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

New group of PCs to 5e some time in 2016. PCs encounter their first legendary creature at lvl 5. Monk uses his Stunning Strike thing and was instantly deflated when I said the monster used its Legendary Resistance to counter it. This after I spent a few minutes before the battle explaining a bit about legendary creatures.

It's one thing to hear it and it's another to see it in action. Totally deflating. I can see why Mearls would consider it a hack.

Zardnaar said:

I bailed in 2010 after Tarmogoyf and Jace the Mindsculptor.

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The funny thing is, both of those cards are unplayably bad now.

You think ol’ Tarmo was OP? Bump the cost up by a single mana (and swap the green for a black) and you can get the exact same thing, only with Deathtouch, Lifelink, and when it comes into play you mill yourself for four and can put a creature card from among the four you milled into your hand. Yeah, someone really thought “you know what the most aggressively statted creature ever printed needs? To gain you a billion life, kill anything that blocks it, and replace itself immediately. But let’s make that cost one more just to keep it fair.”

Zardnaar said:

Buying house also contributed.

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Well, yeah, that’s definitely a better use of your money lol

Remathilis said:

It's the same problem as Magic: The Gathering. It's often a better play to nullify your opponent than to defeat them quickly (unless you can do so faster than they can act). Shutting down an opponents opportunity to act is almost always the best (and most unfun) play.

We want D&D combat to be dynamic: back and forth, full of suspense. I take 5 damage, I deal 10 in return. But as any OS player will tell you, the smart play is not to fight fair, but to win with overpowering advantage and control is the easiest way to gain that tactical advantage. And so players will opt for the spells that deny action economy to their enemies while maximizing their own action economy.

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I had a Red/White/Blue deck back in the day full of multi-lands and every counter for a specific type of card that you could cast - Stone Rain, Counterspell, Flash Counter, Swords to Plowshares, Disenchant. If you could cast it, I could destroy it. It was incredibly annoying to play against and the only benefit is I played it quickly.

Charlaquin said:

The thing is, competitive play sucks now. It’s a coin flip, followed by two people playing solitaire, where the person who won the flip has a significantly higher chance of winning at solitaire first. Or four people playing Solitaire in CEDH. That’s what happens when you make all the win conditions too powerful for interaction to keep up with; the game becomes uninteractive. Pauper is the last bastion of competitive constructed play where there’s an actual back-and-forth instead of just a race to get your unbeatable bomb off before the other guy does. Or, I guess you and three of your friends can all agree to pretend the game isn’t horribly broken together and play Bracket 1-4 Commander.

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I realize this is heresy, but maybe that's less a modern design decision and more an inevitable implication of the whole structure of dude-basher, life depletion, symmetrical objective card games when played well. There's actually not a ton of design space (or even all that much decision making) in the available player interactions, just in the engine construction that happens outside the moment of gameplay.

All of which is to say, more people should try Netrunner, even just to get an understanding of the design.Garfield saw the beginnings of these problems a long time ago, and a ton of work has been done to iterate on his solutions since then.

I still like the 13th Age solution: hp thresholds for crowd control spells. There is some of this in 5e with sleep and color spray, but not enough IMO.

Pathfinder 2e's spell degrees of success/failure handle these spells interestingly- if a creature succeeds vs the Paralyze spell (their version of Hold) then it is Stunned 1. That means that they lose 1 of their actions (IIRC pf2e creatures get 3 action per turn). On a fail theyre paralyzed for 1 round, if they fail really badly theyre paralyzed for multiple rounds.

So because we're not going to rewrite 5e into every spell having these degrees of success, cool as they are, we can try to apply it to these boss monsters.
A5E sort of does this; if a dragon uses their 3 legendaries, some of their scales go brittle/break away and their AC drops a bit... so the caster feels like their spells at least did something.
I would propose to take it further; if the creature uses a legendary, perhaps a lesser effect takes hold? Ugh, now we're talking about adding a "legendary resisted" section onto every spell
Well as GM you could adjudicate these circumstances. Fail vs hold monster, use a legendary? Maybe they lose an attack, or get a penalty to said attacks? Hm. Worth kicking around the ol' brainbox.

My players always have a bad time with the control spells because they try to use them on the big bad and not the big bad's lieutenant.

Pedantic said:

I realize this is heresy, but maybe that's less a modern design decision and more an inevitable implication of the whole structure of dude-basher, life depletion, symmetrical objective card games when played well. There's actually not a ton of design space (or even all that much decision making) in the available player interactions, just in the engine construction that happens outside the moment of gameplay.

All of which is to say, more people should try Netrunner, even just to get an understanding of the design.Garfield saw the beginnings of these problems a long time ago, and a ton of work has been done to iterate on his solutions since then.

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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.

Charlaquin said:

The thing is, competitive play sucks now. It’s a coin flip, followed by two people playing solitaire, where the person who won the flip has a significantly higher chance of winning at solitaire first. Or four people playing Solitaire in CEDH. That’s what happens when you make all the win conditions too powerful for interaction to keep up with; the game becomes uninteractive. Pauper is the last bastion of competitive constructed play where there’s an actual back-and-forth instead of just a race to get your unbeatable bomb off before the other guy does. Or, I guess you and three of your friends can all agree to pretend the game isn’t horribly broken together and play Bracket 1-4 Commander.

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It's always been. That's literally the nature of random draw card games. There's some modicum of skill in play, do I kill this 1/1 creature now or wait for something bigger. Etc. Do I play my big creature now or try to get them to use all their counterspells first, but the real skill is deck building (and money to get access to the best cards). Anymore it's not even deckbuilding as most just netlist.

Charlaquin said:

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.

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How old is netrunner?

Theres a small group of nerds here playing it in one of the stores.

I vaguely remember it from early 2000s but may be confused with another game.