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

[Lanefan]

What if we designed a game such that those two motives lead to the same outcomes? Designed it so that trying to keep your character alive (while, I assume, accomplishing their goals) is entertaining the audience--namely, the other players and the GM.

Unfortunately, I don't think the latter part of that can be designed. The entertainment piece has to come from the people at the table, and will or won't do so pretty much regardless of the system design.

For your group, I certainly believe that. But conversely, if that were to be consistently the outcome, I'm fairly sure even your group would grow bored with it.

Agreed.

Other groups have a lower tolerance for anticlimax. Indeed, I would say most players appreciate anticlimax as a sometimes food, in part because its presence is evidence that their choices really do matter and that they can (in a limited, local sense) "win" when they believe they shouldn't have. (And, likewise, being forced to retreat--which is something I support being included in a game's design, believe it or not!--is good because, again, it can show that their choices matter in the other direction, and that they can "lose" when they believe they shouldn't have.)

Again agreed. I'm not after anticlimax all the time; I just want it to be able to happen, just like I want the opposite - flee for your lives and leave the fallen where they lie - to also be able to happen.

D&D design (in 4e and 5e anyway) has been trending away from both these extremes in pursuit of the middle, which also gets boring after a while.

The great majority of folks generally want decent-to-good pacing and satisfying conclusions. Anticlimax as a sometimes food can be a satisfying conclusion. Having it as a staple leaves a bad taste. And that, right there, is also a fact of life--and one no quantity of rules or design or style will ever alter.

Three for three on agreement - hell must be getting cold!

You don't see the experience of play as resembling the experience of cinema or story.

Not in the moment, no. In hindsight, sure, the game logs will end up telling a story of some sort. In the moment, though, I don't want to have to even think about that meta-side of it as a player and prefer to pay, at most, wave-in-the-distance attention to it as DM.

That's fair. Unfortunately for you, most people do see at least some similarity between those experiences, and as a result, they want certain components, like pacing, rising and falling action, satisfying conclusions, and a perceptible (but not necessarily obvious) "arc" or "direction" for how things went.

The main problem I've found with "satisfying conclusions" is that it can be hard to get rolling again after one occurs. Things tend to stall, which isn't a good thing for an ongoing campaign. There's ways to mitigate this, but it can take a lot of trial, error, and recognition to figure out what they are and how to implement them without using too big a hammer.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

I know this is 20 pages back but I wanted to address it.

As noted several times in this thread, control spells are not innately OP, they just tend to be OP against single monster encounters.

So from a design perspective, it makes all the sense in the world to target the boss monster for chance (which directly addresses the boss monster issue) instead of the changing the spell (which impacts all encounters, some of which needed no change).

It’s scalpel vs hammer

Then Legendary Resistances must stay because the single enemy boss encounter is, quite frankly, a much older and deeper part of core fantasy experience than all these control spells, it goes as far as they mythology, where usually big monsters were indeed singular - Typhor, Tiamat, Ymir - and/or taken down in one on one duels. If you hate Legendary Resistance, then all these spells need to be nerfed.

 

[Zardnaar]

Then Legendary Resistances must stay because the single enemy boss encounter is, quite frankly, a much older and deeper part of core fantasy experience than all these control spells, it goes as far as they mythology, where usually big monsters were indeed singular - Typhor, Tiamat, Ymir - and/or taken down in one on one duels. If you hate Legendary Resistance, then all these spells need to be nerfed.

Yup. Or legendary resistance, 4,5,6 12?

 

[Flying Toaster]

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.

Yep. In other words... B/X and AD&D combat! Or OSR games designed to recapture that spirit.

What you describe sounds a lot like the repetitive loop of “swing magic long sword” that had me complaining about boring 1E combats circa 1988. It did not help that some of the stricter DMs I played with back in the day saw attempts to try creative combat moves as “cheating”, because they had read Gygax’s stern advice in the 1E DMG or Dragon editorials and interpreted it to mean “if it is not in the official AD&D rules, you cannot do it” (ironically, a far cry from the freewheeling spirit of 70's OD&D and EGG’s actual Greyhawk campaign). Ironic that the kind of swashbuckling maneuvers we learned not to bother trying are now part of the official rules.

2E introduced more character customization options in both the core rulebooks and the splatbooks, so there were more decisions to make during Session Zero, but retained the core of the AD&D rules. In my group’s experience 2E streamlined some of the clunkier rules enough for combat to actually flow a bit faster than it did in 1E, even when using the optional d10 individual initiative system. We had never even tried to use the excruciating official 1E initiative rules, but had used the side-based d6 that most groups seem to have retained from B/X or BECMI.

