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

[Daztur]

5e was not designed for older edition DMs. It was designed to appeal widely to multiple styles of play which happened to be the same philosophy as older editions.

For me at least 5e plays like a cleaned up version of 3.5e. Which is good enough for a lot of things...

Those threads you had me look up on why people left 5e....half of them were those complaining that it was designed for newbs and they wanted crunchier systems. Those were players complaining rather than DMs.

Yeah and a lot of people are getting grumpy at 5.5e for not adding enough crunch. I think it's pretty safe to say that if 5.5e added as much crunch as some people wanted it would be harder to GM/play. There seem to be relatively few voices online calling for it to become more streamlined and newbie friendly due to potential future newbie players (obviously) not playing much of a role in online discussions of D&D despite making the game fun for them being an absolutely essential part of design. This makes me think that in the history of D&D when they actually find something that appeals to newbies it's usually by blundering into it blindly, the how massive runaway success of various versions of Basic D&D seem to have caught TSR by surprise in the 80's...

(“We actually built fifth edition as a follow-up to second edition,” Crawford said at the panel.)

Bwuh? I just don't see that...

This is believable to me, because one of the first things I called 5E was "Alternate reality 3E".

5E, whilst incorporating lessons and ideas from 3E and 4E (less from the latter - though that is increasing with 2024), basically seemed like a different way 3E could have gone, rather than a true derivation from those later editions.

I can some a good bit of 2e spirit in 5e, but not all that much of its specific rules. 5e seems to be a messy compromise in which it takes a lot of what 4e was like under the hood and twists it to be more 3.5e in its details with some 2e philosophy even though not the specific rules. Seemed like a mess at first but worked decently as a compromise for a whole slew of people and it was nice to see it bring the hobby together and bring so many new people in. Don't see the hobby staying that united in the coming years.

It's just that it implies that everyone has a preference for how much they like the rules to be vague/codified. It's a spectrum and different people fall on various places in the spectrum. It's not that more codified = "rules that work," because things can be so codified that they become a "step too far." A step too far, in that that the codified rules of 4e did not allow for creativity and versatility for some. The OP of this discussion is simply stating that 5.5 goes too far in one direction for them.

Yup, there's a big old spectrum and for my personal preferences 5e is waaaaay too close to 4e to be my ideal game, but 5e is a good enough compromise I can roll with it just fine. 5.5e is a less good compromise and I think's crossed a line for me and will keep on going in that direction in the future. I don't really have any interest in DMing it (unless I was obliged to due to running a club or something) but I'd play it if a good friend was really pumped to run a 5.5e campaign.

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.

I think the pacing issue as a reason for 5e being hard to GM carries a lot of weight. It's something I struggled with personally when I first started running 5e and it's something I've personally seen newer 5e DMs struggle with in a way that makes the game less fun.

Simply put 5e is built around the assumption that there will be more encounters per long rest than most groups can reasonably get done in a session. So what happens is generally either:
A. The party does fewer fights per long rest than the game's assumptions call for, which does bad things to class balance, refocuses the whole game on nova tactics and constant long drawn out brutal fights (to counter the nova tactics), and worsens a lot of the flaws of 5e that already exist. From the comments I've seen from 5e newbs this happens a lot and causes a lot of problems.
B. The party has more than one session per long rest. With a party of adults with constantly changing schedules this is a pain in the ass as you have to track partially-spent resources across sessions and have naughty word like the party getting attritioned down in the middle of the dungeon and then BAM! a fully rested cleric pops up among them since Bob couldn't make last session but could make this one and you can't tell him to wait until the party's out of the dungeon before rejoining the game since Bob is your friend and he's bringing pizza.

These problems can be overcome with good DMing, but I found them to be a big pain in the ass personally.

This same problem was even worse in 3.5e (the infamous ten minute adventuring day) but not really an issue in TSR-D&D (due to combat being so fast and PCs having fewer resources) or 4e (since 4e works fine if you have just 1-2 big fights per long rest). I think that the playstyle of a lot of 5e newbies would really be muuuuuuuch better served by 4e than by 5e.

My workaround for all of this was "put the PCs on a boat" (or space ship) and only allow the PCs to get a long rest in port (not on a random desert island). They had to go on long sea journeys between each long rest so I got to really grind them down Oregon Trail-style which was fun. It also explained why Bob's PC wasn't around last session but is here now (he was busy doing naughty word below decks on the boat). And why Jim's character suddenly isn't around during Jim's vacation (he got sick and is in the infirmary below decks, we have to get him to port for treatment!).

