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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6518461" data-attributes="member: 2011">Now I know that you are either arguing just to argue, or that you just don't understand at all why some people play casters. Some people play casters to have versatile fun, not to spam the same old lock down spell adventuring day after adventuring day.Locking down some foes, sure. It can be effective. But when one does it over and over again, adventuring day in and adventuring day out? Meh. But, there are no second level fun spells like the explosion one I just described.I'll give you an example of fun from 4E last year. As DM, I had a scenario where every living creature that died in the local area immediately rose from the dead as a zombie. PC, NPC, it didn't matter. So, the PCs were in a room with a pit trap in it. They were outnumbered greatly, but managed to knock a few foes into the pit where they died. The lieutenant NPC had a spell that could knock creatures around and she tried to use it to knock PCs into the pit. This could have been really bad for the party, but somehow, only one PC got knocked into the pit early on and managed to climb back out. Everyone else knocked into the pit (by either the lieutenant, or by a PC) was an NPC and as more and more fell into the pit, the undead in the pit started killing more and more NPCs which resulted in more and more undead.This, on the surface, might not sound especially entertaining to you as a player. At my table, the players were cheering and laughing, in fact, some players were laughing to the point that tears were coming out of their eyes as yet another NPC went into the pit and got attacked by his former allies. In just a few rounds, the combat went from extremely deadly to the PCs to a meat grinder of the NPCs. The game actually came to a halt the players were laughing so hard.I've never seen this type of reaction with a web spell. I see it when cool things like a mini-explosion that knocks some NPCs over a cliff occurs. Cheers occur when the wizard does something cool. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> Locking down a few foes? Meh. Effective maybe, but boring, especially if it is the one trick pony that the wizard has to keep going back to.5E spells are like that to me. Maybe it's because there were more riders in 4E spells, but 5E spells for a low level wizard just seem like spamming the same cantrip over and over until the caster gets to cast his megaspell. And then, that spell often fizzles. To prevent this from happening, the caster starts doing spells like Fog Cloud and Web which tend not to fizzle and modify which PCs get attacked and how many NPCs attacks occur, combined with the occasional Magic Missile or Burning Hands or Scorching Ray or some such in order to do as much damage as the martial types do every encounter.I'm actually glad that all of the watering down and restrictions of 5E spells works for your game, but if you cannot understand that it might not work at every table, then we really do not have anything else to discuss. It's fine for you, it's boring and repetitive to me. C'est la via.Wizards only get a few highest level spells. When a wizard pulls out one of those, he should be more badass than when the fighter does his extra attack every single round. That's not necessarily (and usually isn't) the case. That's the problem with 5E spells. They watered them down so much that the spell caster doesn't often shine, even when he pulls out his best spells.As an example, Silence is no longer mobile. Hence, Silence is next to worthless except in the most limited of circumstances. It used to have three main functions. Take out a caster, allow the party to move and sneak silently, and allow the party to prevent sound from going into an area (like through a door or down a hallway). The first function can sometimes, maybe, once in a blue moon happen, and the second never happens. So, only the third function works like it used to and that's the function that Silence, at least IME, was used the least for. So the spell has gone from one of the best spells for when it was useful to an extremely situational so so spell.Yes, it CAN work in 5E if a different PC locks down the caster that a PC wants to Silence, but with concentration and all of the other limitations imposed in 5E, the PC cannot just cast the spell and shine himself. He's forced to do it in either relatively tight quarters, or he has to have some other PC lock his target down first (which can happen if you have another PC in the group designed for grappling). Yeah, I get the whole teamwork thing, but whenever a PC caster's shining relies on teamwork, the first casualty of any battle is the plan. Seen it happen over and over again. And having the Cleric or Ranger prep Silence day after day after adventuring day on the off chance that the PCs both a) run into a spell caster that they cannot just handle without Silence, and b) have the perfect storm of lockdown which allows their Silence to actually work, to then watch either the lockdown not work, or the Silence get disrupted with a failed Con save, just seems like the opposite of fun to me.It might be fun for your PC to prep Silence for gaming months on end and have it not work for one reason or another (or worse yet, you cast it on the wimpy NPC mage who couldn't do much of anything in the first place), but that does not sound like fun to me. Sorry. Different preferences for a PC spell caster.</blockquote>

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