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

[Maxperson]

I'm going to push back on this a bit. IMO, if a "best" strategy is not fun, then it is not the best strategy!

Call it "most successful strategy" then.

 

[Remathilis]

PCs getting taken out of action by all-or-nothing control spells was never any fun, but at least in early editions like B/X or AD&D the effects did not usually take up much real session time due to faster combat rounds. Players generally had fewer options and fewer decisions to make. Combat rounds could pass quickly if the dice gods frowned on both players and DM, with all sides whiffing repeatedly.

Nowadays combat seems to take much longer to play out fewer rounds, so being left out lasts longer in real time. Scarce play time is generally more valuable to busy adults than it is to kids or teens, so I can understand why people don’t want to waste a big chunk of a session cooling their heels in a magical penalty box.

I keep saying that you can only speed up combat by severe restrictions on available actions. You would have to cut bonus actions, reactions, pets and summons, and a large chunk of class features to make combat fast enough to finish a character turn quick. Unfortunately, that would also mean characters don't have much more to do than attack, cast a spell, move, or use a class feature (like turn undead) and it would be very boring and repetitive.

 

[mearls]

The idea that players will optimize the fun out of a game is an old one. For a TTRPG, the design challenge comes in finding ways to give DMs the tools to keep their games fun. If the DM is bored, the game probably ends.

Competitive games have solved that adjusting the environment. A video game might introduce a balance patch. In a card game like Magic, a new set comes out and strategies shift to account for the new cards.

D&D is really weird compared to other games in that the company publishing it has never acknowledged the metagame. Instead, we get new editions that throw out the old game and replace it with a new one. On balance, a new edition usually introduces as many problems as it solves. Sometimes it solves more than it breaks, or vice versa.

I think it would be a lot healthier for D&D, and probably a lot better for its business, if the game evolved slowly, rather than asking its audience to dump its old content in favor of new stuff every few years.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I keep saying that you can only speed up combat by severe restrictions on available actions. You would have to cut bonus actions, reactions, pets and summons, and a large chunk of class features to make combat fast enough to finish a character turn quick. Unfortunately, that would also mean characters don't have much more to do than attack, cast a spell, move, or use a class feature (like turn undead) and it would be very boring and repetitive.

I'd argue that to speed up combat, you need to decrease granularity, which is in line with your thinking here, but a little akimbo. Bonus actions and reactions, sure, but pets and summons are probably still viable, just not on a "I control your entire turn" kind of level. And the "boring and repetitive" thing only really applies if you don't, in fact, speed up combat, or if combat is something you want a lot of in your game. If you only spend 5-10 minutes in a fight, you're whipping through fights in the span of what we now spend in a whole turn, and that's a lot more dynamic than waiting for Chad to determine the optimal use of his bonus action. And if you still only have 1-3 fights in a session, simpler moves and fewer options can remain impactful and diverse "enough."

I don't want to really return to the days where fighters only had one option in a fight, but I would like to have a modern D&D game where a turn takes about a minute, where there's maybe 2-3 options for each turn and they are big and dramatic and obviously different, and after we roll 2 dice, we move on.

The challenge, of course, is combining that with a game that can have more tactical decision-making and more options in a fight if the group wants to turn that on for an encounter.

Because most D&D groups want to be able to do both, and D&D has only ever been able to do one or the other (and when it did faster fights, it had other issues, too).

 

[Basic Expert]

A lot of this depends on the experience you value as a player or as a DM.

A certain player desires victory more than anything. They want combats in which they can contrive an overpowered solution to (say a potent control spell from command to Tasha's to forcecage or what have you). They feel good about dominating the combat and smart for selecting "the most OP option". They will be happy cakewalking through the entire campaign in such a fashion. I, on the other hand, don't know how "smart" one can really be for taking the obviously BEST spells at each level (or Googling "most OP build and spells" and following that advice), but people can play any way they want.

Some DMs might not see a problem with the above player, and continue to feed them a series of under-tuned encounters that play out almost the exact same way. These DMs are probably under-represented in these sorts of forums but are undoubtedly out there. If they and their groups don't have a problem with their play, there's no problem. Play on.