I missed the edition wars during a long hiatus from tabletop games, but even I can tell that the biggest difference between early and recent editions is the introduction of feats and combat options that are obviously popular with players, but slow down combat and introduce lots of complexity for DMs trying to run boss monsters and NPC spellcasters. The OSR was at least in part a direct response to the long, slow combats of games in the D&D3/PF1 family of games. I am actually interested in learning PF2 in order to see what a game is like when it has been designed with a finely tuned action economy that is (AFAIK) more complex than 5E, but less complex than 3E. I have seen PF2 compared to D&D 4E, but do not know how accurate that comparison is.

Over the last half century D&D has evolved from relatively light rules (B/X, BECMI, AD&D) to very crunchy rules favoring optimized character builds (3E), and now the current D&D5 family of games (including Level Up, Tales of the Valiant, etc) seems like a compromise between two opposing camps. The 5E compromise has been very successful in recruiting lots of new fans to the TTRPG hobby, but compromises will rarely satisfy purists of any type. So it is good that those purists have other games to play, because I do not expect to see D&D return to either the rules-light OSR style or the high crunch of 3E. But who knows! Prediction is hard.

 

[Flying Toaster]

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.

This comment reminds me again of the Civilization games. In a 2014 interview with Ars Technica, franchise creator Sid Meier said that the Civ team at Firaxis had a “rule of thirds” design philosophy for new Civilization entries: one-third traditional gameplay, one-third improvements on the last entry, and one-third brand new ideas. Each new edition has introduced features that have been hailed by some as just what the franchise needed, while proving to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for players who were mostly satisfied with what they had. The arguments between the various camps on the CivFanatics forums were remarkably similar to those seen in the D&D Edition Wars, because they involve the same core tension between fixing problems and leaving well enough alone (“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”).

But what happens when people disagree about what is broken and needs fixing? Even if the game designers have a coherent philosophy, there will always be disagreement among fans about what the game should be. Designers may not be able to accommodate all preferences even with optional rules. Instead of chasing trends, second guessing themselves, or giving up on new editions altogether, designers ought to think about what they really want to do, because balancing different imperatives is never easy.

It might well be beneficial for the D&D design team to be more forthcoming about their goals. I have not read them yet, but apparently the Daggerheart rules go into a surprising amount of detail about exactly what they intended to do with their game design, what kind of play you can or cannot expect from the game, what other games they drew on for inspiration, and even an admission that the game is not for everyone (something which really ought to be routine, but instead feels like bracing honesty).

I was first drawn to EN World by M.T. Black’s ongoing series of articles on old Dragon magazines, and one of the recurring themes is the evolution of Gary Gygax’s ideas on game design. There was an editorial in an early issue from the late 70’s (wish I could remember the number...) in which he expressed deep ambivalence about how the gaming hobby was turning into an industry. He even asked whether game companies should be chasing profits by cranking out an endless series of new variants and supplements, requiring players to choose between shelling out money indefinitely or jumping off the treadmill. He almost sounded like an old 60’s hippie, or one of my fellow 90’s Gen-Xers complaining about rock stars selling out! Deeply ironic considering how early this was in the history of the RPG hobby, and the very commercial direction that TSR would take just a few years later. Of course without new editions or supplements, every game would be a one-and-done, and most likely no one could even make a living making games, let alone make profits.

I sometimes wonder what it is like in that alternate Prime Material Plane where mellow 70’s Wargamer Gary chose not to polymorph into uptight 80’s Corporate Gary. Did D&D continue to dominate the industry, or did it fade into a historical footnote as some other game took over? But then I love counterfactuals.

 

[Distracted DM]

It might well be beneficial for the D&D design team to be more forthcoming about their goals. I have not read them yet, but apparently the Daggerheart rules go into a surprising amount of detail about exactly what they intended to do with their game design, what kind of play you can or cannot expect from the game, what other games they drew on for inspiration, and even an admission that the game is not for everyone (something which really ought to be routine, but instead feels like bracing honesty).

We had this kind of personalized writing in 3.Xe, where the designers would speak to the reader and tell them what their intent was and why they did things they way they chose to. I couldn't tell you which books it was in, because I'm sure it wasn't in all of them, but the ones that had it like Red Hand of Doom were the books I ended up going back to repeatedly.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I sometimes wonder what it is like in that alternate Prime Material Plane where mellow 70’s Wargamer Gary chose not to polymorph into uptight 80’s Corporate Gary.

My personal experience is that zero war gamers are mellow. They are the most meticulous and uptight types I have ever met. Statistics says they must exist, but my mind boggles at the notion of a war gamer saying "just move 12 inches, 13 inches, whatever. No biggie. We're just here to have fun, don't let the rules get in the way."