Genuinely Tough Fight - So yeah it is possible to take out D&D 2024 PCs

 Brief post, but my D&D 5.5 campaign last week had an actual tough fight. The encounter balance was on the high end for a group of 6 players with a competent NPC ally, against 4 vampire spawn (CR 5) and 12 CR 1 satarre from the Monster Vault for Tales of the Valiant. Half of the party dropped before victory was snatched from defeat. I admit, I used some competent monster tactics, including the vampires putting out the light sources in the chamber on round two, plunging the room in to darkness. Somehow, amazingly, only two of the six party members had any darkvision so that created a harrowing round or two until they secured some light.

The real killer wasn't the vampires, although like many monsters in the 2025 MM they do have a slight boost in that their main attack leads to an automatic secondary benefits (grapple) rather than prompting a saving throw. They do then get a bite attack if a grapple is landed, which alas does require a saving throw....so only one bite was made successfully in the session. My experience with D&D has been that, on average, PCs make their saves unless something weird is going on. 

But the surprise moment in the encounter was the satarre, vicious void-driven gecko/lizardfolk things from the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault (and other books prior). They are only CR 1, but they get two attacks, which land with base damage plus necrotic/void damage. The result was that I had a furious level of success with them....they could overwhelm D&D 2024 PC defenses with so many attacks, and in the space of two rounds three PCs dropped. 

Afterwards, we agreed it was reflective of the fact that while the 2025 MM has monsters that often benefit from simplified effects in their attacks (with a secondary benefit landing automatically, for example), the Tales of the Valiant monsters seem geared to hit a bit harder.

I am not 100% sure if this entirely true (many of the changes I have caught so far in TotV are along the lines of Kobold Press design standards simply being broadly applied to their own variant system), but it does make me want to play Tales of the Valiant in a pure form at the game table even more than usual. I need to convince the group of this. With many more new tomes coming out that contain player-facing archertypes and material this may be an easier sell now. Labyrinth, The Old Margreve, a Player's Guide 2 in Kickstarter and a forthcoming Book of Swords adapted to Tales of the Valiant are all full of useful player stuff, something the core Player's Guide was a bit short on with only two subclasses/archetypes per main class. When you have an old, experienced and jaded group like my own, they need more weird stuff, not less. 

Anyway, if this happens I will report more on it.

Post- Session: Player's Handbook 2024 is A Utility Driven 5.25E D&D

 Just a brief follow-up, and this is with the noted caveat that the devil is in the details, but my group last night agreed that the D&D 2025 Player's Handbook is basically a marvel in reorganization and a clear rewrite, but it also appears to be simultaneously far less invasive than we expected in terms of rules changes, and also somehow a bit more so in some very specific cases. The fact that it really does appear to be backwards compatible with no fuss (that is to say, you can run a 2014 character with a gang of 2024 characters and not miss a beat) is helpful. That makes it noteworthy as being less of a hassle than, say, using 3.0 products with 3.5 books back in the day, where there were a lot of discreet structural and design changes to improve mechanical problems. This book is far less about fixing mechanical issues then simply adding new content and revising stuff that will, while not invalidating the older PHB, make your players want the new PHB.

No one in my group had a copy yet, and as it turns out despite getting several boxes of books my FLGS sold all of them on Tuesday, and so no one in my group other than my son and myself had the new PHB yet. Still.....I am sure they will grab it on D&D Beyond or something quick enough, or when the formal non FLGS release hits on the 17th.

By the way, I have gotten over the freakishly friendly smiling phenomenon I was ranting about yesterday. After making such a big deal about it, I began to notice that this is not quite the bother it initially felt like to me.....yes, there are still about 10-15 notable illustrations where I am a bit weirded out at the maniacal joy of the expressions on these character's faces, but a disproportionated number of them appear to all be bards and (weirdly!) druids. So yeah....probably just a "me" problem LOL

Anyway! We already started using the book in actual play to look up stuff like spells and such. We did not find any surprises (yet) but there are some. Healing seems to be buffed up a bit, for one. It is much, much easier to look content up in this edition, so it is already feeling pointless to me to reach for the old PHB unless I really needs to identify some legacy content information, such as on a class that got more heavily revamped, or the poor half orcs and half elves who have lost their identities in this new edition. 

Speaking of half orcs and half elves Is it just me or does that feel like some sort of weird form of discrimination? Was WotC more worried about the kind of questions being half-this and half-that raised, and decided it was better to not raise those questions and hope no one brought up the counter point that in a world where elves, orcs and humans can all apparently interbreed that there will be people of mixed descent? Is this purged because they decided to remove the concept of races and go for species, implying everyone is genetically too different to interbreed? The entire thing feels weird to me, and like there was no right way for them to address this without offending some camp, so they just tried to dodge the entire issue instead. I feel like this is even stranger given they made orcs, as the most contentious example, far more "not evil" in this version, at least according to the lone paragraph of detail they get, which strongly implies that humans, elves and such who have a green muscle mommy fetish (damn you internet for creating these memes) would inevitably lead to even more half orcs in the world, not less. Oh well. It's like 1989 all over again, and no doubt a future book will find a way to delicately address this such that the WotC overlords don't look like they are crapping on people of multiracial descent through their fantasy game analogues.