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Reply backlog down to 11 pages of comments. Am doing my best to catch up... Yeah, I've had issue with people giving suicidal commands, easy enough to clear up with people reading the spells description. Got mixed up, it's flagstones not cobblestones and balance not tumble. Been a long while...

Good point. You can certainly be juvenile in any version of D&D if you want to. In games where "flavor is free" you can reflavor stuff into stupid juvenile antics and that would be your fault, not the fault of the rules. Ugh, I really hate rule solutions to player problems. If your players are...

In my experience that kind of bathos is what D&D does best: On Bathos It is just plain easier to run bathos than pathos in D&D and faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar easier to run D&D with a Swords and Sorcery tone than an Epic Fantasy tone. I've always found that if you want more pathos and narrative...

Trying to reply to everything relevant. Am mostly done with page 16 now o_O. This is going to take a while... Thanks! I think part of it is that the changes in philosophy are fairly subtle since 5.5e isn't the kind of shock and awe change that 4e was and there's been a bit of boiling frog...

I agree that the AI stuff is just a suspicion, but I don't think Command is an unpopular spell. It comes up a lot of in discussions of which 1st level spells are good to select which which 1st level spells upcast well. And yeah, it got a buff in terms of in-combat power (due to the language...

Yeah, 3.5e was filled with all kinds of rules oddities that are forgotten now. For example did you know that there is a rule that distinguishes between the difficulty of tumbling across even vs. uneven cobblestones? And over here 3.0e is the only main version of the game I've never played...

People said the same thing about 4e and...I'm just not sure. But if that is what WotC is doing it seems so self-defeating. The main selling point of D&D is that you can do all kinds of things in it that a computer could never handle so changing D&D rules to make them easier for a computer to...

Well that goes for every game shrug You need to get people on board with the expectations of the game. In my experience it isn't any harder to teach newbies with no RPG experience OSR games than it is to teach them 5e. If anything OSR games are easier to teach random people since so much of the...

Yup, you totally disagree with me and that's fine. You're pretty hard on one end of the spectrum and I'm pretty hard on the other end. For me I don't want the mechanics to be 100% codified, I want the flavor to be 100% codified. Why? Well, if the flavor isn't totally codified then when the...

I'm going to try to reply to the whole slew of comments that piled up while I was asleep, but for now I'm going to stick to just this one since it so perfectly sums up the issue at hand. Great post. The crux of the issue is that we both want creativity in our D&D games but we're talking about...

I think what you and @Chaosmancer upthread are missing is that dragging people while grappling has been significantly buffed in that you used to only be able to move at half speed while dragging grappled people around. This is no longer the case. This doubles how are you can drag people and...

5.5e had added several new ways for players to force monsters to move. Increasing the scope of forced movement is one of the most consistent themes of 5.5e. I presume they want people to use those features they just added to the game, otherwise why add them. The problem is that there's a bunch...

There's being better than something than other people and then there's the kind of cheesegrater tactics now possible in 5.5e. They can do truly ludicrous amounts of damage now in a way that breaks the game if you allow them.

I think that by locking down a mechanic to one precise flavor interpretation you open the door to players doing more fun off the wall things. If spells just give a general mechanical effect then there's nothing for the players to latch onto to figure out how to MacGyver it. But if the spell is...

I don't mind them being so good at grappling, but the distance that they can force someone who is grappled to move in a single round is a bit much, especially compared with other sources of forced movement.

As a tactical idea, I like the idea of forced movement, they just should have sanity tested the amount of forced movement they're making available vs. how much utility you can get out of it. The sheer amount of forced movement a monk can now force on people is fairly ludicrous and really...

Eh, it's bigger than the changes between the various versions of Basic and I'd argue it's bigger in rules terms than the difference between 1e and 2e, although 1e and 2e had some pretty big differences in terms of aesthetic and outlook, the actually rules of core 1e and 2e were pretty similar...

Yup, same here. I think I stated my own place on the D&D spectrum 12 years ago pretty clearly: [Very Long] Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War: a Key Difference in D&D Play Styles... and I haven't changed much in my views since then. Although 5e was never my favorite edition it was a good enough...

Thanks to WotC backing down after the OGL debacle last year, the fate of D&D as a general cultural thing is more secure than ever. There is army of small companies making their own versions of D&D. I'm gearing up for a Beyond the Wall campaign myself, just because the official version isn't to...

A lot of illusions are TOO open-ended. I like how TSR/3.0e/5e Command very specifically defines what it does but also allows the door open to creativity. Just a great spell that's a lot of fun. Yes, it also scales very well with upcasting. My complaint is more than the flexibility. I LIKE...