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

[M_Natas]

Couterpoint: that's what multiple campiangs I'm in (two playing, on running) and it doesn't slow it down significantly.


Great, they are playing with house rules that make the spell OP. A table having house rules does NOT make the spell OP.


As said, we do, and it doesn't add a lot of time.

Of course, because we do that, counterspell isn't OP so no everyone has it so it comes up far less.

In other words, this is entirely a problem of the table's own making on a balanced spell. They (a) make it OP, (b) because it's OP everyone always has it, (c) because all casters and foes have it, the call response would come up more often and make playing it correctly take more time.

This is the exact case of "after the roll but before if it's known if it's a success or not" that comes up for other things - if the DM just blurts out "it's a success!" or "it failed!" before a chance to evaluate, it makes the ability more powerful.

I think what would have helped is some guidance (not the spell) in the books on how the intended play is.
Also, another big problem is: outside of counterspell I can't think of a spell or another reaction that can be used in the specific time when the casting a spell action is declared but the spell itself is not yet declared.
So counterspell is an outlier. Only one spell makes uses of that specific time frame which you otherwise wouldn't need to specify, which is strange and not very well designed.

 

[el-remmen]

Please, you're attacking for things that I didn't say, and trying to turn every case to absurd extremes, such as 3-4 being the only thing they can face, or ignoring circumstances like being deep in a dungeon when the conversation is explicitly about them noticing circumstances.

I thought with my example about noticing the temple overrun with undead I was being clear about specifically talking about things the characters can notice.

I did not intend to "attack." So my apologies if it came off that way. I was extrapolating from what you said, maybe I shouldn't have.

What you describe here makes more sense to me than reducing it to 'based on 3 to 4 encounters a day."

"I always seem to have spell slots/class abilities/whatever left over by the time we camp" seems like a perfectly reasonable in-game reasoning for going all out more often more than noticing an arbitrary number of encounters a day (to be clear, arbitrary from the PCs PoV). This could be the case if they typically face one encounter a day or 10 encounters a day, since it says nothing about how tough those encounters might be and thus how many resources PCs expend in the process.

From what you posted, I assumed you meant based on the number of encounters alone, which still seems absurd to me, personally - but your clarification suggests that is not the case.

 

[Stalker0]

Don't waste your time trying to guess just how many styles can get "fixed" by whatever rules changes you think there should be. You'll drive yourself crazy and have no way of proving it one way or the other anyway. Either that or you'll just force yourself to believe that number is large enough to thus justify why your views on what the rules should be are in fact the correct ones.

While I will never be able to stop folks for getting themselves all worked up over the game rules WotC produces... I will always be here to just remind them there's nothing wrong with just "letting go" and stick to making their own table work fine for them instead.

Your statement though goes against the grain of the point of a discussion board. At its core the entire point of this board is to debate the common core of dnd…the game rules being one of them.

I mean sure all of us could adapt our own slice of the game, but then there isn’t a whole lot to talk about.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I've never enjoyed survival in classic D&D games because I find the focus on food, water, and getting lost just something I personally do not enjoy. I much more enjoy travel in the vein of the LotR movies, where it's cinematic, scenic, and you zoom in when you happen upon something interesting (or it happens upon you).

Because of this, I don't find the spells that impact survival all that problematic. Actually, I find them interesting, because since humans love to exploit technology, and magic certainly is a type of technology, the things you could achieve with goodberry and tiny hut are enormous. This has led me to some very fun worldbuilding, and it has allowed me to introduce new arcane survival challenges. Certain blogposts have helped a lot with this.

I think if you have issue with spell survival, you should embrace more mythic locales. These are places with certain "laws," and when those "laws" are broken, bad htings happen. Maybe you can't expose skin in this one region, and doing so means you are immediately cut by stinging winds haunted by the souls of gnolls that died here, hungry to taste flesh just one more time. Maybe in this region, you have to stay quiet because sound is greatly amplified, and one loud note can create a thunderwave centered on yourself. These kinds of arcane challenges are present even in Sword and Sorcery fiction, and I feel you can really make them fit just about any tone of campaign. I mean, LotR BOOKS had the mountain Moria was in be alive, old, and cranky! So low or high magic, these allow you to create new survival challenges that can push your players into new directions without having to just focus on food and water.

So if you have issues with how these concerns are addressed, basically you should just get over it?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Your statement though goes against the grain of the point of a discussion board. At its core the entire point of this board is to debate the common core of dnd…the game rules being one of them.

I mean sure all of us could adapt our own slice of the game, but then there isn’t a whole lot to talk about.

So you're not looking for WotC to make changes to the game... you're just talking in general terms about what you prefer to do? Good! That's my hope!

Nothing wrong at all with just having conversations... I just don't want people to have the mistaken belief they can actually affect the game with what gets said here. I'd feel bad for them if they did.

