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

[TiQuinn]

I can definitely see 5e as a follow-up to 2e but with different technology under the hood. The reversion of magic items to pre-3e structure is a major part of that because one of the biggest shifts in D&D play was the magic item economy in 3e - it really changed (or damaged depending on your perspective) how players approached their characters. It gave you something to do with treasure other than spend on training costs from the ol' 1e days, but it sucked the joy out of the room with respect to most oddball magic items.
And I have to say, 5e's reversion on magic items is a significant reason I prefer it to the 3e family. For many years after 3e first come out (then 4e, then PF), remained my second favorite edition. 2e cleaned up some of the worst of 1e, filled in many of its gaps (still managed to cock up the ranger, oh well, not everyone's perfect), while still keeping what was best about 1e. 5e shifted play back toward 2e to the point where I found it extremely comfortable and easy to work with, easier than any of the 3es.

That’s interesting because that’s my number one frustration with 5e: I feel that it’s minimized magic items to a degree that they are unnecessary. In 2e, the magic items were largely the point of adventuring. My fighter was the same as your fighter except mine has a frost brand and a cloak of the bat while yours has a flame tongue and gauntlets of ogre strength. There weren’t the same restrictions on attuned items. You needed lots of magic. With 5e, I feel if I stripped all magic items out of the game, my group would barely notice. The class abilities are the juice with 5e.

 

[billd91]

That’s interesting because that’s my number one frustration with 5e: I feel that it’s minimized magic items to a degree that they are unnecessary. In 2e, the magic items were largely the point of adventuring. My fighter was the same as your fighter except mine has a frost brand and a cloak of the bat while yours has a flame tongue and gauntlets of ogre strength. There weren’t the same restrictions on attuned items. You needed lots of magic. With 5e, I feel if I stripped all magic items out of the game, my group would barely notice. The class abilities are the juice with 5e.

While they may differ in a variety of other significant ways in 5e (and honestly, even in 2e they could have different NWPs, kits, specializations), the magic gear you've depicted them choosing are still pretty different in how they appear and in some of the things they can do.
If you find the attunement budget too stringent, it's an easy house rule to increase it by one, maybe even 2. They're still a good reason to go on adventures.

 

[TiQuinn]

While they may differ in a variety of other significant ways in 5e (and honestly, even in 2e they could have different NWPs, kits, specializations), the magic gear you've depicted them choosing are still pretty different in how they appear and in some of the things they can do.

Right, my point was that to really differentiate the characters in 2e, you needed magic items. Yeah there were kits as well but they were outshined by what you got from the items. I find that to be reversed with 5e. Class abilities and feats drive the differences, and magic items are pretty optional nice-to-haves.

 

[Daztur]

Meh, that's not clever. That's just being a jerk because the DM didn't write iron clad clauses into the Suggestion spell because I have zero interest in that sort of thing. I very clearly and openly NEVER do that sort of thing to the players. I absolutely refuse to.

Maybe we have different inspirations. For me one of my biggest D&D inspirations is fairy tales and players skating through loopholes in spells because they didn't have iron clad clauses is the most fairy tale thing I can possibly imagine. I'd stand up and give that player a high five for being awesome and for acting EXACTLY like the protagonists in the fantasy stories and fairy tales I most enjoy.

That doesn't mean you're wrong, we just have very different expectations for what we want at our tables and different sources of inspiration. I just find my way of DMing easier since getting players in fairy tale protagonist mode is generally the path of least resistance and I'm fine with that, while getting players in Epic Fantasy mode tends to require some cajoling and a lot of careful work maintaining the correct tone.

So, in return, I expect that players don't try to do it to me and I get rather annoyed when I have to deal with this sort of thing over and over and over and over and over again. Campaign after campaign. Group after group.

That is more or less the sort of play that Gygax envisioned way back in 1974 when he set up the basic assumptions that D&D is based on. Your players are doing that sort of thing over and over and over in campaign after campaign because that's what D&D was built for.

Now D&D has changed a lot over the years and it can do many things now, but at the end of the day D&D players are going to act like D&D players most of the time and it's a whole lot easier to embrace that then to fight that. As you've found out that's what you're going to generally get in D&D unless you have a dedicated group that is all very focused and cooperative at maintaining a different tone, which is rare.

