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

[TiQuinn]

It's, of course, a matter of taste. One isn't worse than the other. Like in a lot of things, 5e was a messy compromise that worked well enough but 5.5e seems to be shifting more and more towards position #1.

Well, part of it too is that when you have memories of rules across different editions, it gets hard to remember what edition has what rules, and this is one of those cases where I don't know if I want to change something that we've established in our game for awhile now.

 

[Oofta]

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?

The biggest issues were conditions, interrupts, reactions, auras, aftereffects.

When I first started DMing and a PC was affected by a condition I would just put a token on that PC's min and ask the player to remember. Every time it came around to that players turn and I'd ask what the condition was they'd develop amnesia and couldn't remember what it was. Eventually I had a chart with more than a dozen different markers indicating what the conditions were. But it really slowed down the game and made it difficult to keep track of everything. Not just what the monsters were doing to the PCs, but everything the PCs could do to my monsters.

There were so many interrupts, reactions, auras. You really had to pay close attention to every monster. A person enters an aura? Something happens. The enemy triggers something, what is it? Having a monster now and then that had a special attack and special aftereffects of that attack, recharge abilities and so on, but it was very wide spread. Then we have PC interrupts, etc. At higher levels a single round of combat could take more than an hour (we timed it once).

Then there was the restrictive nature of the rules. Maybe this was something that varied, but especially when you're running a public game you're supposed to more-or-less adhere to the rules. That could really limit creative solutions. There were many times when I was playing and the DM would tell me that I couldn't do something because there was a power that did something like it and I couldn't steal their cheese. I regularly had people question my DMing because I would have the monsters do things that were within their capabilities that I just did for descriptive flavor. I like running a more free-form game but I always felt like I was handcuffed by the rules.

Last, but not least, complicated powers and outright cheating. Maybe this wasn't wide spread, but I ran a lot of LFR (public games). Because every power was so unique and there were so many powers spread amongst multiple books. I couldn't remember them all so I would ask people to explain what the powers did. Thing is, a handful of players would just flat out lie and make their power into something it wasn't. Like the guy who would say that his power "ate the action surge of an enemy" when it did nothing like that. I generally want to trust players and give them the benefit of the doubt, but I never let that player use another power unless he could show me the original text from the book. But even if people were trying to be open and fair, you really had to read some powers to understand them. Will likely always be somewhat of an issue but 4E increased this type of complexity dramatically.

So that's it off the top of my head. Obviously other people had different experiences and some of the issues were because, as I stated, I ran a lot of public games where we were expected to stay pretty close to the rules.

EDIT: typo

 

[Oofta]

Sometimes i read all of this stuff and think....i should just set my books on fire.

I read all this stuff and wonder if I have a different version of the books.

 

[Daztur]

Only 25 hours behind in the backlog of trying to reply to everything relevant to my OP Working on it, working on it...

Rules will never make a game interesting for me. The stories that we create at the table are what makes it interesting.

For me at least what helps bring RPG stories to life is flavor REALLY mattering. That's why the harder it is to reskin a mechanic the more I like it.

The most popular TTRPG ever is terrible to DM? Someone should tell all those people that started DMing with 5E. Heck, ask them to DM for 1E and try to figure out how to make that mess work.

DMs have always been in somewhat short supply, it's nothing new.

Kids have always been pretty naughty word at DMing. I was certain a terrible DM back in the 90's as a kid and my son's friends suuuuuuuuuuck at DMing, as is the way with kids (unless you teach them). It's often more the idea of D&D that sustains a game than the actual play, at least until the DM learns the ropes.

That said, yeah, OSR games can be pretty damn hard to DM well. That is balanced out, however, by the being reaaaaaaaaaaaaally easy to learn how to play if you have a good DM.

Again, the problem is not one specific usage of one specific spell.

It is having to have this kind of conversation over, and over, and over, and over. Because it isn't just one spell like this. It's easily half the spell list, particularly for Wizards. Nearly every illusion, many enchantments, more than a few conjurations and transmutations. Even evocation gets in on the game, with obvious "full of edge cases" examples like Leomund's tiny hut and Otiluke's resilient sphere, but you don't have to go further than 2nd level's darkness to get the potential for problems (does darkness dispel lights that simply happen to intersect with it after it's cast, or is it only at the moment of casting?)

