This will be a slightly edited excerpt from this homebrew I’ve been making here, for Fully Playable Actual Dragons- I deemed the only way to make the dragons actually FEEL like dragons was to build them to start at level 10-11, with the first 10 levels representing the features from their race as a dragon- but that in turn meant that I needed to actually start fixing high level play, as well as writing out a guide in my homebrew for other DMs to help guide them if they wanted to allow a dragon PC. (This template is still a work in progress on the balance front, I’d be honoured if you use it and I’ve been tinkering with it for months, but please don’t expect it to be perfect)
So as preamble, the game balance gets pretty awkward from levels 9 to 12 (which is almost certainly why BG3 caps out at level 12), and completely breaks at level 13.
This is for a few reasons, but there are two main stinkers.
AC at higher levels of DnD does not keep up with hit rates. In official content, then the highest AC given to any creature is 25, seen on the Tarrasque and Tiamat. This ignores the fact that three main things can raise hit rates, and only two things raise AC- Magic items, Ability Scores, and Proficiency. Having no way to add proficiency to AC means it becomes badly irrelevant beyond 13th level for most tank builds, and the problem is only made worse by the fact that the game puts magical armour at a truly massive premium compared to magic weapons.
Below, I’ve created a table of levels against the suggested non-boosted AC for an average creature of that threat rating, which doesn’t factor in magic armour, spells, or AC-boosting class features, but DOES assume that opponents will have level-appropriate stats and proficiencies, and that players will be outfitted with level-appropriate magic items (acquiring enough +3 weapons for the entire party at around level 12). AC should be raised by a further 2-4 points for an enemy with high AC, and if it’s a low AC enemy, just use official numbers lol.
Remember, dragons are meant to be high AC, and Challenge Rating is a fucking awful system, so most adult dragons need a bit of an AC buff.
1: 15 (Compare to an ‘optimized’ first level AC tank, a fighter with chain mail, a shield, and Defence Style- they have 19AC, which is within that 2-4 points for a fairly balanced High AC)
2: 15
3: 16
4: 16
5: 17
6: 17
7: 18
8: 18
9: 19
10: 19
11: 20
12: 20
13: 21 (At this point, martial humanoids should have their first +3 weapon, and a hit modifier of about +13, which can easily shred vanilla Tiamat with a little Advantage)
14: 21
15: 22
16: 22 (Raphael from BG3 is here. He has 26AC and more HP than the Tarrasque, and he’s not considered unfair as a threat to a party of level 11 to 12 PCs, just tanky.)
17: 23
18: 23
19: 24
20: 25 (Tiamat should have 28 to 29 AC in order to come across as reasonably durable for the strongest villain in DnD)
To finish this point, DO NOT think that every enemy must have this much AC or a hitrate to match. If your players have characters (dragon or humanoid) who have 21AC, then never be afraid to give an encounter a swarm of weaker foes who have a measly +5 or +6 to hit. Players fucking love getting attacked ten times and being told that 9 out of 10 arrows simply bounce off them harmlessly, and the tenth that hits them doesn’t do that much damage (This can also help with both encounter pacing and the game’s narrative).
Saving Throws get even more broken than AC at higher levels, and are quite possibly the main reason that BG3 and other official content tends to cap out at level 12. If you don’t have proficiency in a DC19 Save, then your chances of passing are horrifically low, even with a pretty solid ability score to draw on- but +2 to the save from a 15 in Wisdom absolutely won’t cut it. This is why Draconic Indomitability (which is pretty much the same as a Fighter’s Indomitable) exists, as most Wisdom and Intelligence Saves at high levels are effectively instant kills if your enemies are smart about using them. And even then, Indomitable is flawed- Advantage is much less effective with a low base chance of success.
