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And by that you mean they’re… what, impossible to create?

I agree that they aren’t games, but I don’t think they’re activities either. RPGs are game creation engines. You can use those engines to create games, or to create non-game activities, but on their own they’re not either.

I think Hypnotic Pattern is particularly egregious for this because there are no repeat saving throws. Most save-or-stun type effects allow the subject to repeat the save every turn and end the effect on a success. The few that don’t are the best-in-slot options for their level, because they...

RE: Upscaling blast spells, honestly I don’t think this needs fixing. I’m ok with casting spells that are natively higher level being more effective than upcasting lower level spells. Fireball is fine when you get it and gets worse at higher levels? Good! That means you’ll have a reason to want...

I don’t think the OP was actually seeking that information. Rather, they were using the question as a litmus test for whether or not the ENWorld community’s perspective around edition changes aligned with their own.

Yeah, regardless of whether it was a human or a machine that produced this article, it seems very likely to be based on assuming the tabletop game works the same way BG3 does.

It’s not just Commander. Designs have been pushing individual cards doing more and more things - enter triggers, cast triggers, attack triggers, generating various artifact tokens that can be sacrificed for additional benefits, not to mention bonkers stuff like Nadu and Vivi. Even in 1v1 magic...

I suppose. It’s an explanation of what he said that makes sense, but he didn’t say it himself, so it’s speculation. Reasonable speculation, but speculation.

Interestingly, I think this might explain what happened with Conjure Elementals, or whichever one it was that everyone was freaking out about in 2024 that scaled double before getting errata’d. It was, in essence, a new damage spell built from the ground up with modern understanding of the...

Ok, so I got to that part of the podcast, and… this isn’t what he said. He just said “we made a mistake.” Which, like… sure, I get that, but I’m still left wondering why, at the time, he said it was intentionally above the curve.

In their defense, we (the folks who playtested D&D Next) really stressed that as something we wanted to be possible.

We aren’t…

Exactly

I’m one of the folks who would normally argue the point, but it seems completely orthogonal to the actual topic

Would you be able to elaborate on that a bit more? I don’t quite understand what this means.

Oh! Ok, so he’s not saying that they didn’t intentionally overtune blast spells, but rather that their initial math probably lowballed blast spells too much, and so what they thought of as overtuning them at the time turns out in hindsight to have put their damage right about where it should be...

Yeah, I was taking @darjr at his word that it was, and giving Mearls the benefit of the doubt that the math was correct. That’s why I find the situation confusing though. Like, did he somehow have the wrong math when he first claimed to have made fireball stronger on purpose? How did that happen?

Of course people make mistakes all the time. I’m saying I don’t understand the nature of the mistake he’s saying he made. If I bake a cake, and immediately after baking it, I say, “notice how moist it is? That’s because I added an extra egg above what the recipie called for,” and then 10 years...

I do remember him saying, back when 5e was still in playtesting, that he specifically wanted big, splashy damage spells to be the most effective, because they feel the most fun to use, and that his intent was to design the math such that the character optimizers would be able to pull out their...

But, I mean, this isn’t just an “I made a math error” kind of mistake. This is claiming you did a thing, and then 10 years later being like “actually I did some math and apparently I didn’t do the thing I said.” Like, brother, are you saying you lied about it 10 years ago? I don’t know, maybe...