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

[pemerton]

Fair enough, but that's the only reason I wouldn't allow it; the principle is sound.

I would certainly allow a command to set something or someone else on fire, if an appropriate circumstance allowed for it.

Again, the spell does what the flavor descriptor says it does. Not my fault if their examples are unimaginative.

Surely you accept the basic proposition that, in D&D, a spell's level is meant to be at least roughly commensurate to its power?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, Moldvay Basic and 4e D&D are both pretty close to fitting the description I gave.

I know that's how you see it. When I said generally, I was excluding 4e (because I knew you would call it out otherwise). Can't speak for Moldvay. Never read it.

 

[pemerton]

As to the bolded, a simple and circumstance-driven + to the target's saving throw can account for these factors, but there'd be no real way to codify that into hard rules

Yet there are RPGs that do it!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Surely you accept the basic proposition that, in D&D, a spell's level is meant to be at least roughly commensurate to its power?

Yes, but the fictional descriptor still trumps anything else IMO. The level of spell should be determined by what the spell can do, using the fictional descriptor as a guide. Mechanics follow fiction.

 

[pemerton]

Yes, but the fictional descriptor still trumps anything else IMO. The level of spell should be determined by what the spell can do, using the fictional descriptor as a guide. Mechanics follow fiction.

Alternatively, one might draw an inference from the level of the spell as to what it is capable of doing. I mean, the level of the spell is also a part of the fiction!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Alternatively, one might draw an inference from the level of the spell as to what it is capable of doing. I mean, the level of the spell is also a part of the fiction!

I'm not sure that's true, at least not all the time. The fictional descriptor is still my preference.

 

[pemerton]

"Direct-brain whisper projection: when you whisper a command direct to another person's mind (they have to be able to see you, but you don't have to interact), you get the effects of going aggro without going aggro. Roll+weird instead of roll+hard. If they force your hand, your mind counts as a weapon (1‑harm ap close loud‑optional)."

My Apocalypse World rules jargon is a bit rusty (although I do have fond memories for Pig Dawg, my AW bike gang leader with Spam can armor who cemented the loyalty of his gang with food) but what I'm seeing here is that you can basically attack people with a different stat but at the same time (IIRC, been a while since I played AW) the specific effects of attacking someone ("going aggro") are subject to a lot of GM interpretation. But there are some problems with this approach. It's so abstract that often the details that are important to the fiction gets abstracted away and doesn't matter.

I don't think the specific effects of going aggro are subject to a lot of interpretation at all (AW p 193):

When you go aggro on someone, roll+hard. On a 10+, they have to choose: force your hand and suck it up, or cave and do what you want. On a 7–9, they can instead choose 1:
• get the hell out of your way
• barricade themselves securely in
• give you something they think you want
• back off calmly, hands where you can see
• tell you what you want to know (or what you want to hear)

Going aggro means using violence or the threat of violence to control somebody else’s behavior, without (or before) fighting. If the character has the drop on her enemy, or if the enemy won’t fight back, or if the character is making a show of force but isn’t disposed to really fight, it’s going aggro.

On a 7–9, the victim can still choose to cave or to force the character’s hand and suck it up.

If the target forces the character’s hand and sucks it up, that means that the character inflicts harm upon the target as normal, determined by her weapon and her subject’s armor. At this point, the player can’t decide not to inflict harm, it’s gone too far for that.​

The controller of the character who is affected - which will be the GM, if that character is a NPC - has to decide what the character does, within the parameters set out in the rules. This has been a part of RPG rules for a long time: for instance, the 1977 edition of Traveller says, in its morale rules (Book 1 p 33), that "a party of adventurers (player or non-player) which sustains casualties in an encounter will ultimately break or rout if it does not achieve victory. . . . Average morale throw is 7+ to stand, or not break." When morale is lost, the controller of the character who has failed the throw has to decide what happens - do they run, or surrender, or fall to the ground weeping? - but the rules themselves are clear.

I don't think that these sorts of rules - in AW or in Traveller - are particularly abstract, either. Details in the fiction don't cease to matter. In Traveller, for instance, the person who controls a character will normally have regard to the fiction in deciding what that character does if their morale is lost. The examples of going aggro in the AW rulebook make the details of the fiction highly relevant:

Marie walks up behind Joe’s Girl and pokes her in the ribs with her scalpel. “Come with me,” she says. She misses the roll, though, so I get to make as hard a move as I like in response. I choose to inflict harm and (bonus) put her in a spot. “Damn, Joe’s Girl is fast,” I say. “She slams you in the face with her elbow — take 1-harm — knocks you down, kicks your scalpel away, and by the time you realize what’s happened she’s kneeling over you with her pistol up under your jaw. What do you do?”