For these reasons, I highly suggest that you introduce your own homebrew for your humanoid players designed to allow them to get some bonuses to their Saving Throws- either make a version of Epic Resistance that doesn’t require them to have Draconic Indomitability, or a magic item that gives them a bonus to saving throws (this won’t be quite as necessary if someone is running a high-charisma Paladin)
While I fully agree that The Wizard On The Coast (and by association Hasbro) has been increasingly scummy this past decade (I kind of blame Pathfinder for salvaging the glorious mess that was 3/3.5e):
People have been angry about balance since there were holy wars over whether AD&D was "for " or not. And it is largely inherent to the nature of any tabletop game. You have two types of people who tend to gravitate toward those. The pure role players who just want to vibe and then the people who go full munchkin/sicko and “ruin it for everyone”. Which leads DMs/GMs/Refs to either enable the latter or add a bunch of house rules to negate it because saying “no” isn’t a thing*.
And that is perfectly fine. Again, we’ve been doing that for over twenty (… thirty? forty?) years at this point. And it has nothing to do with the health of the company.
*: One of my favorite "Jesus christ, " house rules is to add a personnel cap to Battletech. That negates the reality that the “meta” would not be giant mechs/rocket magnets and would actually be jeeps with guns on the back.
Ah, but I have to offer some nuance there- Balance is actually pretty good from levels 2 to 8 (level 1 HP issues lmao).
You’re absolutely right that RP chillers and munchkin power gamer builds are two entirely different breeds, but my point is that as a DM, I’ve seen firsthand what happens if you run a party through an adventure that goes 1-11. AC breaks down at higher levels because hit rates increase so much faster, Saving Throws become guaranteed failures at high level if you’re not proficient in them, and also Flat Damage Reduction isn’t a thing so action economy is pretty rampant.
Anyways I guess my point is that we ran into these balance issues with the pure players who just wanted to vibe. And that’s what makes them a serious issue to me. Some people have fun breaking games and I can respect that. The problem is when the game starts breaking when nobody was trying to break it.
(Also there’s the whole issue with Magic Items not being priced or treated as available in 5th edition)
Its just a design choice. I have definitely had to deal with the frustration of someone wanting to vibe getting increasingly angry over the munchkin player(s) (which led to an extension of the “If you ever try to grapple, you are buying the entire table drinks” to “if we have to reference a rule book, you are buying snacks for next week”). And it was definitely frustrating to try to balance those two experiences because one person could kill anything through a clever use of the rules for how throwing glass bottles work and the other was supposed to be a mighty Paladin but struggled against level appropriate challenges.
I am not going to say I like all the changes but… I have never liked all the changes. My point is more that NOBODY has ever liked all the changes and that is kind of the point of house rules and splatbooks.
Yeah, they got super lazy with magic item economy in 5e and justified it by saying “you can play this game without the expectation of magic items!” Like bullshit, you just didn’t want to deal with the hassle of pricing items correctly to the point that there are items in lower tiers that are functionally the same or better than items in higher tiers. (Ring of warmth vs ring of resistance is an egregious example, but if you look hard enough you’ll find more.)
Yup. Mechanically, what do you even spend money on once you’ve got Platemail? A boat? A castle? Neither of those are especially likely to be of use to a roaming party of adventurers.
I think my favourite example of a really shitty 5e item (that was apparently quite good in previous editions) is the Ioun Stone. If I believe in official item prices (Very Rare items are worth around 50,000gp), then that means I’m paying that much for an item which…
-Has the same impact as a +1 weapon
-Uses an Attunement Slot
-CAN BE EASILY DESTROYED (Has 20hp, can be hit by enemy AoE attacks. For example… Fireball, dragon breath…)
That said, for what it’s worth, dragons aren’t the only thing I’ve homebrewed. Here, I made it standard practice to assign prices to all my magic items. Feel free to steal some!
In addition to the math starting to break down at high levels, DND has a shitty magic system and a shitty recovery system.
A lot of spells are sort of flashy big deal fight enders. Like yeah there’s magic missile but there’s also Sleep. Sleep just ends the fight sometimes. The higher level spells tend to be more problematic.
