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

[Demetrios1453]

No. Why would you bother? Repent? That's just Grovel.

To be fair, in ten years, I think I'm the only one I've ever seen actually USE command, let alone try using it in funky ways. It was a spell that almost saw no air time. To me? I'm absolutely thrilled to see spells get more exact uses.

"Roll" for when that hill giant is on top of a hill with his goblin cohorts below him. Which my paladin did in our current campaign.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Once again, the DMG needs to be redone. Of course the game can be improved, everything can be improved. I would be worried if they thought 5E was perfect.

That doesn't make the game particularly difficult to DM (compared to other D&D or similar games) or support your other extreme claims.

DMG organization aside. This idea that 5e is uniquely difficult to DM bothers me on a deeper level than maybe it should. And it bothers me because DMing is just hard in general. And the issues people point to with 5e, and what makes 5e hard to DM in their minds, aren't the issues that you'd see if you played with random DMs off Reddit. And they aren't where the true difficulty lays in the DM role, nor are they objective.

In those games, with random DMs, you will see two main culprits of bad game play. DM table presence, or lack there of, and a lack of proper pacing. Neither of which can be adequately taught in a DMG. You could write an entire book on pacing alone, and people have. And there is an entire branch of science having to do with human behavior and by extension table presence.

We see people on this very forum, repeatedly asking for rules fixes for problems caused by a lacking in these two areas. Blaming 5e's rules for their own inability to handle social problems, or their own poor understanding of the pacing involved in storytelling. Topics that could fill college courses and far outstrip a section in a D&D book.

Yet we are repeatedly led to believe that the real difficulty in DMing is a flexible CR system that requres looking at your players character sheet before blindly throwing enemies at them. Or that a DM has to make a judgement call because a rule isn't spelled out with great specificity. As if memorization is objectively easier than making said judgement calls. Or maybe the real fun is watching the DM flipping through the rule book. Needless to say, all of these are preferences portrayed as truths.

But it all seems like a distraction and a minimization of the true difficulty in DMing which is system agnostic. We are just suppose to pretend 5e is uniquely hard. While in reality, DMing is just hard in general and the examples provided as 5e's issues are, at most, minor pain points and likely just personal preference.

But maybe I just don't understand the true challenge in this role. Maybe Im missing something, and scripting out every DM action by developer fiat would fix all issues, and definately wouldn't end with a mediocre video game with bad graphics. But at least DMing would be "easy."

 

[KYRON45]

DMG organization aside. This idea that 5e is uniquely difficult to DM bothers me on a deeper level than maybe it should. And it bothers me because DMing is just hard in general. And the issues people point to with 5e, and what makes 5e hard to DM in their minds, aren't the issues that you'd see if you played with random DMs off Reddit. And they aren't where the true difficulty lays in the DM role, nor are they objective.

In those games, with random DMs, you will see two main culprits of bad game play. DM table presence, or lack there of, and a lack of proper pacing. Neither of which can be adequately taught in a DMG. You could write an entire book on pacing alone, and people have. And there is an entire branch of science having to do with human behavior and by extension table presence.

We see people on this very forum, repeatedly asking for rules fixes for problems caused by a lacking in these two areas. Blaming 5e's rules for their own inability to handle social problems, or their own poor understanding of the pacing involved in storytelling. Topics that could fill college courses and far outstrip a section in a D&D book.

Yet we are repeatedly led to believe that the real difficulty in DMing is a flexible CR system that requres looking at your players character sheet before blindly throwing enemies at them. Or that a DM has to make a judgement call because a rule isn't spelled out with great specificity. As if memorization is objectively easier than making said judgement calls. Or maybe the real fun is watching the DM flipping through the rule book. Needless to say, all of these are preferences portrayed as truths.

But it all seems like a distraction and a minimization of the true difficulty in DMing which is system agnostic. But we are just suppose to pretend 5e is uniquely hard, when in reality, DMing is just hard in general and the examples provided as 5e's issues are, at most, minor pain points and likely just personal preference.

But maybe I just don't understand the true challenge in this role. Maybe Im missing something, and scripting out every DM action by developer fiat would fix all issues, and definately wouldn't end with a mediocre video game with bad graphics. But at least DMing would be "easy."

Folks around these parts don't like when we say DMing is hard. Buckle up.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, you'll be happy to know, it has been removed from the 5.5e version! You just can't invent any command you want now.

Most folks seem to think this is a pretty significant buff, alongside the removed requirement that the target understand the language you're using, and I would tend to agree. Being able to order someone to do something obviously harmful, even if only from a restricted list, seems rather more powerful than being able to order whatever you want, but it can't be harmful to the target.

Agree that the removal of the language requirement is a major buff. (does the target still need to hear the command or can it work now on deaf targets?) Both for that and flavour reasons - language should always matter - I'm not a fan.

Whether nerf or buff or neither, that you can't invent any command you want is, IMO, a step back from fun and creativity in play.

 

[billd91]

Folks around these parts don't like when we say DMing is hard. Buckle up.

Heh. Hard/easy - that's going to vary from one person to another. I fully accept that DMing takes effort that is distinct from and generally more extensive than the effort it takes to be a player. Whether someone finds that hard or not, I can accept their word for it because they're judging how it is for them.

This idea that 5e is uniquely difficult to DM bothers me on a deeper level than maybe it should. And it bothers me because DMing is just hard in general.