Keeler’s hidden in a little nest outside Dremmer’s compound, she’s been watching the compound courtyard through the scope of her rifle. When I say that this guy Balls sits down in there with his lunch, “there he is,” her player says. They have history. “I blow his brains out.” She hits the roll with a 9, so I get to choose. I choose to have him barricade himself securely in: “no brains, but he leaves his lunch and scrambles into the compound, squeaking. He won’t be coming out again any time soon.” I make a note to myself, on my front sheet for Dremmer’s gang, that Balls is taking himself off active duty. I think that we might never see him again.

Bran yells at Fleece, calls her . . . stupid . . . and threatens to push her off the roof. He hits the roll with a 12. “She falls to her knees, she’s crying,” I say. “She’ll do whatever you want. Jesus Bran, you’re a piece of work.”​

I don't see what fiction is being elided in these examples.

I really am not grasping the distinction between deciding what happens when I throw some honey at the owlbear and deciding what happens when I cast "defenestrate" at the orc. They're the same exact thing to me. Players try to do naughty word that requires some DM input and I decide what happens. They're both a normal part of the game.

Well, at least in the versions of D&D that I play, there is a rule for trying to distract an owlbear with honey so as to escape it. From Moldvay Basic p B24:

If characters wish to evade and are slower than the monsters, the DM must decide what the monsters will do. Use the Monster Reactions table to find the actions of the monsters. A low score means that the monsters will pursue, and a high score means that the monsters will let the party escape. . . .

PURSUIT: . . . Monsters will chase evading characters only as long as the characters are in sight. Evading characters may be able to slow this pursuit by dropping things. Unintelligent monsters will stop to eat food 1/2 the time (a result of 1-3 on 1d6).​

The "creative" uses of Command are not the same. The rule in 5e is simply that "the DM determines how the target behaves". Presumably - given that if the save is failed, the victim "must . . . follow the command on its next turn", the GM's decision as to how the target behaves is supposed to correlate, in some fashion, to the word that the caster has uttered; but there is no reference to player (or character) intent - which is a contrast with Go Aggro on a 10+, or getting lucky when distracting a pursuing monster with food in Moldvay Basic; and there is no reference to a general sort of behaviour which is (broadly) consistent with the caster having succeeded in their action - which is a contrast with Go Aggro on a 7-9, or with a failed morale throw in Traveller.

What bits of the fiction - the caster's desires, the target's desires, the gods' desires, possible semantic and/or pragmatic uncertainties, maybe something else - are supposed to matter to the GM's decision about what the target does? The rule doesn't say. Is the GM supposed to have regard to the spell being 1st level, and make a decision commensurate with that power level/resource cost? The rule doesn't say anything about that either.

I think the contrast with other rules that allow influencing or controlling behaviour outside of a participant's "normal" zone of character control, like Go Aggro or morale in Classic Traveller or evasion by dropping food in classic D&D - is pretty clear. Those rules are clear in explaining not only who gets to make what decision, but also what the parameters for that are. Whereas the Command rule just tells the GM to make a decision, without stating parameters, thus encouraging any discussion among participants concerning the resolution of the spell to focus on rules elements (what exactly can a 1st level spell do? what counts as following a one-word command?) rather than on the fiction. Gygax was clearly conscious of this problem way back in 1978, at least to some extent, which is why his version of the spell description excluded "suicide" as a permissible command, by saying that the target will always construe it as a noun, and gave a non-literal interpretation to the command to "die" (I mean, taken literally, this should fizzle as dying is not normally a behaviour that someone engages in).

This is why, in this thread, I have been pretty sympathetic to @Hussar's posts.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

The entire year?

Yes the entire year of D&D at least.

 

[Oofta]

But...but...but...why? I'm honestly am having trouble wrapping my head around your point of view. In both cases people are using tools at their disposal (Spells and honey) to do something that is not specifically covered by the rules and which requires a DM call. I just don't see how distracting an owlbear with honey is any different from the DM side of the screen than screwing with someone with Command. Now of course some people try stupid naughty word with spells ("I'm going to cast heat metal on the iron in his blood, har har.") but I've seen people do stupid naughty word with mundane stuff as well ("I'm going to throw the pot of honey into the dragon's mouth so it's stuck closed by the sticky honey so it can't breathe fire on us!"). In both cases the DM has to roll their eyes and tell the players their stupid naughty word doesn't work. What's the line you're drawing here?

