D&D 5E (2024) Circle Casting is gonna break a lot of games

[EzekielRaiden]

Not really but its probably more likely to be ignored and forgotten in a month or two.

Just like silvery barbs was ignored and forgotten in a month or two?

 

[Horwath]

Just like silvery barbs was ignored and forgotten in a month or two?

still to this day I do not know what is the problem with silvery barbs?
Except the reroll mechanics, that is a time sink that is not needed more in combat. But if you are fine with rest of re rolls in the game...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not everyone agrees with that, but it is what gets people playing.

[Citation needed.]

By which I mean: You believe that's what gets people playing. I've experienced, over nearly three decades, that the things that get people playing have nothing whatsoever to do with any of that. It's the idea of a fantastical adventure with friends, of being part of a grand story, of getting to do anything you can imagine.

Game balance is something you can only discover after you've already, y'know, played a fair amount. And when you do, it usually is not very fun to find out that the things you like actually suck, or the things you don't like are crazy powerful. Of course, it is fun up to a point to discover that things you like are strong. But for some folks, including people on this very forum, it's pretty frustrating to have made choices solely because they sounded cool, which left their friends barely scraping by at minimum competency, while they themselves are ruling the roost, consistently being the strongest participants. 5e is better about this than 3e was, but that's like saying that some location is a higher elevation than the Mariana Trench--of course it is, you'd have to be intentionally doing things horribly wrong to get any lower!

still to this day I do not know what is the problem with silvery barbs?
Except the reroll mechanics, that is a time sink that is not needed more in combat. But if you are fine with rest of re rolls in the game...

I had and have no problem with it. I'm citing it because I know it's one of Zardnaar's personal frustrations with balance in 5e, a spell I know he bans. The point was to highlight that, for all the claims 5e fans love to make about how balance is antagonistic to fun (or whatever), they still care about balance too.

 

[Minigiant]

Circle Castling does help the 5MWD Problem as factions with many weak casters can gather together for bigger spells if the PC alert a faction then rest.

 

[Horwath]

Circle Castling does help the 5MWD Problem as factions with many weak casters can gather together for bigger spells if the PC alert a faction then rest.

yes, 6 1st level wizards throwing 12 magic missiles from 1 mile away at your nicely lit camp

 

[aiouh]

The madmen at WotC did it, they made peasant trainee wizard railgun RAW

 

[Sulicius]

[Citation needed.]

By which I mean: You believe that's what gets people playing. I've experienced, over nearly three decades, that the things that get people playing have nothing whatsoever to do with any of that. It's the idea of a fantastical adventure with friends, of being part of a grand story, of getting to do anything you can imagine.

Game balance is something you can only discover after you've already, y'know, played a fair amount. And when you do, it usually is not very fun to find out that the things you like actually suck, or the things you don't like are crazy powerful. Of course, it is fun up to a point to discover that things you like are strong. But for some folks, including people on this very forum, it's pretty frustrating to have made choices solely because they sounded cool, which left their friends barely scraping by at minimum competency, while they themselves are ruling the roost, consistently being the strongest participants. 5e is better about this than 3e was, but that's like saying that some location is a higher elevation than the Mariana Trench--of course it is, you'd have to be intentionally doing things horribly wrong to get any lower!

It is way worse for a player to struggle playing their first game, than to discover they picked a spell they don't like after 10 sessions. I don't believe it, I studied it.

Apparently game design principles aren't well accepted.

 

[Sacrosanct]

once again I will say; D&D should be exclusively playtested by powergamers/optimizers/munckins.

Absolutely not. Testing and Project management is my actual day job. I also happen to be a game designer. There are generally two types of testing that are critical:

QA: Quality Assurance. This is generally functional testing. Does the thing work functionally as you designed it. You might test one function once to make sure it's working.
UAT: User Acceptance Testing. Regardless if it works as designed, what is the usability from the users' perspective? This is where you test several scenarios in the same functional workflow to find things that may have been missed.

While I think it's important to have optimizers do testing, by making it exclusively optimizers, you're limiting your testing to one perspective and will miss things that casual gamers or story gamers would catch. You really want all kinds of testers, and each is equally important.

I do have a slight issue with the title to this thread: "Circle Casting is gonna break a lot of games"

The circle casting rules shouldn't break a single game. If you don't like the rules - don't use them! Simple, easy, and no games broken!

We all know on paper this is true. We also know that RAW drive behavior at the table. It sets the expectation that that's how the game is supposed to be played, and lots of gamers will play it that way even if they don't like how the rule works. And of course all those gamers that say "It's in the rules so I can do it!"

 

[bedir than]

Mass combat has never been a strength in DnD, but this absolutely ruins it.

I think this makes mass combat in a common magic realm absolutely fantastic.
No longer is a land with thousands of mages marching peasants and sending walls of knights on horseback, a silly endeavor for sure.
They're absolutely blasting each other with the Weave.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I hate to rely on technicality, but prolong could be ruled out for concentration spells:

Prolong​

When you cast a spell that has a duration of 1 minute or longer, you can increase the duration of the spell depending on the number of secondary casters contributing to the spell, as detailed in the table below.

Note that the duration has to 1 minute or longer.
Concentration spells all read: "Concentration up to X".

Now the worst offenders are gone.


Range is not that big of a problem to be honest. Yes, you can throw some spells very far, but you still need line of sight.

A simple illusion spell can foil that plan.