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.

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.

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

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

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.

But by no longer utilizing poison against the party because of the monk, the monk has effectively made the entire party immune to poison by virtue of it no longer being present in encounters! Hah! But seriously though, cutting out stuff you know the party will hard-counter is just going to make the party not feel as cool. A balance of both is important. Believe me, as the guy in the party who could cast Silence, I know; hard-countering every boss encounter kind of makes the boss feel lame instead of fun.

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.

But by no longer utilizing poison against the party because of the monk, the monk has effectively made the entire party immune to poison by virtue of it no longer being present in encounters! Hah! But seriously though, cutting out stuff you know the party will hard-counter is just going to make the party not feel as cool. A balance of both is important. Believe me, as the guy in the party who could cast Silence, I know; hard-countering every boss encounter kind of makes the boss feel lame instead of fun.

I have a character in a campaign DM'd by my buddy, and they're a pretty weak build, as he was giving powerups to the party I asked for a much weaker change to my character that would let me make an attack while staying hidden. Literally, the first time I got to try out the strategy, it was immediately invalidated, and I wanted to quit on the spot. The one cool thing my character could do I wasn't allowed to do...

I feel like too many DMs play *against* the players instead of *with* them The goal is not for the DM to win and feel cool The goal is to let the players win and feel cool

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...

Wrong. I'm perfectly capable of creating comex encounters. It's just a fact that the system actively punishes any DM who tries to set up a FUN encounter because there's so many special abilities that just simply solve any inconvenience at the cost of an action. My players should feel rewarded because they managed to build a campfire from discarded boxes so that they have a steady source of light during an important fight and not feel punished because they picked one of the threeish races that don't have darkvision. My players should feel clever because they managed to fashion a pulley system to move a significant amount of treasure out of the dungeon and not because they just stuffed everything into their bag of holding and forgot about it. 5e is boring by design and making it interesting means fighting against the system every step of the way!

I managed to work up an immunity to Poison, so our DM had a drow princess get one last action when she got to 0 hp to attack me with her only attack spell as I had severely pissed her off, and it was cast at 5th level But her only attack spell was Ray of Sickness

I have a character in a campaign DM'd by my buddy, and they're a pretty weak build, as he was giving powerups to the party I asked for a much weaker change to my character that would let me make an attack while staying hidden. Literally, the first time I got to try out the strategy, it was immediately invalidated, and I wanted to quit on the spot. The one cool thing my character could do I wasn't allowed to do...

That's all we'll and good but in my experience DMing, it takes a lot of work to prepare interesting outcomes for the actions my players might take during a pivotal moment. A player with a guaranteed success at something is usually something I try to avoid so they don't feel railroads or like doing things that way is the ONLY solution. With 4 players I want everyone to have an equal share of interesting moments but when one person starts being a powerbuilding min/maxer I tend to build events from time to time that won't let them just steal the whole show. Unfortunately, because they are a min maxing powerbuilder they are keenly aware of any opportunity for which they should have been the most OPest of characters and will sniff out how they have been silently slighted. They lock on to the fact that they didn't get to shine a few times while glazing over the times where they were OP because in their mind, that's how it's supposed to be! Before you know it they start pouting, complaining to others, backseat rules lawyering, and just generally acting like they are being mistreated rather than trusting the DM to be trying their best to fit their fucking chadly, mind-controlling demigod in to situations with 3 other people who haven't hyper focused for days on the most efficient use of their action economy. I'm bitching sure but end effect was similar to this meme's bad DM. I just stopped putting effort into letting the flawless demigod look cool because while he was A main character he was not THE main character and if that upset him... Well maybe next time he'll finally learn why the actual best characters to play are the ones with lots of interesting flaws