D&D (2024) Command is the Perfect Encapsulation of Everything I Don't Like About 5.5e

[Ruin Explorer]

Hmm...only knowing a few bespoke commands in the language of the gods/universe/whatever would actually make quite a bit of sense. You can't command the orc to "autodefenestrate" because you simply don't know that word in the godstongue.

Considering how many Cleric spells revolve around tropes of words, languages, and communication, one could argue for some implicit worldbuilding between divine magic and this "universal language".

I always assumed that was how the Command Word: X spells worked, like they were the actual god-word, which a mortal requires magic to even utter. It wasn't an entirely uncommon idea in fantasy - some of Le Guin's Earthsea stuff is adjacent to it at least.

 

[TiQuinn]

Yeah. No thanks. I'm not 12 years old anymore. Something like this would be far more mood breaking and annoying than it would add to the game. He crapped his pants is not an "awesome" roleplay moment for me. It's a cheap laugh and totally breaking in immersion.

Like I said, it's not role playing to me. That's just a player not actually playing in character. The priest of war decides to drop a cheap poop joke, Rick and Morty style, in the middle of combat? Yeah, no thanks.

I enjoy a cheap laugh. Number one movie in the world right now is full of them. But you do you, I guess.

 

[Daztur]

Well that's the rub.

Old school games pretty much only work if you have a group with similar mindset experiences and expectations.

D&D is a game specifically tailor to everyone. Because of that it has to be more strict on what it allows. This is why they command spell was changed

As great as games like Shadowdark and OSE are, They could never be the flagbearer for fantasy TTRPGs. Did direct appeal is way too niche to be the main engine and thruway into the hobby.

Well that goes for every game shrug You need to get people on board with the expectations of the game. In my experience it isn't any harder to teach newbies with no RPG experience OSR games than it is to teach them 5e. If anything OSR games are easier to teach random people since so much of the mechanical weight is dumped on the DM, which means you can play just fine with players who don't know sweet naughty word-all about how the game works. However, it's hard as hell to teach a newbie how to DM an OSR game so it balances out.

That's not to say that 5e doesn't have some things going for it. My son, who is obsessed with D&D in that very specifically teenager way LOVES that it hits the sweet spot between being complicated enough that he can do mental CharOp exercises when he's not playing but simple enough that he can wrap his mind around the rules. For him 4e and 3.5e were overwhelming in how many mechanics there were and "3d6 in order straight down the line" was too simple for him while 5e was just right.

 

[Lanefan]

The only reason to "roleplay" magic is to power game and make life a PITA for the DM.

I play TTRPG's for actual roleplay - playing your character and developing the personality and story within the framework of the adventure. "Defecate" is not roleplaying. "Masturbate" is not roleplaying.

Clearly you've never met some of my characters, for whom those commands (if they were Clerics and could cast the spell) would be perfectly in character.

My namesake here, for instance. Any command he ever cast (if he could) would be a 4-letter word of some sort, because that's just how he rolls. And it's probably a good thing for the setting he's in that he can't cast Suggestion!

Which in short means that yes, sometimes these things really are roleplaying.

 

[vagabundo]

The other way to go about writing up RPG rules is to write up a mechanical effect that you think would be fun and then slap some flavor text onto it. This flavor text then doesn’t matter, it’s just for color. If the mechanics and the flavor don’t align, you just shrug and handwave the flavor. The most famous example in D&D of flavor text not mattering at all was the whole 4e brouhaha over knocking gelatinous cubes prone. The official ruling was that the flavor of your power being described as tripping people and gelatinous cubes being cubes that logically can’t be tripped didn’t matter, you could trip them the same as could trip anything else.

And that brouhaha was always stupid. The DMs job there was to mesh the narrative to the mechanical, if it matters to the group, and its so straightforward to do that: "your attack (effect whatever) creates a resonance wave in the jelly, causing it to wobble, destablising it." Same mechanical effect as prone. Everybodies happy.

"Rulings not rules" was a cop out that left DMs hanging out to dry, without enough tools and mechanics to hang their hat on.