For me an important line is between Associated and Dissociated mechanics: The Alexandrian » dissociated mechanics

Associated mechanics: the PC is making the exact same choices as the player. For example "I'm going to hit that goblin."

Dissociated mechanics: the player is making a decision that the character himself isn't making in the game. For example: "I use my inspiration to get advantage before I hit hat goblin." The character himself doesn't know what "inspiration" is.

For me if the player is using associated mechanics in a clever way that's always fine, even if it doesn't always work since the player is thinking the same thoughts that the character is thinking. For example even something as obviously abusive as "I cast create water in their lungs!" is not something I'd have a problem with players TRYING, since I could see some dumb newbie wizard trying that stunt IC, it's not going to WORK but the logic behind it is the same IC and OOC and gets the player thinking about what works and what doesn't in terms of the fiction of the world.

If the player is trying to be a weasel about the wording of dissociated mechanics, then that's just being a bad player and I'll shut that down.

You see no difference between trying to push the boundaries of the wording and intent of the spell and interacting with the fiction of the world? One is saying "I'm attempting to change the rules of the game, the way my character interacts with the world, in order to gain an advantage." The other is "I'm doing something in the world and engaging with the fiction". It sounds like a fundamental difference, not using the rules to engage in a fictional world, but engaging in a set of rules to play a game.

Inspiration one of the few examples of a metacurrency in D&D*, in other cases it's a crude simulation. Not a simulation of the real world of course, that would be boring. To me it's more of a simulation of an action movie with magic, even something like second wind is seen time and again in movies and TV. When playing D&D I'm running a character that is engaging with the world, not the rules. Which is one of the reasons I don't care for the direction some other games work, I don't want metacurrency.

*about the only other metacurrency I can think of off the top of my head is the luck feat or halfing's luck. But even those are just representing things that just happen to go our way, not that I'm suddenly changing how the world works because I can.

 

[Hussar]

But...but...but...why? I'm honestly am having trouble wrapping my head around your point of view. In both cases people are using tools at their disposal (Spells and honey) to do something that is not specifically covered by the rules and which requires a DM call. I just don't see how distracting an owlbear with honey is any different from the DM side of the screen than screwing with someone with Command. Now of course some people try stupid naughty word with spells ("I'm going to cast heat metal on the iron in his blood, har har.") but I've seen people do stupid naughty word with mundane stuff as well ("I'm going to throw the pot of honey into the dragon's mouth so it's stuck closed by the sticky honey so it can't breathe fire on us!"). In both cases the DM has to roll their eyes and tell the players their stupid naughty word doesn't work. What's the line you're drawing here?

Ok, let's see if I can explain this better.

1. The Honey/Owlbear example is a perfect example of using the in game fiction to resolve events. In the game world, the honey, the owlbear and the characters all exist. To resolve this event, we'd probably use the Handle Animals skill with a DC set by the DM. All of this is pretty clearly defined before the event. No one is trying to change anything. They are simply using the resolution mechanics that exist - a skill check - in order to resolve an event. No problems.

2. Expanding Command - most of the "creative uses" of Command require, and this is the important part, rewriting the rules of the game. The Command spell is pretty clear - it forces a character to move (if the caster wishes) and take a most a free action (drop). It does not force a target to take actions. None of the examples given force a target to take actual actions. So, Drop causes the target to take a free item interaction to drop their held item in their square. Defenestrate forces them to actually take an action to throw an item in a different square than their own. "Change" forces a target to potentially take an actual game defined action. After all, a werewolf needs to actually take a full Action to shapechange. In fact, I think most NPC's who can shapechange in some manner must at least do it with a bonus action and most require a full action. This is a clear rewriting of the mechanics of the spell.

It's pretty clear that 99% of the "creative uses" of Command are either already covered - what's the difference between "Salute" and "Grovel" really? - or examples of massively expanding the power of the spell - "Change" forces the target to actually take an action, never minding that it's creating an effect of a 2nd level spell (sorry, I said 3rd before) that clerics CAN'T ACTUALLY CAST. Moonbeam is a Druid spell.

So, that's the difference. You aren't entirely off track with the whole associated/disociated thing, despite the massive amount of edition warring trash that Alexandrian essay carries with it. But, that's the difference. In the "Honey/Owlbear" example, the players are engaging with the game world directly. There's no distance between the actions declared by the players and the actions taken by the characters. In the "Creative Command" example, the players are not engaging with the game world at all. They are rewriting the rules of the game world - rewriting the definition of the spell - in order to gain advantages that are not granted by the mechanic.