Daztur
Hero
Command is the Perfect Encapsulation of Everything I Don't Like About 5.5e
Let’s take a look in how 5.5e changed the Command spell:
1. The requirement that the target knows the caster’s language and not be undead has been removed.
2. Only pre-set Command words are allowed instead of “You might issue a command other than one described here.”
So power-wise we have one nerf and one buff, so nothing much to see here power-wise but these changes really matter to me. Command isn’t important in and of itself but how it’s changed is a good way of showing how WotC’s design philosophy has shifted since 2014.
…As Long As it’s Black
Quite simply, the 5e version of Command allows for a massive amount of creativity. I’m sure that all of you have stories about clever/stupid/funny uses of the Command spell. Having my cleric commanding people to “Repent” was great RP fun, as was using “Climb” to get NPCs into awkward positions tactically. That’s all gone now. Instead we have something bland and flavorless.
Command and abilities like it also give creative newbies a great introduction to D&D since you don’t need to know anything about D&D rules to think up creative ways to use Command or abilities like Fast Hands. Often newbies make great players since they don’t know the rules well enough to know what’s not allowed and think of outside of the box solutions. Ideally WotC would cater to this kind of play, but 5.5e is inching in the exact opposite direction.
And yes, I know it would take me literally five seconds to houserule Command to allow any verb to be used, but this rant isn’t really about Command itself but that the people in charge of D&D now think that creative tactics and using abilities in novel and unexpected ways isn’t literally the most fun part of D&D, but rather a problem to be solved. Even if I houserule things like Command, I don’t trust these people to make D&D content that I find fun going forward. And that’s a problem.
Flavor Isn’t Free
Keep in mind that Command was changed in two ways. Not only was the ability to use it in fun and creative ways gutted but the requirement that the target has to understand your language was taken out. And that matters because flavor isn’t free.
Saying “flavor is free” is just another way of saying “flavor doesn’t matter.” Nothing that matters is free in an RPG.
Let me explain. There’s two basic ways of writing RPG rules. You can have an idea for something that you want in the game (“I summon an elephant!”) and then write up some rules for that (“elephants have 76 HPs!”) while also recognizing that the rules don’t perfectly capture the concept that you’re going for and that you’ll need some DM input to make the rules and the concept align (“I don’t care what their strength mod is, elephants can’t jump at all, much less 9 feet into the air!”). In order words the flavor MATTERS and rulings trump rules.
The other way to go about writing up RPG rules is to write up a mechanical effect that you think would be fun and then slap some flavor text onto it. This flavor text then doesn’t matter, it’s just for color. If the mechanics and the flavor don’t align, you just shrug and handwave the flavor. The most famous example in D&D of flavor text not mattering at all was the whole 4e brouhaha over knocking gelatinous cubes prone. The official ruling was that the flavor of your power being described as tripping people and gelatinous cubes being cubes that logically can’t be tripped didn’t matter, you could trip them the same as could trip anything else.
The flavor of Command is “You speak a one-word command to a creature you can see within range.” In 5e, this flavor text matters. If the target can’t understand your Command then the spell doesn’t work. In line with this flavor text as a DM I’d make the following rulings:
-If the target is deaf then the spell doesn’t work.
-If the target is an orc that doesn’t speak common and the caster doesn’t speak orcish, then the spell still works if the caster has taken the time to write the orcish word for “flee” on the back of their hand (with maybe an ability check for correct pronunciation).
-If the target is an 8 Int bumpkin then “autodefenestrate” is right out (even if doing so is not “directly harmful” to the target) as there’s no way that the target knows what that word means.
-If one of my players wanted to go down a fantasy linguistics rabbit hole so that you can convey different commands with a single word in different languages (“there is no word for flee in orcish!” or what have you) I’d roll with it even though I’d also be fine with this never coming up.
I think that all of those rulings would be perfectly in keeping with spell’s intent as the spell working hinges on the target knowing what the Command word means. Because of all of those specific things it’s be nearly impossible to reflavor the spell. The flavor is intertwined with the mechanics and can’t easily be swapped out. In 5e, Command’s flavor isn’t free.
But look at how things work in the 5.5e version. Is there anything stopping you from reflavoring it as any other sort of effect that moves people around? Nothing I can think of except the distinction between forced and voluntary movement in the rules. A wall between the fluff and the crunch of the spell is being build up in 5.5e.