For experienced DMs I doubt it was an issue as they tend to bring their toolbox from edition to edition, even TTRPG to TTRPG. But for newer DMs that kind of help is invaluable. I think what saved them are all the Youtube vids and podcasts to level up as DMs quicker.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Yeah. No thanks. I'm not 12 years old anymore. Something like this would be far more mood breaking and annoying than it would add to the game. He crapped his pants is not an "awesome" roleplay moment for me. It's a cheap laugh and totally breaking in immersion.

Like I said, it's not role playing to me. That's just a player not actually playing in character. The priest of war decides to drop a cheap poop joke, Rick and Morty style, in the middle of combat? Yeah, no thanks.

I agree, the insistence on allowing players to do stuff like that kinda reeks of the bathos and irony-poisoning that is plaguing mainstream media, where you cannot even try to do a serious scene without someone laughing at you for taking it seriously. Not everyone wants to turn every campaign into MCU, trying to do so like that sends clear message there is tonal dissonance between player and the GM and the thing I would probably do is either shut such gross behavior down, point to our lines and veils or pause the game entierly to talk with the player.

Just for me, when players do stuff like that I'm OVERJOYED. Players trying to derail entire encounters with harebrained cunning plans it my absolute favorite part of DMing. That's why I like my flavor strictly codified but my mechanics a bit loose so that when they try crazy harebrained plans I can use that flavor to figure out if their bizarre off-brand uses of their spells/abilities apply to this situation and I like mechanics that are flexible enough for me to let the players apply them in unusual ways not just tell the players to stop screwing around and stop coming up with cunning plans.

My biggest single inspiration for D&D is The Black Company and those books are FULL of "open ended power grabs for people to futz about trying to get as much bang for the buck as they can every single time they can." One of my favorite scenes in those books involve the heroes springing a sneak attack one someone...with a point blank ballista. I just love that kind of stuff as a DM.

For me as a DM, RPing is important but it isn't as important as creative problem solving (what I called Tactical Creativity upthread). But I find that with the way I DM by treating flavor as strictly codified and not at all flexible while being totally open and encouraging "open ended power grabs for people to futz about trying to get as much bang for the buck as they can every single time they can" it can really encourage more RP as the players feel that the flavor REALLY MATTERS and isn't just color, the flavor descriptions can mean the difference between life and death for their PCs so they have to really pay attention to all of the flavor details and immerse themselves into the world more.

The thing is, the Black Company has a consistent tone, even its actually humorous moments, like that time Croaker included One-Eyes horribly written report in the annals. The scene with the ballista is played for drama and it outright increases the dramatic tension, once this fails to kill the bad guy and they have to then jump him, knockin him down (and he doesn't go without a fight), crucify him and feed him something that will burst form his chest like a Xenomorph later.

There is a difference between creativity and players trying to turn the game into a joke by force. There's usually plenty of laughs to go around, but we like to take the adventure somewhat seriously. The "I make villain poop his pants" isn't creative or fun, it's juvenile and effectively laughs at everyone at the table for trying to take the collaborative story we're telling seriously. Not everything needs to have a "Hulk vs Loki" scene and at this point people are fed up seeing it everywhere anyway.,

 

[Daztur]

I don’t think the change to command is much about the direction of the game or creating more ‘rules’ per se. I think it is directly tied to the upcoming VTT. It’s easier to code the computer calculation for a short subset of commands, than an open ended one. Likewise, summons and conjures are easier for the VTT to handle as AoE effects, rather than more processing power for multiple discrete additional creatures. Abilities mirroring spells, check. And so on.

I’d like to think that it’s because Wizards is trying to help newbie DM’s by limiting options in some cases, but looking at all the other bizarreness in the PHB, and interpretations of things, and actually trying to apply them (as a newbie GM), it’s definitely not that.

People said the same thing about 4e and...I'm just not sure. But if that is what WotC is doing it seems so self-defeating. The main selling point of D&D is that you can do all kinds of things in it that a computer could never handle so changing D&D rules to make them easier for a computer to handle seems to go against everything that makes D&D more fun than a computer game.

