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

[Lanefan]

Plus, let us point out the rhetorical trickery employed here. (Note that I am arguing to the thread at large; I know you don't need to hear this.)

"Tough. Not evryone [sic] is going to be involved every moment, fact of life."

What does that actually mean? "You won't be involved in every single moment." A pretty milquetoast thing. There will be some number of moments where you aren't involved.

But what is that being used to claim? "You not being involved for long stretches of time is completely okay." No! No it is not!

That's our fundamental disagreement, as I say that when the game state denies your involvement for however long then so be it.

And periodically-denied involvement is a built-in fact of the game state, sometimes inflicted by the opposition (usually as an effect that takes you out of combat), and sometimes inflicted or even self-inflicted by roleplay (Player: "You guys explore, I'll stay and watch the horses" or "Jerelle, you go scout the ramparts, we'll wait here".)

Sure it's maybe not fun for those inactive at the moment, but I'm in no way pretending or trying to claim the game will be fun for everyone all the time. There'll be highs and lows and everything in between, with the aggregate in the end being (I hope) an enjoyable experience.

Hard lockouts for extended periods of time should be rare. When they come up, there should be things players can do about them--just as there should be things opponents can do about them. Players should not be pulling out their phones while they wait for something interesting that might actually involve them this time. That, too, is a fact of life. Boring your audience in the long stretches between things relevant to them is bad.

A player not paying attention while their character is also unable to pay attention is actually good in-character roleplaying!

More seriously, I think it was @guachi just upthread who said - and I completely agree - the number one job of a player is to be entertaining and the number two job is to be entertained. Well, if the other players and the DM are doing Job One right, I should still be entertained as a player by what they're doing even if I myself am not actively involved at the moment.

Plus? Realism is only one element of game design, and it is not the most salient in all parts of things. Realism requires that every character relieve themselves on the regular. Does that mean we force heavily-armored characters to doff all their armor three to six times a day to go piddle in a hole?

It should. We skip over such things in play but still assume they occur.

Does that mean we expect players to have a plan for digging out a latrine hole every time they make camp, and how to cover it again every time they break camp? I should think no one in this forum would say "yes" to those questions.

Again, it's assumed as part of the established SOP for making camp; and actually becomes relevant if the party is trapped in a confined space for any length of time.

Realism is good when it provides useful or beneficial things, like making the experience feel more vivid and tangible. But being realistic is not the end-all, be-all of game design.

So whether or not "not everyone is going to be involved every moment" is a "fact of life" is not, in and of itself, the reason to do something.

But it sure makes design a lot easier (and IMO a lot better) if you just think "What would the characters do?" and design around the more obvious answers, with minimal or even no regard for the metagame.

 

[dave2008]

I will admit I am having a hard time expressing what I am trying to say, so I apologize for that. However, I think this is a horrible analogy:

It's the same as an author arguing they don't need to write a good prose; the reader should simply experience what they have written as a quality work regardless.

Reading a story and playing a game are not even within the same realm IMO.

I want to be clear that I am not saying a game shouldn't be designed to make the most effective way to play fun. That is a great aspiration. I just think a rpg game like D&D is so open to methods of play and so many people come to it with different ideas that what is fun can be very different from group to group. person to person. What your group thinks is most effective is not what my group thinks is most effective which is not what another group thinks is most effective. I think with RPGs, the fun will always rest to some extent on the players (DM & PCs). So, IMO, it is on the group to:

1. Play a game that fits them / their style*
2. Modify the game they are playing (whatever it is) to their style* of play.

*Where style of play = fun.

 

[Lanefan]

That's exactly the abdication of design I was talking about though! "Fun" is complicated and subjective of course, but ultimately it's an evaluation of an experience, not a trait that can be brought to one. You do things you think are fun, you have fun while doing things, you decide the bar crawl isn't particularly fun, you pull out a deck of cards to create a different experience that is more fun.