Why does this matter? Well it matters because if flavor doesn’t matter then rules start to matter a whole lot more than rulings and the era of “ruling not rules” is at an end. Let me explain…
The Gates of Ijtihad Slam Shut
For me at least, the rules of D&D are always an imperfect way of representing the fiction of what’s going on in the game. It’s my job as DM to try to haul D&D over the line into immersion by telling the rules to take a hike if they get in the way of our shared imagination.
The way I see things, flavor tells me what the rules are trying to accomplish and the mechanics are an attempt to get to that goal. I like it when there’s a bit of fuzziness and room for interpretation in the rules (“what precisely happens if I cast Command: hug on an enemy archer? Well, that’s up to the DM.”), as that gives me room to bend the facts of the mechanics towards the intent of the flavor as needed.
But if everything is cut and dry, if each spell and ability is so tightly locked down and defined in mechanical terms that there’s no room for me to making rulings based on flavor then flavor stops mattering as much at the table. And I want flavor to matter, it’s the cord that binds the rules to the world.
The more the decisions that the characters are making and the decisions that the players are making align the happier I am and the more that flavor matters the tighter that alignment gets. But when the characters are making flavor-based decisions that are mechanically irrelevant and the players are making decisions based on mechanics that don’t exist in character, then my immersion gets weakened.
A Gaze Blank and Pitiless as the Sun
Why is WotC taking D&D in this direction? I don’t know. It’s probably just that they have different tastes when it comes to D&D than I do. However, one possibility is that they’re trying to make D&D rules more compatible with online tools. The easiest ways of doing that is to make D&D rules things that an app can understand and an app is sure as hell going to have an easier time understanding 5.5e Command than 5e Command with all of its infinite possibilities. But, for me at least, the main selling point of D&D has ALWAYS been that by having a human DM it can do things that no computer game or board game can do as it needs a human DM with wide latitude in order to function. The closer D&D gets tied to online tools the more it loses what makes it special. Is 5.5e D&D there yet? No, but that’s where it’s slouching towards…
Of course none of this means that 5.5e is bad design. It just means that it doesn't match my personal tastes. Are my tastes universal? Hell no, it's just that 5e was a good enough compromise between my ideal D&D and the sort of D&D that other people wanted and I don't think that 5.5e is that compromise anymore. And that makes me sad, I wanted to like 5.5e but I just think that the goals of the devs and my goals as a DM are just too different.
Let’s take a look in how 5.5e changed the Command spell:
1. The requirement that the target knows the caster’s language and not be undead has been removed.
2. Only pre-set Command words are allowed instead of “You might issue a command other than one described here.”
So power-wise we have one nerf and one buff, so nothing much to see here power-wise but these changes really matter to me. Command isn’t important in and of itself but how it’s changed is a good way of showing how WotC’s design philosophy has shifted since 2014.
…As Long As it’s Black
Quite simply, the 5e version of Command allows for a massive amount of creativity. I’m sure that all of you have stories about clever/stupid/funny uses of the Command spell. Having my cleric commanding people to “Repent” was great RP fun, as was using “Climb” to get NPCs into awkward positions tactically. That’s all gone now. Instead we have something bland and flavorless.
Command and abilities like it also give creative newbies a great introduction to D&D since you don’t need to know anything about D&D rules to think up creative ways to use Command or abilities like Fast Hands. Often newbies make great players since they don’t know the rules well enough to know what’s not allowed and think of outside of the box solutions. Ideally WotC would cater to this kind of play, but 5.5e is inching in the exact opposite direction.
And yes, I know it would take me literally five seconds to houserule Command to allow any verb to be used, but this rant isn’t really about Command itself but that the people in charge of D&D now think that creative tactics and using abilities in novel and unexpected ways isn’t literally the most fun part of D&D, but rather a problem to be solved. Even if I houserule things like Command, I don’t trust these people to make D&D content that I find fun going forward. And that’s a problem.
Flavor Isn’t Free
Keep in mind that Command was changed in two ways. Not only was the ability to use it in fun and creative ways gutted but the requirement that the target has to understand your language was taken out. And that matters because flavor isn’t free.
Saying “flavor is free” is just another way of saying “flavor doesn’t matter.” Nothing that matters is free in an RPG.
Let me explain. There’s two basic ways of writing RPG rules. You can have an idea for something that you want in the game (“I summon an elephant!”) and then write up some rules for that (“elephants have 76 HPs!”) while also recognizing that the rules don’t perfectly capture the concept that you’re going for and that you’ll need some DM input to make the rules and the concept align (“I don’t care what their strength mod is, elephants can’t jump at all, much less 9 feet into the air!”). In order words the flavor MATTERS and rulings trump rules.
