D&D: Why DMs Should Stop Making Fake Challenges In Encounters

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When many Dungeon Masters made the transition from 4e to the 5e rule set, they realized it was a wholly different animal from the tightly balanced math of 4e, and that encounters that dance on the knife’s edge of a Total Party Kill typically provide fake challenges, removing player agency from the experience. The fourth edition system, and 2e, both deliver well-designed tactical fantasy combat where a Dungeon Master can trust the game’s balance will work as intended. ’s current edition has wildly varying levels of power, depending on party composition, making deadly encounters unsatisfying.

More DMs should attempt encounters with -style maps, taking advantage of complex terrain, and the tactics it facilitates, butfar too many DMs instead follow misguided advice, stretching out encounters and trying to create an illusion of dire stakes. There are some DMs, and players, who do not feel a battle is a challenge unless half the party is dead or reduced to single digit hit points. Others feel an epic boss fight must last at least four rounds for it to feel satisfying. Such approaches lead to a style of encounter that is, in truth, DM vs DM.

The 5e system already has rules to make boss monsters feel menacing, like the mythic monsters from ’s setting, or features like Legendary Actions and Legendary Resistance. Some misguided internet advice posits that a boss battle needs to last a certain number of rounds to feel like an appropriate challenge.

Very new players may still equate to a video game and judge its challenges by the same standards. If a player completed a video game RPG without ever seeing the Game Over screen, they might judge it as too easy. In, a TPK ends the campaign. The 2025 will adjust balance, but ideally that willresult in more satisfying fights, not longer ones.

Such an arms race inevitably results in either a TPK, or an ersatz challenge when monster tactics suddenly evaporate.

During 4e, the designers recognized that the original monsters were designed