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

[Zardnaar]

And yet the actions one type of Fighter would take would be consistently different from the type of actions another type of Fighter would take.

Being a particular type of <class> actually mattered for how you played and what you wanted to do. Being a particular type of <class> in 5e? Makes little to no difference. Pretty much all Fighters want the same kinds of feats. Pretty much all Warlocks want the same spells and invocations. Pretty much all Wizards will have the same staple spells, whether they're Diviners or War Wizards or Stupidly Overp--I mean Bladesingers. Etc., etc.

The allegedly huge variety evaporates rather quickly when you realize that (at least!) half the spells on your class's spell list aren't worth the cost of casting them.

You forgot to add an imho on that.

We're experienced players. Most casuals just want to have fun and use "bad" spells because they don't know any better.

Most players are casuals. I figured this out in 2002 when I discovered I sad the only one locally paying attention to internet discussions.

We are an extreme minority here.

It's also why 3E wasn't broken in most games because most people don't play like internet hyperbole claims. They didnt know how to break it or didn't have the required material.

Fireball hasn't been good (its B tier more average) since 2E I suspect it gets used more tgan every other spell at that tier. It's fun. Hypnotic pattern not so much.

 

[Shardstone]

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.

The Mage Hand Necromancer BANGS. 3pp makes the dnd everyone wants

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You forgot to add an imho on that.

Because I know the statistics involved. Great spells really are taken more often. Consider the hand-wringing over silvery barbs. Which got huge press because of the various D&D podcasts. Your casual dismissal of the intelligence and awareness of players isn't accurate, especially in this modern era of seventeen million guides online, and folks asking for guidance on Reddit, and thousands of hours of guides (some better, some worse) on Youtube.

Telling people smart character building choices is literally a career choice now, for some people.

Most players are casuals. I figured this out in 2002 when I discovered I sad the only one locally paying attention to internet discussions.

....you do realize that most people are dramatically more online now than they were over twenty years ago, right?

Like, simply because of smartphones and Youtube/Tiktok.

We are an extreme minority here.

Not anymore. Especially with the runaway success of Baldur's Gate 3, which will put character optimization into the minds of players all over the place.

Fireball hasn't been good (its B tier more average) since 2E I suspect it gets used more tgan every other spell at that tier. It's fun. Hypnotic pattern not so much.

Er...fireball is actually the best damage spell of its spell level (at least for Wizard/Sorcerer), and in fact is almost as good as a spell a full level higher. Because the designers specifically made it overpowered relative to other damage spells of its level in order to encourage more people to take it. Fireball is, in fact, the standard by which other damage spells are judged in many, perhaps even most guidance online, because it is such a good AoE damage spell.

 

[Zardnaar]

Because I know the statistics involved. Great spells really are taken more often. Consider the hand-wringing over silvery barbs. Which got huge press because of the various D&D podcasts. Your casual dismissal of the intelligence and awareness of players isn't accurate, especially in this modern era of seventeen million guides online, and folks asking for guidance on Reddit, and thousands of hours of guides (some better, some worse) on Youtube.

Telling people smart character building choices is literally a career choice now, for some people.


....you do realize that most people are dramatically more online now than they were over twenty years ago, right?

Like, simply because of smartphones and Youtube/Tiktok.


Not anymore. Especially with the runaway success of Baldur's Gate 3, which will put character optimization into the minds of players all over the place.


Er...fireball is actually the best damage spell of its spell level (at least for Wizard/Sorcerer), and in fact is almost as good as a spell a full level higher. Because the designers specifically made it overpowered relative to other damage spells of its level in order to encourage more people to take it. Fireball is, in fact, the standard by which other damage spells are judged in many, perhaps even most guidance online, because it is such a good AoE damage spell.

Damage dealing spells kinda suck though. Fireballs situational great.

I have been playing BG3 a lot. And have been following stuff online.

Only 20% of players have beaten the gane apparently less than 1% have beaten honor mode. I skipped to tactician mode after getting towards end of act 2.

Game sold 20 million+ copies. Looking at sone youtube buikd guides a see 1 at 200k views. Most are under 100k. One of the biggest is at 400k-600k after 5 months.

On tactician I evaporated the Dragon and Emperor before they got to react.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Damage dealing spells kinda suck though. Fireballs situational great.

I have been playing BG3 a lot. And have been following stuff online.

Only 20% of players have beaten the gane apparently less than 1% have beaten honor mode. I skipped to tactician mode after getting towards end of act 2.

Game sold 20 million+ copies. Looking at sone youtube buikd guides a see 1 at 200k views. Most are under 100k. One of the biggest is at 400k-600k after 5 months.

On tactician I evaporated the Dragon and Emperor before they got to react.

It's actually quite normal for a game to have relatively few people complete it compared to the people who buy it. I myself own it and haven't completed it yet because I've been playing co-op games that move at a glacial pace as a result. Someone who only has, say, 5-6 hours of game time a week because they're a working adult with children? They could easily take 20 weeks to beat BG3, minimum--which would mean they'd only have beaten it in early January, if they started on release day.

But--at a bare minimum--20% of people completing the game means over a million people. The lowest estimates I've seen for sales of BG3 are over 5 million copies, and that was back in August, shortly after release. Higher-end estimates nowadays are in the 20M+ range. Even if we assume it's only around 10M, that still means two million people have completed it at least once.

The typical numbers people throw around nowadays for how big D&D has gotten are in the roughly 8 million range. So we're looking at, roughly, about a quarter of the population of D&D players. Now, not all people who play BG3 will be D&D players, and vice-versa. But that's a far cry from your dismissal of optimization as being something effectively nobody does, based on your observations of how people used the internet two decades ago.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Success just matters more than theme to most people, IME.

Right! And those people can go to hell!

(Is joke. I joking.)

 

[Hussar]

/whoops, made an error in judgement. Time to fix that.

 

[Stalker0]

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.

It’s the problem though with a dms proffered method leading to a radically different power effect in game.

Some dms are happy to track every players AC and can just say “hit or miss”. Others prefer to call out the attack and let the players do the work of confirming it’s a hit or miss.

The fact that two very reasonable methods of play lead to a radically different power scale for a 1st level spell…might indicate the problem is with the spell

 

[Stalker0]

just give them a hand full of d4s and say “here, give a d4 when you want to and Roleplay how your doing it without ever saying the word guidance again.”

Here’s how I solved guidance:

Provides a +1 bonus to all skills for 6 targets for tbr duration (still concentration).

No more asking me can I apply guidance, no more ruling if guidance works in situation X. No more getting a 4 that lets them bag a dc 30 way earlier than they should.

My players still use it all the time, but now it’s simple fire and forget and still perfectly worthy of a cantrip

 

[Burnside]

Some dms are happy to track every players AC and can just say “hit or miss”.

You make that sound like more work than it is. You just roll behind the screen, and ask the player what their AC is.