D&D (2024) Command is the Perfect Encapsulation of Everything I Don't Like About 5.5e

Although trial and error is a way to learn, I think the hostility to teaching DMs or explaining the base assumptions of the game is saddening

As a whole it think D&D (minus 1e and 4e) was and still is too chicken to describe the details of its base assumptions. Mostly to enforce DM freedom.

For example, the point of Command is either action denial, causing a disadvantage, or limited forced movement. Not damage nor long term effects.

Therefore this should be say.

"The spell fails if the target is undead, if it does not understand your command, or if the command is immediately harmful to it, cause indirect harm to it, or cause major loss to it after one turn"

So no "Renounce" to make a priest lose its magic.
No "Abdicate" to make a king give up their throne.
No "Give" to make the demon hand you its magic weapon.

Want those effects, create a new spell.
 

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Very few DMs got there without first having been a player*, which means they had a DM to learn from. What was learned there (for good and for bad) is very likely enough to start with. After that, there will only ever be three words that matter when it comes to learning the ropes:
See, I'm not really sure that's true anymore. When the D&D gaming population has more than tripled in the last ten years, there's got to be a LOT of DM's out there that started out without having a DM to learn from. That's just simple numbers.
Which of course quickly raises the question: is that degree of predictability a good thing?

Because if it's that predictable for you-as-DM the pattern of events will become predictable to the players as well after a surprisingly few combats, after which the whole thing becomes very boring.

Which means you-as-DM can ramp it up on your side as well. Use more spellcasters (or similar) as opponents. Give your opponents and monsters ways of changing the ground rules. In short: do what you can to make it less predictable.

But, you're missing the point of the conversation. The question was about ease of play. If the game is predictable, then it is easier to run. I would think that's pretty true without any real argument.

And the whole "well, use spellcasters" thing just turns me right off. I have zero interest in turning the game into a spellcaster arms race. The notion that predictable means that it's 100% accurate is false. Yes, you can generally say that a group will defeat the baddies in X rounds if you have a fairly reliable metric for how much damage the party can do in a given round. So, to increase difficulty, simply increase HP. Easy peasy. You want an easier encounter, use less HP.

Note, unless you are actually telling the players how many HP the encounter has, they have no way of knowing predicting how the combat will turn out. Add to that the fact that you have monster creation rules that let you build a bespoke monster at any level in about ten minutes, and you're REALLY good to go.

Now, there's more than enough variation between roll to roll that it doesn't become boring at all. It just means that it becomes MUCH easier to build adventures when you don't have to worry about the MacGuyver caster just pulling out some trick and bypassing challenges.

So, in conclusion I would say that predictability is absolutely a good thing.
 



Why does any spell need to be limited? It's magic after all.
Yup, everything can be a pretty arbitrary "it's magic" but some kinds of magic are more fun for me in the game than others. For example you find no save death effects in a lot of fantasy fiction, but that's not much fun in an actual game.
If you have a set list you know what's going to happen and you don't have to guess how it's going to be interpreted. It's easier to know what the effect will be for player and DM alike.

Seems to me like a lot of people complaining that they're making this spell clearer turn around and bemoan the lack of clarity elsewhere. It's just not a big deal.

It's not always that clear-cut. There's the question of: does fiction take priority over mechanics or do mechanics take priority over fiction? Different DMs and editions of D&D have ruled this in different ways. To bring up the famous 4e example of tripping gelatinous cubes, which should a DM do?

1. Say: "gelatinous cubes are not immune to the prone condition so I'll say that the trip attack made them discombobulated instead of literally tripping them." The specific flavor doesn't matter, the rules for the prone condition apply no matter what. Some people on this thread have been full-throated in their support for this exact thing.

2. Say: "no, you can't trip a gelatinous cube. It's a freaking cube." Many people (me) have been just as insistent in their support of this position.

It's, of course, a matter of taste. One isn't worse than the other. Like in a lot of things, 5e was a messy compromise that worked well enough but 5.5e seems to be shifting more and more towards position #1.

For me "It's easier to know what the effect will be" if the flavor of a spell is very clear, so that I can get everyone on the same page if the players try to MacGyver the spell. If the flavor is more nebulous but the mechanics are crystal clear then it can be very unclear what happens if the spell is used in an off-brand way. For example, some 4e powers are really really vague in terms of flavor and very concrete in terms of mechanics which make them good for some DMs and bad for others.

I'm never going to agree with every decision they make. I just don't see this having any significant impact while also improving it.

