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

[Bae'zel]

My opinion is that 5e followed the flaw of 3e where it was designed around the new players, poor players, and other under optimized players.

People just can’t help themselves eh? Gotta throw shade at fans of a game.

I love the declaration that 5e wasn’t designed for “real” players.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

I'm saying this same thing I always said.

No, you have very specific said you believe that 5e was designed with assumption 3RD PARTY PUBLISHERS will be the ones providing additional rules, not WotC. Which you still have not provided proof of and, quite frnakly, if the quotes you claim to have say what you said later they say, they directly contradict this claim. Quoting you again as evidence:

with an open skeleton for an old school fanbase with an assumption that 3PP would produce modules for 3e fans, 4e fans, and story forced game fans

 

[AnotherGuy]

It was something that you could do very easy with just Book of Vile Darkness, and likely as much a reason why this book was banned at many tables as all the edgelordness of it.

You needed to get a single level in Cancer Mage Prestige Class

Hold up! I know I'm late to the party but I have never looked through the Book of Vile Darkness - they actually labelled one of their prestige classes the Cancer Mage? That is an absolutely terrible name.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Hold up! I know I'm late to the party but I have never looked through the Book of Vile Darkness - they actually labelled one of their prestige classes the Cancer Mage? That is an absolutely terrible name.

Book of VIle Darkness is so edgy it flips back into being unintentionally funny.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Book of VIle Darkness is so edgy it flips back into being unintentionally funny.

And then flips a second time into painfully bad again when you read up on things like the PrCs and such.

BoED is in a similar boat. So over-the-top "we have to make an Inherently Good version of EVERYTHING" that it starts out incredibly cringe-worthy, and then becomes funny, and then the humor runs out and it's just really sad again. Some nice spells though. I quite liked the improved version of mage armor, and rain of roses was a nice way to incapacitate evil opponents.

 

[Remathilis]

BoED/BoVD was products of their time. When people talk about how kiddy friendly D&D has become, I remind them what WotC looks like when they try to go edgy.

(I also lump the 3pp Book of Erotic Fantasy in this as the trifecta of tryhard.)

 

[tetrasodium]

Hold up! I know I'm late to the party but I have never looked through the Book of Vile Darkness - they actually labelled one of their prestige classes the Cancer Mage? That is an absolutely terrible name.

To be fair though it was a long time ago and there were a bunch of superheroes/villains who developed power of some sort from cancer as a result of curing cancer or by the cancer reshaping their body in some way.

Overall the bovd was a great book packed with useful stuff for the gm and a handful of maybe cool stuff a player might possibly convince their gm to allow

 

[AnotherGuy]

To be fair though it was a long time ago and there were a bunch of superheroes/villains who developed power of some sort from cancer as a result of curing cancer or by the cancer reshaping their body in some way.

Using a disease to power your magic, is a cool concept. I think I find the name to be silly - and think they should have rather gone for something more general than focus in on one ailment.

Overall the bovd was a great book packed with useful stuff for the gm and a handful of maybe cool stuff a player might possibly convince their gm to allow

Yeah I'm sure it is. I have often found myself inspired by RPG things that are deemed not great by many.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Kind of, If martials took the trap options they were in trouble. There were some trap options for casters, but not nearly as bad and being a full caster compensated for a lot.


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!)

I don't know, there were a lot of spells with low utility or combat ability, it would certainly be possible to screw yourself over. Especially at low levels when you don't have many spells known.

3E had built-in stuff that rewarded system mastery like Toughness as trap feat, but I don't think the christmas tree 15 minute adventuring day party scry-buff-teleporting its enemies was really something the original designers had intended or fully expected. And yes, of course not everyone went to these extremes. Paizo managed to capitalize on that, IMO, its adventure paths were often grinders that required heavy optimization, you probably won't find this as extreme in the early adventures for D&D. (Of course, early low-level adventures could be grinders, simply because 1d4+CON hit points just isn't much to start with...)

 

[Marc17]

3E had built-in stuff that rewarded system mastery like Toughness as trap feat, but I don't think the christmas tree 15 minute adventuring day party scry-buff-teleporting its enemies was really something the original designers had intended or fully expected.

They should have. It's been a thing since at least 1E. Using a mirror of mental prowess to jump into single room encounters, defeat them, and leave like some fantasy medieval special forces unit. That's the time I decided all the giants of G3 just packed up all their stuff and deserted the dungeon after having a few cases of that. (To be fair, the adventure started by getting caught by the guard at the front door leading to a huge, epic hallway fight that drove the PCs off but did leave many of the giant's fighters dead.)

ETA: Similarly I always figured that was why old school wilderness encounters were so much harder than dungeon encounters, because there would only be one encounter per day. I think that was from Gary in his posts here even when I had my old account, but that was so long ago.