Given the incredible potency and versatility of magic, and the fact that it comes in discrete chunks where it really feels awful to cast something for zero benefit, every spellcaster is incentivized to pick the options that will let them squeeze out the maximal benefit every time. So you push and push and push with the "creative" options....or you fall back on old faithful ones that are generically powerful (e.g. haste, fly, fireball, etc.)

Illusions are SO open-ended that they can be a pain in the ass to DM. That's why I like how Command is more limited, down to a single word. I like those limits, they make people more creative and make the spell easier to adjudicate.

Where is this well known? Is there a blog, or a YouTube video or something?

Well, I saw some of what my son's friends were doing when they were DMing they were...not good. Teaching someone to be a decent D&D player can be done in 10 minutes flat. Teaching someone to be a good DM can take a good bit longer, although I've seen a few naturals who figured out how to DM well almost immediately.

And in any case, really solid intro adventures for newbie DMs to run matter a LOT here. As does mentoring if at all possible. At least kids these days have YouTube videos, I had no idea WTF I was doing back in the 90's.

That's great!

It's also not, in my experience, representative of the typical D&D player that makes use of these edge-case spells. And it emphatically isn't the case that typical players pick through and analyze such things well in advance during downtime and then bring it up to the DM before play. I've literally only seen people do that with the edition that must not be named.

I like more edge-case style shenanigans, but I also like playing PCs who don't think things thorugh so my plans often end up blowing up in my PC's face, which I'm fine with. It's why I really like playing barbarians. They can survive "hold my beer" tactics.

Don't mean to add to your backlog, but part of this was quoted and I want to address it.

This is flavor that pretty much only causes the following (mechanical) effects:

1. Punishment because of something either outside of one's control (such as weather) or which is obscure and difficult to predict. I get that this makes it more "realistic", but the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, all it does is make things suck more for the player in question. That's the single biggest reason folks don't want this.
2. Significant effort invested simply to avoid the aforementioned punishments, without any actual benefit gained. Mechanics that work solely by applying a penalty for failure, but do nothing for success/clever play/etc., are generally not well-liked and often get ignored or downplayed. That's why most "encumbrance" type mechanics fail.
3. Extreme fiddly-ness. This arises from both of the previous things, but can also just happen on its own. Having to keep in mind a bazillion little effects here and there is often tedious and time-consuming, when players would much rather get to the action. Doubly so when the fiddly stuff feels like a mere distraction if it doesn't really change the result any.

I get it, I really do, you want to have a world that manifestly makes all the real considerations of "using black-powder weapons" or "fighting with blades" or whatever else actually meaningful. That level of detail excites you, gets you pumped, makes you WANT to engage and explore and do all the things. Unfortunately...for a lot of people, including myself, it does exactly the opposite for us. It feels like having to file your taxes just to not get slapped with a nasty penalty or to be merely allowed to do the cool adventurous thing you signed up to do, and then you find out you failed to include supplemental form #238B in triplicate with a blood sample, so now you're paying the Rainy Day Fund penalty.

Like...the fact that you can grok how the Warlock would be annoyed by this with a re-skinned eldritch blast shows you get that people can be deeply, deeply annoyed by this kind of stuff. There's just one small leap to make from there: people who want to play Gunslingers very frequently (as in, almost all the time) also feel that annoyed when they find out that suddenly their gun-slinging is useless crap because of bad weather.

I see where you're coming from here, but I think a distinction can be drawn between flavor in the book and flavor that the PC made up themselves.

If the PCs pick out a gun from the equipment list I DO feel justified in making their guns not work if the powder is wet and having the sound of the guns draw attention but on the other hand I feel justified in letting them make bombs out of their black powder, scare off animals with the loud noise of gunshots, shoot werewolves with silver bullets, etc. etc. In this case I feel it's fine for flavor not to be free since it's built into what they're selecting.

With someone reflavoring a warlock as a gunslinger that falls under more of a "flavor is free" paradigm and if flavor is free it doesn't matter, so I don't think it's really fair for that PC to be helped or hurt by some tacked on flavor.

But in any case, that is a bit of a session zero thing, gotta get everyone on the same page about that sort of thing or people will get cranky when their powder gets wet when they didn't think of that as a thing ahead of time.

