Hi everyone! To (mis)quote Walt Disney, "[Dungeons and Dragon] will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world. It is something that will never be finished. Something that [we] can keep developing and adding to."
I'm a rules fiddler and a house rule-er. I love the game partially because it can be fiddled with. I've now had the chance to run several games, enough to start feeling out the system. It's definitely harder to do that it was in 4E, where the character balance was a lot tighter. But I'm gladly finding the character balance in 5E to be reasonably close to each other. There are a few things within the classes that I'd like to address (wildshape, animal companions, and bladelocks mostly), but by and large I like the class system and the feat system, and I absolutely love the class system.
There are only two things that really stand out to me. First, is player and low level monster HP. I feel it's too low. I fully understand the "realism" metric, that a crit from a big weapon should be as deadly as an executioner's axe to the back of the neck. I get it. It's definitely a play style that should exist (though I'd handle it differently myself, such as with active defenses and damage mitigation, for instance). When a greatsword wielding fighter deals 11.33 damage on a hit at first level (on an average roll), and a Rogue with a rapier does 11 damage (or two shortswords for a potential of 13.5), and that's as much HP as a Fighter with a reasonable constitution score, I'm a little worried.
The first sessions we ran, we used the rules by the book. People were dropping in every single fight. Our very first encounter brought the cleric down in the first round, before he could act, and the characters got to sit around for 2 hours for the cleric to wake up. Oops. The fact that an equally skilled fighter vs. a fighter (which I could do with the NPC creation guidelines) would boil down to rocket tag, or that 1st level spells can do the same thing, is not a style I or my group enjoy. We liked 4E, which was balanced around "about" 4 hits to drop something, and had a similar hit chance, so combat lasted 6 rounds or so. The only fight we've had in 5E that lasted that many rounds was an anti-climactic zombie horde (6).
My second issue is with the monsters in general. Many of them feel boring to me (the only thing exciting about the dragons is their lair actions; otherwise, they're all nearly identical to each other). Their HPs feel inflated and their ACs seem low. Their attack bonuses are largely low and their damage is largely high. I trust that the designers had a balance point in mind for these, but maybe there's a way to change it.
Someone suggested getting rid of the swingyness of combat by doubling HP and all short rest and long rest refreshed abilities. I'm sure the spellcasters would like having more spell slots. I could also turn "per short rest" into "per encounter" for even less spikes.
But I wonder if there's another way. Player attack bonus starts around +5, while monster AC starts around 13. Monster attack starts around +3 and player AC typically has a floor of 15 (leather+16 Dex, 14 Dex+mage armor) and goes up from there. A little more to hit and AC for monsters, and more HP for players, might balance things out. Also, some guidelines for saves and ability scores for monsters would be nice.
So what do you think? If you like things as they are, explain yourself rather than just shooting the discussion down. If you find combat too swingy, how would you tackle it?
Thanks.
Hello Xeviat! BTW, I always enjoy your stats posts.
Xeviat-DM wrote:
I also enjoy your posts, Xeviat, though I'll admit that I don't see eye-to-eye with some of your positions. 
My experience so far in 5th has been up to 4th level in the Lost Mines of Phandelver, as well as a single short session (1 hour) of level 6 test encounters - we got through 2 of 6. To explain that last bit a little more, I am running a "Day's" worth of encounters (six) with short rest periods after encounters 2 and 4 in order to see how well I can create encounters using the encounter creation system in the DMG, and to see how well it measures up to the party.
Xeviat-DM wrote: