D&D 5E Mechanics you don't want to see, ever

[doctorbadwolf]

So if another player uses a Wish to turn your character into half your height or twice your height, or to drastically alter your alignment or make you donate all your gold or soemthing, what would you do?

Those are perfectly valid uses of a wish mechanically. You should get a saving throw, but let's say you failed it. Then what?

I’d tell the other player no. And because my table aren’t a-holes, it wouldn’t happen.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Sacrosanct]

Since it’s just my opinion, damage on a miss, and non magical healing back to full on long rests.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I’d tell the other player no. And because my table aren’t a-holes, it wouldn’t happen.

Well, this never happened at our table. But we did have a NE character "cursed" to a new alignment and has been LG ever since (most of his levels, actually). The player grumbles about it at times, but plays him as a very brutish LG. The rest of us laugh when the DM tells him his actions are against his cursed alignment, he sighs, and smiles and goes along with it... that's the game after all.

I am hoping the OP will respond as I am curious as to how he would handle it...

 

[BigBadDM]

Multi-classing because of the melted cheese.

 

[pogre]

Armor soak rules and damage on a miss.

 

[Lanefan]

I've played a Wild Magic sorcerer, and some of the wild surges change your appearance, age, etc. Those that temporary change your appearance are amusing, but some are permanent change, which are a problem and I can understand if one refuse to accept it, or simply not want to play that character anymore.

Ah. For us, changes like that are an occasional fact of life; as wild magic surges (WMS) are an underlying, if infrequent, risk of using any magic.

And given what else WMS can do to you, someone else, or the surrounding neighbourhood, appearance change is really quite an innocuous outcome.

 

[Lanefan]

• XP loss - this was probably a worse effect than death in AD&D, creating radical party imbalance; worse in 3E when death also meant level loss

Totally disagree on this one. Yes level loss is bad - and that's the whole point! Lose a level or two or three and you either have to do a lot of adventuring to catch up or find a very high level Cleric and pay through the nose for a (Greater) Restoration. In broader terms, given as how death has been made relatively trivial to overcome there need to be other things in the game that can really seriously knock a PC backward long-term. Level loss is one such.

And yes, 3e and 4e didn't handle varying in-party levels very well, but all the other editions do.

And does this also mean you'd never want to see random XP gain mechanics e.g. one of those Tomes that bestows a level on whoever reads it?

 

[Lanefan]

I’d tell the other player no. And because my table aren’t a-holes, it wouldn’t happen.

A-holes or not, if something in the game - be it another player, an opponent, a random magic effect, or whatever - does something to you that you can't/don't resist (either by failing a save or because there isn't one) then IMO for better or worse you're stuck with it.

In most if not all cases there's spells and effects in the game that can later mitigate or negate these things anyway - revival effects for death, restoration or curatives for a variety of other things, and wish-miracle-alter reality if you really need a bigger hammer - thus making pretty much any effect more or less temporary.

Sports analogy: a hockey player plays because s/he enjoys playing the game and is maybe even halfway good at it, but still has to accept that there'll be times when some seriously un-fun stuff happens such as season-ending injuries.

 

[Umbran]

A-holes or not, if something in the game - be it another player, an opponent, a random magic effect, or whatever - does something to you that you can't/don't resist (either by failing a save or because there isn't one) then IMO for better or worse you're stuck with it.

There are limits. There are things you don't do to a PC without the player's consent.

Exactly what those things are will vary from table to table. But, a blanket, "Well you failed your save, so they get to do what they want," is not generally acceptable.