I have started to balance the game less and less and its getting more and more fun.

DM- "Catch this, monk boy"

This was always frustrating. One particular dm did that a lot. Oh, x was showing up so someone took y ability to deal with it? X no longer shows up ever again. Cool. Feels bad.

First, hell yes. Second, if you like being an adversarial DM, just let them know that's the type of game you like to run. They don't have to play and you will have to find some players that like that style.

But you see, that's not how 5e works. 5e just throws an endless amount of instant problem solving abilities at your players to the point where there are no problems left except for "How do I deal even more damage?". It still kind of works with characters up to level 7ish, but everything after is just cool character moments without any problem left to overcome. Iean, there's a reason why almost no one plays double digit levels in DnD. I just finished my last DnD campaign and am now enjoying my life with systems that allow me as the DM to actually challenge my players without the need to spend several days of preparation to make sure my encounters won't just be solved by a single "Um actshually..." sentence.

They removed that from monk in 2024

I'd like to imagine the monk catching the ballista projectile and getting whisked away by it

It's honestly really funny to me how frequently some DMs forget basic writing principles. If something is set-up, either by yourself or your players, you should find a way to pay it off. It's a really lame story if your monk has developed an immunity to poison and it never comes up a single time. Chekov's gun was made to be fired!

And if you still want to throw them a curveball you can always throw in the occasional bit of exotic ammunition that messes with them when they catch it (Use sparingly so they still get to feel cool) 

My favorite dragon encounter was a dragon that I still don't know the species of. The damn thing was puce. My DM didn't want us to have any meta knowledge. It was fun though because of how we got to, and dealt with, said dragon. Dragon was in a mountain lair that, when scryed upon it was revealed, was full of traps and minions. My wizard figured out that she had just enough 8th and 9th level spell slots to cast Xorn Movement, and Improved Invisibility on the entire party (no invisibility on herself though), and still have 2 casts of Unfailing Missiles (9th level spell she created). We successfully snuck into the dragons lair, and took positions. Our monk was ready to grapple its tail, our rogue was ready to backstab, and was flying because he had a magic item, our cleric was prepping Harm,and our fighter was annoyed that I put her behind myself. I tapped said sleeping dragon on the nose, and said in Draconic, "Wakey wakey." The dragon opened its mouth to use whatever breath weapon it had, and I said, "That's not a good idea, that will just make me and my friends angry." The dragon then realized I was speaking draconic and parlayed with us. We explained that we didn't even want to be there, but the gods had tasked us with the eviction of the few dragons that weren't supposed to be on this particular prime material plane in the first place. We also explained that we had brought with us 20 empty bags of holding, and would prefer to relocate them off the plane to a plane of their choice. Thankfully that dragon took the deal. The other three ended up with their souls in rather large black diamonds.

Even better, just have that inscribed on the ballista bolt/arrow/the flying tree.

"Oh the monk is immune to poison?! Well hah! ......I completely forgot"

I’ve run campaigns all the way up the level 20. It’s still possible that to challenge the PCs, just increasingly difficult. Eventually it gets to be so much work on the DM that it’s not really worth it anymore.

In a comedically Looney Toons style

Any favorites? Our DnD campaign just fizzled out due to several unsatisfying sessions - mostly due to an increasingly boring combat experience.

I don’t want to sit here defending 5e but 80% of the complaints I hear about always seem to boil down to “why isn’t the system creative _for_ me?!”. It’s a lot of people self-limiting and then being mad. You can instantly create a harder, thoughtful encounter by simply introducing more enemies than just one they can beat on, and/or by doing WHAT THE BOOK SAYS and get the players used to multiple encounters per day so they need to manage their resources. My DM wanted to make fights harder and I simply mentioned that a stronger enemy is cool and all but what would be better is making us have to make choices. I was a stupid accurate fighter and focused on range, and while feats and stuff made me a dangerous close-quarters fighter I was also the only one who could reliably down other ranged enemies. We played up to level 13 in that campaign and there were a lot of fights that were pretty stressful and fun. We even had a tournament arc and that was wild. _Your_ inability to create complex encounters is not the fault of the system, especially when the system literally tells you how to make it work and you ignore what’s in the book. But, of course, not reading the material is pretty standard procedure for D&D players.

I would argue that both are bad game/story design. Unless the skill is a plot point, it should not change the chance encounters in the world your players are in. Both of these examples are meta-gaming. The NPCs of the world didn't know the player characters had that ability, and should not change their actions until it is known to them. I had one DM who was huge on meta-gaming, and at first I thought it was just some peev of his, but honestly after a while and understanding it better- it made a better experience. It now makes me annoyed to see it used and I better understand his rants...

Honestly, why do DMs feel the need to try and wipe the party? DMs should be hoping the party succeeds because the party is usually going to find a way to wipe without their assistance.

You also don't need to make every enemy an idiot like a videogame. Monk catches an arrow? Archer wastes a turn figuring that out, calls it out to his teammates start of next turn and targets someone else. A green dragon, depending on your source books, should be more than smart enough to notice its breath attack didn't work on someone and change tactics. It doesn't work in every situation, like with enemies that shouldn't be smart enough to figure it out, but there's some great room for fun reminding your players that the enemies aren't always braindead. It also can add an extra layer to combat. Take out the commander that's noticing this stuff to prevent it. Kill the archer before he can call out the monk caught his arrow, so another archer wastes a turn.

See, my question here would be "Why is combat boring in your games?" Because I see a lot of people try to fix D&D by focusing on making the most interesting board game possible, but roleplaying games aren't board games, they're stories. For me, combat in systems like Shadowrun, D&D, WFRP, Storyteller and so on is boring because it brings the game to a crashing halt. The fact that it can takes hours of table time to play out a few rounds of combat in most of those systems is, to my mind, a far bigger issue than their relative quality as tactical gameplay experiences. Shadowrun tried to layer on more and more special moves and manuevers and combat abilities in the name of making combat more "interesting" and the effect was the exact opposite as so much more of the game became looking up the mechanics for the specific action you're trying to take. Combat should be fast and vibrant, and sometimes really scary. A firefight in Shadowrun - my go-to because it's the game I run the most - should feel like a shootout from Heat or Ronin, or a John Wick movie. And it's impossible to make anything feel like that when it takes an hour for everyone to get a single turn in. This is just my take at the end of the day, but I don't think the solution to boring combat is more or better rules. I tried that for years and nothing ever worked. What did work was finally shifting to more narrative focused systems with minimal, versatile rules that allowed me to treat combat just like anything else in the game. That way I could stop focusing on tracking hit-points and initiative, and I can make combat flow into the rest of the rest of the story in a way that feels natural, fluid, and visceral.