Yeah, I agree that this specific spell isn't a big deal (since I can houserule it back to how I like it in 5 seconds just like I did in 3.5e where I never had any DM ever follow the actual rules for Command, all of them always let me use any verb I wanted if I asked nicely). I'm just using it as an example of how 5.5e design is trending. Even though 5e and 5.5e aren't too different, 5.5e is pretty consistently trending away from my tastes.

As soon as Fighters can get access to something--anything--that is half as versatile and potent as command, which I will note is a first-level spell, then I will consider these complaints valid and warranted.

Until then? This is making barely-above-minimum-power magic something slightly less than "incredibly powerful and only constrained by a DM actively waging a vanguard campaign against caster dominance."

Well there's three basic ways of balancing linear warriors/quadratic wizards:

1. Take away all of the versatile reality bending stuff from wizards and make them more straight-forward blasters.

2. Give versatile reality bending stuff to fighters. Plenty of support for this in the crazy powers of mythical heroes.

3. Let wizards keep the versatile reality bending stuff but hit them with the nerf bat and keeping on beating them over and over and over until relative balance has been achieved. It doesn't go far enough to balance things at higher levels but TSR-D&D wizards are muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch more fragile than 5e wizards and that keeps things relatively balanced at lower levels. Another way of limiting things is how things are done with Mongoose d20 Conan 2e which REALLY puts some pretty hard limits on the Scholar (caster) class in that their magic is narrow with pretty limited and has such long casting times that it's hard to use in combat.

#3 is harder to balance because in that system what fighters and wizards are good at is so different. Mongoose d20 Conan 2 worked pretty well in my experience as the consensus was that barbarians were a stronger class than scholars. I don't mind #2 at all though, I just don't want #1.

I don't think it matters to 99% of the time and the removal of the target understanding the words greatly increases it's utility. I can't imagine how this one spell makes more than the tiniest of dents in the versatility of things that happen in a D&D game.

It's such a minor change to be a hill to die on.

It's not a hill to die on (as I can houserule it easily), it's a litmus test. People who don't find Command to be fun don't see eye to eye with me on what are the fun parts of D&D. This goes for when I play barbarians every bit as much as when I play clerics. There are other examples of similar things I don't like in 5.5e, but Command is the clearest and most straight-forward example of how WotC design philosophy has shifted since 2014 so I used that.

Yep. The spell's intended effect is to lose their turn and maybe be placed in a disadvantageous position. The DM should adjudicate non-standard uses of the spell to be on a similar level.

Well "flee" (which is still in place in 5.5e) can potentially be VERY powerful as it gives everyone standing next to the target an AoO so it can end up being a Save or Die spell in practice. Command is a powerful spells and I wouldn't mind it seeing smacked with the nerf bat a bit (maybe advantage on saves if the area is noisy enough or a reduced range?), just don't want to see all of the creativity the makes me love the spell removed.

But everyone else is repeating the line that these players aren’t bad at all. They’re just being creative. That your priest is using the holy powers granted by the gods for a puerile poop joke is both creative and in character.

If someone has a cleric and that cleric honestly believes that the gods would be fine with poop jokes, then that’s not a player I want at my table.

Funny how it’s all “in character “ when it’s to the player’s advantage.

Depends on the priest and the god in question. There is all kind of puerile stuff in myths and legends if you go hunting for it. I mean there is a whole story in the Icelandic Sagas centering around the worship of a horse dick and there are CONSTANT CONSTANT descriptions of chopping people's heads off and shoving their decapitated head up their butt to prevent them from rising as zombies. I could imagine some CN/CE gods being fine with that, other gods less so to the extent that some would remove the spellcasting power of the cleric making a mockery out of their gifts.

And again, the primary reason why I detest plain English spell definitions. It’s such a huge pain to deal with this over and over again. Is it this? Or that? What about this?

Screw that. Spells should have rock solid lists of specific effects. Full stop. The worst thing in the game is open ended effects subject to interpretation.

Those are my very favorite things in D&D when I DM. I love shenanigans, they show that the players are engaged. Of course there is a line between IC creativity and metagaming rules lawyering naughty word, and laying down that line is one of the things I make sure I always do as DM.

And it's OK that we like different things. My main point here in this thread is pointing out how 5.5e is a worse compromise between my views and your views, not that my views are the way that everyone must play D&D.

The problem is that every DM doesn't know to cause those commands to fail.

That's the issue.
Command and other open-ended spells rely on there being a sense of meta knowledge of a curated fanbase.

D&D is too broad and diverse for that.

