They play differently? They literally had an in-house weekly game to test things. And guess what? It worked for them. There are interviews of them saying how much fun this was. As for those classes, that is a different debate.
and you do not consider the wheels coming off on the highway a design flaw? What about not telling anyone that the car is only semi-safe in the city and closer to a deathtrap on highways?
It's not just boss monsters, high level play is the issue, the issue is at least as much on the character / spell side of things
Its not just mechanics i think its more real life.
D&Ds a class based game. It takes time to level up IRL.
Other games dont level up. I wonder if a year or two long game is typical.
I suspect theres more going on. D&Ds a bit more crunch heavy, DM shortage and I think a lot of DMs just burn out regardless of edition by level 7-10.
If youre leveling up every 3 sessions and play bi weekly its around a year of real time to hit level 7/8ish assuming you miss some sessions as well.
If you want to run to hit level 20 run the game yourself seems to shut a few up. Alot don't want to DM full stop let alone to level 20 aka year or two of your life.
Or you level up even faster, or play more often. Playing weekly or multiple sessions a week leads back to real life time commitments.
1. Are you willing to run a game to level 20? If the answer is no go to 2.
2. Are you prepared to pay someone to run to level 20. If the answer is no go to 3.
3. Can you find reliable players/group to go to 20? If not go to 4.
oh, there are several reasons why high level play is rare, sure. That it also is broken / hard to DM in the first place is not helping however
I think games that limit themselves to 10 levels had the right idea, whether those are 1-10 or 5-20 with accelerated progression is up to what you are looking for
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.
I think this bears some thought, though I don't agree with your conclusion.
Unfortunately a lot of folk aren't going to have context since they don't have the books, but I'll provide a couple screenshots to help the conversation:
OPTIONAL RULE: LURE OF POWER
The Mythos offer power at the price of everything else. As an optional rule, when you expend a spell slot to cast a mythos spell, you must make a Wisdom saving throw equal to 15 plus the level of the spell slot expended. On a failed save, you gain the following Passion with a rating of +10.
Power at Any Cost
You have tasted the boundless power the Old Ones offer, and you can't shake this lure. Whenever you cast a spell, you must use one of the spells presented here provided it is appropriate to the situation. If you have the opportunity to acquire and attune to a Mythos Tome, you seek to do so at any cost.
Clutch of Darkness
Level 2 Conjuration
Casting Time: Bonus action
Range: 120 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
You create a terrible force that slowly crushes the target from the inside. Choose a creature that you can see within range and roll 2d6 and record the total rolled. At the start of each of your turns, roll another 2d6 and add the number rolled to the total.
If the total is greater than the target's Strength, it has Disadvantage on Strength-based attacks.
If the total is greater than the target's Dexterity, its Speed is halved and attack rolls against it have Advantage.
If the total is greater than its current Hit Points, the target immediately implodes and dies.
Dread Curse of Azathoth
Level 7 Evocation
Casting Time: Bonus action
Range: 120 feet
Components: V
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
You utter the secret name of Azathoth and doom a creature to an inevitable death unless it breaks the spell. The creature gains a curse point at the end of each of its turns. When the creature gains its third curse point, it dies. It loses all curse points when the spell ends.
The designers had a bias to old school gaming. However it was the survey results that tilted the game by cutting good ideas.
Overall from 2nd edition to 3rd edition to 4th edition to 5th edition all we've been doing is given the fan base less and less restrictions so it's no surprise that they voted for less restriction and end up with a situation where their low restriction spells can control the hell out of the boss monsters.
The mistake the designers did is not sneak in to counterweights for these restrictions.
I think this bears some thought, though I don't agree with your conclusion.
Unfortunately a lot of folk aren't going to have context since they don't have the books, but I'll provide a couple screenshots to help the conversation:
OPTIONAL RULE: LURE OF POWER
The Mythos offer power at the price of everything else. As an optional rule, when you expend a spell slot to cast a mythos spell, you must make a Wisdom saving throw equal to 15 plus the level of the spell slot expended. On a failed save, you gain the following Passion with a rating of +10.
Power at Any Cost
You have tasted the boundless power the Old Ones offer, and you can't shake this lure. Whenever you cast a spell, you must use one of the spells presented here provided it is appropriate to the situation. If you have the opportunity to acquire and attune to a Mythos Tome, you seek to do so at any cost.
Clutch of Darkness
Level 2 Conjuration
Casting Time: Bonus action
Range: 120 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
You create a terrible force that slowly crushes the target from the inside. Choose a creature that you can see within range and roll 2d6 and record the total rolled. At the start of each of your turns, roll another 2d6 and add the number rolled to the total.
If the total is greater than the target's Strength, it has Disadvantage on Strength-based attacks.
If the total is greater than the target's Dexterity, its Speed is halved and attack rolls against it have Advantage.
If the total is greater than its current Hit Points, the target immediately implodes and dies.
Dread Curse of Azathoth
Level 7 Evocation
Casting Time: Bonus action
Range: 120 feet
Components: V
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
You utter the secret name of Azathoth and doom a creature to an inevitable death unless it breaks the spell. The creature gains a curse point at the end of each of its turns. When the creature gains its third curse point, it dies. It loses all curse points when the spell ends.
I think the bigger claim here, and one that is very relevant especially in the context of books Mearls has helmed previously that....were not, shall we say, the best-received books at the time (e.g. 4e's Heroes of Shadow), is that this calls into question Mearls' judgment as a designer.
More specifically, something I've seen, a subtle but persistent pattern, is that Mearls tends to fixate on a particular idea and lets go, or changes his mind, only very slowly, even when doing so isn't necessarily the most logically consistent choice with his other stances. I've heard many times that Mearls likes rolling lots of dice at once. The whole thrill of the randomness thing is a big deal for him. So, when he was the head honcho, he put in lots of rolling. Advantage and Disadvantage were a good product of that (even if it was, as I predicted back in "D&D Next", horrifically over-used). But the "proficiency dice" mechanic was...not good. Pretty bad, actually. But it lingered for ages, packet after packet, despite being unpopular. I am well convinced that that was Mearls stubbornly holding onto a mechanic he liked, even though the data would otherwise have kicked it to the curb almost immediately, like what happened to the playtest Sorcerer and Warlock.
My broader point here is that Mearls' stance on something may not necessarily be very self-consistent, nor well-reasoned, given what he's done before. That doesn't mean everything he says is inherently false, that would be committing the fallacy fallacy, but it does mean we should view his arguments and conclusions with a chunk of halite.
So you go all in for cheeseburgers. You make ten billion cheeseburgers. They sell pretty well for a while. Cheeseburgers are popular!
And then when people start wanting something else, what can you do when your entire infrastructure is built around selling cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, and also cheeseburgers?
Odd, in that the more dice you roll at once the less random (i.e. more predictable) the result is likely to be; the law of averages will trend the expected result closer to the middle of the bell curve with every added die.
Example: rolling a d16+2 will give an equal chance of any result between 3 and 18 while rolling 3d6 will give a result in the same 3-18 range but bell-curved around an average of 10.5, the most likely results being 10 or 11 and the least likely being 3 or 18.
