D&D General Mike Mearls says control spells are ruining 5th Edition

[FrogReaver]

I always felt control spells were unfun. Either they worked and trivialized an encounter or failed. Now with Magic Resistance and high saves monsters get out of most spells. So what do the designers do? Create Intelligence saves and uncommon damage types like psychic. This needs to stop. Remove energy resistance and immunity. Reduce save values and give control spells a limited time duration. Say 3 rounds with no save per round to end the effect earlier.

Are you trying to make the problem worse?

 

[tetrasodium]

I almost want to make vancian for 5e again and incentivize it somehow ... But I feel like any reasonable incentives would never be strong enough to make it worth taking over the existing system.

There must be existing work others have done in that line for 5e homebrew. But again I can't imagine anyone would use it without it being massively overpowered.

Ive considered it as well and even started spit balling it at one point but 5e really went out of its way to make it hard for someone to make that kind of change without going past major homebrew into full on fantasy heartbreaker. For all of the empty lip service that Crawford gave us over the last decade about how this or that aspect of 5e was designed to make it easier to homebrew and make changes it's remarkably inflexible and difficult to make meaningful changes that impact wargamer side of wargamer/theater kid spread.

It almost feels like something like that would probably take a total rewrite of everything the spells chapter plus a reconsideration for the role of cantrips and rebuilding a few classes that wind up with their class+subclass spaghetti code broken by the results of doing one or both.