D&D 5E Is Concentration Bugging You?

[Eejit]

Because the BBEG never has minions between himself and the party. He never has allies with ranged attacks to take out the PC spell caster. He is always within 30 feet of the grappling Fighter at the start of the encounter (whose init beats the BBEG's). He never throws spells right away that hinder the PCs or have allies do so. The PC actually prepped Silence this particular adventuring day, or didn't swap it out because he never got to use it as a class that doesn't prep spells and finally gave up on it. Life is always ice cream and flowers and puppy dogs for the PCs. Woo hoo!

Sorry, but your scenario sounds contrived and optimistically simplistic.

And you're interpreting my scenario in such a way that you can be pessimistic. Where did I say that the silence/grapple needs to be in the first round? Or that it has to last indefinitely?
Also it's far from the only scenario to maximise silence in combat - how about a Sentinel melee next to the BBEG instead of grappling? In that case he could even dash to get next to the enemy spellcaster and not need to use an Action to facilitate silencing him.

Any caster who has Silence should always, always have it prepared. It has innumerable out-of-combat uses in addition to stopping spellcasting - which is really more of a niche role considering how many fights won't involve enemy casters. Silence is one of the very best utility spells of its level in the game, right up there with Invisibility and Suggestion.

 

[Prism]

Hold Person is one of those iffy spells because of these types of things. When the timing is good and the target fails one or more saves and it works, it can be great. But there are scenarios (like worse case above) where casting it usually means that not much happens. Either the target saves, or he loses an action. And the PC caster gave up an action and a spell slot for that to happen.

Granted, there are foes with low Wisdom modifiers where the odds increase dramatically for something good to happen. But, the players do not always get to decide who they are fighting against, that's mostly the purview of the DM.

Yeah good points. I kind of threw it in as a casual example but it does require good timing. We use a round tracker so we always know the best target as far as timing but its not usually the best target as far as who to take out quickly. Works well with a rogue and a readied action I suppose.

 

[Prism]

Any caster who has Silence should always, always have it prepared. It has innumerable out-of-combat uses in addition to stopping spellcasting - which is really more of a niche role considering how many fights won't involve enemy casters. Silence is one of the very best utility spells of its level in the game, right up there with Invisibility and Suggestion.

Hmm, my cleric had it prepared for 3 levels and never found a good reason to cast it once. I was looking for an opportunity since we are still kicking the wheels of 5e but found the fact its no longer a mobile spell pretty limiting. Certainly no good for helping the party sneak about and the only time we met a caster the room was too large to make use of. Any examples as I'd like to try it out?

 

[Eejit]

Hmm, my cleric had it prepared for 3 levels and never found a good reason to cast it once. I was looking for an opportunity since we are still kicking the wheels of 5e but found the fact its no longer a mobile spell pretty limiting. Certainly no good for helping the party sneak about and the only time we met a caster the room was too large to make use of. Any examples as I'd like to try it out?

Silence the enemy lookout or guard animals just as you charge them.

Once you get into a building or dungeon... Silence the sounds of breaking down a door/into a chest. Bring a prisoner to the corner of a room, cast silence on the rest of it and interrogate him in that pocket of sound. Silence the room you're brawling with some guards in so as not alert the others.

Silence the Big Bad Evil Ritual.


There's all kinds of fun to be had.


Plus, in combat...
Silence in an area where an ally of yours is rocking it out with Greater Invisibility - they're now essentially undetectable.
Silence to back up your friendly grappler/sentinel (or even just to force an enemy caster to eat opportunity attacks as they successfully move out of it).
Silence vs Banshee/Vrock/Gibbering Mouther/Harpy etc (doesn't matter if they moves away, you stay in the silence and their special abilities won't effect you)
Silence vs Grimlocks or enemies with Echolocation.

 

[KarinsDad]

Yeah good points. I kind of threw it in as a casual example but it does require good timing. We use a round tracker so we always know the best target as far as timing but its not usually the best target as far as who to take out quickly. Works well with a rogue and a readied action I suppose.

Yup. The issue, at least for our table, is to get players to do things like ready actions. It's not so much the cross table talk (which I have been at tables where they frown on metagaming tactics cross table), but the fact that with 5E not having delay and only having ready (and 4E having riders on practically every power), many of the 5E players I've played with seem to not do it as much as in 4E. The rogue tends to just go in and do damage as quickly as possible. Obviously, it would be better if the caster casting Hold Person and the rogue using sneak attack worked together, but I just do not see it to the frequency that I did in 4E.

In fact, I just took over as DM for our group (our DM was overcommitted, so is now a player) and I just sent out an Email yesterday with a half dozen or so "tactical suggestions" for things that the PCs can do together (but the players probably would not have thought of on their own). My players are really good at optimizing their PCs so that they are effective that way, but they are only so so at group combat tactics. Course, 5E is not like 4E with conditions and forced movement and bloodied and a lot of other things which encourage group tactics. 5E appears to be more dependent on how invested individual players are in figuring these types of things out.

 

[Mercule]

I'm a bit late to the discussion, but I'll throw out my thought on the original question:

5E concentration doesn't really "bother" me, but I can see where it would be nice to have a way to expand a caster's ability in that area. The thought I had, early on, was to add a generalist wizard school/subclass with one of the granted abilities to be able to concentrate on two spells at once. I had a couple other abilities picked out, but I never got around to writing it up.

 

[KarinsDad]

Silence the enemy lookout or guard animals just as you charge them.