I mostly agree with the OP. Where I differ is that what OP describes as changes to the flavor of the spell are, in my judgment, actually not flavor at all but mechanics. "Flavor is free" is for things like "I want to use elf stats but call myself a belf instead and be blue". If you mess with the mechanics in any way, it's no longer flavor.

Probably more of a case of us having slightly different definitions of "flavor." The way I see things, the harder a mechanic is to reskin the better. Which I guess means I like mechanics that are tied tightly to a specific flavor so that they intertwine tightly.

I think the same problem that happened in 4e and 5e is happening.

They ran out of time and didn't get to everything by the time corporate said the books need to get to the printers.

Anybody who was involved with the open D&D next and a one D&D play test No that they wasted a lot of time on stuff that didn't get in.

Yeah, 4e especially needed some polishing before it was sent to the printers. If the PHB 1 had the same level of mechanical tightness as the later books, KotSF wasn't a grindy slog, MM1 had more damage and less HP for the monsters as in later books, and the DMG did a better job of teaching people how to play 4e in a fun way (more big epic battles, less attrition via dungeon crawling) it would have been received much better. Still wouldn't have been to my tastes really, but I wish it had a chance to be a better version of what it was trying to be since it had a lot of good ideas that had some implementation issues.

For 5.5e there were some real perplexing changes (for example grappling someone no longer makes you move at half speed) that were never in any of the UAs.

No, but command can't do that either. I'm not sure what your point is. I thought you were asking whether a dm would allow creative use of their weapon attacks. "Can you summon a chandelier" in this context is like asking if you can use command to set someone on fire.

No, but I see what point they're going for here. It is a bit unfair that casters are clearly better at sneaky ratbastard tactics (due to the flexibility that their spells give them) while (in theory at least) balanced in terms of straightforward DPS-focused tactics. My ideal way of balancing things would be to make casters clearly inferior when it comes to straightforward DPS-focused tactics but maintain their edge in sneaky ratbastard tactics. So basically nerf Fireball, leave spells like Command intact.

That's a related issue. I don't like the impression I get with some games (including 5.5) that some rules changes have been made to protect players against theoretical "bad DMs". Lay out expectations for both players and DMs in the text as advice and suggestions for good play, not as mechanical handcuffs because we assume DMs can't be trusted not to screw over players.

Yeah, I've just never seen one of those rules help at all in actual play. Good rules can't fix bad DMs. Some clear and straightforward rules can help fix well-meaning but innumerate/overwhelmed DMs though.

 

[Minigiant]

Well that goes for every game shrug You need to get people on board with the expectations of the game. In my experience it isn't any harder to teach newbies with no RPG experience OSR games than it is to teach them 5e. If anything OSR games are easier to teach random people since so much of the mechanical weight is dumped on the DM, which means you can play just fine with players who don't know sweet naughty word-all about how the game works. However, it's hard as hell to teach a newbie how to DM an OSR game so it balances out.

That's not to say that 5e doesn't have some things going for it. My son, who is obsessed with D&D in that very specifically teenager way LOVES that it hits the sweet spot between being complicated enough that he can do mental CharOp exercises when he's not playing but simple enough that he can wrap his mind around the rules. For him 4e and 3.5e were overwhelming in how many mechanics there were and "3d6 in order straight down the line" was too simple for him while 5e was just right.

It's not the same for every game.

Every TTRPG is not trying to be mainstream.

That is the rub. Many of the better games are not willing to make mechanical, narrative, and gaming sacrifices to be mainstream.

For better or worse, WOTC is the only company designing a game that Alice, Bob, Charlie, Diana, and Eddie all are willing to play. And spells like Command are neutered to do this.

 

[Hussar]

Clearly you've never met some of my characters, for whom those commands (if they were Clerics and could cast the spell) would be perfectly in character.

My namesake here, for instance. Any command he ever cast (if he could) would be a 4-letter word of some sort, because that's just how he rolls. And it's probably a good thing for the setting he's in that he can't cast Suggestion!

Which in short means that yes, sometimes these things really are roleplaying.