In different campaign it can be fun to focus on certain things REALLY mattering and other things mostly get handwaved. In a survival-oriented campaign tracking ammo can be interesting, but in most campaigns people handwave that. For example I ran a Greek myth campaign where the gods were VERY present and PCs and NPCs alike got smacked around for pissing off a god (hitting the PCs with a giant pissed off Divine Swan of Aphrodite made for a fun and hilarious combat, as did having Ares randomly show up in the middle of a battle and start killing members of both armies for shits and giggles). At one point the players realized that their host had sacrificed to many gods but left out Apollo and they PANICKED, fearing divine wrath to fall upon the hall at any moment. Great fun. In another campaign having that sort of thing be such a constant concern would be an annoying distraction from the main action. Meanwhile in one D&D campaign I'm planning Fantasy Racism will be a huge issue while in a lot of campaigns that's mostly swept under the rug (elves basically rule the world as the Ancien Regime on steroids with minor nobility being half-elves, orcs being the scary people in the mountains that the lowlanders hate but who aren't inherently any more evil than anyone else despite the negative stereotypes, lots of halflings being impoverished city-dwellers due to their half-elven landlords turning their farms into pastureland etc. etc.).

The problem isn't with one "endless argument". It's that you have one argument, then another, then another, then another, endlessly because there are just so many vaguely worded spells.

Good grief, 50 years of Sage Advice isn't exactly for nothing.

Don't argue with the DM, if you don't like how they run things find another DM instead of arguing. Don't be an naughty word DM, if you do you deserve to have all your players leave. I'm a kind and merciful DM personally and let the players have their shenanigans, but when I put my foot down on stupid naughty word that is that. Not going to argue that point since I'm the DM and they're not. As a player I only have a problem with how a DM runs things if they're directly contradicting the rules, rather than making rulings along the edges, but there I point something out and then try to roll with what the DM is doing.

shrug

An ongoing sequence of short arguments that disrupt the game is no less alien to me, and I remain unable to understand how or why anyone would play like that.

I would not game with the sort of people who go to Sage Advice (or Reddit, or whatever) seeking ammunition to win an argument at their table, and thus I have no need for rules designed to keep such players quiet.

Sometimes in my group the DM is unclear on how to rule on something and asks me to check Sage Advice before making a ruling. Sometimes I tell the DM I'm not sure if what I want to do is rules-legal and ask if they want me to check Sage Advice or if they want to making a ruling.

I’m reading a thread where several people including myself have said that spell descriptions are not going to turn bad players into good players, and that many of the problems being described have to do with lack of communication around what the group wants out of their game, I.E. a session zero.

How you’ve turned that into “there’s no bad players. Only creative ones” is beyond me.

And in some cases players that are bad players in one campaign can be good players in another. I always thought that the terrible players in the DM of the Rings: DM of the Rings I:The Copious Backstory - Twenty Sided webcomic would be fine players in a more "you guys are Cugel the Clever in a naughty word up Jack Vance world, go nuts" campaign.

Dozens

Almost every "Why I left 5e" blog, vlog, or video says it.

It's too late.

Those initial 5e DMs were burned by the lack of help and want restrictions now.

That's one reason why Command was claimed down.

Do they want more restrictions or do they want simpler rules where there isn't as much stuff to remember? My son who has mostly played 5e is getting a bit burned out on 5e and has been LOVING the simpler rules of Blades in the Dark, and those rules are open-ended as all hell.

If the rules weren't written in vagu... oh, sorry... open ended fashion, then the players wouldn't be constantly testing the boundaries of what the rules allow.

Yes, exactly. I love it when my players do that naughty word as a DM. I'd take that over them dropping yet another fireball any day. It's fun when what they do makes sense and they get to kick some ass, it's also fun when what they do doesn't make sense and it blows up in their faces. Win-win for me.

Usually I rule in favor of the players but I put my foot down on naughty word. Never really get arguments. It helps that I have the reputation as the groups' resident rules expert (to the extent that I sometimes get DMs asking me for rules clarifications when I play, especially since I often make sure to be fair and make sure the rules are applied in ways that hurt my PC) so people trust me to know the rules and don't argue with me (since I'm not a dick). This is especially the case when I run games for kids, kids don't argue rules with the person who taught them the rules (at least in my experience).

This was so much not my experience. 3e was a huge breath of fresh air where we could just play without constantly having to have rules discussions. The rules just worked. 4e was perhaps a step too far, fair enough. And, frankly, 5e was a step too far back the other way. Again, IME and all that.