I'm pretty much with you, @DinoInDisguise, about being a bit confounded about 5e being harder to DM than other editions. Having DMed every edition since Holmes Basic with the exception of 4e, I'm finding 5e a lot easier to DM than most predecessors. I'm sure some of that is the benefit of 40+ years of experience, but there are some things I weigh in this evaluation. 5e has quite a few spinning plates in motion at most times - it's definitely got more options, powers, spells, monster abilities, etc than Basic did back in the day. But many of the concepts underlying it all are so much more familiar to average hobbyists now from the start when they were brand spanking new to pretty much everybody when we got our grubby hands on Basic. The amount of time we spent just trying to grok the rules was enormous (and sometimes contentious). And for all of the complaint about CR in 5e, we didn't really even have that in Basic - just a number appearing on a monster block. If we wanted an example of play, we looked to our own DMs who recruited us for our first game. Now, new players have a wealth of real play examples on the internet - some of which may be a bit advanced or even intimidating, but many of which serve as helpful examples. You just gotta learn to sip at that firehose and manage information evaluation and overload - a good lesson for more than just newbs looking for examples of how to DM.

 

[Lanefan]

The command spell is not limited to combat.

Command gets cast here fairly regularly and I'm not sure I've ever seen it used in a situation that wasn't either combat or immediately-potential combat.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, were you reading threads here or on RPG.net or...really much of anywhere for the first three or four years of 5e's existence?

Every single thread that had someone asking for advice about a rule was swamped with 10+ replies saying something to the effect of, "We can't answer your question, it's purely up to your DM" or "you're the DM, you figure it out." Often, the former would be followed by the latter once the original poster clarified, "I am the DM and I'm seeking advice."

It was genuinely infuriating to see the pervasive distaste for actually giving advice or support to brand-new DMs.

Except advice was being given, to the general tune of "In 5e, you-as-DM are charged with the responsibility of, when necessary, interpreting rules and guidelines in a manner suitable to yourself and your table; and [your question] is a case where you have to exercise that responsibility".

Put another way, the advice being given often amounted to "Use this as an opportunity to learn how to figure it out for yourself as you see fit, because that's what the game is sometimes going to expect you to do". Which is roughly the same advice they'd have learned if mentored by a DM whose teeth were cut on any edition before 3e.

 

[Remathilis]

Taking inspiration on design from TSR era D&D does not mean it was targeted at 2E DMs. It just means they looked at what had worked in the past and tried to figure out why.

The story Mearls told (and forgive me, I don't remember where) was that in the wake of 4e, they went back and played EVERY edition of D&D to see what people liked and disliked about each. Apparently, they took detailed notes on those games and attempted to integrate what they felt worked in each edition into 5e. And I can see elements of that: Rulings not Rules feels very at home in as Basic/OS style of play. The leaning in on their own IP/nostalgia of the original APs pulls heavily from the classic AD&D modules. The Multiverse style of world-building is straight from 2e. The 3e style of multiclassing and feats (the latter being optional for those who preferred the simplicity in builds). Some elements of 4e (like short rests) coming over in an altered form. But all of that was made to capture a feel similar to that, not emulate that exactly (which is why the infamous modular concept never worked; 5e was never going to emulate 4e style powers or AD&D style multiclassing). It also very heavily leaned in on nostalgia elements (a trend actually started in Essentials, where the starter set was literally a recreation of the Basic Red Box) to try to tie it all together.

Why it worked is because it felt enough like a generic mixture of all the D&D editions that came before it without emulating any one of them in specific. That was its blessing and its curse. It was much more streamlined than 3e or 4e and tried to capture some of the quirky elements of AD&D under the assumption that a good DM would know how to adjudicate it. And it 10 years, they felt they needed to provide a little more structure to the rules than they had prior while removing rules that nobody used (apparently).

 

[KYRON45]

Command gets cast here fairly regularly and I'm not sure I've ever seen it used in a situation that wasn't either combat or immediately-potential combat.

That says more about the situations in which you find yourself in more than the versatility of the spell doesn't it?
I've never seen Command used in almost 40 years of gaming. To each their own.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, it's not as bad as you're painting it. It's not that the players are arguing all the time, every time. No one is being unreasonable. That's the thing, no one has to be unreasonable here because, as you say, the rules are open ended. Which means that the players are going to gravitate towards trying to do stuff outside of the box. Not every time. Of course not. Just often enough that it becomes a thing the DM has to deal with.

And, it's not like it's just one spell. It's the fifty or so spells that are in the PHB. So, you spend a couple of years hammering off the rough edges with your group. Great. But, then Dave moves away and Jeff gets a job, so, now you have two new players at your table and you get to start having the same conversations all over again. Then, the year after that, another splatbook drops, dropping another dozen or so vaguely written spell effects onto the group and you spend time every session or two hammering the rough edges off those books. Then, six months later, Peter gets a new job and you're looking for another player which means you get to have the same conversation about the fifty PHB spells plus the dozen splatbook spells all over again. By now, you've finished that campaign, whatever it was, and you're starting up a new one. But two of your players have moved on and now the five people sitting at your table are completely different thant the five you had at the beginning.

Which means you get to hammer the rough edges off those vaguely worded spell yet again.

Only if you-as-DM aren't keeping records of how you've filed off those edges and-or putting those rulings right into the spell write-ups for future reference and for new players to see up front.