Stabbing people with swords is a mainstay of fantasy literature, it's no wonder that D&D players want characters who can stab well. The question that has been plaguing me is how good is good enough, what does it take to make a viable melee character in D&D. Some people set the bar high, a Druid is viable because they can defeat a level appropriate encounter more than 50% of the time, by himself. Unfortunately for those who pursue melee the writers at WotC decided that melee should be a team sport, so even a very good melee character will have difficulties dealing with an encounters even a few levels below them. So I'm off to quantify what a team needs to be able to do to survive in the exciting world of melee combat!
AssumptionsI'm assuming that we are dealing with a 4 member party, and that the party and the monsters are focused on doing HP damage to one another. I'm also assuming a complete lack tactics other than stab the baddy, and that the party's tank absorbs all the damage from the monster. For the party to win it has to drop the monster before the monster drops the party's tank, because resurrections are expensive. Since a party doesn't just fight monsters equal to their CR, I'm going to test versus CR+2/+3, which I think would be a suitable melee boss monster, because if the party can't beat a boss, then it can't really succeed.
MethodologyI am just doing a small survey of monsters, I could have spent a lot of time crunching data but I wanted to focus on fairly common monsters that are melee oriented and would be a challenge for a party a few levels lower than it. I will look at a selection of melee monsters at levels 7, 13 and 18, which I think would be challenging encounters for parties at levels 5, 10 and 15 respectively. My thinking is, it's all well and good to be able to defeat opponents of your CR, but every few encounters will be a boss fight and if you can't reliably win those then your party isn't really viable. I decided to cap the CR gap by 2-3, the DMG says that even a +4 encounter would be challenging, but I think that could be asking a bit much, and hopefully the group is smart enough to run from battles that are 5+ over their ECL. Also, one thing I noticed when compiling this is that CR is a really horrible metric for judging monster difficult, but it's what we have so I'm going with it.
Math:We assume that our party's tank has some way to attract the monster's attack. Further we assume standard WBL, half of which is spent to boost AC. This table shows the tank's AC and hitpoints through the various levels.
Level: | AC | HP |
5 | 20 | 42 |
10 | 26 | 90 |
15 | 38 | 161 |
Using the Tank's AC and HP I calculate how many turns on average it will take for the monster to kill the tank. For instance it should take 1.6 rounds on average for a hill giant to kill our party's tank. So the party has 1.6 turns to kill the giant, there are 4 members in the party so they have 6.4 PC turns to make the kill, we divide the giants HP (102) by those 6.4 PC turns, and we get 16.4. So each member of the party has do be doing at least 16.4 damage.
CR | Monster | TTKT | AC | ADR |
7 | Flesh Golem | 2.8 | 18 | 7.1 |
7 | Hill Giant | 1.6 | 20 | 16.4 |
13 | Iron Golem | 2.25 | 30 | 14.3 |
13 | Storm Giant | 1.16 | 27 | 42.9 |
18 | Mature Adult Red Dragon | 2.9 | 32 | 26.9 |
18 | Ancient White Dragon | 2.15 | 37 | 43.6 |
*TTKT - Turns To Kill Tank
**ADR - Average Damage Required to drop the monster.
Conclusions:So when given an arena that totally favours a melee party's paradigm, they are almost doomed to failure. I'll draw your attention to the Storm Giant entry, each character has to be doing 43 damages on average to an enemy with an AC 27 to win, which I think may be impossible in core (save for a Druid, maybe) and even demands optimization outside of core. This confirms something Min/Max has known inductively for a long time, to succeed at higher levels your party either needs a smart caster or a really reliable dirty trick, simplistic straight forward melee will not work. Which isn't to say that melee has no part in D&D, it just can't be the only part.