Yeah, 2e had a lot of weird inconsistencies and bespoke rule systems, but 3e rules often just BROKE in ways that 2e rules generally didn't. "They just worked" doesn't fit with many people's experience with the more cumbersome aspects of 3.5e. I still have a lot of good memories of my 3.5e campaigns but the rules could be pretty damn cumbersome at times.

Not every humor needs to be bathos, and personally I'm sick of seeing bathos everywhere, to the point it is outright poisoning people's perspective and they report struggling to get immersed into sincere works, due to enforced expectation at any point they will be laughed at for taking things seriously. Honor Among Thieves is not the only way to do d&d (hell, I don't even run in the same setting as it right now). And if I am trying to get immersed into a game, often letting my guard down after having to be strict and serious among toxic enviroments of day to day life, and then other player decides to mock me and rest of the table for it, it feels extremely disrespectful.

Nope, not the only kind of humor. It's just by faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the easiest way to run D&D (at least for me). If I don't want that kind of mood in a campaign I'm going to run a different system rather than trying to stomp out the kind of mood that animated Honor Among Thieves, as that just is what D&D is all about for me. And I loved Honor Among Thieves. Perfect slice of D&D for me. Sure you can run D&D with any kind of mood imaginable, but some go along the grain of the basic assumptions of how D&D is set up and some run against it.

While I liked 3e for a time, primarily because it provided greater options for players who had been asking for more variety in the game, after a very short while, I saw all the same issues you did. Combat was a grind. Did they incur an AoO or not? Did this stack? HOW much is that bonus? The game started to crawl.

As much as the over-use of advantage/disadvantage in 5e can get aggravating at times, I get all twitchy thinking about tracking and remembering all of the types of bonuses:

• 
  Ability Modifier
  
  
• Alchemical Bonus
  
  
• Armor Bonus
  
  
• Circumstance Modifier
  
  
• Competence Modifier
  
  
• Deflection Bonus
  
  
• Dodge Bonus
  
  
• Enhancement Bonus
  
  
• Insight Bonus
  
  
• Luck Modifier
  
  
• Morale Modifier
  
  
• Natural Armor Bonus
  
  
• Profane Modifier
  
  
• Racial bonus
  
  
• Resistance Bonus
  
  
• Sacred Modifier
  
  
• Shield Bonus
  
  
• Size Modifier

Aaaaargh!

5.0 was written for seasoned poets who just need a jumping off point every now and then. It was then given to middle school children, expecting them to be able to use tools and techniques meant for Wordsworth and Frost and Plath. Now, we've had a decade of middle-schoolers who grew up trying to imitate the masters without having the fundamentals first. That's not something compensated for (let alone overcome) overnight, and it's definitely not something that merely changing your attitude and rewriting the textbook could possibly fix.

Yeah 5.0 was built more to try to bring veteran players back with a compromise after the 4e edition wars, it wasn't really set up well for the kids. But then neither was the 1e DMG back in the day. Dear god that blew my mind reading it as a kid, but I had no idea how to apply half of it at an actual table.

I think what was most needed to teach people how to run games well, however, was more better intro adventure modules that really explained naughty word more than a DMG. 5e adventure modules have really been sadly mediocre.

However, I'm not seeing how 5.5e is necessarily going to be much better for the kids. It seems to be ADDING to rule complication when a lot of kids are still getting mixed up about what they can add their proficiency bonus to. 5.5e seems to be catering more to veteran 5e players who want some new shiny more than kids who are struggling with the system.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah 5.0 was built more to try to bring veteran players back with a compromise after the 4e edition wars, it wasn't really set up well for the kids. But then neither was the 1e DMG back in the day. Dear god that blew my mind reading it as a kid, but I had no idea how to apply half of it at an actual table.

I think what was most needed to teach people how to run games well, however, was more better intro adventure modules that really explained naughty word more than a DMG. 5e adventure modules have really been sadly mediocre.

However, I'm not seeing how 5.5e is necessarily going to be much better for the kids. It seems to be ADDING to rule complication when a lot of kids are still getting mixed up about what they can add their proficiency bonus to. 5.5e seems to be catering more to veteran 5e players who want some new shiny more than kids who are struggling with the system.

I do not disagree with the idea that 5.5e will be similarly not so great for getting new DMs injected into the hobby.

That's why I fully expect the rumblings of a 6th edition to begin sometime in the next four to six years. An edition made from the ground up for the new blood that 5e brought in, rather than the (IMO incomplete/half-baked) effort represented by 5.5e. Every edition "update" or "revision" has a shorter lifespan than the pre-update did.

