D&D (2024) It Is 2025 And Save Or Suck Spells Still Suck (the fun out of the game)

[Eric V]

And that's even assuming your players aren't willing to engage in a counterspell war (I don't even know the spell, just because I was in an AL game where three party members had it)!

I sympathize with the whole of your post, but this part right here? This is what made us switch game systems. I was converting all my awesome 2e Al-Qadim stuff to 5e, and for a while it was good, but...the main enemies tend to be spellcasters, and 2 of the PCs had counterspell. That was that. Trivialized encounters.

 

[Horwath]

I don't like all or nothing stuff. IMO action economy needs more of a gradient.

I.e.
Everyone has ~5 actions, bosses can have more.
Getting stunned means you lose 1-4 actions
Stunned doesn't stack, just take the highest.

Or maybe.
Suggestions only works against creatures with less than 10 * the spell level of current hit points (maybe 10 + a roll vs Wis or whatever). Beat someone up first before you dominate them.

6 seconds, 6 action points per turn.

 

[mellored]

I don't like all or nothing stuff. IMO action economy needs more of a gradient.

I.e.
Everyone has ~5 actions, bosses can have more.
Getting stunned means you lose 1-4 actions
Stunned doesn't stack, just take the highest.

Or maybe.
Suggestions only works against creatures with less than 10 * the spell level of current hit points (maybe 10 + a roll vs Wis or whatever). Beat someone up first before you dominate them.

Just to toss out a more 5e compatible option, which was already used at least on one monster (hydra? Etten?)

Bosses get multiple turns. I.e. initiative -5 and initiative -15. With a saving throw at the start of each of them.

Thus if you land Stun, they lose 1/3 of their damage.

 

[evilbob]

A level 4 PC should be topping out at around +6 to hit. Even with attacks of opportunity the AC18 dragon should be tanking a lot of hits.

If your players can deal 127 damage in two rounds to an AC 18 creature then you probably need to use higher CR creatures to challenge them.

Advantage isn't the 100% guarantee at level 4 vs. level 11+, but I've found you can generally assume PCs have advantage in 5.5, so +6 is more like +11. I suspect that contributes to the feeling that encounter design is all over the place. The OP's original assumption about the encounter's challenge was reasonable! Saying that it should have been harder is both true and unhelpful.

That's part of what this thread is about IMO: 5.5 PCs seem far more powerful, and the success rate of save-or-suck spells is part of that. However, this clearly isn't everyone's experience. I'm curious as to what is the difference.

 

[Eric V]

That just exacerbates the faulty D&D design of higher level casters having essentially useless low level slots.

Really casting needs a complete overhaul along with save or suck spells.

Would having SoS spells be subject to hp gatekeeping resolve the issue somewhat? 13thAge does this; you can paralyze someone, but you need to beat them down a bit first.

 

[SlyFlourish]

That is interesting: what if the Gm gets "Doom Points" based on encounter numbers disparity? That is, the ratio of PCs to monsters (as the encounter is designed) equals the number of Doom points/LRs the GM starts the encounter with. So if it is 4 PCs against a boss monster and its lieutenant, then the GM gets 2 Doom Points.

I've done this in my games. Some bosses get one or two doom points (I call them "dreadful blessings" in my game and they're usually tied into the story like having the Blessing of the Nameless King or the Blessings of Ibbalan). Bigger bosses at higher levels get more. I wing the amount but once I've decided on the amount, the players know how many there are. I have little Shadow of the Demon Lord tokens I put on the table. Online, I make it clear how many doom points a boss has and how many they've spent.

Because I can basically use doom points for anything, I end up using them faster than legendary resistance (they replace LR for my legendary monsters). This means players can see them being burned faster than normal, which they like.

Before using doom points, my players essentially ignored them and just didn't cast anything that they worried would be affected by LR. But now, they're willing to burn them down because they burn down fast enough that it's worth while.

I've used them now in three different games at tier 2 and tier 3 and my players have pretty much universally liked them. They get the point of them and find them less annoying than pure LR which is interesting.

Flavor-wise, I have some in-world flavor for them and I don't feel like they're forcing a story. Instead, I feel like the save or suck spells are forcing the story out of whack. Powerful shouldn't be trivial encounters. That's the break in the story, not letting them remain powerful and threatening. Powerful and threatening is the story.

 

[Zardnaar]

Are you referring to Wild Magic?

That was one of the first things that I vowed that I would either hack (eg, make my own table of wild effects that fit my campaign theme better) or just ban outright from play.

Nope twin spell on things like tashas, command, tashas mind whip, hold person, hold monster.

 

[M_Natas]

The big problem is encounter design and action economy.
D&D5e (and 2024?) assume 1 Monster vs Party as the standard encounter.
Save or Suck effects benefit the party in this situation greatly, because only one PC needs to succeed with its safe or suck effect to negate a whole round for the Monsters.
So using safe or suck effects makes logical sense. It is a very efficient use of ressources for the players.

If gets way less efficient, if you have more monsters.
If you have one PC vs. one Monster, safe or suck effects are less efficient, because now you are not negating the whole enemy round but only one of 4 enemy actions that would happen that round.

So build encounters as 1 vs 1 standard, and a lot of problems go away.

 

[Kannik]

solo monsters are always bad idea for encounter, action economy will be the end of them.

Solos are better when built/run as having multiple actions per round, which avoids the action economy issue. This can also avoid the "one save and be done" concern either by allowing additional saves on each of these turns or having other immunities or abilities to automagically end effects.

 

[TheSword]

Advantage isn't the 100% guarantee at level 4 vs. level 11+, but I've found you can generally assume PCs have advantage in 5.5, so +6 is more like +11. I suspect that contributes to the feeling that encounter design is all over the place. The OP's original assumption about the encounter's challenge was reasonable! Saying that it should have been harder is both true and unhelpful.

That's part of what this thread is about IMO: 5.5 PCs seem far more powerful, and the success rate of save-or-suck spells is part of that. However, this clearly isn't everyone's experience. I'm curious as to what is the difference.

How do you figure that? I understand why for fighters and rogues if they are using a vex weapon - which is a pretty specific choice (and unlikely to be every attack) but how is everyone else doing that?