Besides, a certain kind of player could probably use such mathematics to "prove" that casters really are just outright superior to non-casters :smallsigh: I really don't want to encourage that sort of thinking.

[Bonzai]

The first time I DM'ed I obsessed over making encounters that challenged the players. Its a fine line to walk, and it gets tough the higher level you go. Eventually it got to a point where the encounters were decided in one or two rounds. The only way to prevent it would have been to take out several players in the Alpha, or some how otherwise deliberately screw over the players. I didn't want to DM that way, and expressed my concerns to my players. They gave me some great advice. They were having fun. As long as the encounters were interesting, it didn't necassarily matter whether they were pushed to their limits or not.

I offer you similar advice. If the players are having fun, it doesn't matter. Make the combats interesting and meaningful, and forget about daily quotas. They might have 1 single battle in a day that cleans them out, or it could be a cake walk that leads to interesting role play and decision making. As they get more powerful they may have a dozen small encounters in a day. As long as you are keeping the players interested, then you are doing your job.

[Quertus]

I can't agree with this. The numbers on the character sheet are larger, they have more abilities, from a crunch perspective they are objectively more powerful.

Likewise, it is really hard for me to imagine a player thinking that a group of level 1 characters spending 80% of their resources to rescue a prize pig from some goblins to be every bit as influential as a level 20 party who spent 80% of their resources to defeat the dark lord who has enslaved this world for the past thousand years, liberating all of humanity in this life and the next, and becoming the god-kings of an empire that spans the entire globe.

It is a role playing game, the pieces on the board actually exist in the fiction and represent real things, and high level characters simply have more options (both mechanical and fluffly) to affect them and guide the direction the narrative takes.


Again, aside from inverting the traditional nature of game levels and starting hard and ending easy, how would you actually model such a thing?

Would it be solved by simply occasionally having the players run dungeons far below their level or just have occasional "bar fight" scenes where someone picks a fight without the PCs despite being woefully outclassed?


I started this thread to ask about whether or not "80% resource expenditure is a good difficulty benchmark," not about whether having a consistent benchmark for difficulty is a good thing or not. Which is an interesting discussion, its just not really what I was talking about.

As others and I have said, 80% is a terrible metric, because all metrics are terrible. What matters is what your table finds fun. And, from the sounds of it, 80% is too high for your table.

However, it's worse than that.

Your game was a hex crawl. The party gained levels. The party went wherever they wanted. Later hexes, they fairly consistently lost 80% of their resources. Therefore, one of the following must be true: gaining power is a lie - their characters are still the same as when they started the adventure; the map is a lie - Talakeal is presenting his railroad in the intended order, with the illusion of choice as to where to go; the encounters and world-building are a lie - Talakeal is just making stuff up "appropriate to our level" / "to counter our power" when we get there.

Without some serious gatekeeping (with zones, keys, etc), you cannot have static enemies on a hex crawl present a static level of challenge to a dynamically-leveled party. That's just utter nonsense. And, if that was (how they saw) your game, your players had to be feeling it.

So, in context, both an 80% benchmark, and any static benchmark, are bad.

And, yes, as I and others have already said, there should definitely absolutely certainly be occasional "bar fight" styles of encounters, to let the players actually notice that their PCs have improved! Although this can be accomplished by letting the players encounter "old foes" (like skeletons or Ogres) and experience how much easier they are now. They don't have to be "why did we bother with this encounter" level of easy, just noticeably easier. And not always as part of some guaranteed 80% (±) grind.

[Red Fel]

I can't agree with this. The numbers on the character sheet are larger, they have more abilities, from a crunch perspective they are objectively more powerful.

Likewise, it is really hard for me to imagine a player thinking that a group of level 1 characters spending 80% of their resources to rescue a prize pig from some goblins to be every bit as influential as a level 20 party who spent 80% of their resources to defeat the dark lord who has enslaved this world for the past thousand years, liberating all of humanity in this life and the next, and becoming the god-kings of an empire that spans the entire globe.


"Objective" power means nothing. Most people don't care that they can objectively kill things, because they don't go around randomly killing things. Unless they actually see that previous fights are now easier, they cannot feel more powerful. If those fights are always in greater numbers such that they burn down to nearly nothing anyway, those fights will not feel easier, they will feel like an unending treadmill. For this clearly completionist group that never skips a fight, the DM must deliberately place combats with previously dangerous (and now less dangerous) foes, without a specific resource/challenge/whatever target, to ensure that the players get to demonstrate their new difference in power.

This.

Look, setting aside the metrics for a moment, at the end of the day, D&D is a power fantasy. It's not suited to many other things. It's not a terrific noir detective experience. It's not super as a harem comedy. And in a world where characters can literally become immune to fear, horror is really, really hard to pull off. It's a power fantasy. That's not to say that everything should be easy for the heroes - it shouldn't - but at some point they need to come out on top and feel amazing doing it.

As in most things, the key is to judge by results, not by inputs. If the players expend the same amount of resources fighting the Orc Army that they did rescuing Grandma Marla's kitty from that tree, how do they feel super? Why should they have stopped rescuing kitties from trees if the outcome of the much harder fight still feels the same? If they expend almost all of their resources fighting some enemies who are relatively low on the totem pole - goblins, kobolds, bandits, etc. - when will they ever feel confident enough to fight a Dragon? If the goal is to make them god-kings of an empire that spans an entire globe, how will they ever feel up to that challenge when raiding the Underdark is still a near-lethal exercise?

That's the point. Before your players can have the confidence to take on bigger challenges, you have to show them their progress - by showing that the smaller challenges have gotten easier. That makes the players feel that the PCs are more capable, more powerful. And that inspires them to move on to bigger and badder things.

If you keep the players on a treadmill where everything they face takes everything they have, they don't reach that point. Because they never feel the result - that they've grown stronger. They never get to enjoy that high. And they need that.

Look, if you ever watch a horror or suspense film, you'll notice something. They periodically relieve the pressure. Somebody makes a joke, or expresses relief, or feels safe. For just a moment, everyone - including the audience - can let down their guard. You need this. If you keep the pressure at maximum for the entire story, the pressure loses its value. You periodically relieve that pressure, so you can ramp it up again to great effect.

Challenges are the same way. It's good to challenge your players, within reason. But periodically, they need to feel strong. They need to face a scrub, or a fight that was a challenge for them once but isn't anymore. That's how they feel they've made progress. That's what keeps them from feeling that everything is too hard.

[AnimeTheCat]

There are a lot of side conversations in this thread that don't seem on-target, and I personally can't really follow them. However, I do want to give some input.



So are the guidelines in the DMG too hard?

If so, what is the right level of challenge? And how do you run an easier game without breaking the system or the setting?

If not, how do you get people more used to the "expected" level of difficulty?

I think the guidelines in the DMG are just that, guidelines. I think they're pretty good for a challenge if they're looked at only in the percentage of resources utilized. The guidelines are good, however all of the additive parts to the "resources" of a character really screw those guidelines up. As characters acquire wealth and equipment, that wizard only having 3 spell slots is a lot less impactful, especially when the spells they go-to most often get wanded (fly, invisibility, etc.). They're not going to use up their resources at the same rate as other characters. Don't get me wrong, wands are great, but they throw off resource percentages because to use 80% of the resources each day, you have to absolutely BURN through wand charges, or you have to be meticulous about loot placement and only drop partial wands of those spells to better control their resources. This, again, gets messed up by character resources like magic item crafting feats. Basically, if there were fewer ways to increase your resources, I would find the guidelines nearly perfect, thus there are two possible answers; 1) the guidelines are good but the system they are for suffers from system bloat (I tend to be in this camp), 2) the guidelines are bad and need to be adjusted for the resource plentiful system (I tend to disagree with this as I tend to NOT allow every resource under the sun in my games).

The right level of challenge is whatever brings your group fun. Typically this is achieved through a challenge and triumph system of play. Challenges can consist of a lot of different parts and vary in compsition depending on party composition and level. At level 1, a challenge might be 3 CR 1/3 goblin warriors. at level 8, that same level of challenge is probably an entire war camp of those goblins. At level 1, your resources are much lower so beating those enemies will be more resource intensive. At level 8, you have many more resources (and those resources are better protected), so taking out 20-30 of those same goblins will probably take approximately the same amount of resources, perhaps even less. The sense of achievement is based on what comes after the challenge though, the triumph. Did the party get sweet loot? did they save the damsel in distress? did they get the big bad guy? or, perhaps they got a "sorry mario, the princess is in another castle" letter and no loot, therefore no sense of achievement to show for their challenge. In short, if there is no triumph, there will be no fun in the challenge.

Ultimately, the overall difficulty is also governed by the challenge and triumph system. If the triumph is lackluster compared to the challenge, there will be no fun. If there is sufficient reward, as long as the challenge is defeated, there is no such thing as "too difficult". "too difficult" would be expecting the group to use 100% of their resources in the first encounter and then not giving them a choice as to facing the next, which you use to ultimately kill all the characters without the players growing or learning.

Now for something that wasn't in the original question:




We just completed a campaign where we played every other week for almost two years.

So, basically, I have four players:
One of them bitches about basically every encounter and finds someone or something to blame anytime his character fails at something.
One of them is normally fine, but occasionally, usually when encountering a monster that he can't just run up to and trade full attacks with, or when he is wrong about a rule, he explodes, calls people (usually me) names, screams, and threatens to quit the game.
The other two were pretty calm and drama free, but during the last half-dozen sessions or so they started exhibiting the same behavior as the first two, and I don't know it is the other players rubbing off on them, my game driving them to it, or some combination of the above.

Some data about my game(s):

I typically run about six encounters a session.

The players complain that they are forced to spend too much money on consumables, but are still significantly above WBL the entire game.

About once every five sessions they have a close fight where several of the players are down and they are seriously considering retreating to avoid a TPK, but pull through and win in the end.

About once every ten sessions the players will have an encounter where they are unable to achieve their goals the first time. They decide to fall back and regroup / resupply / research / ask for help, the enemy gets away and has to be tracked down, or the enemy incapacitates them on their first encounter.

About once every twenty sessions the party suffers a serious setback; the fail to stop the villain, they are forced to abandon the mission, one of the players dies (and resurrections isn't recoverable), they get their allies killed, or they make a mistake and choose the wrong side.

About once every fifty sessions the group actually suffers a TPK and either starts over or has to resort to a deus ex machina.



Three things:
First bolded is the mindset there. Regardless of the player, this is an antagonistic mindset to have. If that behavior is the character's concept, what are you going to do about it? That's the character the player wants to play. If this is a player issue and the entire party also finds this to be an issue, this should be handled out of character in a discussion with the player. perhaps the player is acting this way out of a lack of understanding of their options available.

Second bolded is a suggestion. As opposed to dropping cash, gems, art, etc. why not just drop the actual consumables? If those are potions, have the enemy use those against the party to clue the party in that there may be more of that on the corpse. If those are wands, drop partial wands on old corpses of previous adventurers or perhaps have partial wands as rewards for side-quests from different individuals in the area, something of a "while you're out there" kind of thing. Same with potions and scrolls as well. If that's for arrows or bolts... uhm... drop those too? Basically, instead of just dropping funds, drop stuff. Stuff is always more fun to fool around with anyway.

