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

[eclair~]

I feel like there's one simple point that needs to be raised in this thread that somehow hasn't been brought up at all:

Cthulhu by Torchlight.

I feel it's very telling that Mearls wants to criticize 5e control spells, yet a book he helmed has spells that impose crippling effects on enemies—stuff from locking down an enemy's spellcasting, forcing enemies to automatically use weak attacks, outright insta-killing enemies—that completely ignore 5e's balancing mechanics for control spells. There's no saving throw. No form of resistance whatsoever. Cthulhu by Torchlight has a spell that kills literally anything after three turns—there's no way to any monster, even legendary monsters, to resist this effect.

Mike Mearls wants to declare 5e balance bad, yet he's happy to purposefully break the balance of the game to sell his own product.

It still baffles me that they removed Bloodied from 5.0. Like...I know it's got 4e cooties on it, but it's useful. Like it's legitimately one of the most useful, and more importantly SIMPLE, mechanics to come out of 4e. You'd think if they kept anything, it'd be that and the way 4e did critical hits, but nope! Stinks too much of 4e, can't be used.

Because "bloodied" isn't a mechanic. For 99% of PCs, it will never have any effect on them or mean anything for them. 5e simply acknowledged that any time such a "condition" was relevant, it was better to simply cite "when below half of your max hit points" rather than cite a "condition" that didn't actually impact anything at all for 99% of players.

And as 2024 5e demonstrates, trying to make "bloodied" a mechanic leads to all kinds of stilted design choices, either in awkward (the UA Necromancer's "reaction when you become bloodied, but not if you already are) or overpowered (the FR feat that gives advantage on every attack you make while bloodied) features that run off an abstract game-mechanics concept rather than an in-universe rationale. "Ah, I am at 51% health and cannot use this feature! Thankfully a rat bit me and that 1 damage was enough to enable this power!"

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I mean, sure. If your GM isn't going to play along with the RAW and RAI (and this is explicitly stated in the 13A rules, see below), the rules aren't going to work as intended. That's hardly something that can be blamed on the rules, though – it's firmly a PEBSAC issue.
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Again I think you are missing my point here.

I don't really care whether or not 13A permits this or not. I don't really care whether 13A even has "you must be at least this dead to Save or Die" mechanics.

I care that if we were to add this to 5e, for the purpose of changing player behavior in a way that avoids bad results, it would not actually help because specifically 5e GMs do not give out that information anyway.

You have twice now brought up, in effect, "Well if a 13A GM isn't doing this, they're wrong." But I don't care what 13A GMs are doing or not doing. My point is, solely and exclusively, what 5e GMs are doing or not doing. And, in my experience? Not one single 5e GM has done this, and the only GM who might is still probably not inclined to just hand out that information. I'm supremely confident that neither of the 5e DMGs has instructions like this. Hence, having these thresholds would, I argue, not actually make things better specifically in a hypothetical future revision/alteration of 5e, or at least would be of fairly minimal value, relative to the impact of adjusting the system to include the Expertise Die (additionally or instead, though my original thought was "instead").

 

[Staffan]

....

Again I think you are missing my point here.

I don't really care whether or not 13A permits this or not. I don't really care whether 13A even has "you must be at least this dead to Save or Die" mechanics.

I care that if we were to add this to 5e, for the purpose of changing player behavior in a way that avoids bad results, it would not actually help because specifically 5e GMs do not give out that information anyway.

And my point is that if this was a mechanic spread throughout the spells (and potentially non-spells) of 5e, along with specific instructions to provide this information when required, GMs would act otherwise.

 

[eclair~]

....

Again I think you are missing my point here.

I don't really care whether or not 13A permits this or not. I don't really care whether 13A even has "you must be at least this dead to Save or Die" mechanics.

I care that if we were to add this to 5e, for the purpose of changing player behavior in a way that avoids bad results, it would not actually help because specifically 5e GMs do not give out that information anyway.

