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

[Charlaquin]

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.

Trying to remove draw variability is a terrible decision, because uncertainty of outcome is an essential quality of what makes an activity a game. If you know who’s going to win, there’s no game to be played, it’s just a formality at best. And in a hypothetical perfectly-balanced symmetrical competitive game, the better player will always win. You need variance so that it takes more games to determine who the better player is, and to widen the range of player skill levels that can have interesting games against each other.

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

Well, yeah, limited is by far the best way to play Magic, and Cube is a great way to curate a limited experience.

 

[Scribe]

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

I don't know, I played, watched, and spent fanatically for a good period of time. There were two points where Wizards jumped the shark, maybe 3. I'll have to put some data together. It was Eldrazi/Tron, still a blight on the game, Companion mechanic, fundamental mistake that turned even Vintage on its head, and EVERYTHING about F.I.R.E.

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

Also, I don’t know what you guys did in closed testing, but during the open playtest you got a lot of your feedback from people playing through the Caves of Chaos and Isles of Dread. It’s no surprise that the game that came out of that works quite well for that dungeon-as-opponent style of gameplay. Unfortunately the game ended up being discovered by an audience that really had no interest in using it for that purpose. It must be pretty surreal to have designed a top-of-the-line screwdriver, only for it to catch on as a tool for driving nails… and then for that audience to complain that it doesn’t dive nails very well, while insisting they don’t want a hammer, they like using your screwdriver, they just want it to be better at driving nails.

 

[The Sigil]

And I'm fond of his more specific reactions, though I think they're maybe a little narrow. Like I've pointed out in other threads, D&D 5e has limited distinctions for encounters that are basically "resource attrition" and encounters that are meant to be more tactical showcases against powerful and deadly opponents.

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

Just have to echo that this is perhaps the most elegant expression of the tension this old-school DM finds himself in with new-school players. I think I'm going to steal "the dungeon itself is the boss, and this encounter is one of its attacks" for my next Session Zero when describing my DMing style.

 

[Maxperson]

But again, they clearly knew this was a problem, they clearly chose to include such spells anyway, and for some reason they decided not to include whatever defenses Mearls claims monsters used to have against them in older editions? WHY??

I think it was because a lot of people complained about a monster's MR/SR(depending on edition) completely negating the spellcaster's turn without the monster even having to roll a save.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think it was because a lot of people complained about a monster's MR/SR(depending on edition) completely negating the spellcaster's turn without the monster even having to roll a save.

Isn’t that exactly what Legendary Resistance does anyway though…?

 

[Maxperson]

Isn’t that exactly what Legendary Resistance does anyway though…?

It's limited, where MR/SR was not. It's 3 times spread out over the entire party. With MR/SR, the entire party can be hit by it every round for the entire fight if they are all casting spells.

 

[Staffan]

Isn’t that exactly what Legendary Resistance does anyway though…?

Legendary Resistance at least gets worn away.

 

[Charlaquin]

Legendary Resistance at least gets worn away.

Ah, I see

 

[Zardnaar]

It's limited, where MR/SR was not. It's 3 times spread out over the entire party. With MR/SR, the entire party can be hit by it every round for the entire fight if they are all casting spells.

Yup. In practice theyre all gone in a round or two then boss dues a round or so after that