u/inner_fears

I'm about to run a mounted dragon combat. (Lord Soth mounting a Greater Death Dragon)

The dragon is an intelligent creature and thus acts on its own initiative order.

But the rider doesn't have ranged attacks. Does this mean if the dragon is not in melee range during the rider's turn, then the rider's turn is wasted because it can't move towards its targets?

Should I just Prepare an action and do a single attack on the dragon turn as a reaction of coming within melee range with an opponent? With these rules, any form of intelligent creature mounted combat is a huge nerf.

Hello fellow dms,

I am asking for some advice. Or maybe it's just a vent? Surely feel like venting. Fairly new DM, it's my first campaign but I've been running it for more than a year with stable weekly sessions. I am running a dnd 5e 2014 campaign (Vecna: Eve of Ruin), players are not randos but are close friends. I'm well into the second half of the campaign, with 5 level 15 player characters. All are minmaxers and I have two spellcasters specialized on disables and crowd control (one of which a divination wizard using disables + portent + simulacrum portent for reliable disabling).

Ever since the beginning of the campaign I've been struggling with them just ending every encounter in 1 or 2 rounds. I have screwed up a little bit by giving both casters magic items to increase the DC of their spells, that was kind of a self inflicted wound, but I knew they were REALLY looking forward for those items and I'm not someone to get in the way of their fun. In fact, my 1st goal is for everyone to have a blast during sessions.

The encounters in the campaign are very far from being suitable for high level, magic items weilding PCs, so they are not really helping. By the time the players are level 15, the campaign is still pitting them against a single CR 2 mimic. Yes that's what you get in area V31. Spells like (but not limited to, I'm not going super deep on these details) upcast Command, and especially Wall of Force and Forcecage are really messing up every encounter.

So far I have done all of the following:

1. Revamped all encounters in the campaign because they are just ill equipped for proper high level pcs
2. This includes customizing every single statblock in the manuals. I hanve't run a book monster since months.
3. For bosses: adopted Sly Flourish' dreadful blessings (doom points from Tales of the Valiant) to give them at least the fighting chance to last 3 or 4 rounds by basically cheating, which is not really something I like because it surely FEELS like cheating, but they seem to like the dreadful blessings token system enough
4. Done my research, adopted action oriented monsters. Adopted monsters from other manuals than just monster manual or even WotC books. Yes, they are better
5. Adopted strategies to adapt or bypass their magic:a. Monster features: monsters that don't understand their language so command can't work; monsters with teleport or burrowing to escape wall of force; no real counter to forcecage, the spell is just broken with no saving throw or concentration or ingredient consumptionb. encounter design: adding bonus big stupid scary monsters to the fight to tank the obvious control spells; adding monster waves when the initial monsters get controlled

Now don't get me wrong, I don't do this all the time: I'm not playing to counter my players. They have never played a high level campaign and they probably never will again. They are living their power fantasy, I'm super cool with that. But I've had players (not the magic users) come to me privately telling me they're not having fun like this. Sometimes they are just walking about like they weild an auto win button and don't care about anything. I've had players tell me privately it's my responsiblity to take into consideration all the powers of every character and make the game more challenging based on that. Which is a nobrainer, I don't disagree with that, but at this level, it's just doing a lot with very little. I have been increasingly adding hazards, monsters that deal NO SENSE amount of damage just to make them feel threatened. I feel like it's my responsibility to rebalance a game that is not balanced. This to make everyone at the table have fun.

I am feeling the fatigue. The fatigue of the chase, of chasing this balance, the fatigue of making them feel like they are using all these amazing super powers in epic ways. You'd think high level play would be epic right? With the odds at stake, and high level magic. There is nothing epic about an ancient dragon battle where the dragon is force caged without any saving throw, without concentration, and then it is just shot arrows until dead. Nothing, nothing on the player handbook or the dungeon master guide, is giving me a hand. There are no tools in this game to help a DM at these levels: in fact its the opposite, every spell, ability or ruling, or even this campaign, seems to be made to make the DM's job harder.

I'm tempted to just stop caring. To just start using default statblocks, using campaign encounters. I know the quality of the game will be degraded, but they would just face the consequences of their own choices would they not?

Even then, it's not really their fault for using the tools the game provides them. If I just stop doing this, the campaign will blow and people will stop having fun.

What would you do? I'll probably soldier on. I think they are having fun overall, I do still enjoy the story building. It's just every time I'm designing an encounter my brain feels like white noise at this point.

Was long. Thanks for reading