D&D General Mike Mearls says control spells are ruining 5th Edition

[Staffan]

Nah, dude. There is a lot of decision-making involved in high-level competitive magic play. The stochastic elements do limit the impact of skill, but over enough games, the more skilled player will win more games, and this is especially true in so-called “fair,” interactive Magic. “Winning is just a matter of net decking and having the money to afford the best cards” is the lament of the low to mid-tier player. Give them access to any cards they want and all the time they need to search through tournament reports and decklists, the top players will still win against them more often than not.

I reckon it's like racing. There's definitely a lot of skill involved, both on the part of the drivers and the pit crews. But if you show up in a proper F1 car and I in a VW Beetle, I'm not winning that race no matter how skilled I am (assuming you can handle the F1 car without flying off the track).

I've been advocating for Legendaries and hit points to be tied together.

Draw Steel does something similar. This is a pretty standard thing on solo monsters there:

Draw Steel saving throws work similar to 4e: some effects let you make a save of 6+ on d10 each turn to shake the effect off. There are other mechanics that, depending on the effect, keep effects from happening in the first place. Draw Steel also generally don't have fully incapacitating effects – I think the worst are Dazed (instead of main action + maneuver + move on your turn, only do one of those things) and Restrained (Speed 0 and has penalties to acting), but there's no Stun or such as general conditions.

 

[Scribe]

LOL. Yea, as if only super geniuses can play Magic well...

 

[FrogReaver]

Definitely a white deck.

 

[Pedantic]

Netrunner is a great game. Personally, I think the problem is not with the fundamental design of Magic (and symmetrical competitive card games derived from it broadly), but with the profit incentives of the medium. We saw these same trends in Yugioh long before they started happening in Magic, because Yugioh never had set rotation. Magic managed to avoid this problem for a long time because Standard was the premier format, so they didn’t need to push power to sell product. Once Commander took off, Magic gradually morphed to accomodate a non-rotating format as the primary mode of play, which meant they could no longer rely on rotation pushing engaged players to buy new products, and we’re now in the process of watching the game decline in exactly the same ways Yugioh did (but now with IP crossovers! ).

Neither set rotation nor power creep would be needed but for the profit incentives of collectible trading cards. As usual, late stage capitalism takes a good thing and forces it to eat itself in the inane pursuit of endless growth.

Oh I think it's both. Nothing that's been said about loot boxes is not at least as true about booster packs, and the secondary "market" is just s slow motion ponzi scheme. Putting that aside though, you still need rotation in a competitive game with an evolving meta, or you'll stagnate pretty quickly as soon as there's any edge in your design to tug on. Unless you design the thing as a closed board game from the start, any competitive scene requires fresh stuff to chew on, and needs an outlet of the meta is solved too quickly.

I'm still convinced it's ultimately a design dead end. There's an amusing trend in board game design of disaffected Magic players turned designers trying to drive out draw variability in their construction deck games and producing barely interactive games or immediately broken metas as a result. You need more decision points baked into the rules, and more game structure you can leverage to make the randomness of drawing cards into a source of tactical decision making, instead of someone to fight against.

There's nothing left that can't better be achieved with a solid draftable cube, or a reasonably well tuned set of dueling decks.

 

[Scribe]

Putting that aside though, you still need rotation in a competitive game with an evolving meta, or you'll stagnate pretty quickly as soon as there's any edge in your design to tug on. Unless you design the thing as a closed board game from the start, any competitive scene requires fresh stuff to chew on, and needs an outlet of the meta is solved too quickly.

You don't need forced rotation. A stable meta, a trickle of new cards, and tiers with depth of archetypes that prey on each other?

Perfect, like Modern was long ago.

Oh, and variability of draw? Critical.

 

[mearls]

Basically, "boss encounters" vs. "the dungeon itself is the boss, and this encounter is one of its attacks."

In the former, control spells are a problem that we need something like Legendary Resistance or these moves Mearls thought of here to solve for, since we WANT a multi-round conflict where most every hit or miss or resource expenditure matters. In the latter, control spells are just another way to mitigate damage and take out what the dungeon can throw at you.

Wow, that is the most elegant expression I've ever seen of the core tension in 5e.

Having played a lot of AD&D and B/X (via OSE) in the past couple years, I think that the main failing of 5e (and that's relative - the game obviously has done very well) is the mismatch between AD&D play patterns with 3e/4e mechanical conceits.

The core math of 5e comes from 4e, yet the game play loop is far older. I think one of the big issues is that the iconic adventures tended to look and play like AD&D ones, even 3e stuff like Forge of Fury. Those adventures all emphasized the dungeon as the opponent, yet I think DMs these days tend to focus on specific encounters.

Oddly enough, when AD&D tried to do the boss monster thing it didn't work great IME. Lolth was supposed to be the boss monster of the GDQ series, but her measily 66 hit points - even when backed with AC -10 - weren't enough to survive a round against a reasonably equipped 14th level party.

 

[Pedantic]

You don't need forced rotation. A stable meta, a trickle of new cards, and tiers with depth of archetypes that prey on each other?

Perfect, like Modern was long ago.

Oh, and variability of draw? Critical.

It's a pipe dream. The razors edge you need to tread with each new release gets tighter and tighter, until something has to give. You can float by with a ban list for a while, but you're always either risking stagnation or power creep.

 

[Zardnaar]

Wow, that is the most elegant expression I've ever seen of the core tension in 5e.

Having played a lot of AD&D and B/X (via OSE) in the past couple years, I think that the main failing of 5e (and that's relative - the game obviously has done very well) is the mismatch between AD&D play patterns with 3e/4e mechanical conceits.

The core math of 5e comes from 4e, yet the game play loop is far older. I think one of the big issues is that the iconic adventures tended to look and play like AD&D ones, even 3e stuff like Forge of Fury. Those adventures all emphasized the dungeon as the opponent, yet I think DMs these days tend to focus on specific encounters.

Oddly enough, when AD&D tried to do the boss monster thing it didn't work great IME. Lolth was supposed to be the boss monster of the GDQ series, but her measily 66 hit points - even when backed with AC -10 - weren't enough to survive a round against a reasonably equipped 14th level party.

Heh took your advice about playing older D&D during playtest.

We switched back to 2E and clones.

Pre 3E creatures are class cannons generally. 4E onwards to many hp.

3.5 whatever its flaws might have git that part right.

Played 2E earlier this year abd a 1E adventures with C&C.

 

[Scribe]

It's a pipe dream. The razors edge you need to tread with each new release gets tighter and tighter, until something has to give. You can float by with a ban list for a while, but you're always either risking stagnation or power creep.

It was real though. Wizards knew how to manage it, until greed and F.I.R.E ruined everything.

 

[Pedantic]

It was real though. Wizards knew how to manage it, until greed and F.I.R.E ruined everything.

I think that's a little rose tinted. That, and it's only a problem that gets worse with time.