The italicized bit is 100% an OOC problem and you've got to get that under control. Talk to the player, figure out where their head space is, and find the middle ground. Getting upset mid-session absolutely detracts from the group and should be taken seriously. Better yet, use bold 2 and figure out a way to drop something for them that will enhance their ability to do their schtick. Maybe boots of air-walking that lets them walk about 3 inches off the ground and then 3 times per day they can do an acrobatic charge without a dice roll OR they can fly until the end of their turn, at which point they float harmlessly back down to 3 inches above the ground. This helps defeat caltrops, marbles, and most other dangerous terrain, while also augmenting their ability to do their thing. It keeps it within the confines of the rules and satisfies many of the problems you identified, but don't just do this. Have the conversation, find that middle ground, and then deliver the solution in-game. If the player starts getting out of hand again, politely stop, talk to the player and remind them of that middle ground, and restore civility to the game.

[Talakeal]

So, while the DMG does say that an average encounter will consume ~20% of a parties resources and that a party should be able to take on 4 encounters before resting, I suppose the 80% resources per adventuring day was just an inference I made 20 years ago and never questioned, so that makes this thread kind of moot.

Basically, my players complain that they seem to always end the adventuring day low on resources, and when I asked about this in another thread many people claimed that my campaign sounded extremely hard and that it was harder than most old school meat grinders, which really confused me as the players never actually lost battles or characters, and always ended the adventure having spent less than they took out and were always above WBL.

But, seeing as how there is actually no numerical metric for encounters per adventuring day, I guess its just totally subjective.


Okay, well then I think we can dispense with over-analysis on the numbers, because it sounds like closer to an expectations issue than anything else. If the players think the game should work such that they can clear a dungeon (completely, leaving no significant treasure behind) in one go (rather than going out and resting, 1. having to figure out how to do so safely and 2. risking the denizens planning countermeasures or leaving with the loot in the meantime), and without expending consumables (which are then used when?), then they clearly want a game with a different challenge tuning than most of us expect. For me, having accomplishing the whole thing so close you can almost taste it is exactly how things should be, because that means you get to make tough decisions, and those decisions matter. That seems like an optimal situation. But clearly your group disagrees. I will say that this rule of having the wizard get to turn unused spells into scrolls for profit does kinda strongly communicate the idea that you are supposed to get out of the dungeon with a reserve (and not just a 'what if you run into one last monster on the way out?' reserve), and that might be messaging-in-contradiction-of-intended-message on your part. Still, overall, I think you are dealing more with differing ideas of normal than anything else.

That is also how I feel.

They are supposed to make it out of the dungeon with a reserve, usually about ~20%. But sometimes things go bad, and that's when you should use consumables as a safety net IMO.


At some point you have to realize that at least some of their complaints shouldn't carry any weight since they seem to be prone to whining. The desire to make the game to everyone's liking is commendable but compromise -must- be part of that. There's a line between being willing to compromise and being a doormat.

I forget who the quote comes from but it goes something like "You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. You've got to choose your battles."

Okay, 1 is just pure whining. "We won but I don't like the margins" is a BS complaint that should be ignored outright. If things are getting tight and you don't want to burn non-renewable resources, either withdraw or hunker down and take the long-rest to restore your renewable resources.

2 is contradictory to 1. If they have the downtime to make scrolls (1 day/ scroll, minimum) then they have the time to slow down and approach the dungeon in a way that doesn't force consumable use. Especially given this:

This confuses me though. They never did have unlimited slots during down time. The per-day limit is exactly that; per day. Or at least per full night's rest for arcanists. Is a night's rest not a "long rest" somehow?



Oh, trust me, if I let them my players would never face more than one encounter per day and would spend years in town grinding money from professions if I let them.

Basically, I use something similar to 5Es long rest variant where it takes a full rest rather than one night to recover, and I use something akin to the Adventure League downtime crafting system.


So, I suppose this one is on me rather than something I can "hide behind the DMG" for.

But I agree with the basic premise, the players can always come back later rather than seeing every optional objective as something that must be cleared immediately and then bitching about a loss of consumables that still results in a net gain of wealth.



I always took the 1/2 price on sales to be a matter of the abstraction of buying and selling gear. You get half because, unless you specify differently, the presumption is that you're selling it to a pawn broker or some similar person who makes it their business to buy up adventurer loot in a market where there are -plenty- of established sellers of good standing while you're just a random nobody. If one of my players wants better than 1/2 then I'll let them roll a few skill checks for as much as an extra 10% or actually try to establish themselves as a competing seller by opening a shop and maybe get full value if they don't mind it taking a good while and dealing with the adventure hooks that come with being a businessman in a high-magic, high-fantasy world.

They always find some argument for making extra money; they will find other adventurer's and meet them in the middle, they will live in a shack and live off bread and water to avoid living expenses, they will trade outside city walls to avoid taxes... always some scheme to squeeze every last copper out of the system and then complaining "but realism" if I shoot any of them down or try and enforce consequences.


That's not the definition I've heard- milestone leveling is that the PCs all level up when you tell them to, after "milestones." Regardless, you're still running into a problem mentioned in the DMG, which is that generalizing xp risks making the players dissatisfied. Even if the amount is in fact the sum of the encounters, the players probably don't know that. And if they have to finish a mult-session dungeon before getting xp, that stretches things further. If they do know exactly what xp they should be getting (as you mention below they're aware of some of the CRs you're using), then the obfuscation and delay of xp gain are pretty much pointless.

The milestone is completing the dungeon.

I don't care what they do in the dungeon, if they want to skip encounters, or provoke extra encounters, or handle them in an unconventional way, that is their business not mine.



The decision to push the players towards that point is yours, because you specifically said you don't want them having 15 minute days, and apparently don't consider any other methods of disincentivizing it valid.

Could you please elaborate on this? I am not sure what ways of discincentivizing this you are referring to or why you assume I don't consider them valid. Also, how do these methods not also include some metric for how many encounters the players "should" face in a day?



Your perception does not matter. You have players that think your game is to hard, their perception is what matters. If you've figured out what amount of consumables they want to spend (by asking them) and the book says different, that means you're gonna have to deal with your players wanting something different from the book.

Sorry, going to have to hard disagree here.

The DM is a person too, telling them that their opinion doesn't matter but a player's does is absurd.

This also assumes that the players know what they want and are in full agreement, which is something that is very rare. Virtually every guide to playtesting I have ever read says something along the lines of "People are pretty good at noticing when something is wrong, but terrible at telling you exactly what it is, and even worse at telling you how to fix it."

Also; some people just like to complain or find excuses for their failures, and I can't accept that these criticisms are automatically valid.


Does it? I don't know what happened in the campaign or how invested the players normally acted, but "progress" is the most nebulous reward. Xp and treasure are rewards, numbers that go up on your sheet and directly say you can X because Y. Progress only matters so long as the players think it matters, and even worse, progress is expected to be automatic. Even if you have a session with no combat and no looting, it is assumed there will be "progress" of the game in some form. Your xp rewards are obfuscated, the players feel they're spending more consumables than they should and falling behind (whether the book says they are or not), and progress is part of showing up. Even if its only a little bit, each reduction in reward satisfaction makes other problems worse.

Yes. If you only care about numerical rewards, it says a lot about you're playstyle. Even the most "kick in the door / hack and slash" players I have ever gamed with care at least a bit about working towards their character's goals and motivations.

Also, I just had another poster get onto me for calling XP and treasure rewards. No wonder I am confused.


Yeah, pretty clear your group doesn't like consumables. The houserule for free scrolls may have sounded good, but what it's actually done is make someone feel like they're entitled to an infinite stockpile that increases every day, without actually making them feel better about using said stockpile. This group should probably just abolish consumable mechanics. Doing so might produce a further "save them from themselves" effect where in the absence of consumables they actually stop and rest at the point which feels comfortable to them, potentially reducing two stress factors.

Agreed.

Although hopefully I can figure out a way to come to terms with them without actually removing consumables, at that really fundamentally changes the game and takes away their "safety net" if things really do go bad, which will only lead to more drama and grief.


Spells (of significant effect) are easily counted. Hp is recovered by spells, therefore hp can be easily valued as spell slots (though hp loss, if channeled through the proper preemptive resistances and armored characters, may count for surprisingly few "spells"). Consumables are extra discretionary spending that I consider part of the safety net: you're never really expected to heal up or finish monsters off with wands or use the emergency potion of Water Breathing, but you use them when you need them. They're insurance against bad luck, mistakes, or trying to shoot for the moon. I would only expect consumable use in fights that I've planned such that I expect consumable use- though for groups where hp recovery is always from wands, that would greatly affect the expectations.

Mostly agree, although there have been a number of times when my players would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had used a consumable reemptively, for example a potion of flight before engaging a flying foe, a potion of fire resistance before facing a red dragon, an oil of ghost touch before facing an incorporeal foe, etc.


There remains one style of game I don't think has been mentioned: Is this a group that wants nothing but 1-2 fight days against equal or overleveled foes at all times? If they don't like "mop-up" and suddenly decide that they're too high level for areas they've apparently left unfinished, but complain not only about using consumables but also even burning through their daily resources, this sounds like a 1 fight per day group.

Which brings us once again back to the fact that as long as they're spending 20% on equal level encounters, they're fine, even if there was only one fight that day. Single fight days are only a problem when the party has a bunch of daily resources they can "nova," which as I mentioned way back at the beginning, can be solved by having them play classes that don't have a bunch of daily resources, even if you're not willing to modify xp appropriately for circumstances.

Such a game would, by necessity, be very slow paced, have (next to) no risk, have (next to) no challenge, and not really require any care or skill on the players.

Although they might find this fun in the short run, I would find it dreadfully boring, and as with the monty haul games I have run in the past, I can't imagine the players wouldn't quickly grow bored and move on.


All of that said: if they're monitoring your CR-use (even though you said they don't have the MMs memorized), then they're never going to be happy. Seriously, if players are whining about your encounters because you didn't use exactly X monsters of CR Y, it doesn't matter what you do. Even if you only use exactly the CR calculations they consider fair, they'll just find something else to complain about. If someone thinks they're better than the DM but insists on playing instead, there is no fix.

They aren't. They simply assume that if they had a hard time it must be because I threw an imbalanced fight at them.


The first time I DM'ed I obsessed over making encounters that challenged the players. Its a fine line to walk, and it gets tough the higher level you go. Eventually it got to a point where the encounters were decided in one or two rounds. The only way to prevent it would have been to take out several players in the Alpha, or some how otherwise deliberately screw over the players. I didn't want to DM that way, and expressed my concerns to my players. They gave me some great advice. They were having fun. As long as the encounters were interesting, it didn't necassarily matter whether they were pushed to their limits or not.

I offer you similar advice. If the players are having fun, it doesn't matter. Make the combats interesting and meaningful, and forget about daily quotas. They might have 1 single battle in a day that cleans them out, or it could be a cake walk that leads to interesting role play and decision making. As they get more powerful they may have a dozen small encounters in a day. As long as you are keeping the players interested, then you are doing your job.

See above.

Also, "interesting" fights are the last thing they want. They want straight forward fights where they can charge in and hack stuff to pieces (or stay back and blow it up with fireballs).

