D&D 5E As a DM - Your Top 3 Most Hated Spells

[Tony Vargas]

Constructed is what most people think of when they think of Magic, where you build a deck out of cards from your whole collection Limited is where you receive a limited pool of cards, , and have to build a deck out of that limited pool. .., the smaller pool of cards to build decks from significantly lowers the average power level and consistency of decks in the event, and accordingly increases the impact of players’ skill at evaluating individual cards.

Thanks for the summary. Makes sense, in context.

 

[Charlaquin]

Thanks for the summary. Makes sense, in context.

No problem

 

[Bacon Bits]

Well, y'know, 5e is s'posed to be simple & rules-lite, so guess that must've seemed much simpler than "move action" or - horrors - the 3.x "move-equivalent action."

The point wasn't to be simple. That's why I said, "Sure, it's super fiddley and I wouldn't play with the spell this way, but mechanically it works just fine. 5e is certainly capable of it."

The point was just to show that 5e can do it if you want it to.

It reduces your speed to 0, and prohibits benefiting from bonuses to speed. Sounds completely different to me.

Try describing the two mechanical effects without simply repeating the definitions and without describing anything about the presumptive source of the effects.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, it's super fiddley and I wouldn't play with the spell this way, but mechanically it works just fine. 5e is certainly capable of it. No, we don't really need to care about misty step or other oddball corner cases. This is D&D, not Magic: The Gathering.

Actually you do need to care about those corner cases, because sooner or later it's inevitable they're going to arise and either you'll have to rule on them then (and note your rulings so they remain consistent the next time) or have rules/rulings pre-done.

Most spell write-ups (in all editions!) could do with a lot more attention paid to corner cases.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You say that like it can't possibly work that way. The Aim action for Rogues from the Class Feature Variants UA already works that way:



And the grappled condition already uses similar language to prohibit movement.

Counterspell could easily say:



Sure, it's super fiddley and I wouldn't play with the spell this way, but mechanically it works just fine. 5e is certainly capable of it. No, we don't really need to care about misty step or other oddball corner cases. This is D&D, not Magic: The Gathering.

Personally, I don't have much of a problem with counterspell. I would prefer that it didn't have the "At Higher Levels" clause at all, but that's really pretty minor. If I really have an issue with it interfering with my encounter as a DM, I would probably just add an additional spellcaster who has counterspell, but that's somewhat of a luxury of milestone leveling.

True strike I think is fairly useless, but it is useful in an ambush or when combined with a much higher level spell that requires a spell attack roll. In both of those cases, you can't really just attack two turns in a row. However, it's somewhat rare that you actually care that much, so its just not that useful. I think true strike would also be more appropriate if it cost a bonus action and then prevented you from casting spells and gave you disadvantage on attack rolls the next turn. However, I think that's too fiddley for 5e.

Blade ward has the same problem that true strike does. It's only useful when Dodge doesn't work because your attackers already have disadvantage. That just doesn't come up often enough.

Spare the dying I think is shockingly awful. When a Healer's Kit costs 5 gp for 10 de facto potions of spare the dying, and you can make a Medicine (Wisdom) check to do it instead, too, it's just inexcusably bad. Both of those take a standard action, and spare the dying is range touch. I think either the cantrip should either have a range (15 to 30 feet), should only require a bonus action, or should have some other benefit (e.g., automatically succeeds on death saves over a specified time period).

You're totally proving my point for me here!

5E doesn't have a Move action and attempts to simulate one in order to create a novel action economy, especially out-of-turn, get complicated and weird. In turn it's less bad but given you can just use your movement before taking an action it can still get weird. I strongly suspect that UA will get changed though it is fairly reasonable as it is entirely voluntary and is its own thing, not a spell. Spells have their own rules and a spell that said "You cannot have moved the round you cast this" world be a tad wacky.

Your own example takes a different approach and uses the Incapacitated condition, which, ironically, doesn't prevent you from moving! Your setup only prevents movement on a failure. In all other cases they lose actions and reactions but can still move. Was that intended?

