Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9789479" data-attributes="member: 6790260">He's correct about the end result (Legendary Resistance is a cheap trick shoved in to deal with design faults), and the initial impetus which produced this (slavish adherence to tradition >>>>>>>>>>>>> anything else), but his reasoning for why that is the problem is flawed, which negatively affects his final conclusion (though, much to my surprise, his final conclusion remains more right than wrong).The actual underlying problem is that the system isn't actually designed to account for control effects. Control effects are simply...not budgeted into the system. Like at all. This applies in both directions. The designers straight-up just pretended that control effects were roughly-more-or-less equivalent to a certain amount of extra damage dealt, and then....proceeded on their merry way.Mearls even gets dangerously close to identifying the real problem. He opens with discussions of the math, which are most likely arithmetically correct, but fundamentally missing the point. He then notes that "chump" monsters are perfectly fine, it's "boss" monsters where it's a problem--and a serious one at that, because it results in gameplay that is simply not interesting nor entertaining for anybody, GM or player alike. But, instead of diving just the tiniest bit deeper, he stops there, and says, "okay, now we know LegRes is bad, so let's replace it with....Unreliable LegRes With More Steps!"The real, actual problem here IS the gameplay. As [USER=2067]@I'm A Banana[/USER] noted, there is--and has been for a very long time--an essential tension between attrition combat and set-piece combat. The designers have been trying to square this circle for a long time. 2e-and-before did it with the extremely un-fun "your spells just probably fail most of the time, so don't bother". 3e just....didn't bother and made saving throws ridiculously overpowered (the well-known issues of "Save-or-Suck"/"Save-or-Die"). 4e chose the tack that attrition combat was something folks could figure out on their own (without properly communicating that), and thus sunk resources into, y'know, actually making really GOOD set-piece combat rules, which made all the control effects a baked-in, functional, expected part of the game, actually encoded into the balance rather than constantly tearing the balance apart.5e tried to have 3e without having 3e, and ended up being the worst of both worlds between 3e and 2e--all the un-fun of "your spell just failed", without actually fixing the problem of control effects being ridiculously powerful. Mearls' reference to the fact that control spells come up almost every turn is simply reflecting the environment created by having: (a) potent control effects, (b) bosses with a finite amount of absolute no-sale fiat points, and (c) stuffing EVERYTHING with magic rather than making more distinct, bespoke class features (which wouldn't benefit from the centralization of spells!!)In order to fix this problem, D&D has to decide to do one of three things. All of them necessitate a break from "tradition".1. Significantly reduce (=fewer) or weaken (=less powerful) the control effects available to PCs.2. Create separate rules for set-piece combat vs attrition combat.3. Redesign the system, from the ground up, so that "boss" monsters getting CC'd for a round (or two!) doesn't debilitate them.None of these paths are palatable to the people who designed 5e, because all of them are un-traditional in some way, and the traditionalists are the only voice the designers listen to anymore, because they won the edition war. #1 is unpalatable because it will be seen as "not D&D anymore", and will very specifically piss off the Wizard fankids, who are the loudest and angriest of the traditionalist factions. #2 is unpalatable because it would be seen as "artificial" or "gamist" or "unrealistic" or (etc., etc., etc.) And #3 is unpalatable because, well, it requires a ground-up actually effortful redesign, with testing and retooling and all the stuff they really don't want to have to do, and would almost certainly ping at least a little bit of the "not D&D anymore" thing too.Mearls' proposed solutions are simply more flowery kludges. Kludges that know they need to dress up in order to blend in better. Like going out and getting paint that matches the color your car currently is, not the color it was when it was brand-new, because it's been dulled by the passage of years and if you JUST painted over the scratch marks, the "fix" would be as noticeable as the unfixed mess. You're still patching a paint job rather than actually getting the car properly painted--it's just a patch that won't be noticeable for a while, until the paints weather to different colors again.</blockquote>

Verification