The biggest complaints I have gotten so far were fights against a fomorian whose goal was to throw them off a bridge rather than kill them, and avatars of the god of violence that when one was killed two would take its place. Both were very interesting non-traditional encounters, but both were absolute bitch-fests.


As others and I have said, 80% is a terrible metric, because all metrics are terrible. What matters is what your table finds fun. And, from the sounds of it, 80% is too high for your table.

However, it's worse than that.

Your game was a hex crawl. The party gained levels. The party went wherever they wanted. Later hexes, they fairly consistently lost 80% of their resources. Therefore, one of the following must be true: gaining power is a lie - their characters are still the same as when they started the adventure; the map is a lie - Talakeal is presenting his railroad in the intended order, with the illusion of choice as to where to go; the encounters and world-building are a lie - Talakeal is just making stuff up "appropriate to our level" / "to counter our power" when we get there.

Without some serious gatekeeping (with zones, keys, etc), you cannot have static enemies on a hex crawl present a static level of challenge to a dynamically-leveled party. That's just utter nonsense. And, if that was (how they saw) your game, your players had to be feeling it.

So, in context, both an 80% benchmark, and any static benchmark, are bad.

And, yes, as I and others have already said, there should definitely absolutely certainly be occasional "bar fight" styles of encounters, to let the players actually notice that their PCs have improved! Although this can be accomplished by letting the players encounter "old foes" (like skeletons or Ogres) and experience how much easier they are now. They don't have to be "why did we bother with this encounter" level of easy, just noticeably easier. And not always as part of some guaranteed 80% (±) grind.


Do note that my players demand balance, so saying "any benchmark is bad" won't fly with them, or me for that matter.

The map had points of interest on it "dungeons" that grew increasingly more dangerous the further from town one strayed. Each was balanced to consume ~80% of the resources of a party of a given level. The players could choose to visit them in any order. They were not the only things on the map, and players could do things like hiring mercenaries or calling in favors to get assistance with the dungeons if they wanted to tackle the tougher ones first.

Bar fight style encounters are absolutely fine. The problem is that they need to be part of a larger session, as my players would run riot if I didn't give them the full rewards.

For example, as I said above I let players convert unused spells into scrolls. One session (in a previous game) the wizard player missed almost the entire session, came in with about 5 minutes to go without casting any spells, and then demanded I let him convert his entire repertoire into scrolls.


This.

Look, setting aside the metrics for a moment, at the end of the day, D&D is a power fantasy. It's not suited to many other things. It's not a terrific noir detective experience. It's not super as a harem comedy. And in a world where characters can literally become immune to fear, horror is really, really hard to pull off. It's a power fantasy. That's not to say that everything should be easy for the heroes - it shouldn't - but at some point they need to come out on top and feel amazing doing it.

Maybe that's the source of the disconnect then. I have never much cared for power fantasies. I play RPGs for the immersion, the experiance of being someone I am not and exploring a fantasy world.

So, while the DMG does say that an average encounter will consume ~20% of a parties resources and that a party should be able to take on 4 encounters before resting, I suppose the 80% resources per adventuring day was just an inference I made 20 years ago and never questioned, so that makes this thread kind of moot.

Basically, my players complain that they seem to always end the adventuring day low on resources, and when I asked about this in another thread many people claimed that my campaign sounded extremely hard and that it was harder than most old school meat grinders, which really confused me as the players never actually lost battles or characters, and always ended the adventure having spent less than they took out and were always above WBL.

But, seeing as how there is actually no numerical metric for encounters per adventuring day, I guess its just totally subjective.


Okay, well then I think we can dispense with over-analysis on the numbers, because it sounds like closer to an expectations issue than anything else. If the players think the game should work such that they can clear a dungeon (completely, leaving no significant treasure behind) in one go (rather than going out and resting, 1. having to figure out how to do so safely and 2. risking the denizens planning countermeasures or leaving with the loot in the meantime), and without expending consumables (which are then used when?), then they clearly want a game with a different challenge tuning than most of us expect. For me, having accomplishing the whole thing so close you can almost taste it is exactly how things should be, because that means you get to make tough decisions, and those decisions matter. That seems like an optimal situation. But clearly your group disagrees. I will say that this rule of having the wizard get to turn unused spells into scrolls for profit does kinda strongly communicate the idea that you are supposed to get out of the dungeon with a reserve (and not just a 'what if you run into one last monster on the way out?' reserve), and that might be messaging-in-contradiction-of-intended-message on your part. Still, overall, I think you are dealing more with differing ideas of normal than anything else.

That is also how I feel.

They are supposed to make it out of the dungeon with a reserve, usually about ~20%. But sometimes things go bad, and that's when you should use consumables as a safety net IMO.


At some point you have to realize that at least some of their complaints shouldn't carry any weight since they seem to be prone to whining. The desire to make the game to everyone's liking is commendable but compromise -must- be part of that. There's a line between being willing to compromise and being a doormat.

I forget who the quote comes from but it goes something like "You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. You've got to choose your battles."

Okay, 1 is just pure whining. "We won but I don't like the margins" is a BS complaint that should be ignored outright. If things are getting tight and you don't want to burn non-renewable resources, either withdraw or hunker down and take the long-rest to restore your renewable resources.

2 is contradictory to 1. If they have the downtime to make scrolls (1 day/ scroll, minimum) then they have the time to slow down and approach the dungeon in a way that doesn't force consumable use. Especially given this:

This confuses me though. They never did have unlimited slots during down time. The per-day limit is exactly that; per day. Or at least per full night's rest for arcanists. Is a night's rest not a "long rest" somehow?



Oh, trust me, if I let them my players would never face more than one encounter per day and would spend years in town grinding money from professions if I let them.

Basically, I use something similar to 5Es long rest variant where it takes a full rest rather than one night to recover, and I use something akin to the Adventure League downtime crafting system.


So, I suppose this one is on me rather than something I can "hide behind the DMG" for.

But I agree with the basic premise, the players can always come back later rather than seeing every optional objective as something that must be cleared immediately and then bitching about a loss of consumables that still results in a net gain of wealth.



I always took the 1/2 price on sales to be a matter of the abstraction of buying and selling gear. You get half because, unless you specify differently, the presumption is that you're selling it to a pawn broker or some similar person who makes it their business to buy up adventurer loot in a market where there are -plenty- of established sellers of good standing while you're just a random nobody. If one of my players wants better than 1/2 then I'll let them roll a few skill checks for as much as an extra 10% or actually try to establish themselves as a competing seller by opening a shop and maybe get full value if they don't mind it taking a good while and dealing with the adventure hooks that come with being a businessman in a high-magic, high-fantasy world.

They always find some argument for making extra money; they will find other adventurer's and meet them in the middle, they will live in a shack and live off bread and water to avoid living expenses, they will trade outside city walls to avoid taxes... always some scheme to squeeze every last copper out of the system and then complaining "but realism" if I shoot any of them down or try and enforce consequences.


That's not the definition I've heard- milestone leveling is that the PCs all level up when you tell them to, after "milestones." Regardless, you're still running into a problem mentioned in the DMG, which is that generalizing xp risks making the players dissatisfied. Even if the amount is in fact the sum of the encounters, the players probably don't know that. And if they have to finish a mult-session dungeon before getting xp, that stretches things further. If they do know exactly what xp they should be getting (as you mention below they're aware of some of the CRs you're using), then the obfuscation and delay of xp gain are pretty much pointless.

The milestone is completing the dungeon.

I don't care what they do in the dungeon, if they want to skip encounters, or provoke extra encounters, or handle them in an unconventional way, that is their business not mine.



The decision to push the players towards that point is yours, because you specifically said you don't want them having 15 minute days, and apparently don't consider any other methods of disincentivizing it valid.

Could you please elaborate on this? I am not sure what ways of discincentivizing this you are referring to or why you assume I don't consider them valid. Also, how do these methods not also include some metric for how many encounters the players "should" face in a day?



Your perception does not matter. You have players that think your game is to hard, their perception is what matters. If you've figured out what amount of consumables they want to spend (by asking them) and the book says different, that means you're gonna have to deal with your players wanting something different from the book.

Sorry, going to have to hard disagree here.

The DM is a person too, telling them that their opinion doesn't matter but a player's does is absurd.

This also assumes that the players know what they want and are in full agreement, which is something that is very rare. Virtually every guide to playtesting I have ever read says something along the lines of "People are pretty good at noticing when something is wrong, but terrible at telling you exactly what it is, and even worse at telling you how to fix it."

Also; some people just like to complain or find excuses for their failures, and I can't accept that these criticisms are automatically valid.


Does it? I don't know what happened in the campaign or how invested the players normally acted, but "progress" is the most nebulous reward. Xp and treasure are rewards, numbers that go up on your sheet and directly say you can X because Y. Progress only matters so long as the players think it matters, and even worse, progress is expected to be automatic. Even if you have a session with no combat and no looting, it is assumed there will be "progress" of the game in some form. Your xp rewards are obfuscated, the players feel they're spending more consumables than they should and falling behind (whether the book says they are or not), and progress is part of showing up. Even if its only a little bit, each reduction in reward satisfaction makes other problems worse.

Yes. If you only care about numerical rewards, it says a lot about you're playstyle. Even the most "kick in the door / hack and slash" players I have ever gamed with care at least a bit about working towards their character's goals and motivations.

Also, I just had another poster get onto me for calling XP and treasure rewards. No wonder I am confused.


Yeah, pretty clear your group doesn't like consumables. The houserule for free scrolls may have sounded good, but what it's actually done is make someone feel like they're entitled to an infinite stockpile that increases every day, without actually making them feel better about using said stockpile. This group should probably just abolish consumable mechanics. Doing so might produce a further "save them from themselves" effect where in the absence of consumables they actually stop and rest at the point which feels comfortable to them, potentially reducing two stress factors.

Agreed.

Although hopefully I can figure out a way to come to terms with them without actually removing consumables, at that really fundamentally changes the game and takes away their "safety net" if things really do go bad, which will only lead to more drama and grief.


Spells (of significant effect) are easily counted. Hp is recovered by spells, therefore hp can be easily valued as spell slots (though hp loss, if channeled through the proper preemptive resistances and armored characters, may count for surprisingly few "spells"). Consumables are extra discretionary spending that I consider part of the safety net: you're never really expected to heal up or finish monsters off with wands or use the emergency potion of Water Breathing, but you use them when you need them. They're insurance against bad luck, mistakes, or trying to shoot for the moon. I would only expect consumable use in fights that I've planned such that I expect consumable use- though for groups where hp recovery is always from wands, that would greatly affect the expectations.

Mostly agree, although there have been a number of times when my players would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had used a consumable reemptively, for example a potion of flight before engaging a flying foe, a potion of fire resistance before facing a red dragon, an oil of ghost touch before facing an incorporeal foe, etc.


There remains one style of game I don't think has been mentioned: Is this a group that wants nothing but 1-2 fight days against equal or overleveled foes at all times? If they don't like "mop-up" and suddenly decide that they're too high level for areas they've apparently left unfinished, but complain not only about using consumables but also even burning through their daily resources, this sounds like a 1 fight per day group.