You have twice now brought up, in effect, "Well if a 13A GM isn't doing this, they're wrong." But I don't care what 13A GMs are doing or not doing. My point is, solely and exclusively, what 5e GMs are doing or not doing. And, in my experience? Not one single 5e GM has done this, and the only GM who might is still probably not inclined to just hand out that information. I'm supremely confident that neither of the 5e DMGs has instructions like this. Hence, having these thresholds would, I argue, not actually make things better specifically in a hypothetical future revision/alteration of 5e, or at least would be of fairly minimal value, relative to the impact of adjusting the system to include the Expertise Die (additionally or instead, though my original thought was "instead").

The problem with this sort of design is, let's take Power Word: Kill.

If your DM tells you exactly how much HP a creature has left, then the moment a creature drops below 100, then if the situation is right to use that spell, every player will just ignore said creature because they know the target will get dropped automatically because of Power Word: Kill.

If you give that information to a player, when the balancing factor of such spells in 5e is "it works if below X hp, otherwise it doesn't", then you've completely defeated the balancing factor.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The problem with this sort of design is, let's take Power Word: Kill.

If your DM tells you exactly how much HP a creature has left, then the moment a creature drops below 100, then if the situation is right to use that spell, every player will just ignore said creature because they know the target will get dropped automatically because of Power Word: Kill.

If you give that information to a player, when the balancing factor of such spells in 5e is "it works if below X hp, otherwise it doesn't", then you've completely defeated the balancing factor.

Just to be clear, you do know that I did not advocate for this, have not been doing so, and was only discussing it specifically because someone else had come along and said, "HP thresholds for powerful control spells would be a really good idea" and I disagreed.

Because this reply reads as though you were of the opinion that I'm an advocate for such mechanics. I specifically said otherwise, and think that they would be likely to not achieve the goals I would like to see in a solution to the "alpha strike nova" problem.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And my point is that if this was a mechanic spread throughout the spells (and potentially non-spells) of 5e, along with specific instructions to provide this information when required, GMs would act otherwise.

Given my opinion of the so-called "advice" in the 5th edition books, and moreover the overall GM attitude I have personally experienced regarding those books (namely, near total disregard, except when it benefits them--again with Hussar as a standout exception)?

It would be false to say that I have no confidence in that outcome. That would imply that my confidence was zero. Rather, I am somewhat confident that exactly the reverse of that outcome would occur. Adding the advice would have a nonzero chance to make GMs more likely to actively reject/ignore it. There is of course the nonzero chance that it could help, but I'm of the opinion that it is eclipsed by the nonzero chance that it would not help and specifically would make things worse. (Remember how the designers for 5.5e openly admitted that players were choosing to play--and run--the game counter to the designers' intent. And, from the conclusions I've seen coming out of various discussions, folks are and were not only doing so, but doing so in a way which was/is often demonstrably harmful to those players' experiences.)

 

[Minigiant]

So what if the caster has to prepare more spells to target a weak save?

• If weak saves are that much weaker he's going to find a spell to target each save and the problem still remains...
• If the saves are close enough that a caster doesn't need to specialize in spells targeting each ( say for any given monster it's saves are all within 1 or 2 points), then having 6 saves vs 3 isn't going to matter.

Your justification for needing 6 saves seems to fall apart to me if you just fix the saves.

I'm not saying it's the ultimate solution.

My point is F/R/W 3 saves exacerbates the problem so much that returning to it would require a lot of changes to the base system.

 

[mamba]

People wouldnt accept a 6R yet.

I am not sure about that, but WotC definitely was not interested in creating one. For that sales have to tank first

 

[mamba]

I care that if we were to add this to 5e, for the purpose of changing player behavior in a way that avoids bad results, it would not actually help because specifically 5e GMs do not give out that information anyway.

I assume that if the rules say to disclose this, many DMs in fact would, 5e or not

The problem is 5e, not the DMs

I'm supremely confident that neither of the 5e DMGs has instructions like this.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don’t know, if you designed a car where the wheels come off at high speeds, I don’t think the defense ‘but only 10% or so ever get to those speeds, this is good design’ would get much traction…

The wheels don’t come off, but my little city car is not very stable at 80+ mph. But that would involve breaking the law, so it shouldn’t be doing that anyway.