The other way to go about writing up RPG rules is to write up a mechanical effect that you think would be fun and then slap some flavor text onto it. This flavor text then doesn’t matter, it’s just for color. If the mechanics and the flavor don’t align, you just shrug and handwave the flavor. The most famous example in D&D of flavor text not mattering at all was the whole 4e brouhaha over knocking gelatinous cubes prone. The official ruling was that the flavor of your power being described as tripping people and gelatinous cubes being cubes that logically can’t be tripped didn’t matter, you could trip them the same as could trip anything else.
The flavor of Command is “You speak a one-word command to a creature you can see within range.” In 5e, this flavor text matters. If the target can’t understand your Command then the spell doesn’t work. In line with this flavor text as a DM I’d make the following rulings:
-If the target is deaf then the spell doesn’t work.
-If the target is an orc that doesn’t speak common and the caster doesn’t speak orcish, then the spell still works if the caster has taken the time to write the orcish word for “flee” on the back of their hand (with maybe an ability check for correct pronunciation).
-If the target is an 8 Int bumpkin then “autodefenestrate” is right out (even if doing so is not “directly harmful” to the target) as there’s no way that the target knows what that word means.
-If one of my players wanted to go down a fantasy linguistics rabbit hole so that you can convey different commands with a single word in different languages (“there is no word for flee in orcish!” or what have you) I’d roll with it even though I’d also be fine with this never coming up.
I think that all of those rulings would be perfectly in keeping with spell’s intent as the spell working hinges on the target knowing what the Command word means. Because of all of those specific things it’s be nearly impossible to reflavor the spell. The flavor is intertwined with the mechanics and can’t easily be swapped out. In 5e, Command’s flavor isn’t free.
But look at how things work in the 5.5e version. Is there anything stopping you from reflavoring it as any other sort of effect that moves people around? Nothing I can think of except the distinction between forced and voluntary movement in the rules. A wall between the fluff and the crunch of the spell is being build up in 5.5e.
Why does this matter? Well it matters because if flavor doesn’t matter then rules start to matter a whole lot more than rulings and the era of “ruling not rules” is at an end. Let me explain…
The Gates of Ijtihad Slam Shut
For me at least, the rules of D&D are always an imperfect way of representing the fiction of what’s going on in the game. It’s my job as DM to try to haul D&D over the line into immersion by telling the rules to take a hike if they get in the way of our shared imagination.
The way I see things, flavor tells me what the rules are trying to accomplish and the mechanics are an attempt to get to that goal. I like it when there’s a bit of fuzziness and room for interpretation in the rules (“what precisely happens if I cast Command: hug on an enemy archer? Well, that’s up to the DM.”), as that gives me room to bend the facts of the mechanics towards the intent of the flavor as needed.
But if everything is cut and dry, if each spell and ability is so tightly locked down and defined in mechanical terms that there’s no room for me to making rulings based on flavor then flavor stops mattering as much at the table. And I want flavor to matter, it’s the cord that binds the rules to the world.
The more the decisions that the characters are making and the decisions that the players are making align the happier I am and the more that flavor matters the tighter that alignment gets. But when the characters are making flavor-based decisions that are mechanically irrelevant and the players are making decisions based on mechanics that don’t exist in character, then my immersion gets weakened.
A Gaze Blank and Pitiless as the Sun
Why is WotC taking D&D in this direction? I don’t know. It’s probably just that they have different tastes when it comes to D&D than I do. However, one possibility is that they’re trying to make D&D rules more compatible with online tools. The easiest ways of doing that is to make D&D rules things that an app can understand and an app is sure as hell going to have an easier time understanding 5.5e Command than 5e Command with all of its infinite possibilities. But, for me at least, the main selling point of D&D has ALWAYS been that by having a human DM it can do things that no computer game or board game can do as it needs a human DM with wide latitude in order to function. The closer D&D gets tied to online tools the more it loses what makes it special. Is 5.5e D&D there yet? No, but that’s where it’s slouching towards…
Of course none of this means that 5.5e is bad design. It just means that it doesn't match my personal tastes. Are my tastes universal? Hell no, it's just that 5e was a good enough compromise between my ideal D&D and the sort of D&D that other people wanted and I don't think that 5.5e is that compromise anymore. And that makes me sad, I wanted to like 5.5e but I just think that the goals of the devs and my goals as a DM are just too different.