As players level up, they get more spells per long rest (except warlocks, but more on that in a bit).
The game is allegedly designed around 6-8 medium encounters that slowly wear down your resources.
Most people don’t play like that. They do like one big encounter per rest. Maybe two. Definitely not 6 medium ones and not even four hard ones.
Well now you have your wizard and cleric loaded up with firepower that should take them through six scenes instead using all of them at once. And the other classes that aren’t built around long rest, like fighter warlock rogue monk, all suck in comparison.
It’s not as obvious at low levels when the wizard has like four spell slots. When they have 20? That’s a problem. They can just fireball every round.
It also causes a side problem in the decision space for long rest casters is big, and gets bigger over time. Your average intelligence player can probably manage having six spell slots and 20 options to pick from, maybe. A lot of people will struggle with 20 slots and 200 options. And they will slow down the table with them.
Anyway. You could do more encounters to wear them down but a. Most people don’t want to play that way and b. That’s really bad for pacing.
It’s worth noting that “Encounter” doesn’t necessarily mean “Combat,” but the 6-8 encounter day is definitely bullshit. I think that framework is held over from very early releases, and if you want an idea of what a 6-8 encounter day would actually play like, Tyranny of Dragons’ “Flames over Greennest” module pushes players to exhaustion with that many encounters before a punishing boss fight that you’re intended to lose, and it’s definitely not fun, especially because those caster classes just do not have the slots to spare at level 1.
It’s clear how SR/LR resources evolved from daily/encounter powers in 4e, and that was a much more elegant way of handling resource expenditure, even if it did make all the classes play kind of the same.
I see, thanks! Will see how it goes since all players are new and have 0 d&d experience, maybe limiting long rest opportunities could fix that on the short run.
Actually yes, that’s what I do- I have a ‘sleeping unsafe’ houserule whereby sleeping overnight in a more dangerous setting such as on the road or in the forest only counts as a Short Rest, albeit preventing exhaustion. Getting a Long Rest requires that you sleep somewhere safer where there’s no need for a night watch.
That way, you don’t need to cram 7 whole events into 24 hours, since that’s narratively wack.
All you should know is that if you’re going to use this houserule, make sure your players know ahead of time so that spellcasters know that they mustn’t blow all their spellslots on the first big threat.
Yeah, house rules like “sanctuary resting” and “gritty realism” are common responses to the problem. They work for some people.
They do not work for people who want to actually use their cool powers.
Like, if your group enjoys the resource management part of the game? Great. These can help. In my experience, most players do not.
Like let’s say a mid level party encounters a group of goblins. Let’s say the players see the goblins before they’re detected.
A lot of players are going to want to go “fireball!” and try to take them all out at once. Because that’s pretty cool, right? But if you’re playing with resource management in mind you have to think about if that’s really the optimal move. If you can sneak past without a fight at all, that’s better. Spends no resources. If you can do it with a lower level slot like invisibility, that’s also better. Save the fireball for a threat that can’t be dealt with with less. Hell, if you can come up with a good strategy to just take them out with tactics and minimal damage, that’s probably better, too.
But most players don’t want to play that kind of strategic thinking. Frankly, most people aren’t especially smart, and they’re not firing at 100% when they’re playing a game for fun.
So the players just want to do their cool powers, but the game’s design is still anchored to “make them count because you might need them later”
If you limit long rests you can help address the problem of the characters having too many resources, but it doesn’t really address the problem that players want to do cool shit. Players want to fireball more, not less
But you can’t really fix this in DND without doing a lot of rules changing. A lot a lot.
And this is one part of why DND kind of sucks. There’s not really a way around it.
Can you explain how after lvl 9 it gets unbalanced? And how to fix it?
As a new dm I feel pretty interested in that, as I will reach this point in the near future.
P.s. Still using no expansions, just base.
Certainly!
