I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
There's an interesting design methodology worth exploring here. D&D is a game that blends narrative and gameplay. You can roll a 1 on a death save, you can get hit with a bunch of crits, you can whiff for a whole night, you can fall off a cliff and die, you can get mind controlled or stunlocked...and these are all gameplay elements. They're not hugely narratively satisfying, because they are part of the random luck of the game side of D&D. They can absolutely suck the air out of the room.
And many of these game elements have survived the march of editions. We've played with getting them out because of their lack of satisfying storytelling, but on the whole, the design values the randomness and the die rolls and the lack of narrative determinism in D&D.
Which means that, to some degree, we're OK with situations like this. A good spell selection and a lucky roll and the right encounter setup (this would've gone very differently if the target was immune to Charm or if the dragon would've concentrated damage on the Suggestion-caster or if there were just more monsters involved) means the big encounter goes very well for the party. Congrats! Maybe the next encounter goes poorly.
In that gameplay environment, it's hard to be precious about "tense" moments. There's no guarantee that any one moment is going to be particularly tense. Dice and good strategy deflate tension. PC's are not story protagonists, D&D is very much still a game, and it's possible to "win" without much effort some times. Folks get lucky.
But, the gameplay environment does not NEED to be this way. We can prioritize narrative more. We can change D&D to prioritize narrative more, with a tweak here or there. There's mechanics out there that really help increase "tension." Getting rid of save-or-suck is one element, but it's by far not the only one.
All of which is just to say that save-or-suck is not exactly the problem here. The problem is that sometimes the GAME of D&D and the STORY of a D&D session are in conflict. Save-or-suck is just one way that can be true.
As someone who very much values the Game side of D&D, I'm fond of them, and I think overall 5e has the best design of them. Not perfect, but definitely better than any edition previous. Suggestion isn't a perfect spell. Even with a lucky roll in an ideal situations (which it sounds like this was), Suggestion is a Concentration spell, which means beating the tar out of the spellcaster is a perfectly cromulent solution for a strategically minded antagonist. That can be a very tense situation, turning the encounter into a bit of a chase, challenging the group to work as a party, etc. If they win, it's because they played smart and got lucky. It also creates ripple effects in the campaign, as the antagonist is still around, and can come back for a round of vengeance.
2024 even did a bit of nerfing for many control spells. Sleep, iconic 1st level encounter-ender, is now only single-target, for instance. Not sure how I feel about that, personally...
I won't dispute the idea that save-or-suck spells are possible encounter-deflators. They absolutely are. But just as I'm OK with the party sometimes getting stomped because of how the dice land and their decisions in the moment, I'm also OK with the party sometimes doing the stomping for the same reasons. One encounter not being as tense as I'd hoped isn't a problem for me, generally. If I really want an encounter to be a barn-burner, I make sure that as a DM I plan for save-or-suck. Legendary resistance, multiple monsters, a clear counter-strategy, etc. It's worth having these effects in the game, for me, so I'm happy to take them into account, just as I'd take into account crit chances, grindy fights against many monsters, the chance of rolling 1's, etc.
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