I on the other hand, value situation and a variety of game experiences. I would quickly loose interest in a campaign in which every encounter played out in the same over-tuned, optimized fashion. I want the fight with the Goblin Horde in the Fire Pits feel fundamentally different from the fight with the Minotaur Death Knight. That goes as a player or as a DM. Any rule system that doesn't support this out of the box, and can be relatively easily over-ridden by OP build options and one-trick ponies is a non-starter for me.

It helps that I don't value the character builder mini-game of Spreadsheets & Splatbooks. Plotting out the perfect 1-20 character build for maximum effectiveness holds no appeal to me. Once again, the OP builds are relatively easy to find in most systems and easy enough to Google. I generally prefer rules-light systems with less character complexity wherein the emphasis is on the "character" rather than the "character build".

Unfortunately, most games with less complex characters usually pair this with less complex rules in general, such as the basic combat system. Many OSR games have a simple fighter with a simple attack option to be repeated each round. Now we're getting back into the "every encounter is the same" territory.

The solution to having simple, repetitive attacks is to have a solid array of situational options (fight defensively, fight aggressively, attempt a disarm or other trick, and so on) in the basic combat system. These must have meaningful, situational limitations to them. If disarm is ALWAYS the best option, then it will always be used. Power Attack in 3e was like this--virtually always used as it was mathematically superior. Is it hard balancing these sorts of options? YES. Does a competently-written system need to include a reasonable amount of balance between options? Also YES.

This is the same solution to seemingly-OP spells and similar abilities. They MUST have meaningful limitations to them (outside of expending spell slots and the like, which hold true for all such abilities). There should be situations for which they are flat-out inappropriate.

Should command work against undead? Or against those that don't speak the language of the caster? It never used to, now it does. The spell goes from situational and thematic ability to a cool-ability button press. Easier to use, certainly, but resulting in better gameplay? Not in my mind.

Most of 5e's magic has been denuded of all style and substance to make it maximally utile for players. I can understand the impetus for these changes. It lowers the barrier for entry into playing spellcasters (spells are easy to understand and use, without a ton of fine print getting in the way) and it increases spellcasting in general (more magic = more fun!). The same goes for increased spell slots, hybrid Vancian casting and similar changes.

However, in making all of this easier and more straight-forward while maintaining power, you are definitely in danger of losing balance. Power-Usability-Balance (choose two).

Limitations tend to work best if the players can work to overcome them, or make choices or tradeoffs. If command only works on enemies that can understand the caster...what's orcish for "Grovel"? Maybe try and find out. That gives challenge and texture to gameplay which, again, I favor.

For those playing 5e, a wholesale rewriting of the magic system is probably not in the cards, so you're left with the following options:
1. Ignore the problem and have fun regardless. Results may vary.
2. Talk to your players or fellow players about not always spamming OP combinations or power-building characters. If these are ruining anyone's fun (including the DM's), just have a conversation about it. See how everyone feels and adjust. Results may vary.
3. Ramp up the challenge or adapt to the players' strategize with OP combinations of your own. As a DM you hold the high ground and all the advantages. "Wait, when did dire wolves learn counterspell and dispel magic?!?!" "Uhh, the Wolf God taught them, deal with it!" Results may vary.
4. Switch systems. Maybe 5e isn't the right system for your group and you want to try something different. However, few if any games are perfect and each comes with their own "peculiarities". Results may vary.

 

[Remathilis]

The idea that players will optimize the fun out of a game is an old one. For a TTRPG, the design challenge comes in finding ways to give DMs the tools to keep their games fun. If the DM is bored, the game probably ends.

Competitive games have solved that adjusting the environment. A video game might introduce a balance patch. In a card game like Magic, a new set comes out and strategies shift to account for the new cards.

D&D is really weird compared to other games in that the company publishing it has never acknowledged the metagame. Instead, we get new editions that throw out the old game and replace it with a new one. On balance, a new edition usually introduces as many problems as it solves. Sometimes it solves more than it breaks, or vice versa.

I think it would be a lot healthier for D&D, and probably a lot better for its business, if the game evolved slowly, rather than asking its audience to dump its old content in favor of new stuff every few years.