But I've played in whole campaigns that constantly ran into these kinds of issues such as waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too few fights per long rest or people coming back to the table after a few week break due to real life and then scratching their heads and trying to remember if they had used Channel Divinity or not last session since the DM wasn't enforcing any centralized method of resource tracking from session to session.

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.

Damn, I've seen it be used more than Magic Missile in a lot of campaigns. People's experiences can be very different....

 

[Daztur]

WOTC struggles with the fact that they want all but can't provide a "one side fits all" option. And there is a prevailing thought amongst many D&D fans that their way is the best way and avoids most problems.

I think my way of playing D&D is the best way (I'm biased like that) but I sure as hell don't think it would avoid most problems as I know most people don't want to play things my way. 5e as a compromise option between my way of playing D&D and other styles worked decently enough despite being pretty far from my ideal D&D ruleset (which would be more one part 1e, one part 5e, one part modern Storygames).

Do they hate the older stuff because they have tried them and it didn't suit them?
Do they hate the older stuff because it's cool to hate things?
Do they hate the older stuff because most younger people look down on most of what came before them?
I think you might need a larger sample size.

Also often stuff can read very differently than it plays. For example 4e classes read as very cookie cutter but sure as naughty word don't play that way, same with a lot of old school stuff. My beloved Cavern of Thracia module reads as a boring grind but is just sublime in actual play.

Also a lot of people could be judging stuff (of all editions) due to memories of naughty word about and doing stupid naughty word as kids rather than people who know what the naughty word they're doing using a ruleset to its greatest potential. It took me a while to get over my prejudices against TSR-D&D that I got from my own DMing faceplants as a kid in the 90's.

M: Also Vancian magic is a poor magic system. I ain't read dem books and I ain't gonna. YOU CANT MAKE ME.

But Jack Vance rocks Although having Vancian Magic for every class is a problem, I think it fits the flavor of the wizard class beautifully and carefully managing Vancian resources just fits what wizards are all about perfectly.

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.

Yeah as much as people roll their eyes about it now, bounded accuracy was such a breath of fresh air after the clunky jury-rigged scaling of 3.5e numbers.

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

Agreed for the most part. As much as I love what TSR-D&D was trying to do the implementation is just too janky. My biggest issues with the OSR is that people tend to either:
A. Focus waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much on specific bits of the implementation of TSR-D&D rather than the goals that implementation was trying to work towards. I think a lot of OSR design is way to hung up on backwards compatibility.
B. Go waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overboard when it comes to minimalism. I loved the insane richness of the 1e DMG and would like to see a more sturdy and well-build system that took a lot of what Gygax was trying to do and make it sing by applying decades of RPG design experience.

That said 5e has a lot of issues, but it has fairly good and solid bones.

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?

Never found 4e hard to DM if you play it the way it works best (story heavy with one or two big epic battles per long rest), but it can be a real slog to DM if you haven't figured out what the best way to DM it and try to...say...run Keep on the Shadowfell as-is. I have, however, found it harder than other editions for some players to learn how to play. I find about 20% of D&D players just bounce off of how the rules are presented and that's a problem if those 20% of people include your good friends who you really want to play with. Maybe this isn't a problem if you introduce newbies to 4e, but I've found that some people who've played other editions just have a real hard time adapting their knowledge of how D&D rules work to 4e.

On the other hand some things like "I want to run a sandbox" just makes 4e keel over and die since 4e doesn't work if you don't know at what level the PCs will be encountering what, and that defeats the whole point of a sandbox.

....except saving throws are very specifically one of the parts that DON'T work consistently, because most characters will be bad at any given save. Intelligence saves, for example, are extremely dangerous because only three classes get Int save proficiency, and only one gets actual mechanical benefits from their Intelligence (four and two, respectively, if counting Artificer). Strength is even worse, with only two classes getting Str save proficiency,

Yeah I like 5e more than you do, but saving throw scaling is the single biggest naughty word-up in 5e rules. Martial classes across the board should've been given various ways to say "naughty word saving throws, I'm a goddam hero." That has only been partially band-aided over in 5.5e with things like buffs to fighter saving throws.

