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

[FrozenNorth]

Why, then, is it an exception to that when a player introduces some open-ended gameplay due to a class feature they want to use? What's the difference between using the command spell to tell someone standing next to a window to "defenestrate" and shoving that same NPC out of a window,

There is an important difference. If you shove an NPC out of the window, you shove an NPC out of the window. If you Command an NPC to defenestrate, they will shove YOU out of the window.

 

[billd91]

Throwing some random object out the window is popular?

If you only learned it because people were using it as a command word, it's an exploit. It also likely wouldn't work when I DM because the target of the spell has to understand what the heck the word means. Even then, the target gets to decide how to follow that command.

There are some of us gamers of a certain vintage that may have learned it from a certain Steve Jackson Games product:

I know I did.

 

[CellarHeroes]

I don't see that as a reason. It's more powerful because targets don't need to understand the command. The intent of the spell is now clear because you are limited to a specific set of commands with specified responses.

There's no reason to invent other reasons.

Ahhh...I didn't catch the bit about targets not having to understand the language. From what I was reading, it seemed like that was still a requirement.

It's the pre-determined command words that leads me to believe that it's set up easily for a VTT. Plus, the team whose job it was to make sure rules aligned with digital environments.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

Yeah I'd broadly agree. I feel like as someone who liked 4E, there isn't really enough of what made 4E good in 5E (primarily the tactical combat), but 5E also removed a lot of what made 4E bad for me, and most of what made 3.XE bad, so it works as a solid compromise.

Re: staying united I tend to agree also - part of this is WotC just screwed up too many times in a row but I think more is down to 5E failing to really give people anything to "grab on to" or really get excited about (even 2024, which should have been very exciting, is extremely muted), and part is that I think that some fraction of the people who came onboard with 5E are beginning to become aware of other RPGs, and seeing that maybe some actually do things that are more interesting to them than 5E. It doesn't help that 5E is relatively more work to both run and prep than most modern TT RPGs (and even a lot of older ones), which I think encourages DMs to branch out. I don't think 5E will stop being dominant, but I do think unless something major happens, ten years from now we'll be seeing a significantly larger proportion of the TT RPG market playing other games.

 

[Oofta]

I think that it is informed speculation. And I agree with @CellarHeroes ...

Look, Hasbro is investing a metric eff-ton (that's a real unit!) in its VTT and DDB. They would be really stupid to not try and make the rules more easy for digital given that this is the major rules revamp before the VTT comes out.

This isn't evil, it's just common sense. (I happen to like most of the changes, by the way, but I'm also a big fan of Monks, so take that with all the grains of salt you need.)

I guess I just don't connect the dots. If you had an AI running the game (not that I ever expect that to happen anytime soon), they'd just limit themselves to a set of standard commands and nobody would be the wiser. You can automate things like spell saves and for spells that have simple effects like damage from a fireball it's pretty straight forward.

But there are a ton of things that will never be easy to automate. Like when your PC is changed into a bard with a wish and their head explodes out of cognitive dissonance like that old school Star Trek episode that killed off Mud's robots with illogical actions*. It's just something the DM would have to handle like many other things.

The VTT doesn't limit things like movement, it just shows you what the standard movement is. Same way it could just tell you whether the target made or failed the save and let the DM handle it.

*Yes, I've been watching old Star Trek reruns on Paramount+.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

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.

I think this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what pacing is, and how it is managed within a TTRPG. Pacing is, at it's core, a response to the human attention span. Human's have an attention span of roughly 9 seconds. They can choose to refocus that attention on the same thing, repeatedly, for, on average, around 5 hours. These are just general guidelines, of course.

Pacing is the DM incentivizing players to continually refocus their attention on the game being played, over their phone or other distractions. Almost every case of a bored player is caused by a pacing error.

Often you see pacing described as high and low beats. This is a simplfied version of the concept. You do, generally, want to alternate between high and low beats, but that is not the extent of pacing and only doing that can leave other glaring errors. Tension building is another aspect of pacing, you see this in novels and how they are structured, but that can be ignored here. It's not really relevant to the point.

A common example of a pacing error is the over narration of a scene. Going into depth, and describing every detail, is almost always wrong. If your narration exceeds around 9 seconds, you are asking the players to refocus on the same narration. Instead your pacing will be better if you narrate the basics and leave the specifics to questions from the players. The reason this is the case, is its easier to refocus on the answer to a question you asked than to maintain focus on a continued narration. In essense, the players are more invested in their question than your monologue.

