"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.

Usually it is one of two things. Either the person is just a toxic asshole who wants to fuck over everyone, which is not that rare or they think of themselves as a player as well a bit too much. While the Dungeon Master is a part of the game and a player, sometimes the line can get a bit blurred where it seems like the Dungeon Master is playing against you to win. Does not mean that they're a bad dungeon master. Sometimes mistakes just happen or people get swept up, or other things they're going on. Soft reminders like saying that you enjoy all playing the game together or other such language that makes it seem cooperative helps to extinguish this behavior from a dungeon master. Using language like you're beating the dungeon master, even if it's in a joking way, can instill that behavior in the dungeon master themselves.

I dunno if the new books do this, but when I started DMing, I was surprised that actually the NPCs *are* like a video game. They have rules for their behavior that dictates what they will attempt to do, and will be fairly stupid if you just do things by the book.

Talking is a free action. He'd say it right away.

I've switched to GURPS because the mechanics *aren't* so combat-focused, but it has interesting combat mechanics too. A lot of people think it's too complicated, but I've always started off super simple and slow-dripped additional mechanics as players get comfortable with the system and start actively looking for more crunch. I do think it balances the super involved, tactical combat well by making rounds much shorter. Instead of 6 second rounds with Action, Reaction, Bonus Action, Movement, you have 1 second rounds that give you a single Action. There are ways to squeeze in a bit more on your turn, but it comes with trade-offs, like sacrificing active defense. Active defense is also a great mechanic. Instead of just swinging at an AC, the defender actually gets an opportunity to Parry, Block, or Dodge. This means a lot less damage gets done every round, but that's balanced by having *way* fewer Hit Points. I always thought people chipping away at each other's mountains of HP until one dies to be kinda boring and unrealistic. In real fights, it's generally a back and forth of attack and defense until an attack finally gets through and does significant damage. And I won't really get into all the details of the many different maneuvers available to you, or the techniques you can train. I'll just say that it's *extremely* tactical and provides for suspenseful combat with real stakes.

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 think my biggest complaint might actually be that no matter what you plan to do, you're pretty much always better off just bonking your opponent and doing damage. Taking an extra turn to sneak around enemies and take them out stealthily? Hitting two turns in a row is better! Grapling an enemy to give your teammate a better chance at succeeding his attack? Still, two bonks will do twice as much damage. Healing? Complete waste of time as long as your HP stays above zero (and even then it only matter when you're still down by the start of your mext turn).

Completely agree. Combat should feel fast and dangerous. With 5e It feels exactly like what it is. A bunch of sweaty nerds having a make believe d*ck measuring contest of whose made up character is the most awesome. But combat is far from the only problem here.

I'm somewhat glad that Pathfinder doesn't have silence in the same way that dnd has and nerfed the shit out of counterspell as well. The second one makes it so much more satisfying when you get to do it.

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 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