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

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

And I'm saying that advice is either useless or outright bad for brand-new DMs needing help.

It is, as my analogy above said, like giving a middle schooler e e cummings and Frost and Plath and saying "see! Poets can do whatever they want! Do whatever you want." That's not how you build up good poets. Good poets must master the fundamentals before they can begin doing high-flying stunts with language. Children must learn to walk before they learn to run, and learn to crawl before learning to walk. Students need to master the rules of algebra and trigonometry before you teach them calculus. Etc. Throwing a child to the wolves and expecting them to come back with pelts is foolish, not wise.

Until someone builds up the necessary intuitions and skills and repertoire of experiences to make such decisions on their own, it is critically important to help them make such decisions. Instead of uselessly telling them "do it yourself!", there are easily half a dozen things you could do instead that would be far more productive:

• Start by asking questions, "Do you have any ideas for how you would like to handle this already?" "What are your players like?" Etc.
• Give examples of what you've done in similar or related situations, "My last group did X" type stuff
• Point to useful rules (a rarity in 5e) or other guidance that helped you with figuring out a solution
• Pointing them to 3rd party rules you have enjoyed (this was obviously not very available in the first year or two of 5e)
• Walk them through how you would make that decision, as if they were one of your players and you were running right that moment
• Provide more general DMing advice and explain why it's relevant and how to use it, rather than tossing a pithy maxim at them and dropping the mic

THAT is how you actually mentor a brand new person seeking advice for how to improve their skill at a complex and challenging task. But of course I essentially never saw people actually doing that. They instead chose the laziest possible approach: "just do it, 4head."

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Oopsies, double post. Can I delete this?

No. Only moderators etc. can do that. Generally they won't bother for minor double posts.

 

[Minigiant]

I think a lot of people dislike the balance choices and power fantasy aspects of 5e and incorrectly attribute that to 5e's core design. 5e's core design is very clean from a math perspective

5e has the best skeleton of all editions.
The official skin on top of it is debatable of its favorability

2014 Command and 2024 Command are choices of skins. Level Up Command is another skin. I use a different Command spell

This is why there should be different Command spells. Because everyone likes different flavors and flexibility.

1. Make more spells of similar types
2. Normalize DM ban lists

 

[ECMO3]

I was simply responding to the example as given by Lanefan, where he hoped for a target that was moving at considerable speed--specifically with the intent of harming the rider when they dismounted.


Okay! Some of these are much better. "Surrender" still seems to me pretty verboten, since the spell only works for six seconds.

Oh I agree, in combat that is never going to work.

We were not in combat though we were doing "parley" with weapons out. It was us and a rival adventuring group that both got to our goal in the dungeon at the same time and one group was going to get it. We were not enemies, and a couple of their members were friends with a couple of our members (not me or their leader) but the two parties were not "allies" or "enemies" overall. Their leader knocked her bow and told us to "stand down we are taking this". Some of the others in their party were hesitant and said so, some in our party were hesitant and wanted to either let them have it or talk it out.

The DM was expecting some sort of response from me/us that would likely be a persuasion check or intimidation check (or maybe just attack them). I just used command-Surrender on their leader .... essentially "no you stand down" in one word and with the force of magic behind it.

The DM thought it was clever and before the save even said I could use that on an intimidation check if I failed (although that character had a horrible Intimidation). If he had ruled different I would have been ok with that too.

"Lie" is more than a bit risky. Just because someone tells a lie, doesn't mean the exact opposite of what they said is true, unless you have very carefully worded your questions--creative, perhaps, but not nearly as useful as you might think.

I think the question was "are any more Zhentarim soldiers coming here" so it was yes or no. But she made her save anyway.

"Breathe" is too non-specific; unless the dragon literally can't reach anyone, that could instead draw the breath to you (since, per the rules, movement can be freely blended with actions).

I think it works, but it is an interpretation thing. Most of the commands require you to that and only that on your next turn. So that is how I would have used it. But yes as DM I would have breathed on a party member (or members) if I could. But I would not have moved.

And that last one already would have failed anyway, so...not really a useful example of a better command?

It would have been if he spoke our language ... so it would have been on another similar creature.

Even with Swim, for example, I could easily see a 5.0 DM saying, "He attempts to start swimming, but since he isn't in water right now, nothing happens."

Sure he could ... but why would he. Rule of cool!

IME DMs love it when you do something creative that is not really explicitly covered by the rules and not overpowered.

As an example - my Kobold was in a hallway, leading to a balcony with party member outnumbered and fighting on the first floor below the balcony. I said I was going to run and leap off of the balcony on to one of the cultists below and try to knock him to the ground using the shove action. The PC at the time was a Bard 5/Chainlock 4/Rogue 1. Now there were lots of "better" things I could do as an action, the DM thought it was so cool he said I have advantage on the shove and if I succeed the bad guy cushions my blow and he takes the 1d6 fall damage instead of me.

 

[Vaalingrade]

5e is very clean in its core design. People are free to not like it, but the design is elegant and functional. It's, at it's core, 3-8 numbers reapplied in different arrangements, depending on if you count ability scores individually or as a monolith, as you never add 2 ability scores to the same roll. You couple this with advantage and disadvantage, and the "round down" rule, you have, in essence 5e's entire math.

It is intentionally full of vagaries to attract the old school crowd on top of additional jank like the 6 saves that aren't actually balanced against each others and rewidened the gulf between martial and magical capability.

It is so simple, that you can reasonably balance encounters using the expected values of these number for a PC to calculate everything from AC to spell save DC of monsters. You can even take any bonuses from magic weapons, and reasonably adjust this number accurately.