This can be extended into the idea of buckets, each bucket is a player. And you put chips representing time in those buckets. You put these chips in these buckets whenever that player is being engaged directly, when they have the spotlight. Anytime the DM is narrating, you are only putting those chips in the DM's bucket. A player that goes too long without a chip being added to their bucket, will lose interest and become bored.

The entire point of my rambling is that pacing is independant of game mechanics. You can use mechanical aspects of the game to facilitate aspects of pacing. But those mechanics themselves are irrelevant beyond their ability to fill that role. Your example of "pacing" issues within 5e's mechanics are simply not pacing issues at all. They are perceived game balance issues, and are completely unrelated.

EDIT: I could have addressed why this also doesn't apply to the rhythm of the story aspect of pacing. But I can do that later if needed. In short, it's largely the same reasoning. The rhythm of the story is largely disconnected from mechanical interactions.

 

[CellarHeroes]

I guess I just don't connect the dots. If you had an AI running the game (not that I ever expect that to happen anytime soon), they'd just limit themselves to a set of standard commands and nobody would be the wiser. You can automate things like spell saves and for spells that have simple effects like damage from a fireball it's pretty straight forward.

But there are a ton of things that will never be easy to automate. Like when your PC is changed into a bard with a wish and their head explodes out of cognitive dissonance like that old school Star Trek episode that killed off Mud's robots with illogical actions*. It's just something the DM would have to handle like many other things.

The VTT doesn't limit things like movement, it just shows you what the standard movement is. Same way it could just tell you whether the target made or failed the save and let the DM handle it.

*Yes, I've been watching old Star Trek reruns on Paramount+.

This is how I'm viewing it working in a VTT...
I select my target, and click the button for "Command", then a sub-menu comes up with the preset word to select from. A message appears "(Target) has been Commanded to Jump", and the DM can interpret that however they'd like. The player doesn't get to explain the intent of the Command, the NPC just acts on the Command.

 

[mamba]

It looks like Command has been changed to make it easy to work in a digital environment.

Unless they removed Suggestion, I doubt that has anything to do with it

 

[Oofta]

This is how I'm viewing it working in a VTT...
I select my target, and click the button for "Command", then a sub-menu comes up with the preset word to select from. A message appears "(Target) has been Commanded to Jump", and the DM can interpret that however they'd like. The player doesn't get to explain the intent of the Command, the NPC just acts on the Command.

There are a lot of spells and other effects that simply wouldn't work that way. In the grand scheme of things, this has such a minimal gain for a VTT that I doubt it was a consideration.

On the other hand, part of the reason I've seen people hesitate to use the spell is because they're not sure how they can use it or if it will have any effect. It's much, much more likely that this is clarifying the intent of the spell while being more effective because targets don't need to understand the spell.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

On the other hand, how easy is D&D to play if you have an experienced DM compared to other games. As a general rule, Indie games tend to take more of the weight off the DM's shoulders...but also put more on the shoulders of the players.

I've played 1e with kids in cases where I was strapped for time and I only gave them a ten minute run-down of what was on their character sheet, didn't teach them any rules, and basically treated the whole system of D&D rules as:

1. Player says what they are going to do.
2. A mystery happens.
3. DM tells them what the result is.

And things worked fine. Harder to do that with a lot of other games.

I'd really question if it is "harder" to do that with a lot of other games, myself.

With D&D, it also only really works to play it that way initially, at very low levels. If you try and play it that way with like, level 5+ characters, especially spellcasters, or anyone who has an actual abilities, I think D&D is actually significantly worse at that style of play than some other games.

I'm also not sure most indie games do put more weight on the players in terms of rules-understanding. FATE kind of does, but PtbA games tend not to (they do ask for a different approach, but my experience with people new to RPGs is that they take to the PtbA approach as easily as the "trad" approach - it's swapping from one to another that's harder). A lot of popular games work at least as well as D&D if not better with the "say what they are going to do" approach, too - Call of Cthulhu, for example.

The ones it works worst with in my experience aren't ones with meta-currencies or the like, like FATE, but ones with hugely complicated characters and enemies such that it's hard for the DM to manage them. For example, Shadowrun in most editions, HERO or GURPS at higher points values, D&D past level 5 or so (especially 3.XE or 4E!), Exalted, etc.