Which brings us once again back to the fact that as long as they're spending 20% on equal level encounters, they're fine, even if there was only one fight that day. Single fight days are only a problem when the party has a bunch of daily resources they can "nova," which as I mentioned way back at the beginning, can be solved by having them play classes that don't have a bunch of daily resources, even if you're not willing to modify xp appropriately for circumstances.

Such a game would, by necessity, be very slow paced, have (next to) no risk, have (next to) no challenge, and not really require any care or skill on the players.

Although they might find this fun in the short run, I would find it dreadfully boring, and as with the monty haul games I have run in the past, I can't imagine the players wouldn't quickly grow bored and move on.


All of that said: if they're monitoring your CR-use (even though you said they don't have the MMs memorized), then they're never going to be happy. Seriously, if players are whining about your encounters because you didn't use exactly X monsters of CR Y, it doesn't matter what you do. Even if you only use exactly the CR calculations they consider fair, they'll just find something else to complain about. If someone thinks they're better than the DM but insists on playing instead, there is no fix.

They aren't. They simply assume that if they had a hard time it must be because I threw an imbalanced fight at them.


The first time I DM'ed I obsessed over making encounters that challenged the players. Its a fine line to walk, and it gets tough the higher level you go. Eventually it got to a point where the encounters were decided in one or two rounds. The only way to prevent it would have been to take out several players in the Alpha, or some how otherwise deliberately screw over the players. I didn't want to DM that way, and expressed my concerns to my players. They gave me some great advice. They were having fun. As long as the encounters were interesting, it didn't necassarily matter whether they were pushed to their limits or not.

I offer you similar advice. If the players are having fun, it doesn't matter. Make the combats interesting and meaningful, and forget about daily quotas. They might have 1 single battle in a day that cleans them out, or it could be a cake walk that leads to interesting role play and decision making. As they get more powerful they may have a dozen small encounters in a day. As long as you are keeping the players interested, then you are doing your job.

See above.

Also, "interesting" fights are the last thing they want. They want straight forward fights where they can charge in and hack stuff to pieces (or stay back and blow it up with fireballs).

The biggest complaints I have gotten so far were fights against a fomorian whose goal was to throw them off a bridge rather than kill them, and avatars of the god of violence that when one was killed two would take its place. Both were very interesting non-traditional encounters, but both were absolute bitch-fests.


As others and I have said, 80% is a terrible metric, because all metrics are terrible. What matters is what your table finds fun. And, from the sounds of it, 80% is too high for your table.

However, it's worse than that.

Your game was a hex crawl. The party gained levels. The party went wherever they wanted. Later hexes, they fairly consistently lost 80% of their resources. Therefore, one of the following must be true: gaining power is a lie - their characters are still the same as when they started the adventure; the map is a lie - Talakeal is presenting his railroad in the intended order, with the illusion of choice as to where to go; the encounters and world-building are a lie - Talakeal is just making stuff up "appropriate to our level" / "to counter our power" when we get there.

Without some serious gatekeeping (with zones, keys, etc), you cannot have static enemies on a hex crawl present a static level of challenge to a dynamically-leveled party. That's just utter nonsense. And, if that was (how they saw) your game, your players had to be feeling it.

So, in context, both an 80% benchmark, and any static benchmark, are bad.

And, yes, as I and others have already said, there should definitely absolutely certainly be occasional "bar fight" styles of encounters, to let the players actually notice that their PCs have improved! Although this can be accomplished by letting the players encounter "old foes" (like skeletons or Ogres) and experience how much easier they are now. They don't have to be "why did we bother with this encounter" level of easy, just noticeably easier. And not always as part of some guaranteed 80% (±) grind.


Do note that my players demand balance, so saying "any benchmark is bad" won't fly with them, or me for that matter.

The map had points of interest on it "dungeons" that grew increasingly more dangerous the further from town one strayed. Each was balanced to consume ~80% of the resources of a party of a given level. The players could choose to visit them in any order. They were not the only things on the map, and players could do things like hiring mercenaries or calling in favors to get assistance with the dungeons if they wanted to tackle the tougher ones first.

Bar fight style encounters are absolutely fine. The problem is that they need to be part of a larger session, as my players would run riot if I didn't give them the full rewards.

For example, as I said above I let players convert unused spells into scrolls. One session (in a previous game) the wizard player missed almost the entire session, came in with about 5 minutes to go without casting any spells, and then demanded I let him convert his entire repertoire into scrolls.


As in most things, the key is to judge by results, not by inputs. If the players expend the same amount of resources fighting the Orc Army that they did rescuing Grandma Marla's kitty from that tree, how do they feel super? Why should they have stopped rescuing kitties from trees if the outcome of the much harder fight still feels the same? If they expend almost all of their resources fighting some enemies who are relatively low on the totem pole - goblins, kobolds, bandits, etc. - when will they ever feel confident enough to fight a Dragon? If the goal is to make them god-kings of an empire that spans an entire globe, how will they ever feel up to that challenge when raiding the Underdark is still a near-lethal exercise?

The goal isn't to make them feel "super" its to make them feel like "heroes".

What do you mean "the outcome still feels the same"? That makes no sense to me; its like saying that nobody should ever try and achieve anything because winning a local competition "feels the same" as becominng the world champion.

Also, I don't get why the proposed high level heroes are expending all of their resources drained by low level enemies in this example. Are you implying that I "scale up the world" like a bad Bethesda game, or do you assume my players are so dense that they can't infer that their level 20 demon slaying heroes could beat the crap out of the orcs they fought at level 1 because I haven't spent the time actually running them through a dungeon 15 levels below them as a demonstration of their power?



If you keep the players on a treadmill where everything they face takes everything they have, they don't reach that point. Because they never feel the result - that they've grown stronger. They never get to enjoy that high. And they need that.

Look, if you ever watch a horror or suspense film, you'll notice something. They periodically relieve the pressure. Somebody makes a joke, or expresses relief, or feels safe. For just a moment, everyone - including the audience - can let down their guard. You need this. If you keep the pressure at maximum for the entire story, the pressure loses its value. You periodically relieve that pressure, so you can ramp it up again to great effect.

Challenges are the same way. It's good to challenge your players, within reason. But periodically, they need to feel strong. They need to face a scrub, or a fight that was a challenge for them once but isn't anymore. That's how they feel they've made progress. That's what keeps them from feeling that everything is too hard.

Again, I find it really weird that you think players can't infer that a character who struggles to kill demon princes in Hell is no more powerful than one who struggles to kill giant rats in the abandoned mill.

Also, the players in my game can and do periodically meet and wipe the floor with the same enemies that they struggled with earlier. I just don't base entire adventures around the PCs beating up things far below their weight class.


Which is not to say I don't agree that there is value in varying the challenge of missions; some should feel harder and some should feel easier. The problem is, my players complain about both; if its too easy they complain that I am wasting their time by not providing them with as much XP and treasure, and if it is harder they complain that it is, well, too hard and therefore "imbalanced".

[upho]

I started this thread to ask about whether or not "80% resource expenditure is a good difficulty benchmark,"As others have pointed out, it's a very loose guideline and it definitely shouldn't be regarded as the only measure of difficulty. (As an example, I believe very few of the TPKs I've seen were caused by depletion of daily resources. Most of them were instead caused by a depletion of tactical resources, typically as a result of player/PC stupidity, poor DM judgement and/or bad encounter design.)

In addition, it's most likely not a good benchmark for your game and the preferences of your players, as both seem to deviate too much from the expectations the DMG guidelines were based on (like a lot of other games and player preferences AFAICT, mine included).

In more detail:

I typically run about six encounters a session.This seems to be reasonably in line with the DMG expectation of a "classic" attrition style game featuring a series of dungeons, each one filled with numerous easier fights against groups of mooks and ending with a more dangerous boss fight. So far so good.


The players complain that they are forced to spend too much money on consumables, but are still significantly above WBL the entire game.There's no causality between the first and the second part of this sentence in this context. It's perfectly possible for players to feel like they're "forced to spend too much money on consumables" regardless of whether their PCs have more or less wealth than according to WBL. The second part just means the PCs and the combat challenges they face in your game are a bit more powerful than they otherwise would've been, while the first part means your average adventuring day is too difficult for the players' apparent "kick in the door of every room, kill every monster with cool magic sword* and take their stuff to pay for even cooler magic sword*"-preferences.

*"Magic sword" refers to any items the PCs prefer to use (which is obviously not consumables).

Assuming the proportion of the treasure you give and of the party's total gear value consisting of consumables is about on par with the DMG guidelines, the players' preferences obviously don't agree with those guidelines. IOW, you should probably reduce this proportion and adjust the difficulty accordingly, treating consumables more like Fizban said:
Consumables are extra discretionary spending that I consider part of the safety net: you're never really expected to heal up or finish monsters off with wands or use the emergency potion of Water Breathing, but you use them when you need them. They're insurance against bad luck, mistakes, or trying to shoot for the moon. I would only expect consumable use in fights that I've planned such that I expect consumable use- though for groups where hp recovery is always from wands, that would greatly affect the expectations.Needless to say, I very much agree.


Basically, the players tend to attack all of the optional encounters, and are thus above WBL, but also a bit more resource starved then normal. If they are beaten up going into a fight, they will typically use consumables before hand to make up the difference. The extra treasure they get from optional fights is typically more than they get lose from consumables. This results in them having an overall higher WBL than normal in permanent equipment, but also using more consumables than normal.This seems to indicate that your adventures include more numerous and/or significant optional encounters than expected by the DMG guidelines. As a comparison, published adventures very rarely include enough optional encounters to noticeably offset expected WBL (or XP/level progression speed).


Basically, I allow scrolls to be crafted XP and GP free, but I also use a long rest variant. In effect, this means that he can save unused spell slots from one adventure to another, and he feels like if he ever ends a mission using more scrolls than he creates he is "getting poorer".This definitely deviates from what the DMG guidelines expect. I can also clearly see why your player feels like he's "getting poorer", because even though his resources have obviously increased once a mission has been completed, they may very well have decreased in relation to the challenges he'll face on his next mission.


I don't actually give XP for combat at all; I use milestone levelling exclusively.And do you grant the players extra milestones for defeating optional challenges? If not, this is also most definitely not expected by the DMG guidelines. And likely more than any of the above, this directly decreases the suitability of using "80% resource expenditure" as a difficulty benchmark, since your players/PCs are rewarded far less than in a "standard" game for taking the risk of expending such a large proportion of their resources.

Independently of the benchmark issue, I really recommend you award additional milestones for successfully taking on any optional challenges and design your adventures accordingly. As long as the PC's level increases are regarded and intended as a direct result of the PCs activities and as a reward for their achievements, it shouldn't matter whether the activities and achievements were optional or not, only how significant they were.

(Btw, I've personally played in and run games with milestones for many years (and haven't used XP in decades), but some years ago my regular home game group switched to simply leveling up when we believe it would be appropriate story-wise and/or simply fun, largely independently of the PCs activities or achievements. This is by far the best PC progression "system" I've used, allowing me to play more in the level ranges I enjoy the most and giving me more freedom and less work as a GM. I completely understand that it's not for everyone though, perhaps especially not for groups of people who haven't already played together for a long time or GMs who rely on related guidelines/systems when designing their encounters and adventures.)


