The newest tent-pole product from Wizards of the Coast, Rime of the Frostmaiden, is out and the reactions to it have been. . . rather mixed. Some of that, I think, has to do with what I perceive as a growing, if diffuse, dissatisfaction with the direction of 5e and 5e products generally over the last year or so. But I was scrolling through Sly Flourish a/k/a Mike Shea's Twitter feed last night, and he posted this:
I shouldn’t have to fix the first encounter of a $50 hardback adventure. #dnd
— SlyFlourish.com (@SlyFlourish) September 16, 2020
What he was pointing to is that the first major fight has an opponent who is going to be really challenging for 1st and 2nd level PCs, set up by potential side quests with equally challenging encounters for those same first level PCs (there is also a discussion, along with Justin Alexander, about how railroad-y and bizarre the lead in is).
In response, Sly Flourish got the response that basically always seems to come up whenever someone notes that an encounter is going to be very challenging, which is that "you as the DM are not obligated to only use balanced encounters!" This response is unhelpful, to the point of being borderline trollish, but it also, I think, misses the point of what is really going on within the design of 5e that creates these problems. Because this sort of thing (alongside how the rest mechanics are broken) is my biggest complaint with 5e.
From a game mechanical point of view, I think the engine that is driving the problem here is that 5e combat is very swingy. Because bounded accuracy reduces the range of bonuses that are in play, much more of the outcome is determined by the dice roll. Others have referred to this as the "chaos plateau," and it is a feature of all d20 games to a certain extent, but I think 5e, certainly among more recent editions of D&D, is the most chaotic. As a result, you can run the same encounter with the same sides multiple times and get wildly different results, depending on how the dice land in a particular iteration.
Again, this is a feature that is hard-coded into 5e via bounded accuracy. But it really manifests itself at low levels, because low level characters lack the pool of hit points to absorb the consequences of bad die rolls. In my experience, there really is no such thing as a "medium danger" combat encounter at low levels in 5e, because any fight is only a few good (from the monster's point of view) dice rolls away from being very deadly. Once you get to higher levels, characters can ride out the bad rolls long enough for most fights to revert to the mean outcomes, so combat becomes more predictable. But at low levels, almost every fight is basically a crap shoot.
As a DM, I hate that. Not because I believe I am somehow obligated to provide a perfectly curated experience for the players, i.e. a "balanced encounter." There is nothing wrong at all with throwing very difficult challenges at players and seeing how they do. But I as a DM want that to be a considered, motivated choice on my part, one that fits into my broader session goals. Having what I think is going to be a set-up encounter turn into a TPK (often very quickly) derails my whole session plan. For example, I ran Waterdeep: Dragon Heist with my group, and the first encounter is with some Kenkus in a warehouse. A round and a half of combat in, and it becomes abundantly clear that this is going to be a TPK. So, I pulled the plug on the fight, and had everyone get captured and eventually escape. Now, was it a big deal at the end of the day? Not really. But I had to scramble to save the adventure path in session #1, and I would rather not have to spin plates right from the get-go.
It is likely that many people will read this and say "gee, I/my group didn't have any problems with the Kenkus in the warehouse." And that's my point. It's pretty clear to me that the designers were not trying to put some super-tough encounter in the beginning; it just so happens that the dice were bad for my group in that particular encounter. On the flip side, my players crushed the later encounter in the sewers, clearly designed to be a tough chapter ender, with a bunch of excellent dice rolls. So, it's not that the encounters are "unbalanced," it's that they can't really be predictably balanced, because the variance in the outcomes is so wide.
Also, you have to situate this in the context of running an adventure path-based game. It is one thing to have high variance combat outcomes when you are playing a grindhouse-style game like Dungeon Crawl Classics, or other intentionally high lethality games (see, for example, my recent review of Forbidden Lands). Everyone knows the score, and bad dice rolls leading to bad outcomes is kinda part of the fun. But when you sit down to run a long, story-based campaign, having the thing derail early on from a not-that-consequential fight is totally contrary to what you are all trying to do. If I spent a couple of weeks hyping up and getting buy-in for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and its city-based premise, had everyone go through a full Session Zero to design interesting characters, and then had said to my players an hour and a half into our first session, "well, your characters are all dead from these random Kenkus. What do you want to play next week?" my players would have justifiably looked at me like "WTF, Mike?" They, and me too, were in this for the long haul, as promised by the product itself. Having high variance early combat outcomes is contrary to what people are buying into when the sit down to play the adventure paths WotC is making.
All of which is compounded when, as it seems here, the designers on Rime of the Frostmaiden decided to ratchet up the difficulty intentionally. Now, instead of having unpredictable outcomes, you have unpredictable outcomes weighted against the players. Again, I am sure that some groups will do just fine, and maybe not even notice what the big deal was. But for other groups, maybe most groups, it will be a meat-grinder, because all low level 5e play can turn into a meat-grinder at basically any moment. And while I know that this adventure path is pitched as being a difficult challenge, TPKing the party at the first major fight seems counter-productive if everyone is there to sit down and play through the whole thing. I suppose you could pitch it as a grindhouse style game where players are going to lose multiple characters a la the classic Call of Cthulhu adventure paths, but you can't even really promise that, either, as you are only a couple of good dice rolls away from wiping the floor with your enemies, and everything becomes much more consistently survivable around 4th level or so in general in 5e.
At the risk of engaging in edition warring, I have to say that this whole issue is one of the major reasons I prefer 13th Age to 5e. First off, 1st level 13th Age characters are much more durable than 5e characters simply by having more starting HP (high teens or twenties). As a result, you avoid much of the particularized problems of low level 5e play altogether. But, more to the point, I find the underlying encounter math of 13th Age to be far more predictable than 5e. If the encounter table in the 13th Age rulebook says that a particular fight is going to be a moderate challenge for a particular party, it is very unlikely to be a shock TPK (if anything, the table leans on the side of fights being a little too easy, especially if you use the slightly but consistently underpowered monsters in the corebook). I feel more confident in the encounters I run in 13th Age because I have a pretty good idea how it is going to go, whereas with 5e I am often more in the mode of "well, hope this doesn't wipe out my players." I prefer the control 13th Age give me as a GM.
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