Either way, point is, trying to balance spells with imaginary Move actions is not a great plan. An after-cost like Incapacitated isn't bad but might be so severe that Counterspell is simply a bad idea in most cases, which is fine if that's the goal.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The point wasn't to be simple.
The point was just to show that 5e can do it if you want it to.

As the DM, sure, you can do what you want with 5e. Including thing's 5e "can't do" (as written) because you're not limited to what's written. DM Empowerment. Rulings not Rules. &c...

Try describing the two mechanical effects without simply repeating the definitions and without describing anything about the presumptive source of the effects.

Huh? One is "you can try to move, but won't go anywhere" the other is "you could have moved, but did this instead."

 

[Lanefan]

Huh? One is "you can try to move, but won't go anywhere" the other is "you could have moved, but did this instead."

Or "A side effect of casting this spell is that unbreakable clamps appear around your feet, painlessly holding you in place even should you become ethereal or gaseous, until a round later when the clamps vanish. The only way to escape the clamps before they vanish is to sever your feet."

 

[Tony Vargas]

Try describing the two mechanical effects without simply repeating the definitions and without describing anything about the presumptive source of the effects.

Or "A side effect of casting this spell is that unbreakable clamps appear around your feet, painlessly holding you in place even should you become ethereal or gaseous, until a round later when the clamps vanish. The only way to escape the clamps before they vanish is to sever your feet."

Sounds like a description of the presumptive source of the effects.

 

[Harzel]

To be clear, skill testing cards in Magic are not intended to trick players. They don’t design cards to look impressive but actually be bad. What they do is intentionally design cards that are obviously bad to players who have a basic understanding of the game’s power curve. For a basic example, the game expects you to be able to get a 2/1 creature for one white mana. A 2/1 creature for one white mana and one additional mana of any color might seem fine in a vacuum, but is obviously behind the curve to any player who has learned this fairly fundamental aspect of the game. The idea isn’t to trick anyone, but to teach players about the power curve. Learning to recognize these skill testing cards is an expected part of the progression of learning the nuances of deck building.

Since I know next to nothing about Magic, a) it's not surprising this makes no sense to me; and b) it might not be important to have it make sense to me. But. This makes no sense to me. It sounds like you are saying these 'testing' cards are introduced to 'teach' players not to make a mistake, which, but for the existence of the testing cards, they could not make. And if it's possible to make the mistake in the absence of the 'testing' cards, then why aren't the negative consequences of those situations sufficient to teach players not to make the mistake?

I don't expect a tutorial on Magic, but if there's a way to clarify briefly, that would be great. My interest is not really to understand Magic, but to try to wrap my head around this notion of building deliberate 'trap' options into a game, on which this seems to be a variant. I've never been able to understand a motive for doing so that didn't seem a little... antisocial.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't expect a tutorial on Magic, but if there's a way to clarify briefly, that would be great. My interest is not really to understand Magic, but to try to wrap my head around this notion of building deliberate 'trap' options into a game, on which this seems to be a variant. I've never been able to understand a motive for doing so that didn't seem a little... antisocial.

Anything but antisocial: System mastery is a reality of any complex game system, and it can be part of the social aspect. A tremendous amount of the on-line community's interactions in the 3e era, for instance, were discussing and debating finer (and grosser) points of system mastery or 'optimization.' Trap, chaff, optimal & sub-optimal, choices - builds, synergies, combos & exploits - they're all part of that. M:tG as a competitive CCG is all about the system in way and to a degree no RPG could be, but D&D, especially 3e, has taken pages (cards?) from it, when it comes to perking it up from the system mastery angle.

One way to think of it is that games also have meta-games. In D&D, for instance, chargen & level-up are meta-games relative to the play of the resulting characters in a session. 3e strongly emphasized those meta-games, including building in intentional rewards for system mastery, which well could include intentional 'traps' (and the opposite, options that were superior, but didn't necessarily look it at first).