You'll find many DMs not being able to grasp the most basic naughty word. There was a recent thread on Reddit where player was complaining about his DM claiming that ALL warlock invocations are 1/day.
 


Like... you can still force people to waste everyone's time dealing with their trial and error fumbles so they 'earn' their fun or whatever while still also arming them with the tools and advice to actually succeed in that trial and error more quickly.
 

But my point was just that even as written, with just the limited number of allowed commands there is room for wide interpretation that could deny any of the existing examples. The idea that any spell or other feature can be written to avoid the possibility of multiple interpretations is a fool’s errand. Now sure, they could be clearer. But I think the openness is a feature not a plug.

Yup, "ruling not rules" what was supposed to be a big part of 5e.

The 2014 command spell (bold added): "The spell has no effect if the target is undead, if it doesn't understand your language, or if your command is directly harmful to it."

Telling someone to "jump" while climbing a cliff for one.

Yeah, I don't think arbitrating this is as hard as some people are making it out to be.

Fleeing into a dangerous situation can be seen as directly harmful to some.

I think a fair reading of the spell description argues otherwise as "flee" is explicitly allowed even if it results in you getting hit by AoOs.

Again, you guys are just proving my point. While this discussion is cool on a message board, it’s far less cool in the middle of a combat at a table.

No need for a discussion. I'm the DM, I make a ruling, that's what happens. If people don't like my rulings they can play elsewhere. Never had a problem enforcing that kind of thing, I'm generally a very kind and merciful DM who is willing to meet players halfway with their harebrained shenanigans (since harebrained shenanigans are my favorite part of D&D and I'm always cheering for the players) but if I put my foot down on stupid naughty word then that's the end of the discussion.

And like @Hussar and I stated, it bogs down the game when 2 people have different expectations.
And that's perfectly fine. Different DMs running the game differently is what makes D&D fun. It's be a horrible shame to try to shove all DMs into the same mold.

Strongly disagree.

The shift from 2e to 3e ended many of these pointless arguments.

The thing about 3.5e, at least when I played it, is that it introduced MORE uncertainty about the rules in many ways. A lot like weapon speed factors and the weapons vs. armor table in 1e, there were a whole slew of rules in 3.5e that a lot of DMs ignored or didn't even know exist. This meant that, every time I sat down at a 3.5e table I had no idea ahead of time how many of the rules the DM was going to follow and what they would do if I started to interact with stuff that those rules covered. At least with 2e I had a pretty clear idea of what rules were set in stone and what rules were more fuzzy while I've never EVER seen a 3.5e DM follow the rules for social interaction by the book. 5e is a bit more predictable than 3.5e in actual play, at least for me.

The Experienced DMs mostly flipped the bird at anything new, stuck to OSR, and refused to teach the new anything but what they like.

So here we are.

Most experienced DMs stuck to the OSR? I don't think the OSR is anywhere near that big. That hasn't been my experience at all. As someone who started on the Rules Cyclopedia, I was fine with running 5e games as it generally played like a cleaned up 3.5e which was a close enough compromise for me. I like the spirit of the OSR a lot, but ye gods is there a lot of defending of bathwater and forgetting about the baby from a lot of OSR people...

Plenty of folks who've been playing 5e since it started are out there, and they all have...checks watch...about 10 years under their belts, at least.

Yeah, I've trained up my son pretty well as a 5e DM and he's never run anything but 5e. He really likes a chargen mini-game he can sink his teeth into and OSR games don't give him that while 3.5e and 4e overwhelm him a bit (his eyes glazed over a bit when I started telling him about skill synergies etc.). 5e hits a good sweet spot for him and a lot of other D&D kids and a lot of them have figured out how to DM pretty damn well.

As far as spells go Command is not even remotely difficult for DMs IME.

It is difficult for some players. Actually the spell is not that difficult, trying to turn phrases into a single word is what is difficult. How do I make him to push the red button with one word.

There is also difficult and annoying and they are not the same thing. Trying to figure out how to roll an attack for a creature in darkness with see invisibility (but not devil's sight) attacking an invisible foe not in darkness is difficult (bonus points if you get this right). Having to reroll a save for silvery barbs or a failure becoming a success because of "reaction guidance" is annoying but not difficult.
Command is not really either IMO.

Yeah, I'm just not seeing how it's such a big hassle to adjudicate Command. Never seen it be an issue with players once they're pointed out the line against being able to use it to make critters commit suicide.

Part of the fun of DMing is in making judgements when PC's throw chaos wrenches into your plan. It is, I'd argue, a core delight of the game in actual play for players and DMs - riffing off of the other players. Not knowing what they will do, having them do something unexpected, and figuring out what happens as a result of that. It's the heart of the improv that attracts so many players. It's part of the unique fun of a TTRPG.

