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

[eclair~]

5e had a missed opportunity by not scrapping the + magic weapons and armour which broke Bounded Accuracy and instead focusing on

The whole point of bounded accuracy is that +x items could be a nice boon to the player while not being vital for characters to remain viable.

 

[Distracted DM]

The whole point of bounded accuracy is that +x items could be a nice boon to the player while not being vital for characters to remain viable.

Yeah, but with all the bonuses 5e PCs can stack having non-attunement +1/2/3 items seem very unnecessary.

 

[Lanefan]

Okay, but that is then strictly a change for Fireball, Cone of Cold and Ice Storm are correctly represented.

Yeah, that was not the point of the exercise.

Okay but to be thorough besides damage done on upcasting there are spells such as Hold Person that when upcasted allows you to add additional persons being potentially affected. If you were to remove upcasting you would have to stipulate for these spells that at every x levels you could add an additional person affected by the spell.

Yes, exactly. The other things that can (but for any given spell don't have to) scale by level are range and duration.

For Hold Person it could probably be locked in at two targets and left there.

 

[Lanefan]

5e had a missed opportunity by not scrapping the + magic weapons and armour which broke Bounded Accuracy and instead focusing on ...

If 5e had scrapped basic + magic weapons, every DM and their little dog would have immediately added them back in. Net result: the same as current.

I suspect the bigger flaws might have been a combination of over-reliance on bounded accuracy (5e-specific) and trying to tighten down the math too much (all WotC editions).

In TSR-era D&D with its much looser math, going from a +0 sword to a +1 to a +2 doesn't really make all that much difference, other than becoming able to hit some specific creatures that require magic to hit, but it makes the player happy.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

What if each level had its own AoE damage spell (except 3rd by tradition has two: Fireball and Lightning Bolt) but each of those spells does a different type of damage. If for example you want AoE cold damage you have to use Ice Storm, a 4th level spell; at 5th level there could be an AoE acid damage spell, at 6th an AoE radiant/necrotic damage spell (depending on caster's alignment), and so on.

I don't get this - are you saying a 10th level Wizard shouldn't be able to cast 1st level spells any more? If not, what are you saying?

Yes. They aren't casting 1st level Magic missiles or Mage Armor anymore. They could, but the lowest slot they might have is, say, 3rd level, so if they cast Magic missile or Expedtious Retreat at all, they will likely cast it at least upcast to 3rd level. A Wizard in this scenario might have only 5-8 spell slots to use per [time unit of spell recovery]. Each such spell is a big deal, a great responsibility, and needs to be carefully weighted. They might still be able to prepare all those many neat utility spells and combat spells they can prepare now, but for example, they can't start dominating both combat and out-of-combat situations with spells, because there are no cheap utility spells they can throw around while reserving the higher level spell slots to defeat enemies.

 

[Distracted DM]

I believe 13th Age, and maybe some other ttrpgs as well, have lower level spell slots phase out as the character levels up.

Cuz yeah in 5e casters have scaling cantrips, there's little reason for them to cast a 2nd level acid arrow when they can throw a 3d10 fire bolt or ray of frost.