I'm just so absolutely exhausted of it. I mean, good grief, the very first 5e campaign I ran was set in Primeval Thule. To get deep into the whole Sword and Sorcery angle and back away a bit from the very high magic level of 5e, I wanted a no-caster game. Half-casters were fine, so, paladin, ranger? No problem. First three character concepts pitched to me? All full casters.

5e is generally more high magic than I like as well. I've been considering making a half caster Scholar class inspired by d20 Conan that covers wizard/warlock/cleric flavor based on the Artificer chassis for a more low-magic campaign but at the end of the day 5e is a pretty damn high magic system, and 5.5e just makes it moreso.

Again, I just heard that you have a player problem, not a spell problem.

More of an expectations mis-match, as that player isn't a bad player, just a bad fit for what he wants. I'd love to have that player at my table.

Yes, I can do it but, it gets absolutely exhausting to have to do it for only half the players all the time. It ruins any momentum in the game. Makes the game frustrating. And encourages players to game the system and not actually engage with the game.

From my point of view, that sort of thing makes player pay more attention to the situation they're in since they're trying to tailor their abilities to the specific situation they're in rather than trying to apply the same hammer to their problems as always.

Now naughty word like instant death create water, will just get eyerolls from me, don't think I've even seen sort of thing crop up that I can remember though...

Now this? This I am 100% behind.

What sort of things you do you in mind here? Because your examples of players being jerks are players doing exactly the sort of things I like, so I wonder what your examples of players being awesome consist of...

But, the thing is, you can do all of that without needing vague rules. Guess what? I have all that sort of thing in my games too. But, I don't have it because the players decide to play silly buggers semantic games and game the system. I have it because the players actually engage with the game and the setting and these kinds of things happen.

OK, let's talk vague.

In the 4e PHB 2 the Warden class has an ability that says: "You lash out with nature’s wrath at a foe that has attacked your ally and diminish its defenses." WTF is going on here? What does this lashing out consist of in concrete terms? What is the warden actually DOING? How is he diminishing the target's defenses? Is he eating away with them with acid? Tying the target down so it can't move well? How does this relate to marking? What even IS the warden's mark? The warden's marking power is Nature's Wrath which just says "Once during each of your turns, you can mark each adjacent enemy as a free action. This mark lasts until the end of your next turn" which doesn't explain anything. How is the warden marking people? What does the warden mark do in fictional terms? What does it look like? The whole thing is nothing but one big fat pile of vague to me.

Now you're saying "Daztur, you're missing the whole point, the mechanics are crystal clear." And that's right, the mechanics are crystal clear, but that doesn't mean much to me if what fiction the mechanics are trying to model is clear as mud or "dunno, just make something up." I want to have some clear flavor to make rulings based on if there's a weird edge situations where things aren't working out the way they normally do and all I get is "there's some nature power that does stuff because reasons" which clears up precisely nothing for me.

For me, meanwhile, 5e Command is crystal clear. The caster says a word and if the target understands it and can't resist the magic's power he has to obey that word (with certain restrictions that are clearly spelled out). There's just no vagueness here for me. The spell's flavor is absolutely clear. It gives me all I need to make rulings. Target can't hear? Spell doesn't work. Target doesn't understand WTF the caster is saying? Spell doesn't work. etc. etc.

Now I haven't even mentioned the mechanics of the spell. That's OK. The mechanics are always an imperfect model of the fiction and the fiction always trumps the mechanics. It's much more important for the fiction to be clear than for the mechanics to be so. The mechanics give me guidelines to follow to model the fiction if things are working normally and the flavor description gives me the ironclad rules of how the spell works that the mechanics have to bend to if there's any conflict between the fiction and the mechanics.

Fiction first, mechanics second. As long as the fiction is clear I'm good. The mechanics are there to serve the fiction, not the other way around.

Part of the issue is D&D magic was designed around gaming the system.

Spell were originally off buttons and gotchas.

The magic game was

1. You only had a few of them
2. You had to guess correctly or they didn't apply
3. You had more obstacles than gotcha spells

This works but it only works one way. This is why these magic systems were eroded over time, to facilitate more playstyles.

But then spells need to adjust.

To me this is why Creative spells should be either high level or have dramatic limitations. Then you can flood the low levels with more spell.

1. Language dependent Command
2. Target dependent Command
3. Effect limited Command

And let DMs decide what they want to deal with.

Just like how there should be a big damage spell of every major damage type at 3rd level.

