Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 9438114" data-attributes="member: 55680">Trying to reply to everything relevant. Am mostly done with page 16 now <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="o_O" title="Er... what?    o_O"  data-smilie="12"data-shortname="o_O" />. This is going to take a while...Thanks! I think part of it is that the changes in philosophy are fairly subtle since 5.5e isn't the kind of shock and awe change that 4e was and there's been a bit of boiling frog going on with Tasha's etc. already prefiguring a lot of these changes. But the change is definitely there and I think it points out the direction that 5.5e will go with future splatbooks and adventures.Although 5e has a number of flaws, it tried REALLY hard to be a compromise between different playstyles with at least some success. I just don't see the same spirit of compromise in 5.5e and I think there's been enough turnover in the WotC team that a lot of the people running things now don't always have a good grasp of why the designers of 5e made things they way they are.It's been one of the most commonly used 1st level spells in my own campaigns and I hear it often brought up in discussions of good spells to pick (not Bless good, but a very strong second tier pick). If you have a good melee front line positioned around a monster Command: Flee can often be a save or die spell.It very much depends on the character being role-played. Serious war priest? I'm going to be casting Command: Repent. Prankster immature trickery cleric? I'm going to be a lot more immature. Verb selection with command can be a great way of showing the personality of your cleric...if you can actually select the verbs you want of course.As a DM you've got to draw a line between OOC powergaming in which silly players try to rules lawyer the precise wording of a spell and IC cunning in which characters try to use the spell in creative ways in the exact same way that a character in the world would try to use a spell in a creative way.Generally, the closer that the thought process of the player and the thought process of the character align the better.If the character is just trying to hit a dude but the player is trying to fine-tune mechanical minutiae about what rules to apply to that attack then that's a problem.If the character is trying to cast a spell in a way that only makes sense if you're read the PHB then that's a problem.If the character is trying to come up with a clever verb to use their Command spell with and that's the exact same thing the player is thinking about, then you're golden.This creates more work for the DM, but I'm OK with that. In my experience more Old School ways to play are harder to DM but easier to play, so they work great with an experienced DM and newbies but often crash and burn with inexperienced DMs and part of that is being able to draw those kind of lines and getting players to respect them and stick to creative tactics instead of stupid rules lawyering.Yeah one thing that has always mystified me is that some people (not calling out Hussar or anyone on this thread here, am thinking back to some ooooold discussions) is that they seem to think that RPing is for out of combat chatting and that when they start fighting you get that Final Fantasy sound effect and all RPing stops. For me often the best RP moments are in fights since HOW my characters fight is VERY much informed by their personalities. In fact often the first thing I do when I'm making a character is think "how would this dude fight a random group of goblins in a way that really shows his personality compared to a generic PC with the exact same stats?" if I can't come up with a good answer then I make another character.The way I DM I'm faaaaaaaaaaaaar more likely to bend the mechanics to the narrative than the other way around. I didn't like that 4e assumed that all DMs should take the mechanics as sacrosanct and then bend the narrative to fit them. I LIKE the approach of "no, it's a freaking cube, of course you can't trip it, I don't care what the rules say" much much more than "it creates a resonance wave." By bending the mechanics to fit the narrative it makes the narrative matter more since it trumps the mechanics and (in my experience at least) makes the players care more about the narrative and get more immersed in it.And yeah, it's often harder for newbie DMs. In my experience TSR-D&D is hard to DM (I certainly sucked at is as a kid in the 90's) but easy to play (can get kids up and running with a 1e PC in ten minutes) while games like 4e are a lot easier to DM but a lot harder for newbie players to get the hang of (especially newbies without much of a background in computer/board games). 5e was a decent enough compromise somewhere in the middle in my experience. 5.5e a bit less so it looks like...</blockquote>

Verification