 

[GrimCo]

Personally, there aren't any spell that bother me. If some spells or casters don't fit the setting, I just remove them. For instance, in last adventure i ran, there were only two casters - clerics and wizards. That's it, no caster subclasses, no half casters ( paladins do exists, but they can only burn slots for smite, no spells for them), ranger and bard were just custom backgrounds.

Goodberry - material component is limitation. It uses mistletoe as component. Unless you brought a bunch of it, you need to find some. Mistletoes don't grow everywhere. Also, one house rule i use, since it fits the theme of transmutation school. It transforms berries from sprig into those of goodberry (similar to goodberry in 3x). RAW, goodberry is more in line with conjuration than transmutation.

I get why they buffed Tiny hut. I gives players reliable method for obtaining safe location to do short/long rest. But it's not that op. Yes, enemies can't enter, shoot at you, shoot spells at you, but you can't do that either. So smart ones will just wait out till PCs get out.

 

[Irlo]

I've never enjoyed survival in classic D&D games because I find the focus on food, water, and getting lost just something I personally do not enjoy. I much more enjoy travel in the vein of the LotR movies, where it's cinematic, scenic, and you zoom in when you happen upon something interesting (or it happens upon you).

Because of this, I don't find the spells that impact survival all that problematic. Actually, I find them interesting, because since humans love to exploit technology, and magic certainly is a type of technology, the things you could achieve with goodberry and tiny hut are enormous. This has led me to some very fun worldbuilding, and it has allowed me to introduce new arcane survival challenges. Certain blogposts have helped a lot with this.

I think if you have issue with spell survival, you should embrace more mythic locales. These are places with certain "laws," and when those "laws" are broken, bad htings happen. Maybe you can't expose skin in this one region, and doing so means you are immediately cut by stinging winds haunted by the souls of gnolls that died here, hungry to taste flesh just one more time. Maybe in this region, you have to stay quiet because sound is greatly amplified, and one loud note can create a thunderwave centered on yourself. These kinds of arcane challenges are present even in Sword and Sorcery fiction, and I feel you can really make them fit just about any tone of campaign. I mean, LotR BOOKS had the mountain Moria was in be alive, old, and cranky! So low or high magic, these allow you to create new survival challenges that can push your players into new directions without having to just focus on food and water.

I was going to let it go with a , but now I want to say more. I appreciate that you shared ideas about survival challenges in mythic locales and how you treat spells as technology. These are not ideas that will be useful to everyone, of course, but they’re valuable contributions nonetheless.

I hope you’re not dissuaded from posting due to negative comments from others. I come here to read posts like this, and I wade through a lot of crap to find them.

Thank you.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Ah, ok. Your question is reasonable. The PCs could presumably notice that they are only having 1-3 skirmishes a day. PCs acting on that knowledge could be argued to be in-game. But why is 1-3 combats the limit? Is that a strict characteristic of the game world? Is it really true that there is no possibility of having more than 3 combats in any given day, where combats last <1 minute on average? Is that the argument?

It can reflect something in the world. If the party walks from Fallcrest to Baldur’s Gate and never has a day in which more than a single combat encounter takes place, then walks from Baldur’s Gate to Neverwinter and the same is true, then, by observation, the characters know that they are unlikely to have 4 encounters before their next long rest. Asking them to pretend otherwise is asking them to play their characters as obtuse.

In game, it just says something about how many monsters populate a certain area.

 

[Hussar]

Not saying looking at it one way over the other is better or preferable... but just that it explains why one way isn't objectively "wrong" and why WotC doesn't seem to mind the side they have chosen. Because there are people who look at how to represent combat from both sides-- where some think Shield et. al. are bad spells because of the issues you presented, and others who think it all works fine.

I totally get it. And, I have no problems with play proceeding non-linearly. That's fine. It's the "After the roll but before the results" thing that's such a PITA. Because now, if you actually want to do it right, you should be pausing after die rolls to check if someone is going to interrupt it. This tends to either get ignored (as in playing on a VTT where results are reported instantly) or it breaks up the flow of the game too much.

For me, it has nothing to do with the narrative of the game. That's fine. We can retcon stuff all the time. It's the "WAIT!!! I wanna do X" stuff that grinds my gears.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I totally get it. And, I have no problems with play proceeding non-linearly. That's fine. It's the "After the roll but before the results" thing that's such a PITA. Because now, if you actually want to do it right, you should be pausing after die rolls to check if someone is going to interrupt it. This tends to either get ignored (as in playing on a VTT where results are reported instantly) or it breaks up the flow of the game too much.

For me, it has nothing to do with the narrative of the game. That's fine. We can retcon stuff all the time. It's the "WAIT!!! I wanna do X" stuff that grinds my gears.

That's the advantage of playing live at a table with your friends... there are already so many other things going on around the table with people talking, eating snacks, using the bathroom, that there's no "continuous game flow" to worry about.