This will be a slightly edited excerpt from this homebrew I’ve been making here, for Fully Playable Actual Dragons- I deemed the only way to make the dragons actually FEEL like dragons was to build them to start at level 10-11, with the first 10 levels representing the features from their race as a dragon- but that in turn meant that I needed to actually start fixing high level play, as well as writing out a guide in my homebrew for other DMs to help guide them if they wanted to allow a dragon PC. (This template is still a work in progress on the balance front, I’d be honoured if you use it and I’ve been tinkering with it for months, but please don’t expect it to be perfect)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit
So as preamble, the game balance gets pretty awkward from levels 9 to 12 (which is almost certainly why BG3 caps out at level 12), and completely breaks at level 13.
This is for a few reasons, but there are two main stinkers.
AC at higher levels of DnD does not keep up with hit rates. In official content, then the highest AC given to any creature is 25, seen on the Tarrasque and Tiamat. This ignores the fact that three main things can raise hit rates, and only two things raise AC- Magic items, Ability Scores, and Proficiency. Having no way to add proficiency to AC means it becomes badly irrelevant beyond 13th level for most tank builds, and the problem is only made worse by the fact that the game puts magical armour at a truly massive premium compared to magic weapons.
Below, I’ve created a table of levels against the suggested non-boosted AC for an average creature of that threat rating, which doesn’t factor in magic armour, spells, or AC-boosting class features, but DOES assume that opponents will have level-appropriate stats and proficiencies, and that players will be outfitted with level-appropriate magic items (acquiring enough +3 weapons for the entire party at around level 12). AC should be raised by a further 2-4 points for an enemy with high AC, and if it’s a low AC enemy, just use official numbers lol.
Remember, dragons are meant to be high AC, and Challenge Rating is a fucking awful system, so most adult dragons need a bit of an AC buff.
1: 15 (Compare to an ‘optimized’ first level AC tank, a fighter with chain mail, a shield, and Defence Style- they have 19AC, which is within that 2-4 points for a fairly balanced High AC)
2: 15
3: 16
4: 16
5: 17
6: 17
7: 18
8: 18
9: 19
10: 19
11: 20
12: 20
13: 21 (At this point, martial humanoids should have their first +3 weapon, and a hit modifier of about +13, which can easily shred vanilla Tiamat with a little Advantage)
14: 21
15: 22
16: 22 (Raphael from BG3 is here. He has 26AC and more HP than the Tarrasque, and he’s not considered unfair as a threat to a party of level 11 to 12 PCs, just tanky.)
17: 23
18: 23
19: 24
20: 25 (Tiamat should have 28 to 29 AC in order to come across as reasonably durable for the strongest villain in DnD)
To finish this point, DO NOT think that every enemy must have this much AC or a hitrate to match. If your players have characters (dragon or humanoid) who have 21AC, then never be afraid to give an encounter a swarm of weaker foes who have a measly +5 or +6 to hit. Players fucking love getting attacked ten times and being told that 9 out of 10 arrows simply bounce off them harmlessly, and the tenth that hits them doesn’t do that much damage (This can also help with both encounter pacing and the game’s narrative).
Saving Throws get even more broken than AC at higher levels, and are quite possibly the main reason that BG3 and other official content tends to cap out at level 12. If you don’t have proficiency in a DC19 Save, then your chances of passing are horrifically low, even with a pretty solid ability score to draw on- but +2 to the save from a 15 in Wisdom absolutely won’t cut it. This is why Draconic Indomitability (which is pretty much the same as a Fighter’s Indomitable) exists, as most Wisdom and Intelligence Saves at high levels are effectively instant kills if your enemies are smart about using them. And even then, Indomitable is flawed- Advantage is much less effective with a low base chance of success.
