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

[Maxperson]

I see this said often "buckets of hp". Were monsters deal in 1 turn in older editions? Because in my experience, even monsters with "buckets of hp" die in 3 rounds of combat. Less, usually. PC's also deal buckets of damage (which is fun). Is this an actual problem in 5e?

Damage was also much lower in 1e and 2e. 3e brought in an increase in damage and hit points.

 

[Parmandur]

The full take is a lot more nuanced. Specifically:

The problem isn't that control spells ruin 5e, it's that they specifically ruin difficult encounters against one hard threat. And that Legendary Resistance is a bit of a kludge to make that not true.

And I'm fond of his more specific reactions, though I think they're maybe a little narrow. Like I've pointed out in other threads, D&D 5e has limited distinctions for encounters that are basically "resource attrition" and encounters that are meant to be more tactical showcases against powerful and deadly opponents.

Basically, "boss encounters" vs. "the dungeon itself is the boss, and this encounter is one of its attacks."

In the former, control spells are a problem that we need something like Legendary Resistance or these moves Mearls thought of here to solve for, since we WANT a multi-round conflict where most every hit or miss or resource expenditure matters. In the latter, control spells are just another way to mitigate damage and take out what the dungeon can throw at you.

D&D's got a lot of the former, though it grew up in the latter, and this is one of the friction points.

I think this gets to the heart of the matter, and shows why the 5E game works with fairly little friction if the latter approach is used.

 

[TiQuinn]

I should also note that back in 2e days, Magic users would focus their attention more on buffing the melee PCs and protecting them when dealing with Magic resistant monsters. We just pivoted our tactics.

 

[Maxperson]

Mearls is talking about the 2014 D&D 5e, because he can't be talking about the 2024 version, as he was laid off before that and was working on MtG for years at that point.

The math didn't change. 5.5e only made minor changes to things in order to keep backwards compatibility, so the base problems of 5e are still present. So yes, he can be talking about 5.5e as well.

 

[mearls]

Also, I don’t know what you guys did in closed testing, but during the open playtest you got a lot of your feedback from people playing through the Caves of Chaos and Isles of Dread. It’s no surprise that the game that came out of that works quite well for that dungeon-as-opponent style of gameplay. Unfortunately the game ended up being discovered by an audience that really had no interest in using it for that purpose. It must be pretty surreal to have designed a top-of-the-line screwdriver, only for it to catch on as a tool for driving nails… and then for that audience to complain that it doesn’t dive nails very well, while insisting they don’t want a hammer, they like using your screwdriver, they just want it to be better at driving nails.

In a lot of ways, the job of a game designer works like this:

• Guess
• Get it wrong
• Adjust

And you keep doing that until you are more right than wrong. Then you release!
But it gets better. The audience keeps changing, so your game is probably wrong in new ways within a few weeks of release. I think that's why TTRPGs fascinate me - it's a moving target.

It's easy to forget how much turnover there is in games. If you were to look at the top 20 selling board games in a game store from 10 years ago and compare it to today, I think 80% of them would be different.

 

[mearls]

The math didn't change. 5.5e only made minor changes to things in order to keep backwards compatibility, so the base problems of 5e are still present. So yes, he can be talking about 5.5e as well.

In looking at 5.5 and playing it, there have been some adjustments to the math. I think it the spreadsheet balance is consistent, but the in-play experience is a bit different:

• Monsters hit harder if you use the 5.5 MM, but healing is massively buffed, so they cancel each other out IME.
• The bigger challenge IMO is that more classes can spam saving throw effects.
• Which is compounded by saving throw penalty effects become much more common.

The net of it is that the hit point war is basically even, but the action economy fight is tilted even more in PCs favor.

(Again, all IMO and IME.)

 

[Maxperson]

In looking at 5.5 and playing it, there have been some adjustments to the math. I think it the spreadsheet balance is consistent, but the in-play experience is a bit different:

• Monsters hit harder if you use the 5.5 MM, but healing is massively buffed, so they cancel each other out IME.
• The bigger challenge IMO is that more classes can spam saving throw effects.
• Which is compounded by saving throw penalty effects become much more common.

The net of it is that the hit point war is basically even, but the action economy fight is tilted even more in PCs favor.

(Again, all IMO and IME.)

Huh. Having not switched to 5.5e, I didn't realize that healing had been buffed. I thought the whole point of increasing monster damage was to bring them more in line as level appropriate challenges so that folks didn't have to throw deadly+++ encounters at the party to challenge the PCs.

 

[Distracted DM]

I mean, I guess if the players are happy to totally nerf the big boss in a very anticlimactic way... I guess that's fine, but as a player I'd be a bit let down.

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game." Paraphrasing.. who was that? Matt Colville maybe?

 

[Bae'zel]

So I read Mike Mearls' post and I like the idea of spending legendary actions to gain a boost to saves. The detail about it lasting until its next turn. I assume that means that they'd get the bonus to overcome the control effect if they failed their first saving throw (they'd still have a bonus next turn)? Or I guess they'd have to spend another legendary action to get the bonus?

 

[Bae'zel]

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game." Paraphrasing.. who was that? Matt Colville maybe?

Last game I set up an encounter just for the PC who was a melee master duellist. Made a big show of having the antagonist challenge the PC to a duel. Did they take up the offer to flex their carefully curated melee build? No they tossed grenades at them because it was more efficient.

Maybe it was but... it was kind of a let down?