Also:

"Objective" power means nothing. Most people don't care that they can objectively kill things, because they don't go around randomly killing things. Unless they actually see that previous fights are now easier, they cannot feel more powerful. If those fights are always in greater numbers such that they burn down to nearly nothing anyway, those fights will not feel easier, they will feel like an unending treadmill. For this clearly completionist group that never skips a fight, the DM must deliberately place combats with previously dangerous (and now less dangerous) foes, without a specific resource/challenge/whatever target, to ensure that the players get to demonstrate their new difference in power.This.


However-

This line makes it sound like you have a group which with an extremely narrow idea of what fights they'll find fun. To the point where I'd usually suggest someone like that should try being the DM, because they'll either be happier in control, or find out how impossible their demands are.And this.


That's the point. Before your players can have the confidence to take on bigger challenges, you have to show them their progress - by showing that the smaller challenges have gotten easier. That makes the players feel that the PCs are more capable, more powerful. And that inspires them to move on to bigger and badder things.

If you keep the players on a treadmill where everything they face takes everything they have, they don't reach that point. Because they never feel the result - that they've grown stronger. They never get to enjoy that high. And they need that.And especially this. So very much.

[Fizban]

What defines "of significant effect?" . . .
Don't get me wrong, this whole argument is purely academic since, as I said in my previous quote, you can just eyeball it and do well enough. I wouldn't expect anyone to actually do all the necessary formulation and math to get a precise value but it doesn't change the fact that details matter if you're trying to be precise.
Whatever your eyeballs find significant. Though as the numbers center around 4/day/level, unless they're completely eschewing use of some level of spells, it's not that hard to see when they've used a slot from every level, or that they've used all their slots that you know can impact their foes. Rating hp loss in spell slots is mostly useful if they're actually going to use slots to restore that hp, you're just anticipating it like any other spell use.

How does an artificer fit into this idea when a -huge- portion of his day to day power comes from wands and staves?
We'll clearly disagree on how huge a portion of the artificer's power comes from burning consumables. Much of which depends on how many they have, which depends on what they're able to craft, which depends on types of treasure acquired (cash vs items to sell) determining how much they can spend on it.


Could you please elaborate on this? I am not sure what ways of discincentivizing this you are referring to or why you assume I don't consider them valid. Also, how do these methods not also include some metric for how many encounters the players "should" face in a day?
As I said, you could just not award xp for fights where the PCs use an extravagent amount of resources. Thus 15 minute days give no xp until they fight something sufficiently difficult that it should take an entire day's power to win, so they either stop doing it, or refuse to fight anything but big nova brawls. You said you would never be so harsh as to not give xp for a fight, so clearly you don't consider this valid.

The DM is a person too, telling them that their opinion doesn't matter but a player's does is absurd.
This also assumes that the players know what they want and are in full agreement, which is something that is very rare. Virtually every guide to playtesting I have ever read says something along the lines of "People are pretty good at noticing when something is wrong, but terrible at telling you exactly what it is, and even worse at telling you how to fix it."
Your perception will not change that of the players. One player is not more important than the DM, but two players is half the party. Desired consumable use if a fairly safe bet when it comes to direct answers, it's not a nebulous playtesting issue. And when I said deal with it, that includes the options of asking them to compromise or kicking them out- if making the change on your end is a deal-breaker.

Yes. If you only care about numerical rewards, it says a lot about you're playstyle. Even the most "kick in the door / hack and slash" players I have ever gamed with care at least a bit about working towards their character's goals and motivations.
And it takes a serious investment for someone who showed up to play 3.5 DnD, one of the most complicated mechanical tabletop games, to care so much about "progress" that it eclipses the other two. Treasure and xp are a foundation of the Game in Roleplaying Game, and I smell dissatisfaction with both in your player descriptions. Furthermore, though it sounds counter-intuitive, the more agency the players have, the less fulfilling "progress" is. Apparently this was intended to be an impartial hex-crawl? So they're not on a continuous adventure path against the BBEG, and they're not pursuing the challenge of personal goals vs intentional DM interference. They're just. . . going around clearing bandit camps and climbing radio towers and maybe plot shows up if they feel like it.

I remember another poster saying once that the best times their supposedly anti-railroad party had, were the parts of the game were the most on-rails. Riding down the rails, plowing through obstacles and doing the stuff expected of you, is the most rewarding of the nebulous "progress" set for a lot of people, though they might not realize it. The trick is to make the rails so fun and inviting they don't see them as rails. In absence of proper structure, many people default to simple power acquisition, as in: treasure and xp. And all your players' complaints seem to be about treasure and xp. . .

Also, I just had another poster get onto me for calling XP and treasure rewards. No wonder I am confused.
The particular terms doesn't matter. The point is the game gives out treasure and xp because people like getting treasure and xp, your players have identified a dissatisfaction with the consumables/treasure system, and you've admitted to using an xp system that has known potential to reduce satisfaction.

Although hopefully I can figure out a way to come to terms with them without actually removing consumables, at that really fundamentally changes the game and takes away their "safety net" if things really do go bad, which will only lead to more drama and grief.
Not as much as you might think. As long as they have a Cleric of sufficient level, there's essentially nothing they need to buy scrolls or potions of. The safety net can be replaced with bigger, flashier consumables that don't even have saleable gp value, like an Angel or Genie (or Devil, Demon, etc) who owes them a favor and can be summoned up with their whatever-name.

Such a game would, by necessity, be very slow paced, have (next to) no risk, have (next to) no challenge, and not really require any care or skill on the players.
Although they might find this fun in the short run, I would find it dreadfully boring, and as with the monty haul games I have run in the past, I can't imagine the players wouldn't quickly grow bored and move on.
You seem to have missed the part where I said they should be playing classes without daily resources to nova. No nova, challenge stays mostly the same. And if/when they get bored and decide to fight more often, great, problem solved.

The actual problem is that it's unlikely they'd actually agree to switch to no-resource classes, because if they feel like they can barely win with normal spells, they'll never win without them.

Also, "interesting" fights are the last thing they want. They want straight forward fights where they can charge in and hack stuff to pieces (or stay back and blow it up with fireballs).
The biggest complaints I have gotten so far were fights against a fomorian whose goal was to throw them off a bridge rather than kill them, and avatars of the god of violence that when one was killed two would take its place. Both were very interesting non-traditional encounters, but both were absolute bitch-fests.
I mean, that bridge fight is still straightforward, they just get the extra fear of being thrown off a bridge. Which probably seems unfair because they can't do it. As for the latter, yeah I'd probably cry foul at a homebrew enemy that duplicates itself on death, without any further context. Especially if it was a puzzle boss vs a party you know doesn't like puzzles.

For example, as I said above I let players convert unused spells into scrolls. One session (in a previous game) the wizard player missed almost the entire session, came in with about 5 minutes to go without casting any spells, and then demanded I let him convert his entire repertoire into scrolls.
Both a problem with the free scroll mechanic, lack of rules regarding late/absent players, and this particular player being a butt. I must assume there was another reason they were showing up, as anyone should know if you're that late you shouldn't bother.

and always ended the adventure having spent less than they took out
You mentioned before spending 50gp consumable to get 100gp, which I assume wasn't an actual example- because that's a terrible deal. But it does seriously beg the question of just how they were spending so much cash on consumables when you're giving them infinite free scrolls and still have to point out they "left with more than they took out."

Basically, I use something similar to 5Es long rest variant where it takes a full rest rather than one night to recover, and I use something akin to the Adventure League downtime crafting system.
I don't know what a "full rest" means, but if you slowed down resting then you don't get to complain about resting slowing down the game.

Oh, trust me, if I let them my players would never face more than one encounter per day and would spend years in town grinding money from professions if I let them.
They always find some argument for making extra money; they will find other adventurer's and meet them in the middle, they will live in a shack and live off bread and water to avoid living expenses, they will trade outside city walls to avoid taxes... always some scheme to squeeze every last copper out of the system and then complaining "but realism" if I shoot any of them down or try and enforce consequences.
Too bad. Consequences *are* realism, and DnD doesn't have a "realistic" economy anyway. This is where you put your foot down and tell them you showed up to run 3.5 DnD, not their fantasy business spreadsheet. If they want to settle down and roll Profession for the rest of their lives, great, game's over, Smash Bros?

Your capitulation and reinforcement of this is not helping. You let them have free scrolls, but I think you also said they could convert them into money, as in these aren't stockpiled spells but actually just free money? And you've given them an extra downtime crafting system that almost certainly results in more than the normal rules. They get rewarded for whining about money, and then apparently have to burn tons of money every time they actually fight, which only gives them more reason to whine about it.

Also, I don't get why the proposed high level heroes are expending all of their resources drained by low level enemies in this example. Are you implying that I "scale up the world" like a bad Bethesda game, or do you assume my players are so dense that they can't infer that their level 20 demon slaying heroes could beat the crap out of the orcs they fought at level 1 because I haven't spent the time actually running them through a dungeon 15 levels below them as a demonstration of their power?
You said you vary the number of fights (and indeed, your players seem to think you're picking CRs out of a hat), and using underleveled fights with the same target resource expenditure means you must use more of those underleveled foes. Now apparently this was a hex crawl game and you set dungeon levels rather than auto-scaling, but that doesn't change the fact that each area has been rigorously leveled and your players apparently have some idea of the expected level (if they're refusing to go to underleveled areas but also not getting wiped for bashing their head against overleveled areas).

Also, the players in my game can and do periodically meet and wipe the floor with the same enemies that they struggled with earlier. . .
Which is not to say I don't agree that there is value in varying the challenge of missions; some should feel harder and some should feel easier. The problem is, my players complain about both; if its too easy they complain that I am wasting their time by not providing them with as much XP and treasure, and if it is harder they complain that it is, well, too hard and therefore "imbalanced".
Well if its a hex crawl they're self directed and you're not wasting their time, and if they walk into an overleveled area it's supposed to be their own fault. Your descriptions do not make this sound like a hex crawl- as Quertus said, something doesn't add up. Either your players are blaming you for their choice of progression through a truly impartial open world, or it wasn't very impartial to them. And the ever murkier question of consumables and free wealth generation only makes it worse.

[Quertus]

Sorry, going to have to hard disagree here.

The DM is a person too, telling them that their opinion doesn't matter but a player's does is absurd.

This also assumes that the players know what they want and are in full agreement, which is something that is very rare. Virtually every guide to playtesting I have ever read says something along the lines of "People are pretty good at noticing when something is wrong, but terrible at telling you exactly what it is, and even worse at telling you how to fix it."

Also; some people just like to complain or find excuses for their failures, and I can't accept that these criticisms are automatically valid.

Blood pudding is gross. The fact that (some theoretical) you is a person, and loves blood pudding, does not change the fact that I find it gross.

So, yes, it is, in fact, absolutely irrelevant that you are a person, too, for how hard your players perceive the game to be.


Such a game would, by necessity, be very slow paced, have (next to) no risk, have (next to) no challenge, and not really require any care or skill on the players.

Although they might find this fun in the short run, I would find it dreadfully boring, and as with the monty haul games I have run in the past, I can't imagine the players wouldn't quickly grow bored and move on.