Fun isn't a property players decide to have, it's a byproduct of an experience. What a game designer is packaging is a set of constraints that promise to create some specific experience (somewhat complicated by the additional layer of situational design by GMs on top of that in RPGs), and the implicit premise of games as entertainment is that the experience thus packaged will be fun.

I disagree with the bolded, in that a player can decide going in whether or not it's going to be fun no matter what the game or system or situation may be. It often depends on the players out-of-game mood at the time.

A player in a good mood who decides before the session "I'm going to make this fun tonight" is almost certainly going to have fun while a player who goes in under a "I'm grumpy and bored and this ain't gonna be fun" mindset is going to get just that out of it.

I'm objecting to your statement because it shifts responsibility away from that person curating the experience to the person having it.

The responsibility is shared. The curator has to provide an experience that has enough potential to be fun to be worthwhile, then it's up to each recipient to realize that potential.

 

[billd91]

"Life isn't fair." gets from me the response "Deal with it."

I'm not entirely sure that suffering known consequences in a game in which you know the rules going in and willingly participate even constitutes life being "not fair". If the rules are being followed, or the rules as amended by Session 0, that strikes me as being within the bounds of fair play.

There's always going to be times when not everyone is involved at once:

--- a character gets taken out early in a combat (held, webbed, slept, killed, petrified, polymorphed into a toad, whatever)
--- the party splits, intentionally or otherwise (a scout gets sent out alone, someone hits a teleport trap, etc.)
--- a character gets captured or kidnapped
--- the party is doing something a given character just isn't suited to help with

IMO the expectation that these sort of things can and will happen needs to be set in stone right from session one; that while much of the time it's an ensemble, sometimes you'll be the star and other times you'll be offstage.

All the problems in the world encapsulated in a single sentence!

"We should make things better than they are, now!"

"No!"

I get that it probably makes you feel rugged and individualistic and heroic or whatever... but it just comes across as being mean.

Before we start ascribing political worldviews here or start turning someone else's take on the issue into caricature, surely there are some instances when a player isn't as involved in action at the table as other players, right? Is it possible for a player's PC to be taken out either via combat or via some other method of separation? I can see a desire to minimize some instances of that if they are not to game style taste, but when a game does have some of those potentials, is it really a case of unfairness or meanness?

 

[Zaukrie]

Going back to this for a moment, I find that giving bosses other form of hit points is more satisfactory for players that just increasing the hit points raw.

Example: That behir in a cave that you have as a boss fight? It spends the fight snaking through the stalagmites (and when spider climbing, through the stalactites!), and turns successful attacks into damage to the stone pillars (which have a hit point pool of their own, and which provide less cover as the fight progresses). Plus, since the natural stone formation apply and AC bonus due to cover, when the PCs can destroy the stalagmites directly, making attacks on the behir more effective as the fight progresses.

Great idea! I need to copy this and expand on it. The dragon that lives near lava would be another good use.

 

[Steampunkette]

Before we start ascribing political worldviews here or start turning someone else's take on the issue into caricature, surely there are some instances when a player isn't as involved in action at the table as other players, right? Is it possible for a player's PC to be taken out either via combat or via some other method of separation? I can see a desire to minimize some instances of that if they are not to game style taste, but when a game does have some of those potentials, is it really a case of unfairness or meanness?

The post you're referencing was in direct response to the idea that "Life isn't fair" gets the response "Deal with it."

It went outside the bounds of discussing the game, and highlighted Lanefan's philosophy, which I characterized as "Mean".

Trying to pull that back into game theory and ask if people getting knocked out in a fight and not having anything to do is "Mean" is thus a mischaracterization of my position. Which is that control effects, as implemented, are an impediment to fun.

Is getting reduced to 0hp fun? No, not really. But that typically takes time wherein you're playing the game and having fun, and the dropping to 0hp is an interesting consequence to a chain of events that you are invested in rather than an instantaneous "You don't get to play, anymore" right at the beginning of an encounter.