The problem i see is that barring organized play, their is no enforcement mechanism for balance patches. If you introduce Wish the PHB and it's broken, there is no way to replace Wish with Fixed Wish except by DMs to be aware Fixed Wish exists and manually enforce it at their table. The "making the DM aware" is the hard part because Gods know how many DMs bother to check that errata exists (I still have conversations with people who don't know Conjure Minor Elementals was nerfed) and publishing fixes in supplements creates confusion on which version is correct (i believe Goliath and orcs all got multiple versions printed in multiple books on their way to the 24 PHB).

The only way you can enforce incremental change like that is via a digital distribution (like Beyond) where you literally replace Wish with Fixed Wish. Other than that, I don't know how you make it work outside of wiping the slate every few years.

 

[Remathilis]

I'd argue that to speed up combat, you need to decrease granularity, which is in line with your thinking here, but a little akimbo. Bonus actions and reactions, sure, but pets and summons are probably still viable, just not on a "I control your entire turn" kind of level. And the "boring and repetitive" thing only really applies if you don't, in fact, speed up combat, or if combat is something you want a lot of in your game. If you only spend 5-10 minutes in a fight, you're whipping through fights in the span of what we now spend in a whole turn, and that's a lot more dynamic than waiting for Chad to determine the optimal use of his bonus action. And if you still only have 1-3 fights in a session, simpler moves and fewer options can remain impactful and diverse "enough."

I don't want to really return to the days where fighters only had one option in a fight, but I would like to have a modern D&D game where a turn takes about a minute, where there's maybe 2-3 options for each turn and they are big and dramatic and obviously different, and after we roll 2 dice, we move on.

The challenge, of course, is combining that with a game that can have more tactical decision-making and more options in a fight if the group wants to turn that on for an encounter.

Because most D&D groups want to be able to do both, and D&D has only ever been able to do one or the other (and when it did faster fights, it had other issues, too).

That's the balancing act. We want characters to get cool toys so we don't end up with 20 levels of "I attack" as your only meaningful option, but the more we feed the game limited resources, tactical abilities, weapon properties, bonus actions, reactions, and dozens of spell choices available every round, the more we bog down the game with rules referencing, analysis paralysis, and lots of dice math. I don't yet know where that sweet spot lies.

 

[Minigiant]

The challenge, of course, is combining that with a game that can have more tactical decision-making and more options in a fight if the group wants to turn that on for an encounter.

• Attack
• Defend
• Engage
• Disengage
• Use Magic
• Dash

With free movement within. That's plenty of tactical options for a complex combat while focusing down the options to be powered up for fodder fights.

What control spells is very simple and it seems that the majority of the community agrees. You can delete weaker and insignificant encounters with control spells but you cannot do so with stronger and boss encounters. We just make the math character abilities and monster abilities match that.

The only issue is we have to as a community not reflexively go "Ew I don't like it" just because it looks different..

 

[Minigiant]

The problem i see is that barring organized play, their is no enforcement mechanism for balance patches. If you introduce Wish the PHB and it's broken, there is no way to replace Wish with Fixed Wish except by DMs to be aware Fixed Wish exists and manually enforce it at their table. The "making the DM aware" is the hard part because Gods know how many DMs bother to check that errata exists (I still have conversations with people who don't know Conjure Minor Elementals was nerfed) and publishing fixes in supplements creates confusion on which version is correct (i believe Goliath and orcs all got multiple versions printed in multiple books on their way to the 24 PHB).

The only way you can enforce incremental change like that is via a digital distribution (like Beyond) where you literally replace Wish with Fixed Wish. Other than that, I don't know how you make it work outside of wiping the slate every few years.

It's mostly a money problem.

D&D doesn't get the grace of the games get where people would allow for it to edit balance and errata issues that come up because of missed gaps in play testing.

NOR

Is D&D ever allowed to go through enough play testing for the amount of times and tests needed to create the base structure that you would build off of without going years of poor profit and poor sales due to it openly advertising a new addition.

