D&D (2024) D&D 2024 Rules Oddities (Kibbles’ Collected Complaints)

[TheSword]

I think there's a very real and important distinction to be drawn between:

A. Rules lawyering poorly-worded rules (weapon juggling).

and

B. Using very obvious tactics that would be immediately obvious to any half-way smart in-game character. Dragging a dude through spikes makes perfect sense in character just like casting Heat Metal on someone's armor.

A biiiig swathe of the added stuff that martials get in 5.5e is more forced movement and generally making mocement matter instead of focusing on trading blows face to face. And now we're not supposed to play with people who want to use those abilities in the most basic manner?

The is not coming up with good tactics. It’s coming up with tactics to do something against logic and common sense because of a loophole in those rules.

The most basic manner does not include hunting out a specific low level spell and abusing a confluence of rules and special abilities to have it deal an unrealistic amount of damage.

Now you can play that way if you and your DM/players like that kind of thing. It’s not for me stop you doing that. But you really surely complain that your janky rules abuse is now too good. Or that anyone else is making you play that way. Or pretend that it’s somehow typical table play.

 

[KibblesTasty]

I mean, they repeatedly told us that they had people reading through all of our comments. People were complaining that their comments weren't being read, so WotC reassured us that wasn't the case. That means that they lied to us about reading the comments, deliberately left in the problem, or meant to get rid of it and fumbled the ball on an easy play. None of that is a good look.

It's also possible that they laid off the blokes reading the comments, and the rest were too busy to pick up the slack there.

It's worth keeping in the back of our mind that when it seems like they were crunched on time, seems like maybe things were rushed, seems like things got sloppy... they laid off >1,000 people, while the executive folks say 'oh that was just back office people' we know that's not true, because we some of the people that got laid off.

When I find myself wondering how they got here, remembering that the had deep cuts in their staff near what would have been final stretch of development on the system does seem to line up. I've been through a lot of crunch in my life (I used to work in the video game industry... crunch is a given there), and thinking about losing a large chunk of your team, in the final push makes very little sense.

Heavily into opinion territory here, but the impression I get is from the folks higher up the chain is that they don't take the edition particularly seriously as an effort of design. They just come right out and say that it is intentionally power crept to get people to buy it, they laid off a bunch of blokes in what had to be the polishing and refining stages of it, and the seem to have prioritized the marketing deadline above getting it done.

 

[Maxperson]

how much outcry was there for the MM being released in 2025?

I think there's a big difference between one book missing 2024 by a little bit and all three missing the entire year, the third book coming in mid 2025. One isn't going to raise much ruckus. All three is a different story.

Think of it like pitching. One strike is no big deal. Three strikes and you are out.

 

[Maxperson]

It's also possible that they laid off the blokes reading the comments, and the rest were too busy to pick up the slack there.

It's worth keeping in the back of our mind that when it seems like they were crunched on time, seems like maybe things were rushed, seems like things got sloppy... they laid off >1,000 people, while the executive folks say 'oh that was just back office people' we know that's not true, because we some of the people that got laid off.

When I find myself wondering how they got here, remembering that the had deep cuts in their staff near what would have been final stretch of development on the system does seem to line up. I've been through a lot of crunch in my life (I used to work in the video game industry... crunch is a given there), and thinking about losing a large chunk of your team, in the final push makes very little sense.

Heavily into opinion territory here, but the impression I get is from the folks higher up the chain is that they don't take the edition particularly seriously as an effort of design. They just come right out and say that it is intentionally power crept to get people to buy it, they laid off a bunch of blokes in what had to be the polishing and refining stages of it, and the seem to have prioritized the marketing deadline above getting it done.

I hadn't thought of that. It's certainly possible that the comments readers were laid off, monumentally stupid, but possible. Also, the readers should have been categorizing the comments as they went through them, so that database should have been available as a reference.

I guess the long and the short of it is that we will probably never know the exact reason for the sloppiness.

 

[KibblesTasty]

While I like most of your takes I'll disagree about Wall of Force: the whole point of the spell is and always has been to be the immovable object that you've no choice but wait till its duration ends, and I'd hate to see that aspect of it nerfed.

