D&D 5E What, if anything, bothers you about certain casters/spells at your table?

[nevin]

been waiting since 1977 for someone to pull it off. Never said it was a bad idea it's just about the same amount of work as creating a whole new system. Maybe less with all the bloat of spells over the years.

 

[nevin]

I wouldn't know. My NPCs operate on the same system as the PCs (albeit sometimes more abstractly). If a PC wanted to use an ability a comparable NPC had, they can learn it.

I Do the same most DM's I've played with don't they get frustrated and start making up villain only stuff that causes far more frustration and angst than they realize I think.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

Suggestion is a spell that bothers me. We, as Players, often want as much power as possible, so we often expect Suggestion to be on par with Dominate Person.

I think Suggestion should be renamed Jedi Mind Trick.

 

[Burnside]

Shield is way less of a problem if the players can’t see the DM’s rolls. And I don’t mean the DM should fudge. But the characters should have no way of knowing whether it is “worth” spending the spell slot.

 

[Quickleaf]

One spell I have a love/hate view of is Sending.

I love that players can communicate long distance with each other or NPCs.

I hate the "ok, it's time to count out 25 words in our response." I'm not sure if the bit of humor it evokes is worth the jarring experience.

 

[nevin]

One spell I have a love/hate view of is Sending.

I love that players can communicate long distance with each other or NPCs. that

I hate the "ok, it's time to count out 25 words in our response." I'm not sure if the bit of humor it evokes is worth the jarring experience.

I hate that the options are so few. Sending is a great spell for what it's supposed to be but there should be other higher level spells, or perhaps expensive devices like two way crystal balls that should be available. I think D&D would work far better if the base assumption by designers was High magic world but where it's expensive so only the rich and powerful have easy access to it. For me at least it's far easier to cut back options than to try to fill in the gaps and spell lists have really weird illogical gaps in them. Caster's can make walls of iron that are permanant but Gold, silver, bronze, copper etc don't work? I think communication, summoning spells and all creation spells need to be completely redone and some rules for what kind of foci, or materials are necessary to have a more logical, and practical spells would go a long way to making specialty wizards something worth playing. All the contradictory, unexplained and downright stupid restrictions on certain kinds of spells just feed angst and wizard / magic hate. It also makes it really hard to defend when your players are complaining about something that creates a cognitive dissonance because the rules and limitations that have evolved over 50 years have just become some bureaucratic mess instead of an actual system that makes sense.

 

[James Gasik]

3pp fixes a lot of this (like it fixes everything ). Mage Hand Press, for example, has a very fun Necromancer class. Level Up's necromancy support is also solid.

Which is fantastic...if your DM allows said third party products. But as I've said before, the stigma against 3pp is still very real. A lot of people seem to hold onto this myth that WotC design is balanced (trust me, I know!), and that anything that seems better than WotC is badly designed power creep, and anything worse is just a waste of ink.

My current game uses Kobold Press content, including Deep Magic. Many of the spells are quite conservative, very niche, or slight variants of existing spells (like the Sacred Flame clone that targets a 5' square rather than have the cover clause). You have to sift through a lot of these, and when you do find a strong spell, you start looking online to see if it's been given errata, because surely, that has to be a mistake, lol.

I now feel the need to subject you to a personal rant of mine- D&D has had specialist spellcasters for a long time. But very rarely can you look at a spell list given to a specialist and say "yes, this is perfectly balanced". 2nd edition was wonderful for this, just compare the PHB Transmutation school to Necromancy, for example. Some specialists had to be given clauses to potentially allow them to use "real" spells (Tome of Magic Elementalists, Wild Mages) as there were gaps in their lists. Due to the way Spheres were designed, you'd have many Mythos Priests unable to cast not only core Cleric spells, but unable to cast many spells that would make sense for their Power!

3.5 shuffled a lot of spells around, inadvertently turning Conjuration into an uber school, even for blasting (thanks to all the SR: No spells in it). Classes like the Shugenja also had to deal with the inequity between elements, and even the "ultra specialist" classes, like the Warmage, Beguiler, and Dread Necromancer, with their large curated thematic lists, have spells of multiple schools in them, with caveats for adding regular Wizard spells to their lists.

5e decided to give us a Subclass for each school of magic, but didn't even try to limit spell access, since the schools are so vestigial and unbalanced. A lot of ink has been spilled to say "Necromancy shouldn't be something D&D players dabble in", but at the end of the day, it's a terrible school to specialize in in the first place, so you probably shouldn't in the first place!

 

[James Gasik]

Suggestion is a spell that bothers me. We, as Players, often want as much power as possible, so we often expect Suggestion to be on par with Dominate Person.

I think Suggestion should be renamed Jedi Mind Trick.

I despise Suggestion. It's effects are completely up to interpretation, and my experience has been that if a player wants to use it, the DM will attempt to loophole it into obsolescence, but if the DM uses it, any attempt to do the same is called out as "metagaming", lol.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which is fantastic...if your DM allows said third party products. But as I've said before, the stigma against 3pp is still very real. A lot of people seem to hold onto this myth that WotC design is balanced (trust me, I know!), and that anything that seems better than WotC is badly designed power creep, and anything worse is just a waste of ink.

My current game uses Kobold Press content, including Deep Magic. Many of the spells are quite conservative, very niche, or slight variants of existing spells (like the Sacred Flame clone that targets a 5' square rather than have the cover clause). You have to sift through a lot of these, and when you do find a strong spell, you start looking online to see if it's been given errata, because surely, that has to be a mistake, lol.

I now feel the need to subject you to a personal rant of mine- D&D has had specialist spellcasters for a long time. But very rarely can you look at a spell list given to a specialist and say "yes, this is perfectly balanced". 2nd edition was wonderful for this, just compare the PHB Transmutation school to Necromancy, for example. Some specialists had to be given clauses to potentially allow them to use "real" spells (Tome of Magic Elementalists, Wild Mages) as there were gaps in their lists. Due to the way Spheres were designed, you'd have many Mythos Priests unable to cast not only core Cleric spells, but unable to cast many spells that would make sense for their Power!

3.5 shuffled a lot of spells around, inadvertently turning Conjuration into an uber school, even for blasting (thanks to all the SR: No spells in it). Classes like the Shugenja also had to deal with the inequity between elements, and even the "ultra specialist" classes, like the Warmage, Beguiler, and Dread Necromancer, with their large curated thematic lists, have spells of multiple schools in them, with caveats for adding regular Wizard spells to their lists.

5e decided to give us a Subclass for each school of magic, but didn't even try to limit spell access, since the schools are so vestigial and unbalanced. A lot of ink has been spilled to say "Necromancy shouldn't be something D&D players dabble in", but at the end of the day, it's a terrible school to specialize in in the first place, so you probably shouldn't in the first place!

I have never had a problem getting 3pp into my games, either as a player or a DM. I sympathize with you for having a different experience, but there is a solution to these game issues, and it's 3pp. If the response to this is, "some people are afraid to step from behind WotC's skirts for no good reason", I don't know what to tell you.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The thing is, these are different groups of people. That's the difference between players (who were doing the complaining about rituals back in 4e) and DMs. Players want more power for their PCs, and hate having less, even if it's for their own good. DMs generally look at the bigger picture.

Given players vastly outnumber DMs, how did the current situation ever arise?