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

[AnotherGuy]

Let's take a step back and take a look at a scenario with no magic, imagine the following:

The PCs have left a dungeon with barely any resources and are limping back to town. On the way home suddenly an owlbear jumps out at them and attacks! RAWR! The players panic, they're in no shape for another fight, but then one player looks over their character sheet carefully and see that they have a jar of honey that they'd looted from a giant bee hive earlier. The player throws the jar of honey at the ground in front of the owlbear and hopes that owlbears like honey. Then the whole party flees in terror and hopes that the owl bear likes honey.

Now does that owlbear like honey? Will it stop to eat the honey on the ground or will it ignore the honey in favor of chasing after the fleeing PCs. It's all up to the DM, there no rules to decide the effects of honey on owlbears. The DM has to make a decision one way or another. What will the DM decide?

Do you have a problem with how the players acted in the honey scenario? How would you rule that one? I don't know, but I'd like to hear your reasoning.

This could be handled a number of ways in 5e as I see it.

* Instead of using a "luck roll" to see if the owlbear likes honey and if that the tactic works, this world-building element and if the tactic was a success could be resolved via a Handle Animal check. All you need to do is determine the difficulty.
(Dice determines Yes or No)

* DM determines if honey is part of the diet of the owlbear, since he is Master of the World - per the DMG and if (a) Yes, then a Handle Animal check or another appropriate check is used to determine if the tactic works.
The check may resolve a number of items (jar was thrown aggressively, did the jar break allowing the owlbear to identify the honey...etc). Perhaps there is an Advantage that is granted.
And if (b) No, then perhaps the sound of the jar smashing scares off the beast, or the honey reminds it of a bad encounter with wasp's nest when it was young, or it makes the owlbear more aggressive...etc
(Say Yes, with dice to determine degree of success, or Say No, but...)

* DM decides the idea was creative enough and that the PC used up an appropriate resource for the challenge thus circumventing the risk of rolling dice.
(Say Yes, no dice)

* Then there is the obviously outright No by the DM, but that is harder to justify in this scenario with such limited facts, IMO.

 

[Hussar]

just don't don't see the division between the PCs using the jar of honey creatively and PCs using command creatively. In both cases the PCs are using a tool at their disposal to do something that logically makes sense in the fiction as something that's at least POSSIBLE (do owlbears even like honey? I have no idea, but it's possible...) and then the DM has to decide if it works or not.

Realistically, that's why we will not agree here. I do not see those things as equivalent at all. In one case, the players are engaging directly playing the game. In the other, the players are gaming the system.

 

[SableWyvern]

But here's the problem. The idea of saluting doesn't exist until about the 16th century. Tell an Ogre to salute and he'd have no idea what it means. In fact, outside of knights, no one would understand what that means. Again, that's not being creative, it's being anachronistic.

Sure. If a player tries to do something clever, the appropriate response is absolutely, "Salute isn't a verb!"

And when the player says, "Umm, yeah, it is," that's when you know they've fallen into your trap, and you follow up with the real zinger!

"Haha, you used anachronistic language so it doesn't work! You might think you were being clever, but you're really just a cheesemonkey jerk and trying to abuse the system! No ogre would possibly know what a salute is. Don't you know your real world history, the etymology of the word "salute" and how it applies to ogres in this fantasy setting??!?!"

I'm getting a much better understanding now why you have had so many disputes, arguments and disagreements at your table.

I'm done with this, have fun running your game any way you see fit.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Indeed. I freaking love Whitehack but if 6e was Whitehack rebranded as D&D I'd understand that people would be confused and upset. And edition of an existing game should be an edition of that game, not something that rebuilds basic assumptions of how that game operates.

I agree, but D&D has sadly only sometimes followed that rule.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Making up fiction is playing the game. It's like deciding what a NPC says, or which PC a creature attacks. It's not a ruling about the consequence or impact of some rules element.

Compare the Command spell to the Apocalypse World Brainer's "direct-brain whisper projection". The latter requires the Gm to make decisions about how a NPC responds, but not to make any ruling about whether or how the effect works.

I'm not quite following you. In both situations the GM is deciding how the NPCs responds. Seems like the same thing to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

According to Merriam-Webster, "suicide" can be used as a verb: Definition of SUICIDE

RPGs, like some wargames, permit the fiction to matter to resolution. They also generally involve asymmetrical participant roles, in that one participant manages the scenes and how these unfold from the backstory, while another participant (or multiple participants) manage particular protagonists within the fiction.

