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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dualazi" data-source="post: 6906368" data-attributes="member: 6855537">It’s bad for groups to favor damage over other options because damage is already heavily weighted favorably since ‘dead’ is the best status effect and more often the desired result of the fight. If CC is so weak that people see it as not being worth the time, then they’ll focus all their effort on ending the fight by the ultimate means: killing everything. This is bad if for no other reason than it reduces game diversity, but also it becomes an arms race of sorts, which only exacerbates your need for increased HP pools. Basically, if your complaint is that solos don’t have enough HP, prodding the players into favoring DPR isn’t going to help that.As for b), I can’t speak for every table (or even most tables) but no, the players are not going to nicely let a dynamic tug-of-war between the wizard’s CC and the big bad ensue. They’re either going to bring three wizards and lock him down in one turn (this is what I referenced by “go back to the old playstyle”, that they just CC the boss and kill him while he’s crippled.) or they’re going to go to the damage option above.The reason for these two results are the same; players, in my experience, massively favor method that produce efficient, reliable results. The three save idea introduces a huge degree of unreliability and decreased efficiency, and so it’s no surprise to me that they will either opt to restore it to prior levels or bail on the strategy altogether.This could be accomplished maybe with a return to 4e style keywords, but it doesn’t address much. Either you add other stuff like damage to the spells to make them still useful in the interim, or you end up with a bunch of spells that have different names but the same effects. How is your fear/nightmare/PK combo different from fear/fear/fear?Maybe a different line of thought would be something like a spell-focused escalation die from 13[SUP]th[/SUP] age, where being subjected to spells (save or no) increases the effectiveness of subsequent spells. So the first time you’re hit with fear, at most it can make you shaken on the first casting. On the 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] casting, you’re shaken regardless, with frightened being the fail state. Monsters would need a thorough redesign though to give them increased potency, since as I have harped about before the action economy is not in their favor.If I were a dev for a day, I would have added more wind-up to certain monster attacks. If you can see the flame building in a red dragon and smoke and cinders start to leak from its jaws, you know you need to drop some CC on him now to avoid the incoming blast. It’s hard for wizards to ‘time’ their CC right since there’s no real predictive measures for enemy behavior, and it simply becomes a good idea to drop it ASAP.This is one of the reasons for my initial analysis about going to damage or super cc. Attrition favors team monster in 9/10 situations, players actively try and avoid it. In my experience, they will do everything in their power to avoid the situation you just described.I would sort of agree, but my point continues to be that it’s incredibly hard to make cc relevant to bosses without being overpowering, or a useless spell you might pack for trash mobs. This is because D&D is so binary in its pass/fail, hit/miss design. I’m not sure that it can ever really be done without the addition of handwavium, to be honest.</blockquote>

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