@Lanefan, and I mean this will all love, I would never, ever want to sit at your table.

 

[Daztur]

It’s the one edition that I haven’t played so it kind of strikes me as strange. I don’t think I ever would’ve ruled that way before.

Yeah, 3.5e was filled with all kinds of rules oddities that are forgotten now. For example did you know that there is a rule that distinguishes between the difficulty of tumbling across even vs. uneven cobblestones?

I was going to say the same. These are exactly the type of changes you saw from 3 to 3.5.

3.5 removed tons of flavor from D&D spells and also hyped tactical combat through the roof.

It took me years to realize that original 3e was the better version of the game.

This is one reason I am not moving to 5.5.

And over here 3.0e is the only main version of the game I've never played (aside from some variants of Basic). I really should go dive into it some time. After all, it has a proper version of the Command spell so it passes my D&D litmus test . But then I also have the Conan RPG (2nd edition, which did wonderful things to the magic system) as my "d20 but without the suck" game. If I was less lazy I'd go through 5e and d20 Conanize it, as that game had such a beautiful magic system. Shame it's out of print now.

The digital push may certainly have something to do with it, but also as I have been cobbling together by own 5E Vanity Frankenstein ruleset and working on tying the rules and features to the lore and style of the setting, I have come to realize that WotC is trying to do the opposite of this - giving generic sans flavor specific rules for those kinds of things because they have no way of knowing what the setting and specific style will be at any given table.

I am not saying that I agree with this or that it even works as an approach (I prefer an opinionated game) but at least it makes it easier to tweak and tie stuff to my own setting/style preference without the baggage of so-called canonical flavor.

I also don't trust WotC to come up with some stuff I'd consider more fun (like open-ended command) but I don't need to, between homebrewing and 3PP stuff I have my pick of stuff, and I don't have to worry about what the "official" books say - that is just one flavor of "generic" D&D - what we play at the table is what matters.

Huh, I didn't think of things in this way. Yeah, making things more and more generic makes sense from WotC's perspective and is less nefarious than "they want to make everything as app-compatible as possible." It's still moving things in the same direction though, towards blandness.

So, no flavor then.

My experience is that just defining it as rules means that most people will only think of it as rules and not add their own flavor.

Yup, in my experience people tend to not care about things that don't matter. If the flavor is just "make up anything you want that has X mechanical effect" then they won't make up much, but if the flavor is deeply intertwined with the rules then they'll care about the flavor more.

Actually thats almost certainly it.

You cannot code 'you can command it to do anything' into a game with an AI DM.

I certainly hope not. An edition of D&D that an AI can DM would make me very sad. And I tend to like AI a lot more than most people...

This whole discussion is not easy for me.

I really had so much fun in the freewheeling AD&D days. When the DM made a call it seemed legit and reasonable because I play games with people I like and trust.

And yet, I really do like some guidelines and parameters. I have a history of enjoying strategy games, afterall.

I have struggled with 5eskills at times…

But the danger of codifying every little thing to the point of “other options not considered” will move a game from wide open rpg to battletech or axis and allies.

This is only one spell; I really want to get my hands on a book so I can see the totality!

There are other changes in the same vein as Command, you can see this especially clearly with the various summon spells where they are not longer actually creatures being summoned with their own statblocks, but rather mobile AoEs with no HPs, AC, etc. etc. Now the 5e summon spells were often overpowered and in need of a nerf, but now instead we have summon spells that don't summon any critters AND are still overpowered. At least druid wildshape was preserved and not turned into a set of bland one size fits all templates.

But overall the number of things like Command getting gutted in 5.5e are relatively small. 5.5e just isn't that different from 5e and most of the important differences are class buffs. But there are several changes that go in the direction of locking things down more, stripping out flavor, and making things more about rules than rulings and nothing (that I can recall) going the other way. So this seems to be the general direction of D&D going forward.

Codification I want is more like examples and benchmarks that help the GM to extrapolate consistently, not exhaustive and limited lists of all possible things.

Yup, which is exactly why I picked out Command as an example, as the 5.5e version of it is precisely an "exhaustive and limited list of all possible things."