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

[mamba]

They don't ruin the game, they provide the D&D feeling that is so vital. If a player saved their control spell until the super dangerous monster showed up, then they deserve the chance to shut it down in one action. If a DM isn't wearing down a party through attrition, then they deserve to have their boss monster vaporized in the first round.

I disagree with all of this

You would be stupid to not keep your / at least one control spell around, why waste it on mobs in the first place. Attrition barely works to begin with, so you will not wear the party down that way to the point that they used up all their spells and then walk into the boss lair

 

[Remathilis]

I don't think the level of reward and punishment that resulted was intended.

They kinda.. overdid... it.. to the point it became very obvious and hurt the game

They intentionally did add dud feats, for the same reason Magic: The Gathering adds inferior cards to a set, part of the game is assembling and playable character/deck and part is being able to pilot it. They said intentionally that feats like Toughness and Dodge were intentionally bad when compared to Spell Focus or Expertise. They did that with spells and magic items too.

Now you can ask if that is them rationalizing it after the fact as a way to explain over conservative design choices, but the fact many got the worst offenders didn't get buffed or fixed in 3.5 tells me they either really thought +1 to AC vs one opponent a round was equal to +1 to all attacks with a given weapon or +1 save DC to a school of magic; or they knew it wasn't and wanted you to figure out the same.

 

[tetrasodium]

Pun Pubs a theory craft builds. Doesn't really exist as it also required dubious rules layering.

Muscle wizard the spelldancer?

I agree on most of it not really existing in actual 3.5 play, which is light-years more than can be said about the game breaking 5e builds like "I take fighter great sword and gwm but make strength my high stat instead of intelligence"


Posting this because I had never heard of muscle wizard either and might as well save others some time googling through weir homebret. It's apparently a build that depends on a 3rd party published feat put out by green ronin. Since gms pretty much never allowed mixnmatch d20 stuff without an eye of extreme skepticality back then IME I'll say he's probably talking about this admittedly pretty good web novel, it too is not a 3.5 thing

 

[Eric V]

Even if attrition worked that way (it doesn't), all that means is that the DM has to have slogs of encounters just to wear down resources and hope one of the latter is that encounter-ending control spell. So what happens? Players learn to always save a spell. DMs have to come up with reasons why the boss encounter is always the last one, even if the players have cleverly sidestepped things. DMs become more limited in adventure structure design. Just doesn't sound like it's worth it.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm not sure this centers so much around builds as around the fact that 1) Most monsters don't actually hit all that hard (most) and 2) PCs don't stay down, because there are no RAW penalties for bouncing up from 0, it's too easy to just spring back up (with the very small exception of an early level big critical. Ironically, the first hit of my very first 5e session involved me critting the mage for max damage with a heavy crossbow. Full to dead in 1 shot, set an interesting tone for the rest of the time!)

Doesn't refute what I said.

If you take sensible choices for PCs in ASI, feats, spells, and class options, you will outstrip the damage and control reliability the CR system is expecting from monsters.

A Greatsword Fighter taking Great Weapon Master deals too much damage for most monsters.
A Wizard with 18 INT casting a spell with their highest spell slot controls Bosses too reliably.

 

[Minigiant]

Putting "trap" options into the book, that punish the player who picks it, is inherently rewarding system mastery to recognize the trap options, which is THE OPPOSITE of designing for new players and bad players

The baseline difficulty is for new players and bad players.

My point was that if you build a character and run a character making mistakes like a new player would you can still reliably beat the stuff in the monster manual. If you actually build or play well, you destroy those monsters.

That's the whole point of this thread.
If you actually cast a control spell versus one of the saving throws of a boss monster the boss monster is absolutely screwed. That's why 5e kludge it via legendary resistance.

Because the monster is screwed if you don't "cheat" for them

You changed what you have said before. In previous posts you have said that 5e was designed with the idea that it will be exclusively 3rd party publishers who will provide these modules and variants, which is a different argument from the one you make now altogether.
And that does not contradict that the game was not designed for new players.

I'm saying this same thing I always said.

I said that my belief based on what I've heard in interviews and articles was that 5e was designed with open space so that DMs and third party publishers could design modules which can be slotted into that open space to provide different kinds of feels.

It was designed so a bunch of 4th edition fans who did not think 5e was tactical and cinematic enough, could buy a book by Monkey Book Publishing and inject those rules into 5th edition.

That's the purposeful design into 5e's completely.

On the new player front, 5e's monsters were designed to be relatively easy to defeat. This is because it use an attrition model heavily preferred by old school gamers where individual monsters were not strong but you would use many of them to slowly wear down resources. The main difference is unlike in Old School D&D, they made the monsters also much weaker than the PCs. So even PCs with suboptimal choices are very strong against those monsters.

Remember in original 2014 5th edition feat and multiclassing were both optional. If you actually allowed feats and multiclassing and you actually did it well your character strength increased dramatically. For spellcasters you didn't even need the optional rules you just needed to pick the good spells and have their slot available.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I disagree with all of this

You would be stupid to not keep your / at least one control spell around, why waste it on mobs in the first place. Attrition barely works to begin with, so you will not wear the party down that way to the point that they used up all their spells and then walk into the boss lair

but 5E is based off attrition?!? so if that barely works, then D&D barely works!?!
oh well, good things most players couldn't care less about rules and how they work.

 

[Minigiant]

No, it wasn't. I'll refer you to this article about the "ivory tower design" of 3E.

What I am saying is that your trap option fighter and trap option wizard wearing appropriate gear and putting their stats in the appropriate ability scores were still viable against the monsters in the book.

From my experience...
If you pick the trap options in 3rd edition, your characters are okay.
If you pick the "bad kits" in Pre3e edition your characters are dead.

 

[mamba]

but 5E is based off attrition?!? so if that barely works, then D&D barely works!?!

attrition barely works, how much that affects your game depends on your game / players

oh well, good things most players couldn't care less about rules and how they work.

not sure how that helps with anything , but maybe it explains your take on control spells. Just ignore how they work and since the players do not care about that either, they do not ruin your game

 

[AnotherGuy]

WOTC was awful with it because they expected 3PPs and DMs to do it.

Same with Bosses and the Legendary Resistance kludge. WOTC expected 3PPs and DMs to fix it.

Well between DMsGuild and the fanbase freely offering their homebrewery content and ideas on the wide array of platforms and forums, I find we are certainly spoilt in the 5e variant department.
5e (in all its forms) is thriving when it comes to mechanical support.