Once you get into a building or dungeon... Silence the sounds of breaking down a door/into a chest. Bring a prisoner to the corner of a room, cast silence on the rest of it and interrogate him in that pocket of sound. Silence the room you're brawling with some guards in so as not alert the others.

Silence the Big Bad Evil Ritual.


There's all kinds of fun to be had.


Plus, in combat...
Silence in an area where an ally of yours is rocking it out with Greater Invisibility - they're now essentially undetectable.
Silence to back up your friendly grappler/sentinel (or even just to force an enemy caster to eat opportunity attacks as they successfully move out of it).
Silence vs Banshee/Vrock/Gibbering Mouther/Harpy etc (doesn't matter if they moves away, you stay in the silence and their special abilities won't effect you)
Silence vs Grimlocks or enemies with Echolocation.

I agree with you 100%.

Unfortunately for the player of the Bard in our group, those opportunities just did not materialize in our game. I was even looking for those opportunities, but they didn't happen.

Something similar happened with our Bard and Faerie Fire. She hates that spell cause she cast it about 6 times now and only one NPC failed the save in that timeframe. Obviously, that's just unlucky dice (or lucky if you are the DM), but the player swapped Faerie Fire out at level 5 because of her experiences with it. C'est la guerre.

 

[Vael]

Something similar happened with our Bard and Faerie Fire. She hates that spell cause she cast it about 6 times now and only one NPC failed the save in that timeframe. Obviously, that's just unlucky dice (or lucky if you are the DM), but the player swapped Faerie Fire out at level 5 because of her experiences with it. C'est la guerre.

The challenges of the d20. In a battle with Frulam (the cleric from Hoard of the Dragon Queen), Frulam was unable to land her Command and Hold Person spells, even targeting PCs that didn't have that saving throw proficiency. Ultimately, that didn't bother me, their saving throw rolls were hot, but so were my attack rolls ... :-D

Right now, the only spells I'd take off Concentration are the Paladin's smite spells (and similar Ranger spells) .... if I could figure out another way to ensure they can't stack them. The easy fix is make the spell only last until end of turn ... don't hit this round, the spell is gone.

 

[KarinsDad]

Right now, the only spells I'd take off Concentration are the Paladin's smite spells (and similar Ranger spells) .... if I could figure out another way to ensure they can't stack them. The easy fix is make the spell only last until end of turn ... don't hit this round, the spell is gone.

If I were to drop concentration from some spells, I might drop some spells like Flaming Sphere. Yeah, if you are an evoker, you can more easily set up some situations where the sphere might damage more than one bad guy and not harm adjacent PCs, but it too is an extremely situational spell. The minor damage only occurs at the end of a foe's turn (except the one foe the caster hits with it once per round), so the foe can often just move away (and in 5E, movement is somewhat easy unless there are 2 or more adjacent foes). An elf wizard with a bow averages as much damage, so why is it a concentration spell that can be disrupted? If a caster is not an evoker, Flaming Sphere is even more of a situational spell.

I would say that I would probably remove concentration from about a third of spells that have it. Smite spells are a good candidate. Web for sure. The odds of keeping someone in a Web spell for more than a round or two are extremely small as is. Allowing enemies to dispel the Web completely by just hitting the caster with an attack seems like total overkill.


I think that maybe WotC created so many concentration spells because the designers thought that many encounters would end in 2 to 3 rounds, so having 1 or 2 round effects can be strong. But in our game, the previous DM did not believe in wimpy encounters. If there was going to be an encounter, it was often going to be in the hard to deadly range because why have it if it's mostly an exercise in rolling dice and not very challenging to the players? (to use up resources maybe???) Our encounters often last 3 to 6 rounds. Many of them are real threatening. We are often outnumbered and sometimes, outgunned. Not always, but enough that 1 and 2 round spells tend to be less impressive (considering that the caster uses up 1 round to cast them) than maybe WotC intends. So, concentration just seems to add insult to injury. Obviously, YMMV on that.

 

[Eejit]

If I were to drop concentration from some spells, I might drop some spells like Flaming Sphere. Yeah, if you are an evoker, you can more easily set up some situations where the sphere might damage more than one bad guy and not harm adjacent PCs, but it too is an extremely situational spell. The minor damage only occurs at the end of a foe's turn (except the one foe the caster hits with it once per round), so the foe can often just move away (and in 5E, movement is somewhat easy unless there are 2 or more adjacent foes). An elf wizard with a bow averages as much damage, so why is it a concentration spell that can be disrupted? If a caster is not an evoker, Flaming Sphere is even more of a situational spell.

The thing is even situational spells can be pretty strong when those circumstances arrive. By making it stronger the rest of that time you make it even more powerful when it has its chance to shine.

My group made good use of it a couple of weeks ago when we were pinning a large group of orcs in a bottleneck (doorway) and the flaming sphere behind their lines was causing them all sorts of difficulties as our moon druid rammed it into them and it forced them to re-deploy themselves and put out fires in wooden support beams in the building they were in. This was a fairly protracted fight btw, like over 10 rounds by the end of it, and losing flaming sphere to a concentration check definitely played its part in extending it!

We also have plans to potentially use it against the Orcs' wooden Dreadnought, and if they can't stop us by breaking the concentration it should burn that ship to the waterline easily (especially if our other caster player shows up that day so we have two spheres).


So just... be very careful when tweaking things like that, there can easily be unintended consequences.