For a martial, I would largely agree with you. When I ran an all martial campaign in the early days of 5e, I could pretty much guarantee that the PC's were going to do X damage per round and could balance encounters simply by using multiples of their damage in monster HP. If the party dealt an average of 100 points of damage/round (not unreasonable for a, say, 7th level non-caster group) then a group of monsters with 350 hp should last about four rounds.

And, yup, it was very predictable.

This whole line of reasoning is making me scratch my head a bit. Shouldn't the tactical choices that players make in combat matter? If those tactical choices matter shouldn't how long fights last (and how much damage the PCs take) vary wildly depending on how intelligent their tactical choices are?

So, in conclusion I would say that predictability is absolutely a good thing.

The amount that we disagree about what is a feature and what is a bug continues to astound me. I'm not trying to criticize you, I think a wide variety of DMing approaches is a great thing for D&D and I'm happy that we can both have fun in our own ways, it's just like I'm looking at my mirror universe DM when I read your posts. Do you have a goatee? Hell, maybe I'm the alternate dimension twin and need to regrow the goatee I had before COVID masks made it too itchy.

I read it and think some people come to the table with a different idea of what’s fun than me.

Yeah, I always knew that a lot of people DMed very differently from how I did but the sheer EXTENT to which my and other people's DMing styles are utterly alien to each other is really getting driven home in this thread.

Part of the problem is D&D is too diverse to automatically think you and another person is coming from the same frame of reference.

It's pretty much why the D&D Ranger has so much problems and it's flavor design. Everyone has 15 different ideas of what it is in their head.

So people have to get into them mindset of talking it out.

Something I question the whole "don't create a world" advice.

Yeah, I have utterly given up at convincing people that they should consider what I find fun about D&D and am just trying to get people to understand that I think that what I like about D&D is fun for me. That's about all I can hope for.

I liked this so much from the older editions that I kept it as an "easter egg" of sorts in that I had the party find a specially prepared spell components that allowed them to cast 3 fireballs using that cubic feet calculation. So yeah, I wouldn't want to worry about it every time they cast fireball, but having it as a special "one-off" ability is fun.

Yeah, those kind of "wait a second..." moments can be pure gold in D&D. I just find that you have to telegraph a lot so that when it happens the players all go "Jesus naughty word, I'm an idiot for naughty word myself over like that" not "you're an naughty word Daztur." Or I just sit back and wait for the PCs to give me rope that I can use to hang them.

 

[Hussar]

But, like, you're the DM, so what's forcing you to agree to the exploit? Or preventing you from having it work Only Once? Or limiting your ability to say Yes And or Yes But? Why AREN'T you comfortable doing a bit of house ruling for your preferred experience?

Missing the point. It's not that I have to agree with the exploit or being able to rule. I'm perfectly capable of doing that.

I don't want to.

I don't want to have that conversation fifty different times for fifty different spells. It's not fun for me. And, let's be honest here, they've been closing loopholes in the language of spells for years. We can't use Spider Climb to pick pockets. We don't use Create Water as instant death spells. On and on and on.

Yes, I can do it but, it gets absolutely exhausting to have to do it for only half the players all the time. It ruins any momentum in the game. Makes the game frustrating. And encourages players to game the system and not actually engage with the game.

 

[Hussar]

Yup, I just love it when there gets to be a bit of chaos. Straight-up brawls get a bit samey after a while, the last game I DMed was a Star Wars game that had all kinds of crazy naughty word like PCs jumping out of the back of transport ships to try to board Tie Fighters and stab the pilots with light sabers, only to be saved at the last moment by friends zipping about with jet packs and force powers being used to yank them about out of danger.

But, the thing is, you can do all of that without needing vague rules. Guess what? I have all that sort of thing in my games too. But, I don't have it because the players decide to play silly buggers semantic games and game the system. I have it because the players actually engage with the game and the setting and these kinds of things happen.

Limits breed creativity as long as there's enough room to maneuver within those limits.

Now this? This I am 100% behind.

 

[Minigiant]

Missing the point. It's not that I have to agree with the exploit or being able to rule. I'm perfectly capable of doing that.

I don't want to.

I don't want to have that conversation fifty different times for fifty different spells. It's not fun for me. And, let's be honest here, they've been closing loopholes in the language of spells for years. We can't use Spider Climb to pick pockets. We don't use Create Water as instant death spells. On and on and on.