I tend to dislike spells that can only be solved other spells, leaving no counterplay for non-magical characters (no save, nothing they can try to do). My personal 'fix' is that I give Wall of Force hit points, so enough battering breaks it. It is still very good for delaying a powerful creature a couple turns, or splitting off a horde for a turn or two, but it can longer freely partition almost any fight into the optimal configuration.

A frequent piece of advice in encounter building is to make something a proper challenge include more enemies, but a single spell completely undoes that by letting the players divide up almost any encounter how they like. I think it's one of maybe half a dozen spells that comes up a lot when you hear about people's frustration with high level play.

That said, this is completely a tangent and obviously just a pet peeve of mine. I feel it's unreasonable to ask the DMs to work around it, and extremely obnoxious to any nonmagical PCs if they ever get locked out of a fight with it. Just let them vent their frustration by hitting the wall and maybe breaking it down after a few turns. Makes it feel a lot better IMO.

 

[Eric V]

Or pretend that it’s somehow typical table play.

How do you know what "typical table play" is?

 

[Maxperson]

I tend to dislike spells that can only be solved other spells, leaving no counterplay for non-magical characters (no save, nothing they can try to do). My personal 'fix' is that I give Wall of Force hit points, so enough battering breaks it. It is still very good for delaying a powerful creature a couple turns, or splitting off a horde for a turn or two, but it can longer freely partition almost any fight into the optimal configuration.

A frequent piece of advice in encounter building is to make something a proper challenge include more enemies, but a single spell completely undoes that by letting the players divide up almost any encounter how they like. I think it's one of maybe half a dozen spells that comes up a lot when you hear about people's frustration with high level play.

That said, this is completely a tangent and obviously just a pet peeve of mine. I feel it's unreasonable to ask the DMs to work around it, and extremely obnoxious to any nonmagical PCs if they ever get locked out of a fight with it. Just let them vent their frustration by hitting the wall and maybe breaking it down after a few turns. Makes it feel a lot better IMO.

I don't mind wall of force being spellcaster only to fix, because I also have anti-magic zones/objects/obstacles that are non-caster only to fix. As long as both are used sparingly, the occasional short inability to be the one to fix things is okay in my opinion.

 

[TheSword]

How do you know what "typical table play" is?

I know it isn’t repeated dragging a grappled creature back and forth over spike stones.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I know it isn’t repeated dragging a grappled creature back and forth over spike stones.

Well, not until now...

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't mind wall of force being spellcaster only to fix, because I also have anti-magic zones/objects/obstacles that are non-caster only to fix. As long as both are used sparingly, the occasional short inability to be the one to fix things is okay in my opinion.

It really is an outsized big deal extending well beyond stuff like wall/cage of force though & it's a big deal because 5e is trying to have it both ways by nullifying all of the risks... Back when vancian casting was a thing those high level spells that tended to lean far into "stop the clock & take a deep breath" like wall of force/cage were less of an issue because they were pulling double duty eating into a player's resources. Firstly there was the easy & obvious resource cost of burning the spell slot containing that spell in this situation even though it might be more important & better used later when it wouldn't be available. Secondly there was the real visceral cost of preparing that spell in that slot with everyone at the table knowing that the party might stop or go back to rest & recover without ever having used the ace-in-the-hole in question simply because a situation where it was going to be useful enough never came up.

Now a player can prepare a bunch of those high level spells & just flexibly slot in the most useful of them at the time when it is most useful. There's no risk of overpreparing too many walls of force/fireball/etc (or whatever) when something else would ultimately be more important. There's no risk of players overspecializing & finding themselves in a bind when foes can somehow counter ignore or meaningfully mitigate a one trick pony. So many of 5e's spells are so far into the realm of being "intentionally overtuned" that it's not really even a risk that players will load up on the wrong set of top shelf A+ & S tier spells. That all gets topped off with the way saving throws were split too many ways for the now mathematically inept monsters to provide the old "oh this monsters is probably good at $saveA & bad at $saveB & probably weak to $elementC, I should cast X instead of Y" to further ensure that the A+ & S tier spells are almost always optimal against almost every monster.