1. Acid Arc
2. Fireball
3. Ice Cube
4. Lightning Bolt
5. Soundwave
6. Venom Spray

I see where you're going here but the problem is that that just creates the need for so so so many spells. More spells than there is room for in core. Maybe a good solution would be a spell splatbook that's nothing but one big fat book of hundreds and hundreds of spells with some guidance about which ones are appropriate for different campaigns. But there just isn't enough room in a PHB for all of the spells your approach would require so the best solution for a mainstream game like D&D is a slew of spells that work in different ways to create a messy and imperfect compromise, i.e. more or less what 5e does.

 

[Oofta]

"You can just houserule it" is never a good response to (subjective or objective) problems with the rules. That's like telling people who are upset about linear fighters, quadratic wizards to "just houserule it if you prefer balance."

Thanks, I needed a chuckle this morning.

A minor change to one first level spell is not at all comparable. I tweak a couple of spells, effectively ban a couple others because I don't care how they work. I assume many, if not most DMs make little changes here and there. It's not like we're rewriting the game. People are really making a mountain out of a molehill on this one in my opinion.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

So, bathos seems to be a term for when characters in a fiction provide their own comic relief rather than have it provided for them by another character whose main function is to be that comic relief.

Are you saying you don't like it when players use their in-game characters to provide comic relief? Or if not, what are you saying?

Personally, I like that Hulk-Loki scene.

You know what? just watch this video and you'll get what I have an issue with

Not a strawman at all, in that long experience has shown me that players who take the game as seriously as you seem to want are also the players who aren't going to react well out-of-character to bad things that happen in-character, and would indeed directly equate your character attacking mine in the game as you attacking me in person because they either can't or won't separate the two.

I think it is quite a strawman to draw a line from "gets invested into the roleplay" and "is too stupid to diffirentiate fiction from reality". It strikes me like a fear of being sincere and putting your emotions on display, which is a disappointing position to take towards roleplaying.

 

[TiQuinn]

More of an expectations mis-match, as that player isn't a bad player, just a bad fit for what he wants. I'd love to have that player at my table.

Maybe? I would’ve told the player “No, your character descends down to the floor to sit down with the others.” How good a player that is then depends on how well they take that ruling.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Oh no, comedy movies and light heart movies are comedic or light hearted!

Look, I went through the dark and gritty 90's and the sad and somber 00's. Let's not got back to that again.

Ever since writers rediscovered fun in a secret 80's tomb, people have been trying to eradicate it like smallpox.

 

[Hussar]

Again, I just heard that you have a player problem, not a spell problem.

Sure. Literally dozens of players, both in groups I've DM'd and played in, across decades of play.

But, sure. It's a player problem. Couldn't possibly be a spell problem. The fact that we never have these problems with identical spells - like Dissonant Whispers - which don't have vague definitions is just a bizarre coincidence. Couldn't possibly be anything else.

Or, maybe it's because things like pretty much all of the most problematic spells in 5e, the ones that perennially top the charts as spells that frustrate DM's pretty much are all brought forward from the early days of the game, when the idea of technical writing wasn't really a thing at all. Command is just a perfect example. At it's heart, in 5e, it's a "Force the target to move somewhere and deny it's action for one round" spell. That's what it does at it's most basic. Which is identical to the Dissonant Whispers spell except that instead of dealing damage, the caster gets a bit more control over where the target goes.

But Dissonant Whispers, being first introduced into the game much, much later, has tight, easy to understand rules with no real vagueness. Command OTOH, being introduced into the game in the 80's, is chockablock with vague definitions which have slowly (very slowly) been tightened up over time.

The changes in 5.24 are simply a continuation of the general tightening of the rules that's been wending its way through the game for years.

But, sure, it's just a player problem. The changes that are being made to the spell have nothing to do with making the game easier to run. No, it's that WotC just hates creativity.

 

[TiQuinn]

Sure. Literally dozens of players, both in groups I've DM'd and played in, across decades of play.

But, sure. It's a player problem. Couldn't possibly be a spell problem. The fact that we never have these problems with identical spells - like Dissonant Whispers - which don't have vague definitions is just a bizarre coincidence. Couldn't possibly be anything else.

Sure, because you seem to have the issue with Command. And now Fly. And Suggestion. And any illusion spell.

But because you haven’t had a player try to abuse Dissonant Whispers, of course, it must be all those spells that were wrong!