Well, then, test it. Either they'll quickly grow bored, and you've not wasted much time, or you'll be proven wrong, and you'll learn something.

Heck, even if you're proven right, you might learn something. And, maybe, if you focus on "learning something" rather than "getting your fix", you'll finally get out of your multi-decade rut in Bizarro world.


Do note that my players demand balance, so saying "any benchmark is bad" won't fly with them, or me for that matter.

Fine. They all play as Quertus, perfectly balanced, done.

My point is, someone else imposing some arbitrary metric (in this case, your misreading of rulebooks to believe in an 80% resource expenditure as a desirable benchmark) does not work. Only you know what you like. Someone else cannot tell you that you cannot enjoy the song because it has "too many notes".

The only value of metrics in this context is that they are things that some groups might care about - and, therefore, if you are having problems, they are things that you might want or need to change, to match the value preferred by your group.

You, OTOH, when told by your players that the food was too hot for their taste, responded that it was exactly as hot as you intended. And you cannot see how that is bad. That's… troubling.


The map had points of interest on it "dungeons" that grew increasingly more dangerous the further from town one strayed. Each was balanced to consume ~80% of the resources of a party of a given level. The players could choose to visit them in any order. They were not the only things on the map, and players could do things like hiring mercenaries or calling in favors to get assistance with the dungeons if they wanted to tackle the tougher ones first.

Bar fight style encounters are absolutely fine. The problem is that they need to be part of a larger session, as my players would run riot if I didn't give them the full rewards.

For example, as I said above I let players convert unused spells into scrolls. One session (in a previous game) the wizard player missed almost the entire session, came in with about 5 minutes to go without casting any spells, and then demanded I let him convert his entire repertoire into scrolls.

So, the adventure sites ("milestones") were clearly color-coded for their convenience. OK.

The players could choose to visit them in any order? Except… they were already more difficult than your group wanted, (and one encounter away from death - or, worse, expulsion / loss of treasure / sense of failure), and they cannot lower the difficulty by leveling up through farming XP, because you only give milestone XP.

So this is very much the "on rails" version of a hex crawl, where there is one clear optimal path, and the party is punished for straying off the rails (or, rather, punished less for staying on them). Which "works" because you have players as conditioned as you are to need their fix (in their case, "getting full rewards", which I take to mean "getting milestone XP").

So, in 3e, I could give them a rewarding, "proof of growth" fight very easily: give them the fight, give them their loot & XP, let them rest, done. With a good group, I could probably pull it off in under a half an hour, leaving plenty of time to still run a "full" game.

Removing the XP (because milestone XP)? That would make it less rewarding for some tables… which would, in turn, make the entire game/system less rewarding for those players. Others, it could work if former "boss fight" characters - say, ogre knights - continued showing up, but in lesser roles. "Oh, look, we just mopped the floor with a dozen ogre knights. Remember 10 levels ago, when one counted as a boss fight?" "Yeah. What I really remember, though, was 5 levels ago, when the lone ogre Knight realized he was hopelessly outmatched, and surrendered to us without a fight." Yet other tables wouldn't care that they weren't getting XP, and would relish the popcorn fights.

And there's the point - run the game for the players you have.

Kudos to your Wizard player, for trying to get you to run the game he wants by manipulating the rules, since talking to you clearly wasn't working. You should consider ways to give the group the agency to fix your games in the future.


Do note that my players demand balance, so saying "any benchmark is bad" won't fly with them, or me for that matter.

The map had points of interest on it "dungeons" that grew increasingly more dangerous the further from town one strayed. Each was balanced to consume ~80% of the resources of a party of a given level. The players could choose to visit them in any order. They were not the only things on the map, and players could do things like hiring mercenaries or calling in favors to get assistance with the dungeons if they wanted to tackle the tougher ones first.

Bar fight style encounters are absolutely fine. The problem is that they need to be part of a larger session, as my players would run riot if I didn't give them the full rewards.

For example, as I said above I let players convert unused spells into scrolls. One session (in a previous game) the wizard player missed almost the entire session, came in with about 5 minutes to go without casting any spells, and then demanded I let him convert his entire repertoire into scrolls.

Also, you might want to consider putting your post on a diet? Not letting it use the photocopier? Or whatever it was that caused it to have doubled content.

[Red Fel]

Maybe that's the source of the disconnect then. I have never much cared for power fantasies. I play RPGs for the immersion, the experiance of being someone I am not and exploring a fantasy world.

Except, and I'm trying (and I know I'm failing) to be delicate here - you're not playing. You're running the game. They are playing.

Immersion is great. If you, as DM, can accomplish immersion for your players, that's a credit to you. But immersion, alone, does not make a game. It makes a story. You can accomplish immersion just as well by reading a well-written story to a group.

This is a game. They are playing the game. Immersion is necessary, not sufficient. Your players need to feel that they have agency - that their decisions have meaning, that their actions make a difference - or else you might as well just be reading a story to them. Letting the PCs feel powerful is a way to accomplish that. It is ostensibly your goal - you wanted them to eventually become god-kings of the continent or world or something, right? They need to feel that. They need to feel that they've earned it. Feeling powerless for much of the game, because each fight takes so much out of them, only to be told at the end, "Congratulations, you're now the most powerful beings alive," does not feel earned. There is no point, before that, in which you feel like you actually are powerful.

That, by the way, is where immersion can too easily break down.


The goal isn't to make them feel "super" its to make them feel like "heroes".

What do you mean "the outcome still feels the same"? That makes no sense to me; its like saying that nobody should ever try and achieve anything because winning a local competition "feels the same" as becominng the world champion.

Also, I don't get why the proposed high level heroes are expending all of their resources drained by low level enemies in this example. Are you implying that I "scale up the world" like a bad Bethesda game, or do you assume my players are so dense that they can't infer that their level 20 demon slaying heroes could beat the crap out of the orcs they fought at level 1 because I haven't spent the time actually running them through a dungeon 15 levels below them as a demonstration of their power?

Except, in D&D terms, heroes are super. A level 1 Paladin, no matter how noble or pure or heroic, will not save the kingdom from the dragon. He just won't. He needs to also be mighty and smitey. To be a hero - to be one who can make a difference - in D&D means to be powerful. And if the players don't feel powerful, the PCs aren't, no matter what their objective numbers are.

I mean the outcome still feels the same because the players experience no difference in the experience. If fighting a housecat at level 1 is just as dangerous as fighting an orc at level 5, a part of my mind is saying, "Why did I leave housecats behind?" I'm not saying everything has to get easier, and I'm definitely not saying you have to run them through a dungeon 15 levels lower - please don't put words in my mouth - but I'm saying they need to feel a difference. See a difference. They need to be able to say, "Oh, I'm fighting orcs because those housecats aren't a challenge anymore. I'm fighting dragons because orcs are no big deal anymore. The PCs need a reason to move up the Ladder of Disposable Baddies, and if every fight is equally exhausting, they don't have that.

I wasn't implying anything "Bethesda-like" about your gameplay. But I also didn't say that proposed high level heroes should expend all of their resources against low level enemies. Because they shouldn't. That's the point. They should be able to face weaker enemies so effortlessly that they can say, "Oh, that's why I'm fighting demons and gods now. Because I'm freaking awesome."

Again, I'm not saying you run them through a lower-level dungeon. But per your description, at no point do they feel like the fighting has gotten easier. At no point do they get that rush of feeling strong enough to take on the world. I'll throw your own question right back at you - why haven't your level 20 demon slaying heroes encountered any hostile orcs? I assume orcs still exist, unless your PCs' job at level 10 was to genocide all of them. I assume they've run into some hostiles who were too stupid to realize they were hopelessly outclassed. Or maybe some hungry wolves who don't know any better. Something. And that's the point - the players need to be able to see that they've gotten stronger, or else those stat boosts and level-ups on their character sheets are just meaningless numbers.


Again, I find it really weird that you think players can't infer that a character who struggles to kill demon princes in Hell is no more powerful than one who struggles to kill giant rats in the abandoned mill.

Also, the players in my game can and do periodically meet and wipe the floor with the same enemies that they struggled with earlier. I just don't base entire adventures around the PCs beating up things far below their weight class.

Which is not to say I don't agree that there is value in varying the challenge of missions; some should feel harder and some should feel easier. The problem is, my players complain about both; if its too easy they complain that I am wasting their time by not providing them with as much XP and treasure, and if it is harder they complain that it is, well, too hard and therefore "imbalanced".

I'm not saying the players can't infer this. I'm saying that what they consciously know conflicts with how they unconsciously feel, because while they know that demon princes are stronger than mill rats, they don't feel a difference in the difficulty of the fight, because they never reached a point where mill rats felt easy. They just jumped straight up the food chain to the next tough enemy.

Again, I'm not saying you base an entire adventure around beating up weaklings. Please don't suggest that's what I said. I said occasional scrub fights. And you mentioning this - that they can and do periodically meet and wipe the floor with earlier enemies - is, frankly, new information. If I had that, say, three posts ago, I probably wouldn't have taken the position that I did. It does seem, however, inconsistent with your stated view that each encounter requires consumption of one fifth of their daily resources.

Also, your players' complaint is a curious one. It sounded earlier like you said that rewards came at the end of a milestone - say, a dungeon - rather than at the end of each combat. Yet now you suggest that the players complain that lower-level fights do not provide the same rewards as challenging ones. Why do they have the expectation of per-fight rewards at all if your default is milestone rewards?

[Willie the Duck]

This thread has taken a negative turn. I don’t feel the need to contribute to that, however, this…

Oh, trust me, if I let them my players would never face more than one encounter per day and would spend years in town grinding money from professions if I let them.
…
They always find some argument for making extra money; they will find other adventurer's and meet them in the middle, they will live in a shack and live off bread and water to avoid living expenses, they will trade outside city walls to avoid taxes... always some scheme to squeeze every last copper out of the system and then complaining "but realism" if I shoot any of them down or try and enforce consequences.
…
This also assumes that the players know what they want and are in full agreement, which is something that is very rare. Virtually every guide to playtesting I have ever read says something along the lines of "People are pretty good at noticing when something is wrong, but terrible at telling you exactly what it is, and even worse at telling you how to fix it."
…
Also; some people just like to complain or find excuses for their failures, and I can't accept that these criticisms are automatically valid.
…
Although hopefully I can figure out a way to come to terms with them without actually removing consumables, at that really fundamentally changes the game and takes away their "safety net" if things really do go bad, which will only lead to more drama and grief.
…
They aren't. They simply assume that if they had a hard time it must be because I threw an imbalanced fight at them.
…
Also, "interesting" fights are the last thing they want. They want straight forward fights where they can charge in and hack stuff to pieces (or stay back and blow it up with fireballs).

The biggest complaints I have gotten so far were fights against a fomorian whose goal was to throw them off a bridge rather than kill them, and avatars of the god of violence that when one was killed two would take its place. Both were very interesting non-traditional encounters, but both were absolute bitch-fests.
…
Do note that my players demand balance, so saying "any benchmark is bad" won't fly with them, or me for that matter.
…
For example, as I said above I let players convert unused spells into scrolls. One session (in a previous game) the wizard player missed almost the entire session, came in with about 5 minutes to go without casting any spells, and then demanded I let him convert his entire repertoire into scrolls.
…
Which is not to say I don't agree that there is value in varying the challenge of missions; some should feel harder and some should feel easier. The problem is, my players complain about both; if its too easy they complain that I am wasting their time by not providing them with as much XP and treasure, and if it is harder they complain that it is, well, too hard and therefore "imbalanced".