It's the combination of fiction-sensitive wargaming with the "first person"/"avatar" player perspective that I think is the core of most RPGing.

A game having the features I've just described doesn't really depend on the GM making rulings. A game can have those features - ie the unique things that RPGs bring to the table - and also have clear rules about who gets to say what when about what is happening in the shared fiction.

It can, but D&D is generally not that game.

 

[FrozenNorth]

IMO, the biggest issue with command is how big of a gap it can be between expectations. Part of the 2024 goal is to get rid of the 'DM may I' ability.

Any DM can wiggle out of any Command with a little of their own creativity. 1 word is not clear. For instance, if a player tells a murder suspect to confess, the DM decides what that means.

DM1: I killed him.
DM2: I didn't like that guy.
DM3:

DM4: I confess. (Useless, since he didn’t specify what he confessed to).
DM5: Bless me, heavenly light of Lathander, for I have sinned. It has been 20 years since my last confession. In that time I have committed many sins. To begin with…(6 seconds are up and he stops confessing)

 

[Micah Sweet]

In 4e D&D, that's a move in a skill challenge.

In B/X D&D that would either be a +1 on a reaction check (if there's no fight yet) or else would be a move in evasion resolution, where there is a % chance that the creature stops to eat the food - I can't recall what that % chance is in B/X, but in Gygax's DMG it works like this:

Food, including rations and/or wine, will be from 10% to 100% likely to distract pursuers of low intelligence or below, providing the food/wine is what they find palatable. Roll a d10 to find the probability, unless you have a note as to how hungry or food-oriented the creatures are. Add 10% to the result for every point of intelligence below 5, and give a 100% probability for non-intelligent creatures pursuing. If probability is under 100%, roll the d10 a second time, and if the result is equal to or less than the probability determined, then the pursuers break off pursuit for 1 round while the food/wine is consumed.​

I don't see that making decisions about the fiction is "rulings". That's just playing the game.

When as a Traveller GM I had to decide how much chance there was of finding a broker at a starport, and what bonus Admin skill gave to that - that was a ruling. (And like the rulebook tells me to, I made a note of it for future reference.)

But when as a Traveller GM I had to work with the players to determine how long it took for of a triple-beam laser to blast through ice, that wasn't a ruling. That was just adjudicating the fiction. (We Googled a scientific paper about using lasers to cut through ice, and extrapolated.)

The analogy I use is this: no one doubts that, in classic D&D, a player can have their PC bang on a door and thereby make a noise. That's not a "ruling". It's just working with the fiction.

As a side note, I absolutely love that the 1e DMG had that rule! Stuff like that is what I want out of TTRPGs.

 

[Vaalingrade]

3e? Yes exactly. All of weird-ass Rolemaster-inspired stuff that was imported into 3.*e (freaking skill points and all the rest of the rules bloat) and dropped by later editions should've never been added. I still shudder at the thought of 3.5e grapple and climbing rules. 3e strayed too far from its 2e roots and in doing so borked the math scaling in some really fundamental ways that WotC and Paizo never figured out how to fix.

2e? That wasn't much of a departure from 1e rules-wise, certainly not in core. As a kid I was playing with a 2e PHB, a 1e DMG, and a Rules Cyclopedia (before I got my hands on enough monster books). naughty word worked fine.

5e? Yeah that was the game rebuilt from the ground-up, but I'll give WotC a pass on that one since after rebuilding the game from the ground up twice and then having a huge backlash against 4e they didn't really have a choice but to make a bit of a weird Chimera edition as a compromise between the warring TSR-D&D, 3e, and 4e camps. I'm actually amazed that 5e was as good of a compromise as it's turned out to be, despite all of its flaws. But if 3e and 4e had been evolutionary instead of revolutionary and built on the good bits of 2e instead of dumping them, then it wouldn't have been necessary for 5e to rebuild the game from the ground up.

2e was a wall made of individual novel rules bricks built on top of 1e. It was just as big a departure as any other full edition. The only difference is that it's the one people here have nostalgia for and being different doesn't make any of the bad and wrong. The reaction and OVER A DECADE of not letting go of the obvious, seething grudge was what was bad and wrong.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm good with a 1st level spell being able to manage this.

Maybe we can have Command replicate other 3rd level spells? "Ignite" can make the foe light himself on fire? "Dispel" can make an enemy caster end his spell early? "Slow" can make them move at half-speed and take only an action OR a bonus action? "Rest" or "Heal" can make the target use a HD? The options are endless when Command is a first level Power Word spell.