As for the earlier part about how different campaigns focus on different parts, sure, I can grant that. My problem is that even in games where it's supposed to be the focus, it's often... well, lackluster at best. Most DMs are not particularly good game designers. Not having actually playtested rules for stuff just tends to mean DMs default to not very engaging tried-and-true basic solutions, which get boring or even frustrating very quickly. Hence why I mentioned encumbrance. It's a rule so often deployed in games, and yet almost never actually interesting other than the ways it'll end up screwing you over.

Your example of the players being afraid of pissing off Apollo is interesting, but that strikes me as reflecting more your skill at world building, rather than the fact that you threw around bolts of divine intervention capriciously. My players are deathly afraid of exhibiting bad etiquette when they meet up with noble genies, even their Jinnistani prince "friend", yet they've never personally suffered from a noble genie's wrath. Far from it, actually; they're generally well-liked in Jinnistan, and seen as useful agents and smart diplomats (and their prince "friend" supports a theater company that makes heavily exaggerated/wholly reinvented renditions of their adventures.)

They just know that crossing a noble genie's is exceedingly unwise, because they know what noble genies are capable of, and how cold and ruthless and inhuman they can be when their plans/interests are threatened or when they perceive that someone is trying to cause them to lose face. A noble genie looks like a mortal (that is, like a dwarf/elf/human/orc/etc.), and usually resemble mortals in word and deed...but they are NOT mortals, and behind the superficial outer layer, they think and feel in ways mortals don't. You can get along with them, perhaps even become something resembling "friends," but you won't ever really connect with them the way you would a fellow mortal. There will always be a gap, and noble genies as a rule either don't mind that that gap exists, or enjoy exploiting it.

 

[Remathilis]

The more I read about 5.5 the more I realize that this product sucks and I hope that Hasbro’s/WOTC’s corporate D&D is an utter failure for them.

Ah yes, the "fan" who would rather see their fandom dead than be something they don't like.

I've seen a lot of chatter today about how The Acolyte isn't getting a second season, and people are treating it like a victory. Yay, less Star Wars. Make it lose money! If we keep trying to kill it, then they will obviously bow to the fan demands rather than write it off and just sell nostalgic t-shirts and mugs to wistful fans on their 9000th viewing of The Empire Strikes Back...

But I'm sure you have already decided to go with what Paizo or Kobold or whatever indie dev you like is and none of this will matter. D&D's death will only make the market shift to them and a golden age will flourish. There is no chance that The RPG market with contract back to niche status and games will be harder to find. Just as long as greedy Hasbro is punished for the Cardinal Sin of not making a game you like.

 

[Remathilis]

He lies down and tries to will himself to die for a few seconds. Not much happens. Any kind of suicidal act is clearly against the plain rules of the spell.

So we're all cool that anyone trying to convince a target to breathe poison, jump off a galloping horse, swim in plate mail or throw themselves off a cliff attempting to fly is effectively wasting a first level spell slot to do nothing more creative than "do nothing for one round" if even that.

 

[Oofta]

For all the people that follow the so called "rule of cool" for what PCs can command an NPC to do, do the NPCs have the same option? If you can ask a monster to "jump" meaning they jump off a cliff, can an NPC caster do the same to a PC?

Because I've long had the policy that whatever the PCs do, so can their enemies. That's one of the reasons I prefer a more limited list, having been on the receiving end of what I felt was pure abuse of a first level spell.

 

[TiQuinn]

For all the people that follow the so called "rule of cool" for what PCs can command an NPC to do, do the NPCs have the same option? If you can ask a monster to "jump" meaning they jump off a cliff, can an NPC caster do the same to a PC?

Because I've long had the policy that whatever the PCs do, so can their enemies. That's one of the reasons I prefer a more limited list, having been on the receiving end of what I felt was pure abuse of a first level spell.

While I don’t agree with the “jump off a cliff” example being a valid use of command, in general, yes, what’s good for the PCs is good for the NPCs.

I think a much more powerful example of this is Hold Person. I’ve heard of players using it but then hating when it’s used against them.

 

[billd91]

I think a much more powerful example of this is Hold Person. I’ve heard of players using it but then hating when it’s used against them.

There's definitely some of that out there, but I'm with you in the sense that what's good for the PCs is good for the NPCs.