Indicates to me that this group dynamic (at least as you report it) is basically broken beyond all recall. It sounds like your group wants to succeed without any actual risk or challenge or expenditure of resources, throw a fit when this does not happen, and cannot or will not explain what it is that they do want (also unaware or uncaring that this is both unfulfilling and nearly impossible to keep up for you). I just can’t imagine how one could have run a game (much less a sandbox one) that meets this criteria long enough for this dynamic to have developed. I am not saying you are misrepresenting this, but honestly, with me reading back my impression of your situation, is there any part of it you think I misinterpreted?

[Talakeal]

There are some individual points in the last few posts that I want to respond to, but I think I am just going to try and resist my urge to be stubborn and defensive and let it go for now.

I will add a clarification though; the 20% per encounter and 80% per adventuring day are averages, not some hard rule, and I absolutely due vary it up a bit.


Overall, I think the root problem for my game might be a sort of "cancelled the Christmas bonus," deal. I have put rules into the game to reward good play and encourage players to play smart and conserve resources, but now this has become an expected part of the reward structure and thus it feels like a punishment when the players have a session that is merely average.

[Kelb_Panthera]

So, while the DMG does say that an average encounter will consume ~20% of a parties resources and that a party should be able to take on 4 encounters before resting, I suppose the 80% resources per adventuring day was just an inference I made 20 years ago and never questioned, so that makes this thread kind of moot.

The guideline is phrased in a way that makes such an inference difficult to avoid. That aside, people saying your idea of fun for the game doesn't matter should be ignored just as quickly as a lot of your players' whining. It doesn't really help that your players' stated desires are self-contradictory.

"We want 'balanced' encounters."

"Your game is too hard."

A series of balanced encounters is -supposed- to be hard, FFS.



Oh, trust me, if I let them my players would never face more than one encounter per day and would spend years in town grinding money from professions if I let them.

And this level of risk aversion suggests they're not interested in being anything that could even be charitably called a hero. There's an anime series running this season lampooning exactly this kind of attitude. I think you'd have a unique appreciation for it.

In any case, this is one of those discussion points where you're supposed to get everybody on the same page for game expectations. I presume you've already expressed to them that their absurd degree of caution makes the game difficult for you to get motivated over.

I gotta tell ya, I'd probably have packed it up and told them to get a new DM if I was in your place.


Basically, I use something similar to 5Es long rest variant where it takes a full rest rather than one night to recover, and I use something akin to the Adventure League downtime crafting system.

So it's a week between spell recovery? That explains why they're unwilling to hunker down in a dungeon.

This is the first thing you've said that I'd actually call a serious mistake on your part. I'm guessing it's something to do with preventing a 15 minute adventuring day in a more permanent way than having to spring ambushes and apply time pressures constantly? If so, it's a kludge.

The ideal solution would be for you to have a talk and for them to agree not to do that unless it's absolutely necessary. Failing that, applying time pressures, including actually following through with consequences, and ambushes at least periodically should at least give them pause with such behavior. Finally and least elegantly, lean into the curve and throw encounters at them that justify it; 65% resource drain per fight.

Having to withdraw for a week, potentially allowing the dungeon to repopulate or at least regroup, after one load of what's normally daily party resources is a bit extreme and likely plays a substantial role in their "too difficult" complaint.

If I've misinterpreted and you only make them take a 24hr long-rest and 8hr short-rest, that's not so bad. Also, what benefits are there to a short-rest, if any?



So, I suppose this one is on me rather than something I can "hide behind the DMG" for.

Eh, maybe somewhat on that last bit.

Overall though, it sounds like you have players that are risk-averse in the extreme, who'd rather balance their in-character books than actually adventure. I'm honestly questioning why you're even playing at this point. The divide between your desires for the game is more of a chasm than a loose seam, IMO.


They always find some argument for making extra money; they will find other adventurer's and meet them in the middle, they will live in a shack and live off bread and water to avoid living expenses, they will trade outside city walls to avoid taxes... always some scheme to squeeze every last copper out of the system and then complaining "but realism" if I shoot any of them down or try and enforce consequences.

Yeah, those complaints are firmly in "STFU" territory. Tell 'em "You want to use "realism" to pinch every copper coin until you've got copper wire then I"m gonna use "realism" to regulate it and have an actual game. You can hide behind "it's a game" if you want but then you're getting half-value from treasure because that's part of the game's abstraction and no more wasting time on avoiding taxes and crap like that. Pick one."

Gotta put your foot down sometimes and that's definitely one of those places. Don't even let them make an argument. Just demand the choice between realism and gamism be made and run with it. If they don't like it, they're free to walk. The game collapsing would just about be a blessing at this point from what I can see.


Although hopefully I can figure out a way to come to terms with them without actually removing consumables, at that really fundamentally changes the game and takes away their "safety net" if things really do go bad, which will only lead to more drama and grief.

I'd cut consumables and crafting altogether in your position. Give the wizard an extra wizard bonus feat for scribe scroll and never look back.

Time to start streamlining until something gives. They bitch, you cut unless it's a part of the system that is essential. Tell 'em you're that's what you're doing up front and they can either learn to stop bitching, play a much smaller game, or kick rocks. Do invite any of them that think they can do better to sit the GM seat for a while.

I'll be honest here, though. I'm getting kind of ticked off at them just reading about your game.



Such a game would, by necessity, be very slow paced, have (next to) no risk, have (next to) no challenge, and not really require any care or skill on the players.

Although they might find this fun in the short run, I would find it dreadfully boring, and as with the monty haul games I have run in the past, I can't imagine the players wouldn't quickly grow bored and move on.

Might be worth sampling anyway, just to make the point. You're apparently willing to suffer for these people's enjoyment so suck it up for an adventure or three and throw it back in their faces the moment they -hint- at a "too easy" complaint.

Hell, tell them "You chuckle-heads figure out what you want this game to be, together, and tell me. If it doesn't sound like utter crap, I'll run it."


They aren't. They simply assume that if they had a hard time it must be because I threw an imbalanced fight at them.

Like I said, invite them to do better if they think they can. You're going through all the work to make a game world so they can play at all and they bitch and moan and whine that it's your fault everytime -they- screw up. How have you not taken to beating them yet?

Sometimes it may be that you really did screw up the estimation of a foe's challenge but that certainly should not be their default presumption if an encounter turns out to be harder than they think it ought to be. That's sheer entitlement. Me and mine are a bit rough and I can't imagine this not having resulted in a fist fight if this is the same group I remember you telliing horror stories about from years ago.


Also, "interesting" fights are the last thing they want. They want straight forward fights where they can charge in and hack stuff to pieces (or stay back and blow it up with fireballs).

The biggest complaints I have gotten so far were fights against a fomorian whose goal was to throw them off a bridge rather than kill them, and avatars of the god of violence that when one was killed two would take its place. Both were very interesting non-traditional encounters, but both were absolute bitch-fests.

Oh, FFS. The first one sounds like a great encounter and an act of mercy, besides. If something like -that- is too much for them, I can't fathom why you're still playing with these people. The latter I could at least potentially see their point but I'm gonna guess that was supposed to be a major boss-fight? They'd absolutely crap the bed over a perfectly ordinary hydra, wouldn't they.



Do note that my players demand balance, so saying "any benchmark is bad" won't fly with them, or me for that matter.

The map had points of interest on it "dungeons" that grew increasingly more dangerous the further from town one strayed. Each was balanced to consume ~80% of the resources of a party of a given level. The players could choose to visit them in any order. They were not the only things on the map, and players could do things like hiring mercenaries or calling in favors to get assistance with the dungeons if they wanted to tackle the tougher ones first.

Ask them to define balance. I'd bet a substantial amount of money that can't, at all. I think the idea that "any benchmark is bad" is a nonsensical one but so is complaining about a benchmark you know nothing about, which is apparently what your players are doing.

Demand they -all- read the encounter section of the DMG. Then tell them, in on uncertain terms, that you're sticking to those guidelines because that's the line for balance set by the system. If they have a problem with it then they can take it up with Monte Cook or Skip Williams. This is -not- a particularly solid argument, tbh. It's not meant to be. It's a shut-down for their bitching. They want to pass the buck to you for their failings so you pass it right along and tell them to STFU. I wouldn't suggest this if your players were anything resembling reasonable but here we are.



Bar fight style encounters are absolutely fine. The problem is that they need to be part of a larger session, as my players would run riot if I didn't give them the full rewards.

Okay, no. You've got to stop taking responsiblity for their screw ups. A bar fight ends in nothing accomplished at best or legal consequences at worst. You don't get treasure for it. You probably don't get more than a pittance of XP for it if you're us


For example, as I said above I let players convert unused spells into scrolls. One session (in a previous game) the wizard player missed almost the entire session, came in with about 5 minutes to go without casting any spells, and then demanded I let him convert his entire repertoire into scrolls.

And you laughed in his face? 'S what I'd do.


Maybe that's the source of the disconnect then. I have never much cared for power fantasies. I play RPGs for the immersion, the experiance of being someone I am not and exploring a fantasy world.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. The problem is that your players don't seem to actually want either of those. They want it to be both and neither as benefits them from moment to moment. They want encounters that aren't too hard but aren't too easiy, not too complex but not too simple, and with rewards that require no expenditure. They want the economy in the game to make sense when it means getting payed and want it to just be a game when it would cost. They're like Goldilocks if she were a spoiled toddler.


The goal isn't to make them feel "super" its to make them feel like "heroes".

The goal is to present them fun challenges and make them feel something. That something can be super, hero-like, dread, or amusement, depending on what kind of tone you want to take.


What do you mean "the outcome still feels the same"? That makes no sense to me; its like saying that nobody should ever try and achieve anything because winning a local competition "feels the same" as becominng the world champion.

It's a weird bit of human pychology. It's also the reason a lot of high-level athletes suddenly quit and get normal jobs. You can see the objective metrics and understand that you -are-, in fact, progressing on an intellectual level but it doesn't -feel- like it because the relative gains from one season to the next are so small and the competition doesn't get any easier when you're competing at the level appropriate to your ability. This isn't sport but it's the same psychological phenomenon. You can see your character's numbers getting bigger and the monsters becoming more and more fearsome but the struggle still leaves you at the same degree of resources drained even if those resources are objectievly bigger units now. It's part of why I run throw-back encounters for my players to absolutely slaughter something they once struggled with once in a while.



Also, the players in my game can and do periodically meet and wipe the floor with the same enemies that they struggled with earlier. I just don't base entire adventures around the PCs beating up things far below their weight class.

And, dare I ask, what do your players think of those encounters?





It would be wholly inappropriate to suggest beating them with lightweight furniture, so I won't. :smallwink:

[QUOTE=Fizban;24269470]Whatever your eyeballs find significant. Though as the numbers center around 4/day/level, unless they're completely eschewing use of some level of spells, it's not that hard to see when they've used a slot from every level, or that they've used all their slots that you know can impact their foes. Rating hp loss in spell slots is mostly useful if they're actually going to use slots to restore that hp, you're just anticipating it like any other spell use.