With that lens, this spell rewrite is clearly poor design. It removes a deeply fun element of gameplay - riffing off of unexpected things that others do. It replaces advice and inspiration with dry calculation.

But, that unpredictability is also something that really puts off a segment of D&D players (especially the segment that's active online). It's also sometimes seen (incorrectly, IMO) as a "problem" for a lot of design-minded folks, because ambiguity is often seen as a problem that needs to be solved. And, as we've seen in this thread, it is something that's not always welcome.

Through the lens of precision and expectation, this is good design. It removes a potentially problematic element of gameplay - an ineffective spell result (the dreaded "null turn") or a demand on the DM or a swingy result (it's either not powerful enough or it's too powerful depending on DM judgement calls).

It's one of those things that keeps switching between revisions because D&D has some trouble deciding what kind of game it wants to be - does it want to be a game played with friends at a table where chaos and unpredictability can add delight? Or does it want to be a game of strategy and optimization where predictable results are prioritized over potential chaos because potential chaos ruins the experience of strategy and tactics?

Where one sits on this continuum is going to be somewhat predictive of what one thinks of this spell's revision.

My bias is typically toward the fun of the unexpected. I'd rather have a sentence or two of DM guidance in the spell than a specific list of potential commands. (Something like "typical commands can result in creatures dropping prone, moving, or not using their actions" could go a long way) I WANT to spend time on judging what happens when a player does something unexpected with the Command spell. It's time well spent that often delights the table. It's FUN. I'm OK with a list of potential commands and good DM advice as a way to make that easier, but removing the potential of chaos is playing with bumpers - it's less fun for me. When I sit down to play D&D, I want to riff off of other players.

Seems like D&D'24 is making some changes that make it more predictable. This isn't a new thing. It always leaves the game feeling at least a little less fun to me. There's a balance, of course, and we'll see if the changes tip the balance too much, but I'm pretty skeptical. Things like this show me that the designers are thinking D&D is something that, when I play it, it is very much not. And if that's too strong of a tendency...it'll be kind of a bigger hassle to play D&D for the next few years. Which would kind of suck.

Agreed completely, this is exactly what I meant in the OP. 5e set out to be a compromise between those different approaches you walked about. And it's a messy and flawed compromise and, like most compromises, it's resulted in lots of grumbling. But it's been a surprisingly successful and resilient compromise despite its flaws. I just see 5.5e as walking away from that compromise (however slowly) and that makes me sad.

The age old Command Question: What is the effect if I tell the target to "die" ?

He lies down and tries to will himself to die for a few seconds. Not much happens. Any kind of suicidal act is clearly against the plain rules of the spell.

I just find it more fun to have a narrow definition of directly harmful or lot better yet cut that part from the spell altogether but then again I like 33,000 cubic foot fireballs. I know that is not to everyone’s taste.

Fireballs expanding to fill 33,000 cubic feet just warms my heart in all of it's clunky unwieldy glory.

I meant 5e was designed with the expectation that DMs from older editions would DM the game and teach the new players how to become DMs for5e.

For the most part that did not happen. Most loudly ran back to 1e, 2e, PF1, or some OSR clone. Only some 3e and 4e DMs stayed really.

This is why 5e skews young and as the first edition for most of its playerbase.

Nah, it skews young because of the massive influx of new players. Same as in the 80's. Just way too many new players for the existing DMs to run games for, especially as most DMs want to run games for their friends, not a bunch of random kids half their age (unless they're running stuff for their kid and their friends or somesuch, as I have done a lot of with 5e).
 

You'll find many DMs not being able to grasp the most basic naughty word. There was a recent thread on Reddit where player was complaining about his DM claiming that ALL warlock invocations are 1/day
Part of the problem is D&D is too diverse to automatically think you and another person is coming from the same frame of reference.

It's pretty much why the D&D Ranger has so much problems and it's flavor design. Everyone has 15 different ideas of what it is in their head.

So people have to get into them mindset of talking it out.

Something I question the whole "don't create a world" advice.
 

Fireballs expanding to fill 33,000 cubic feet just warms my heart in all of it's clunky unwieldy glory.
I liked this so much from the older editions that I kept it as an "easter egg" of sorts in that I had the party find a specially prepared spell components that allowed them to cast 3 fireballs using that cubic feet calculation. So yeah, I wouldn't want to worry about it every time they cast fireball, but having it as a special "one-off" ability is fun.
 

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