Most other games can simply go into the new edition and fix problems while keeping some of the same base mostly because by the time they do so they have little real sales of their old edition to lose. The old game is dead so as long as they have the funding for the development phase they can go 2-4 years in testing.

D&D only had that luxury one time when Wizards had initially bought it and were redesigning their system because it was dead.

 

[Zardnaar]

Interesting that the Civilization games came up in this conversation. Turn-based 4X strategy games for desktop PCs would not seem to share many design issues with tabletop RPGs, but that series has seen a kind of arms race between the game designers and certain subsets of hard core players who keep finding exploits or novel strategies that allow them to beat the game in ways the designers did not anticipate. Other game series have similar issues.

In the 2010s I played lots of Civ V, and I learned a lot by lurking on the forums at CivFanatics and (to a lesser extent) Steam. There was lots of discussion of “wide” strategies (claiming lots of territory with small cities and minimal cheap infrastructure) vs. “tall” strategies (building up a few advanced but expensive cities), and how different editions of the game encouraged or discouraged these strategies.

Many players don’t care much about the actual victory conditions. Some play in sandbox mode, or play only the early stages of the game (widely considered to be the most fun) before quitting and starting a new game once victory seems assured. Other players approach Civ like chess grand masters, interested only in playing to win with the fewest moves on the hardest mode. I preferred playing on a slightly easier mode than necessary, so I could mess around with historical accuracy, counterfactuals, and other fun approaches that were not 100% optimized.

In hard mode the rival NPC civilizations (nicknamed “AIs” in the jargon of the CivFanatics forums ) did not get to use better tactics or strategy, they just got to “cheat” by getting a bunch of bonus stuff at the start. Rather than program tougher computer opponents for the human players, the game designers just gave the AI factions a big head start. There were modders in the fan community who managed to program smarter AI for their Steam mods, so presumably the professionals could have done it too.

The only way to win consistently on hard mode was to exploit the general incompetence of the AI whenever it tried to fight wars or maneuver troops on a one-unit-per-tile (1UPT) map, as seen in classic war games. Skilled hard mode players learned to completely ignore the game’s intended focus on developing culture by building great cities full of World Wonders. Instead they played as the Huns or Mongols, and burned the world to the ground because the computer did not know how to fight back.

Years earlier, players of Civ I and II had developed a remarkably similar strategy called “Infinite City Sprawl” (ICS), in which the player spammed the map with crummy little cities that just pumped out cannon fodder troops for human waves and zerg rushes. Instead of switching to a modern but expensive form of government like Communism or Democracy as intended, ICS players would keep the primitive but cheap Despotism through the whole game.

The designers of Civ III nerfed ICS by hitting distant cities, far from their capital at the edge of the empire,
with crippling levels of waste and corruption. This had the unintended consequence of wrecking all large empires, especially overseas empires. Civ III turned out to be one of the less popular entries in the franchise, while its successor Civ IV was widely considered to be a return to form, and is a fan favorite to this day.

Civ V tried to make “tall” empires with few cities more competitive by punishing “wide” empires with arbitrary, nonsensical penalties that scaled up as empires grew. This also meant punishing the core gameplay loop of the very same 4X genre which the series had once pioneered. Civ III & IV had an issue dubbed “Stack of Death (or Doom)” - the AIs built huge, unrealistic stacks of troops. 1UPT was meant to stop that, but unfortunately nobody remembered to teach the AI how to actually fight a war...

Some of the discussions on CivFanatics remind me of the D&D Edition Wars. Players will naturally develop new play styles, and do surprising things with a game if the rules provide an incentive. Designers need to decide what their game is really about, and figure out how to reward the kind of play they want to see in a fun way.

CiV III had those strategies at cov fanatics years ago. Hell I wrote some of them lol.

ICS was still a thing in civ 3. Abused with feudalism government for a massive army.

Running on Sid was the gold standard. Once we figured that out winning on deity and sid using 5 city challenge or 1 city challenge became a thing. Managed to beat deity with 5 cities cant remember if I did 1. Won with 1 city in Civ revolutions.

Tall vs Wide still a thing in various games. I prefer tall due to micro in games like Stellaris.