D&D 5E Casters should go back to being interruptable like they used to be.

[James Gasik]

What the game doesn't say (but really should) is how long you have to maintain that touched-thumb fan position before flames shoot out of it. You seem to be saying that in your view the flames appear as soon as you get the touched-thumbs fan formed; but IMO that's just as much a house rule as it would be were I to say it has to be maintained for x-amount of time.

Well, I guess at this point you'd have to decide how much time "an action" takes up in your individual turn in a 6-second round. Given that a high-level Fighters can use this same time to attack 4 times (leaving enough time to quickly move 30' and make a bonus action attack)...or hell that a Wizard could cast Burning Hands, Misty Step, and throw out a reaction spell in the same round, it does seem that spellcasting is fairly brief.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Well, I guess at this point you'd have to decide how much time "an action" takes up in your individual turn in a 6-second round. Given that a high-level Fighters can use this same time to attack 4 times (leaving enough time to quickly move 30' and make a bonus action attack)...or hell that a Wizard could cast Burning Hands, Misty Step, and throw out a reaction spell in the same round, it does seem that spellcasting is fairly brief.

Certainly. From a math perspective at least, we're looking at 2-4 attacks made for an action vs. 1 spell cast as an action. It'd seem, at least to me, that action attacks are faster than action spells.

But there's no real answer.

 

[nevin]

Agreed that a lot of the problem is ranged versus melee. And there likely is an issue with the balance of hp vs martial damage output (I'm not an expert on the MM, so this could just be perception, and tbh, maybe a bit afield of the topic)

The oft-cited counterpoints to "range is too strong" are "melee gets attack of opportunity" and "you can grapple in melee"..which is cool.

Except that attack of opportunity doesn't trigger on spellcasting, just movement, and it does not impact spellcasting in any way unless it kills the caster. Grappling also..somehow.. does not impact spellcasting in any way. Neither does prone.. or restrained. So you can have that caster on the ground, halfway to an armbar, and they'd have an easier time teleporting to another plane of existence than stabbing you with their dagger. It's crazy.

Something should at least have the potential to make spellcasting more difficult. Maybe it's interrupts, maybe it's making more conditions applicable, maybe it's both, I don't know.

I just look at what happens when you take a caster prisoner. What do you have to do to secure them.

1. Take away their focus or materials pouch
2. Gag them
3. Blindfold them
4. Break or remove their hands (or invent a device to prevent somatic components because the game sure doesn't describe one)
5. Edit: Keep them from sleeping or otherwise resting.

And god help you if you capture a sorcerer or druid.

Like, maybe spellcasting doesn't have to be so reliable that you need to violate the Geneva Convention to prevent it?

I think just a wheel of time style potion is fine but then we'll be back on the forums listening to why it's bad DM'ing to actually shut a character down for you know .0003% of that character's playing life. I

 

[James Gasik]

There's a lot of things that characters wish they could interact with in 5e. Prevent someone shooting at you with a bow. Stop someone from using a potion. Even if done for balance reasons, I think once you open the door to interrupting one thing, there will be questions about all the other things you can't prevent, and next thing you know, we'll be back to 3e opportunity attacks.

Which, you know, if you liked that sort of thing, fantastic. I don't miss it quite as much.

 

[nevin]

no...3e combat seemed so awesome but now I just long for old school one action per person per round sometimes. 3E was getting your cake and a bucket of icing, a truck of icecream and a perpetual stomachache and brain freeze unless you had a very good DM. Let's not do that again.

 

[Maxperson]

YEs I have watched videos. I will link one below, and I can touch my thumbs and make a fan with my fingers much, much faster. Not just a little faster, but in like less than half of the time. It is not even close, andI can do it while contorting my body in many more ways. I can do it hanging upside down or on my back or lying on my shoulder or in a head lock or while driving a car, or any time both of my hands are free (and I realize only one needs to be free RAW but this is a case where the description would require both hands specifically to be free).

Can you, though? When if the arc of the fan is even 1% off it fails? When if any distance between any two fingers isn't precisely the same as all of the others? When if your thumbnails don't meet at the exact edge and are off by even the smallest bit the spell fails? It takes wizards a very long time and tons of practice to get the somatics for even burning hands down. And that's under normal conditions, not when lying on your back, driving a car, etc. Somatic components are precise gestures.

 

[nevin]

I'll say this. some people can do things like that with only being shown once or twice. I watched my middle son with group of other kids being shown how to heat a piece of metal and turn and twist it into a skewer in a blacksmith forge during an outing. All the other kids took awhile on the forge to do it. He walked up threw the metal in the forge and let it reach the correct temperature and then in about 3 seconds created a skewer that looked exactly like the one the blacksmith made. He was moved from his art 1 pottery class straight to art 3 with the seniors because he did the same thing in pottery. People that can do things like that are usually confused that other's can't and most people think they are liars. So arguing about whether or not he did it here is a bit like saying newton couldn't have figured out gravity when the apple hit him.

 

[Gammadoodler]

There's a lot of things that characters wish they could interact with in 5e. Prevent someone shooting at you with a bow. Stop someone from using a potion. Even if done for balance reasons, I think once you open the door to interrupting one thing, there will be questions about all the other things you can't prevent, and next thing you know, we'll be back to 3e opportunity attacks.

Which, you know, if you liked that sort of thing, fantastic. I don't miss it quite as much.

On the one hand I understand this concern.

On the other, it seems to me that this seal was explicitly broken at release with the existence of Counterspell. There are also effects like Cutting Words on the Lore Bard and the Silvery Barb spell more recently which allow casters to impact the chances of success with spells, attacks and ability checks on reaction. Some martials have some similar abilities with things like 'Deflect Arrows'

Now many of these interactions cost a resource, so use is typically limited. Perhaps other forms of interruption could be similarly limited?

Edit: thinking through this a bit, this seems like it could be a tailor-made battlemaster maneuver. Something like "interfering attack" or something. Spend a superiority die to make a reaction attack when a spell is cast by a creature within your melee range. On a hit, the spell is lost (or force a save or something)

 

[nevin]

i'd love to see an interruption mechanic that was difficult, but not impossible to use, and difficult but not impossible to save. It should be difficult to do, cost a full attack on resources, and it shouldn't be trivial to save against. If you are going to take another character's action away it should take your full action as well.

 

[nevin]

though after writing that It seems that this is the problem with magic and interrupts and all that. Instead of defining what they want the action to look like and how difficult it should be, and how hard to save and then adjusting for low to high levels, anything related to spellcasting just get's the eternal patch cycle like a really bad piece of software and we all wonder why it never works.