For these reasons, I highly suggest that you introduce your own homebrew for your humanoid players designed to allow them to get some bonuses to their Saving Throws- either make a version of Epic Resistance that doesn’t require them to have Draconic Indomitability, or a magic item that gives them a bonus to saving throws (this won’t be quite as necessary if someone is running a high-charisma Paladin)
While I fully agree that The Wizard On The Coast (and by association Hasbro) has been increasingly scummy this past decade (I kind of blame Pathfinder for salvaging the glorious mess that was 3/3.5e):
People have been angry about balance since there were holy wars over whether AD&D was "for " or not. And it is largely inherent to the nature of any tabletop game. You have two types of people who tend to gravitate toward those. The pure role players who just want to vibe and then the people who go full munchkin/sicko and “ruin it for everyone”. Which leads DMs/GMs/Refs to either enable the latter or add a bunch of house rules to negate it because saying “no” isn’t a thing*.
And that is perfectly fine. Again, we’ve been doing that for over twenty (… thirty? forty?) years at this point. And it has nothing to do with the health of the company.
*: One of my favorite "Jesus christ, " house rules is to add a personnel cap to Battletech. That negates the reality that the “meta” would not be giant mechs/rocket magnets and would actually be jeeps with guns on the back.
Ah, but I have to offer some nuance there- Balance is actually pretty good from levels 2 to 8 (level 1 HP issues lmao).
You’re absolutely right that RP chillers and munchkin power gamer builds are two entirely different breeds, but my point is that as a DM, I’ve seen firsthand what happens if you run a party through an adventure that goes 1-11. AC breaks down at higher levels because hit rates increase so much faster, Saving Throws become guaranteed failures at high level if you’re not proficient in them, and also Flat Damage Reduction isn’t a thing so action economy is pretty rampant.
Anyways I guess my point is that we ran into these balance issues with the pure players who just wanted to vibe. And that’s what makes them a serious issue to me. Some people have fun breaking games and I can respect that. The problem is when the game starts breaking when nobody was trying to break it.
(Also there’s the whole issue with Magic Items not being priced or treated as available in 5th edition)
Its just a design choice. I have definitely had to deal with the frustration of someone wanting to vibe getting increasingly angry over the munchkin player(s) (which led to an extension of the “If you ever try to grapple, you are buying the entire table drinks” to “if we have to reference a rule book, you are buying snacks for next week”). And it was definitely frustrating to try to balance those two experiences because one person could kill anything through a clever use of the rules for how throwing glass bottles work and the other was supposed to be a mighty Paladin but struggled against level appropriate challenges.
I am not going to say I like all the changes but… I have never liked all the changes. My point is more that NOBODY has ever liked all the changes and that is kind of the point of house rules and splatbooks.
Yeah, they got super lazy with magic item economy in 5e and justified it by saying “you can play this game without the expectation of magic items!” Like bullshit, you just didn’t want to deal with the hassle of pricing items correctly to the point that there are items in lower tiers that are functionally the same or better than items in higher tiers. (Ring of warmth vs ring of resistance is an egregious example, but if you look hard enough you’ll find more.)
Yup. Mechanically, what do you even spend money on once you’ve got Platemail? A boat? A castle? Neither of those are especially likely to be of use to a roaming party of adventurers.
I think my favourite example of a really shitty 5e item (that was apparently quite good in previous editions) is the Ioun Stone. If I believe in official item prices (Very Rare items are worth around 50,000gp), then that means I’m paying that much for an item which…
-Has the same impact as a +1 weapon -Uses an Attunement Slot -CAN BE EASILY DESTROYED (Has 20hp, can be hit by enemy AoE attacks. For example… Fireball, dragon breath…)
That said, for what it’s worth, dragons aren’t the only thing I’ve homebrewed. Here, I made it standard practice to assign prices to all my magic items. Feel free to steal some!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15je74qMiYxSEnF43zp2UkEoSk3LqRymMbxruPVGQ-i4/edit
Wow thanks! That’s a lot of stuff. I’m gonna read it multiple times before understanding it all.