Yes, I can do it but, it gets absolutely exhausting to have to do it for only half the players all the time. It ruins any momentum in the game. Makes the game frustrating. And encourages players to game the system and not actually engage with the game.

Part of the issue is D&D magic was designed around gaming the system.

Spell were originally off buttons and gotchas.

The magic game was

1. You only had a few of them
2. You had to guess correctly or they didn't apply
3. You had more obstacles than gotcha spells

This works but it only works one way. This is why these magic systems were eroded over time, to facilitate more playstyles.

But then spells need to adjust.

To me this is why Creative spells should be either high level or have dramatic limitations. Then you can flood the low levels with more spell.

1. Language dependent Command
2. Target dependent Command
3. Effect limited Command

And let DMs decide what they want to deal with.

Just like how there should be a big damage spell of every major damage type at 3rd level.

1. Acid Arc
2. Fireball
3. Ice Cube
4. Lightning Bolt
5. Soundwave
6. Venom Spray

 

[Hussar]

Heh. That's exactly the sort of crap I love. I'd grin ear to ear at that kind of cleverness.

Meh, that's not clever. That's just being a jerk because the DM didn't write iron clad clauses into the Suggestion spell because I have zero interest in that sort of thing. I very clearly and openly NEVER do that sort of thing to the players. I absolutely refuse to.

So, in return, I expect that players don't try to do it to me and I get rather annoyed when I have to deal with this sort of thing over and over and over and over and over again. Campaign after campaign. Group after group.

I'm just so absolutely exhausted of it. I mean, good grief, the very first 5e campaign I ran was set in Primeval Thule. To get deep into the whole Sword and Sorcery angle and back away a bit from the very high magic level of 5e, I wanted a no-caster game. Half-casters were fine, so, paladin, ranger? No problem. First three character concepts pitched to me? All full casters.

It remains to this day one of my more fun campaigns for me to run simply because I could concentrate on the campaign and the game and not constantly have to futz about dealing with this sort of magic arms race and pedantic wankery. My current Phandelver campaign is right up there as well. No casters save a single warlock. It's freaking fantastic. I don't have to deal with this sort of thing at all. Game runs at a super high pace and it forces the players to actually engage with the campaign instead of engaging with gaming the game. Loving it.

 

[TiQuinn]

It just sucks any and all enjoyment out of the game for me.

Again, I just heard that you have a player problem, not a spell problem.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Again, I just heard that you have a player problem, not a spell problem.

That the players were told no full casters and pitch full casters nevertheless makes this pretty obvious. I can certainly imagine these sort of players also arguing with GM rulings.

 

[billd91]

I can some a good bit of 2e spirit in 5e, but not all that much of its specific rules. 5e seems to be a messy compromise in which it takes a lot of what 4e was like under the hood and twists it to be more 3.5e in its details with some 2e philosophy even though not the specific rules. Seemed like a mess at first but worked decently as a compromise for a whole slew of people and it was nice to see it bring the hobby together and bring so many new people in. Don't see the hobby staying that united in the coming years.

I can definitely see 5e as a follow-up to 2e but with different technology under the hood. The reversion of magic items to pre-3e structure is a major part of that because one of the biggest shifts in D&D play was the magic item economy in 3e - it really changed (or damaged depending on your perspective) how players approached their characters. It gave you something to do with treasure other than spend on training costs from the ol' 1e days, but it sucked the joy out of the room with respect to most oddball magic items.
And I have to say, 5e's reversion on magic items is a significant reason I prefer it to the 3e family. For many years after 3e first come out (then 4e, then PF), remained my second favorite edition. 2e cleaned up some of the worst of 1e, filled in many of its gaps (still managed to cock up the ranger, oh well, not everyone's perfect), while still keeping what was best about 1e. 5e shifted play back toward 2e to the point where I found it extremely comfortable and easy to work with, easier than any of the 3es.

 

[Remathilis]

Meanwhile the bard is giggling at all of you with his Dissonant whispers spell which has never been language dependent and deals direct damage.

I wonder why no one has been bitching about that for the past ten years. [emoji1745]

Because no one ever tried to RP the spell as whispering "IgottagopeeIgottagopeeIgottagopee" over and over while running for a latrine?