That works well enough for the game to function but it's hardly what you could call precise. And that was the core of my point there; making a -precise- measurement of resource expenditure isn't so simple. What you've said here amounts to expendables aren't party resources, or could be read that way at least. That's patently false on the face of it though.

I agree that they probably shouldn't be part of the expected expenditures for most characters but you don't want to put them in some sacred, untouchable space either. It's a weird game space, all in all. I mean, you can't reasonably consider the charges on a wand of lessor vigor as just part of a safety net that has nothing to do with their day to day staying power.


We'll clearly disagree on how huge a portion of the artificer's power comes from burning consumables. Much of which depends on how many they have, which depends on what they're able to craft, which depends on types of treasure acquired (cash vs items to sell) determining how much they can spend on it.

Potions and scrolls, we probably agree. Wands and staves though? Several of the early mid-level features of the class may as well be a neon sign that says "use some wands, dummy.*" If you're in that boat anyway, not upgrading to a staff later so you can use your own caster level just seems foolish. Even several of the lower level infusions are geared toward making the most of wand use.

You don't have to if you don't want to but I suspect most artificer players will. Then you have to account for it because the argument that it's not a major part of that character's day to day power is utterly absurd. It'll probably also play a pretty substantial role in slowing the day to day use of their infusions.

*hypothetical "you" not Fizban, specifically.

[Fizban]

I agree that they probably shouldn't be part of the expected expenditures for most characters but you don't want to put them in some sacred, untouchable space either. It's a weird game space, all in all. I mean, you can't reasonably consider the charges on a wand of lessor vigor as just part of a safety net that has nothing to do with their day to day staying power.
Yeah, that's why I said groups that wand-heal all the time would count differently.

Potions and scrolls, we probably agree. Wands and staves though? Several of the early mid-level features of the class may as well be a neon sign that says "use some wands, dummy.*" If you're in that boat anyway, not upgrading to a staff later so you can use your own caster level just seems foolish. Even several of the lower level infusions are geared toward making the most of wand use.
The question is how much wands. A charge per fight of an affordable wand seems reasonable to me (said wand will last around four levels), more if you use the infusion that pays for them or you're in throuble, but most people seem to assume that Artificers are spamming full metamagic stacked mailman orbs every round all the time (which I wouldn't allow any more than a non-Artificer mailman). Again, if they're using consumables as main tech rather than safety, that means you'll need to figure out how much you want them to consume per level and track accordingly. But I think the intended default is closer to safety/prudence than expected burn.

[Willie the Duck]

Overall, I think the root problem for my game might be a sort of "cancelled the Christmas bonus," deal. I have put rules into the game to reward good play and encourage players to play smart and conserve resources, but now this has become an expected part of the reward structure and thus it feels like a punishment when the players have a session that is merely average.

That is certainly something that is easy to have happen. My current DM recently let the game slide into a 15 minute workday, and at least one player started treating it as the new normal. Given that the DM just kept upping the challenge to compensate, it became untenable to be a front-liner (because both sides' aggro had increased, but it still mostly landed on the front line).

[smetzger]

Observation -

You seem to be following 'guidelines' in the DMG pretty specifically. But then you don't give XP, you use milestones for leveling up.

Is your progression slower than if you were giving out XP as per book? If it is slower then perhaps players the slower progress is an issue.
Also, their is a psychological aspect to getting XP. It is a measurable progression towards going up a level.

You may want to consider switching to using XP. If you want slower progression don't give as much XP out, I have calculating XP as if the monster had one less CR, matches my preferred progression rate.

[Talakeal]

Observation -

You seem to be following 'guidelines' in the DMG pretty specifically. But then you don't give XP, you use milestones for leveling up.

Is your progression slower than if you were giving out XP as per book? If it is slower then perhaps players the slower progress is an issue.
Also, their is a psychological aspect to getting XP. It is a measurable progression towards going up a level.

You may want to consider switching to using XP. If you want slower progression don't give as much XP out, I have calculating XP as if the monster had one less CR, matches my preferred progression rate.

It is about the same as if they killed every monster in the dungeon.

[Calthropstu]

It is about the same as if they killed every monster in the dungeon.

See, in a sandbox world or even overland this doesn't work. Because ALL of the players I have ever had try to squeeze out extra coinage, extra xp, extra npc favors etc.

But I like the plot driven levels rather than xp driven. It allows me to throw higher level monsters that actually challenge the party without forcing me to hasten their xp growth.

[Godskook]

IMO progression and narrative goals are accomplishments in and of themselves; beating up an army of demons and saving the world certainly feels more "powerful" to me even if it uses up the same percentage of my resources as beating up a group of goblins and saving a sheep farm did at level one.

You're doing a comparison. That's -logic-. You're making a logical comparison, i.e., approaching this rationally. How an encounter /feels/ is not a comparative thing. Some of us have managed to route our feelings through our rational thought, and while that can be useful at times, it's not the standard method of feeling generation.

[Talakeal]

See, in a sandbox world or even overland this doesn't work. Because ALL of the players I have ever had try to squeeze out extra coinage, extra xp, extra npc favors etc.

But I like the plot driven levels rather than xp driven. It allows me to throw higher level monsters that actually challenge the party without forcing me to hasten their xp growth.

I don't follow. Could you please elaborate?


You're doing a comparison. That's -logic-. You're making a logical comparison, i.e., approaching this rationally. How an encounter /feels/ is not a comparative thing. Some of us have managed to route our feelings through our rational thought, and while that can be useful at times, it's not the standard method of feeling generation.

No; but it can sure help inform the approach I take when trying to rectify the situation.

For example, if you are doing something that is logically good but feels bad, trying to "put a positive spin on things" might be more effective than reworking the thing entirely.

[Godskook]

No; but it can sure help inform the approach I take when trying to rectify the situation.

For example, if you are doing something that is logically good but feels bad, trying to "put a positive spin on things" might be more effective than reworking the thing entirely.

Sure.

--------------------

As for your initial question, it comes down to three things:

1.The zone of proximal development

2.What sort of experience your players want to have.

3.Are you more attached to your style of gaming or your group of players.

The first is a concept from psychology to describe how tough something is. For some players, an encounter that requires resource expenditure to survive is too tough. For others, if an encounter can't kill 3 players in the opening round, there's no point even pulling out the combat map. Understanding your players and where they're at, developmentally as players, will let you tailor encounters to them, rather than some arbitrary standard. My PCs can't handle solo-threat invisible monsters typically. They don't have the preparations or tactics to deal with them before PCs die. So at my table, I treat invisibility as a bump to CR if the monster is a respectable melee threat without it.(Hellcats, for instance).

For the second, some players don't want to rollplay(not a spelling error) at all, and just freeform roleplay. Others want to "play" as if they're using cheat-codes. Not every player wants to experience D&D as it was (roughly)designed: a weaving of storytelling, tactical combat and random tragedy. It will be eminently helpful to you to understand what sort of gaming experience your players -want-. Players who adamantly their characters to be essentially invincible outside major plot events will not enjoy 3.5 as it is suggested unless they are insanely good at this game, as most players will inevitably die a few times in cheap situations.

Finally, on understanding how skilled your players are(as a group), and what sort of gaming experience they're after, you need to decide where your compromises are going. Are you ok DMing an easy-mode game cause that's where your players are at? Are you ok DMing one cause that's what they -want-? Cause while D&D is "supposed" to be hard, those are just guidelines, and you can trivially tailor the difficulty of the game to where-ever you want. For me, I lean towards preferring to have a group and make the game easier because that's where my players are at, but not making the game easier because that's the sort of game they want. I try to keep the game hard enough that players can legitimately just -die- from time to time, and they do.

[Calthropstu]

I don't follow. Could you please elaborate?


I mean "experience equal to fighting the dungeon" doesn't work when there is no fixed dungeon. In a sandbox world, you often have to make up stuff on the fly. And PCs have a tendency to go onto WIDELY different paths that you never thought of. Flexibility and adaptability are an absolute must.

But if you throw stronger monsters then, under the xp method, you accelerate level progression far faster than if you did "Equal to ecl" encounters. Since, in my experience, "Equal to ecl encounters" generally equates to cakewalk, I tend to pit my PCs against actually challenging monsters that are well above their CR. With no TPKs to date, I seem to have a knack for identifying and making challenging but not party wiping encounters. (No TPKs, but plenty of character deaths)

So, I decide ahead of time when my PCs should be level X based on larger events within my world, rather than "exp should equal this after X many monsters have been killed."

[Bartmanhomer]

If D&D was easy then it will be a very boring game. :tongue:

[Psychoalpha]

So, I decide ahead of time when my PCs should be level X based on larger events within my world, rather than "exp should equal this after X many monsters have been killed."

This is more or less what we do. Also we play Pathfinder so no spending xp for anything. :p

[Calthropstu]

This is more or less what we do. Also we play Pathfinder so no spending xp for anything. :p

Same. Even when I ran 3.5 I always hand waved the xp cost of crafting. It was a bs mechanic in my opinion. It doesn't even make much sense. How can we have these gigantic magic marts when crafting required xp costs?

Instead, I wrote a very different requirement into my universe. It needs something to bond the magic to the item. One such thing that was in widespread use was elemental souls. This was kept secret from anyone who wasn't a magic crafter. Another possible way is to place a part of a magical or planar creature into the item in question. ie: a feather from an angel's wing, a dragon's claw, etc. Only problem with this use is that it twists the magic towards the alignment of the creature the item came from. A paladin with a sword that was created using a demon claw would feel uneasy every time he picked it up. That sort of thing. I like this a lot better than standard magic item crafting rules.

[Talakeal]

I mean "experience equal to fighting the dungeon" doesn't work when there is no fixed dungeon. In a sandbox world, you often have to make up stuff on the fly. And PCs have a tendency to go onto WIDELY different paths that you never thought of. Flexibility and adaptability are an absolute must.

But if you throw stronger monsters then, under the xp method, you accelerate level progression far faster than if you did "Equal to ecl" encounters. Since, in my experience, "Equal to ecl encounters" generally equates to cakewalk, I tend to pit my PCs against actually challenging monsters that are well above their CR. With no TPKs to date, I seem to have a knack for identifying and making challenging but not party wiping encounters. (No TPKs, but plenty of character deaths)

So, I decide ahead of time when my PCs should be level X based on larger events within my world, rather than "exp should equal this after X many monsters have been killed."

Ok, got you.

Yeah, it isn't really a pure sandbox, more of a freeform hex-crawl. The players were wandering monster hunters, and they got milestone XP for killing one of forty legendary beasts that roamed the wilderness in the region. Half of these monsters were in dungeons, and those that were gave out an XP reward roughly equal to clearing the entire dungeon, even if the players ignored or bypassed the actual fights.

[omegaghost]

In my games most encounters are overpowering at least. But more often than not my players (all of whom are beginners) are enjoying it and are successful at overcoming them (with some DM help here and there on my part, which they usually don't even notice). So I'd say it's just that people you're talking to aren't the people this game is meant for.