And trivializing encounters due to poor rolls on the DMs part is, similarly, not particularly fun. That's why Legendary Saves were invented as a kludge.

 

[tetrasodium]

The post you're referencing was in direct response to the idea that "Life isn't fair" gets the response "Deal with it."

It went outside the bounds of discussing the game, and highlighted Lanefan's philosophy, which I characterized as "Mean".

Trying to pull that back into game theory and ask if people getting knocked out in a fight and not having anything to do is "Mean" is thus a mischaracterization of my position. Which is that control effects, as implemented, are an impediment to fun.

Is getting reduced to 0hp fun? No, not really. But that typically takes time wherein you're playing the game and having fun, and the dropping to 0hp is an interesting consequence to a chain of events that you are invested in rather than an instantaneous "You don't get to play, anymore" right at the beginning of an encounter.

And trivializing encounters due to poor rolls on the DMs part is, similarly, not particularly fun. That's why Legendary Saves were invented as a kludge.

The fun happens before going down though.

Walking the razor's edge of competence porn while trusting your group to juggle everything going on alongside you carries the suspense tension and is fun as a result. Sometimes doing that includes going down to eat a learning experience of what to do better with in the future

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Okay, that's not exactly what @mearls said. But here's an excerpt from the latest post on his Patreon.

Legendary resistance is a cheap hack, jammed into 5e because we didn't have a better solution to the broken control spells that we had to include in the game for tradition's sake.

How's that for an intro?

As incendiary as the statement might be, it's fundamentally true. D&D changed over the years, but its content remained the same. The spells that give DMs headaches today had counters in AD&D when they were first released. As the game shifted over time, those spells retained their core functionality while monsters lost their defenses against them.

It's an interesting post and worth a complete read.

What's your opinion on control spells and legendary resistance?

I think this shows why I don’t have much respect for Mearls as a game designer, compared to others in the D&D design alumni.

Legendary Resistance could be more interesting, sure, but it’s a great mechanic that adds a layer of strategy to fights that isn’t there without it, just like legendary actions and the underutilized lair actions.

I’ve recently decoupled legendary actions from a specific creature and made it a resource the whole enemy team has, and I use lair actions as they were in 2014 as simply enviromental effects, and it is awesome. The enemy leader shouts a command and the whole enemy team moves half speed imposing disad on OAs against them during the movement. The boss gets stunned? Another creature can take command of team bad guy and issue those commands now, and some legendary actions don’t even assume commands so much as just practiced tactics.

Decoupling legendary resistence from specific creatures has a similar effect, allowing the DM a small number of negations. Now, I actually have considered award inspiration to someone if LR negates an action that costs a resource, OR making it so that if the enemy uses a LR to pass the save, you don’t spend the resource.

I think those are vastly better ideas than complaining that control effects are broken.

That and give fighters legendary resistence instead of indomitable, so it’s two sided. Seriously it’s makes people who hate LR hate it less because it’s a thing that some PCs can have too.

ETA: by decoupling LR from a critter I mean that if you have a vampire in a battle you can use a LR to make any creature succeed on a save as long as it’s an ally of the vamp.

 

[Steampunkette]

The fun happens before going down though.

Walking the razor's edge of competence porn while trusting your group to juggle everything going on alongside you carries the suspense tension and is fun as a result. Sometimes doing that includes going down to eat a learning experience of what to do better with in the future

... did you read the first 9 words of that line and then stop? 'Cause that is what the rest of that paragraph is talking about.

 

[Minigiant]

I just wonder if instead of Legendary Resistance we have more different creatures

A CR 20 SwordMaster Creature with

		Mod	Save			Mod	Save
STR	20	+5	+11	INT	17	+3	+9
DEX	20	+5	+11	WIS	18	+4	+10
CON	20	+5	+11	CHA	19	+4	+10

Or a Psionic beast that is just immune to all Enchantment spells, Illusion spells, and attacks or spells that deal Psychic damage.