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  1. EzekielRaiden

    D&D General Circle Magic Concerns In "Heroes Of Faerun"

    There is a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge difference between throwing GMs to the wolves because you know every GM will make small tweaks here and there to the game, and making a game that is designed to work exactly as advertised, while recognizing that GMs will likely make small changes here and...
  2. EzekielRaiden

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

    Plus, let us point out the rhetorical trickery employed here. (Note that I am arguing to the thread at large; I know you don't need to hear this.) "Tough. Not evryone [sic] is going to be involved every moment, fact of life." What does that actually mean? "You won't be involved in every...
  3. EzekielRaiden

    D&D 5E (2014) Two wizard homebrew mechanics: any unintended consequences?

    The main problem with the proposed Savant feature is not that it is thematic, it's that it will push players even more to focus on the very best spell schools. Divination would be pretty thoroughly nerfed, I'll give you that, but the three you mention would be an enormous buff. You'll get a...
  4. EzekielRaiden

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

    Sounds like the condition track, no? If so, perhaps we could even make it have either 3 or 5 steps as desired for any particular effect, like so: Hold Person (concentration; see text) -2: Paralyzed for one minute, concentration no longer required -1: Stunned and Restrained 0: Dazed (can only...
  5. EzekielRaiden

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

    Wanted to come back to this. 4e did not "strip them out for the most part". A lot of the things folks want are in there. They've just been rebuilt to fit into the paradigm of a combat system where "combat" means "set-piece" and attritional stuff is handled in other ways. It's sort of like how...
  6. EzekielRaiden

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

    Key problem being, as folks around here are so keen to point out, high-level games are pretty rare. If you've just raised the level of a spell from 4th to (say) 6th, you've just made that a spell only reached in the last few weeks of most campaigns (going from char level 7 to char level 11)...
  7. EzekielRaiden

    D&D General Circle Magic Concerns In "Heroes Of Faerun"

    When you start our by saying that all the examples have to be excluded without having specified that there were any limits before, it makes responding rather difficult. I am, of course, specifically talking about the very thing you seem to think is a tiny exclusion, not large sections of the...
  8. EzekielRaiden

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

    All that does is kick the fan down the road. Either you've just made those spells worthless because they fail so often they aren't worth deploying, or you've simply made it so lower level parties never get access to them at all, which is functionally the same as banning them entirely. As...
  9. EzekielRaiden

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

    Ding ding ding ding. We have a winner, folks. And I can't even derive schadenfreude from it, because I have to endure this reality as much as anyone else does.
  10. EzekielRaiden

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

    Then why do monsters do some things as attacks and other things as saves? Why this hybrid? If players like rolling, make them roll always. And if players want simple easy-to-learn systems, then do that. What's the point of this half-on, half-off, half-who-knows-where approach? I just...what...
  11. EzekielRaiden

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

    Just wanted to specifically call out that this actually gets to the heart of the matter that Mearls, unfortunately, doesn't actually reach with his analysis. He stops short, and stays focused on band-aids, rather than trying to address the problem itself. You are quite right that this is a...
  12. EzekielRaiden

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

    And switch to defenses which spells attack, rather than saving throws that targets must roll. Not only is it simpler and easier to teach, it makes creating support effects for others' abilities significantly easier, AND makes spell design easier to balance. We already have the notion of Death...
  13. EzekielRaiden

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

    He's correct about the end result (Legendary Resistance is a cheap trick shoved in to deal with design faults), and the initial impetus which produced this (slavish adherence to tradition >>>>>>>>>>>>> anything else), but his reasoning for why that is the problem is flawed, which negatively...
  14. EzekielRaiden

    D&D General Ben Riggs interviews Fred Hicks and Cam Banks, then shares WotC sales data.

    Absolutely. New take on Sorcerers that makes them ACTUALLY completely distinct from Wizards? That gives the origin of their magic a central, leading role? NOPE, screw that noise, absolutely the hell not, give us the blandest possible crap instead. New take on Warlocks that puts their...
  15. EzekielRaiden

    D&D General Ben Riggs interviews Fred Hicks and Cam Banks, then shares WotC sales data.

    Yeah. Frankly, the fact that DDI + RPG sales were collectively over $7M when they hadn't published a single page of 4e content for over a year and had been ramping up the replacement for nearly two? That's goddamned impressive. But of course, trawling for any data that can be spindled, folded...
  16. EzekielRaiden

    D&D General Circle Magic Concerns In "Heroes Of Faerun"

    Okay. I can only go by the rulebooks I read. The ones that repeatedly say things of the form "You can do X. Or you can not do X. You decide!" Or the absolutely hilarious, legitimately "you can't make this stuff up" level of anti-advice, when the game literally tells you to figure out how much...
  17. EzekielRaiden

    D&D General Circle Magic Concerns In "Heroes Of Faerun"

    That's the issue though. It was never "leaving room for different people to evaluate things differently". It was often described that way, I freely admit. But it has always been "if the rules don't work as written, the GM will figure it out". That's one of the reasons I generally dislike the...
  18. EzekielRaiden

    D&D General Circle Magic Concerns In "Heroes Of Faerun"

    Given the loosey-goosey, "you're the GM, you figure it out" design of 5e, I doubt this will be even remotely an issue. 5e is never going to be a game where the rules just inherently work out of the box. That was, quite literally, one of the design intents, leaving a portion of the design for...
  19. EzekielRaiden

    D&D 5E (2024) If D&D 2024 Had Been Radically Different, Would You Have Stuck With 5E

    And? What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? For goodness' sake. Does this reply, in any way, address anything about the argument made?
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