In addition to the math starting to break down at high levels, DND has a shitty magic system and a shitty recovery system.
A lot of spells are sort of flashy big deal fight enders. Like yeah there’s magic missile but there’s also Sleep. Sleep just ends the fight sometimes. The higher level spells tend to be more problematic.
As players level up, they get more spells per long rest (except warlocks, but more on that in a bit).
The game is allegedly designed around 6-8 medium encounters that slowly wear down your resources.
Most people don’t play like that. They do like one big encounter per rest. Maybe two. Definitely not 6 medium ones and not even four hard ones.
Well now you have your wizard and cleric loaded up with firepower that should take them through six scenes instead using all of them at once. And the other classes that aren’t built around long rest, like fighter warlock rogue monk, all suck in comparison.
It’s not as obvious at low levels when the wizard has like four spell slots. When they have 20? That’s a problem. They can just fireball every round.
It also causes a side problem in the decision space for long rest casters is big, and gets bigger over time. Your average intelligence player can probably manage having six spell slots and 20 options to pick from, maybe. A lot of people will struggle with 20 slots and 200 options. And they will slow down the table with them.
Anyway. You could do more encounters to wear them down but a. Most people don’t want to play that way and b. That’s really bad for pacing.
Tldr:
It’s worth noting that “Encounter” doesn’t necessarily mean “Combat,” but the 6-8 encounter day is definitely bullshit. I think that framework is held over from very early releases, and if you want an idea of what a 6-8 encounter day would actually play like, Tyranny of Dragons’ “Flames over Greennest” module pushes players to exhaustion with that many encounters before a punishing boss fight that you’re intended to lose, and it’s definitely not fun, especially because those caster classes just do not have the slots to spare at level 1.
It’s clear how SR/LR resources evolved from daily/encounter powers in 4e, and that was a much more elegant way of handling resource expenditure, even if it did make all the classes play kind of the same.
I see, thanks! Will see how it goes since all players are new and have 0 d&d experience, maybe limiting long rest opportunities could fix that on the short run.
Actually yes, that’s what I do- I have a ‘sleeping unsafe’ houserule whereby sleeping overnight in a more dangerous setting such as on the road or in the forest only counts as a Short Rest, albeit preventing exhaustion. Getting a Long Rest requires that you sleep somewhere safer where there’s no need for a night watch.
That way, you don’t need to cram 7 whole events into 24 hours, since that’s narratively wack.
All you should know is that if you’re going to use this houserule, make sure your players know ahead of time so that spellcasters know that they mustn’t blow all their spellslots on the first big threat.
Yeah, house rules like “sanctuary resting” and “gritty realism” are common responses to the problem. They work for some people.
They do not work for people who want to actually use their cool powers.
Like, if your group enjoys the resource management part of the game? Great. These can help. In my experience, most players do not.
Like let’s say a mid level party encounters a group of goblins. Let’s say the players see the goblins before they’re detected.
A lot of players are going to want to go “fireball!” and try to take them all out at once. Because that’s pretty cool, right? But if you’re playing with resource management in mind you have to think about if that’s really the optimal move. If you can sneak past without a fight at all, that’s better. Spends no resources. If you can do it with a lower level slot like invisibility, that’s also better. Save the fireball for a threat that can’t be dealt with with less. Hell, if you can come up with a good strategy to just take them out with tactics and minimal damage, that’s probably better, too.
But most players don’t want to play that kind of strategic thinking. Frankly, most people aren’t especially smart, and they’re not firing at 100% when they’re playing a game for fun.
So the players just want to do their cool powers, but the game’s design is still anchored to “make them count because you might need them later”
If you limit long rests you can help address the problem of the characters having too many resources, but it doesn’t really address the problem that players want to do cool shit. Players want to fireball more, not less
But you can’t really fix this in DND without doing a lot of rules changing. A lot a lot.
And this is one part of why DND kind of sucks. There’s not really a way around it.