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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9739576" data-attributes="member: 18">This is an interesting opinion, because it's all about context, and I think the context you provide is, imho, rather unusual. 3 Deadly/High (2014/2024 terminology) and 3 Hard/Moderate or Normal/Easy (again 2014/2024 terminology) is a lot of encounters per day, and further it's much higher difficulty than is suggested even in 2024. I double-checked - the DMG 2024 suggests High encounters are for when you're really pressuring the PCs hard, for really important fights, and that Low/Moderate should be used for most encounters. You slamming the PCs with 50% High encounters is pretty much the equivalent to playing a videogame on Hard or Extra-Hard. Especially on 6 encounters/day days.Now you play videogames, I know you do.So you probably know that changing the difficulty level of a videogame can drastically impact what strategies are viable, and particularly, what spells are viable. And indeed, changing difficulties upwards in party-based fantasy RPGs strongly tends to up-value CC spells, particularly hard-to-break CC spells, and down-value AOE spells, because CC has the double-advantage of tending to make your damage dealers able to do more damage (either directly with stuff like Hold Monster auto-crits, or indirectly, by allowing damage dealers to focus on un-CC'd targets with much less risk and use more aggressive strategies).And that's exactly what we're seeing here. As D&D doesn't have much of a way to "turbocharge" AOEs (unlike some videogames), and 5E doesn't use minions, and as you point out, doesn't want you to use more 2x PCs enemies*, AOEs that don't 1-2 shot some enemies aren't particularly impressive, and the harder things get, the less impressive they get. Whereas locking a serious bastard out of a fight (or multiple enemies), or just deleting them from existence, or massively impairing them, that has a lot more value.So I'm sure in the context you're operating in, the very specific "Hard+" difficulty mode you want to run/play 5E 2024 in, everything you're saying is true (apart from BG3-created errors lol but I get that!), but I think for most players it's not going to be particularly meaningful.* = The 2x PCs thing is both sensible from the perspective that if you don't do that, combat rounds can easily become 60-70% or more of the DM rolling and the PCs waiting (which degrades fun, in my experience), especially if the players are good and know what they're doing, but it's also quite limiting because it means "Minion"-type enemies can't really exist, and that changes the value of AOE a lot. I feel like 5E really, really should have retained "Minions" at least as a concept - if they had to make it "verisimilitude" and not have them just have 1HP have some "minion" monsters at every tier that have few enough HP that they get one-shot by an average AOE roll at that level, but do respectable (non-rolled, fixed) damage and have ultra-simple mechanics.</blockquote>

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