We're talking about CR, right? The notoriously, ongoing bugginess that is the CR system? Well, I assume some people called the Delorean and the Pinto elegant int heir time too.

Even HP is also merely a small selection of dice combinations. Essentially maxing at 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12. And again, this simplicity allows for reasonable estimations of monster HP based on player level.

Having hite die that are... existing die... is not new to 5e. It's not even new to the last two decades.

I think a lot of people dislike the balance choices and power fantasy aspects of 5e and incorrectly attribute that to 5e's core design. 5e's core design is very clean from a math perspective.

I'm not talking about the math, but the math ain't that great either. An effective +5 bonus as a reroll being thrown at literally everything isn't actually all that elegant -- nor is it new save for the 'used for everything for no good reason' part.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sure he could ... but why would he. Rule of cool!

And 5e DMs on this very forum have made very clear they think the Rule of Cool is not only a bad idea in general, but something they personally oppose heartily. I love the Rule of Cool.

IME DMs love it when you do something creative that is not really explicitly covered by the rules and not overpowered.

I have had one 5e DM who does that. My current one, Hussar. As with most things, in my experience, 4e DMs were much more copacetic with players doing creative things not explicitly covered by the rules than 5e DMs have been; because they could trust the rules to work when used, they were confident about doing other things when the rules weren't used. By comparison, with 5e being so wild and woolly and difficult to predict, I find even experienced 5e DMs give a chary eye to anything too "creative", because they don't know what consequences it might have and don't want to set a bad precedent they'll have to reverse later.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

5e is very clean in its core design. People are free to not like it, but the design is elegant and functional. It's, at it's core, 3-8 numbers reapplied in different arrangements, depending on if you count ability scores individually or as a monolith, as you never add 2 ability scores to the same roll. You couple this with advantage and disadvantage, and the "round down" rule, you have, in essence 5e's entire math.

It is very limited in its core design, which is not the same as being clean, elegant, nor functional--and the things you speak of here, like ability scores and such, were already in that state in 4e, where exception-based design was actually clean and elegant. General rules apply, unless a specific rule says otherwise--and the general rules were easy to apply and, in general, quite easy to predict how they'd change if you altered or ignored them. That was the whole point of "showing how the sausage is made"--making it easy for DMs to predict mechanical consequences.

By comparison, 5e is often extremely difficult to predict mechanical consequences, and its absolute mess of subsystems and profligate over-use of mechanics (such as Advantage) or blatantly too-dramatic-to-be-used stuff (like Exhaustion) leads to numerous rule dead-ends where DMs are left with nothing to provide. There are better ways. I've developed better ways in back-of-the-envelope stuff. But WotC can't use them, because errata is unacceptable to the playerbase.

It is so simple, that you can reasonably balance encounters using the expected values of these number for a PC to calculate everything from AC to spell save DC of monsters. You can even take any bonuses from magic weapons, and reasonably adjust this number accurately.

Er...no, you can't. Because I've seen the products of doing that. It doesn't work, and produces wildly unbalanced encounters, sometimes the PCs doing the curbstomp, sometimes them getting curbstomped.

Even HP is also merely a small selection of dice combinations. Essentially maxing at 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12. And again, this simplicity allows for reasonable estimations of monster HP based on player level.

Except that it doesn't! Because monster HP varies wildly even within a single CR--and attempting to use PC math to create NPC monsters doesn't work. That's a big part of why monsters that aren't explicitly spellcasters (and even some that are!) are moving away from using PC-based magical abilities. They're much, much too powerful on a monster even when they'd be weak on a PC, because the mechanical expectations and needs of a monster are VERY different from those of a PC.

Being able to build a game where the PCs and NPCs work by exactly the same rules is a beautiful dream. It generally doesn't work in reality, because PCs have to survive several encounters a day most days. Monsters rarely fight more than once.

I think a lot of people dislike the balance choices and power fantasy aspects of 5e and incorrectly attribute that to 5e's core design. 5e's core design is very clean from a math perspective.

It is far less clean than 4e's ever was.

 

[Hussar]

I’m finding the argument that 4e was hard to dm to be really hard to believe. An edition where the monster creation rules fit on a single business card? The edition where you rarely had vague or open effects requiring the dm to pull out interpretations without any assistance? The edition where the math out of the box was so good that the only math fix it needed on the pc side was a single +1-3 spread across thirty levels?

Granted monster hp was wrong at release but that was fixed within a matter of months.

That’s the really difficult game to dm? Why? What was difficult?

 

[W'rkncacnter]

Being able to build a game where the PCs and NPCs work by exactly the same rules is a beautiful dream. It generally doesn't work in reality, because PCs have to survive several encounters a day most days. Monsters rarely fight more than once.

i mean, i figure it'd probably be possible in a system that's 100% encounter based then (i.e. you recover all resources after any encounter), since then both PCs and monsters effectively have to survive the same number of encounters at a time (due to PCs getting everything back after the encounter anyway).

 

[SableWyvern]

I’m finding the argument that 4e was hard to dm to be really hard to believe. An edition where the monster creation rules fit on a single business card? The edition where you rarely had vague or open effects requiring the dm to pull out interpretations without any assistance? The edition where the math out of the box was so good that the only math fix it needed on the pc side was a single +1-3 spread across thirty levels?

Granted monster hp was wrong at release but that was fixed within a matter of months.

That’s the really difficult game to dm? Why? What was difficult?

I found it hard to DM because I came to detest many of the core underlying assumptions and the whole thing was a personal fun-sink. However, that's a matter of mismatched requirements, and doesn't mean there's an inherent flaw with 4e, as much as it might have felt otherwise to me. Had I found the underlying concepts and intended game style positive and uplifting, I'm pretty sure it would have been easy to run.