D&D 5E Not Much Ado About Bless

[James Gasik]

TANGENT: This can have a great deal of variance in of itself. I played in a game where a crowd control spell was placed in big fights first, and then the enemies got picked apart before the enemies could even get into melee, with the melee characters actually acting annoyed that they weren't being allowed to contribute, lol.

Even telling them that we could clear a whole room of Ogres with two spells didn't seem to make them happy about it, so we went back to letting them wade in and get beat up the very next fight. But that was a 6-man group for Storm King's Thunder where we had a caster heavy party, so spell slot resources didn't need to be conserved.

Obviously, at a different table, you might need melee types to gum up the battlefield so you can throw out big spells. Or just have less spellcasters, so they have to be more frugal with their spell slots.

DOUBLE TANGENT: The weirdest group I saw in an AL game was a party that had 3 characters capable of casting spirit guardians (2 Clerics and a Cleric/Ranger) and one guy with sleet storm and another with moonbeam and that was an absolute nightmare for the DM.

Which is why I won't DM for AL games anymore, it's home campaigns or nothing. You have to be able to adapt to oddball strategies. But that's neither here nor there.

 

[abirdcall]

TANGENT: This can have a great deal of variance in of itself. I played in a game where a crowd control spell was placed in big fights first, and then the enemies got picked apart before the enemies could even get into melee, with the melee characters actually acting annoyed that they weren't being allowed to contribute, lol.

Even telling them that we could clear a whole room of Ogres with two spells didn't seem to make them happy about it, so we went back to letting them wade in and get beat up the very next fight. But that was a 6-man group for Storm King's Thunder where we had a caster heavy party, so spell slot resources didn't need to be conserved.

Obviously, at a different table, you might need melee types to gum up the battlefield so you can throw out big spells. Or just have less spellcasters, so they have to be more frugal with their spell slots.

DOUBLE TANGENT: The weirdest group I saw in an AL game was a party that had 3 characters capable of casting spirit guardians (2 Clerics and a Cleric/Ranger) and one guy with sleet storm and another with moonbeam and that was an absolute nightmare for the DM.

Which is why I won't DM for AL games anymore, it's home campaigns or nothing. You have to be able to adapt to oddball strategies. But that's neither here nor there.

Difficulty has everything to do with the DM.

2 DMs can run the adventure completely differently.

Also 6 PCs are about twice as powerful as 4. Not only is the game not designed for parties of 6+ but most DMs either don't know how or won't put the effort into modifying the game to compensate.

 

[James Gasik]

Difficulty has everything to do with the DM.

2 DMs can run the adventure completely differently.

Also 6 PCs are about twice as powerful as 4. Not only is the game not designed for parties of 6+ but most DMs either don't know how or won't put the effort into modifying the game to compensate.

That was an AL game, so I know the modules have guidelines for running them on harder difficulty, but I really don't know if the adventure books like SKT do or not.

 

[abirdcall]

That was an AL game, so I know the modules have guidelines for running them on harder difficulty, but I really don't know if the adventure books like SKT do or not.

It isn't about that.

Different DMs will run adventures at what they perceive to be the base line difficulty they are designed for and end up with vastly different levels of difficulty in actual play.

 

[James Gasik]

Ah well, yeah. Not much you can do about that, other than wish them well if they're having fun. It'd be nice to have more guidance for how to adjust for different kinds of groups, but the de-emphasis on internal balance between classes in this edition makes that fairly hard to do.

And even if you do find the proud nail that's giving your game trouble, what do you to about it? Ban it, I guess. Adjust it? You're on your own, buddy, good luck!

 

[Oofta]

It isn't about that.

Different DMs will run adventures at what they perceive to be the base line difficulty they are designed for and end up with vastly different levels of difficulty in actual play.

When I was running public games I could almost always tip the balance to more difficulty with very minor tweaks to tactics and formations. Have the enemy always approach in fireball formation? Don't be surprised when they get fireballed.

 

[FrogReaver]

When I was running public games I could almost always tip the balance to more difficulty with very minor tweaks to tactics and formations. Have the enemy always approach in fireball formation? Don't be surprised when they get fireballed.

Exactly! In many ways tactics have a far greater impact than more DPR.

Enemies focus firing is a scary sight for any pc group. Casters with high value concentration spells up being focus fired is often much more scary than anything else. Targeting downed PCs till death. There’s a lot that greatly increases the difficulty outside of just more numbers.

 

[Hussar]

I would amend that to say that worrying about it in a broad, general way, just in "how much damage do they do overall" is pointless, as the total amount of damage done isn't the only determiner of value to the adventuring endeavor.

This becomes clear when we note that amount of damage done is taken out of context. What has made it so the wizard is safe enough to use that fireball? What is keeping that artillery from being overrun by infantry, or whacked by other artillery? Generally, that's the fighter types. How much absolute damage they do is less important than whether they fulfill their role in the fight.

But we’re discussing bonuses to hit being broken. I agree that situation matters far more than just looking at the numbers.

And yup you need those fighter types there to let the casters do their job. My point wasn’t that wizards make fighters redundant.

My point was that boosting the fighter’s damage makes zero difference to balance in the long run because most of the damage the group is dealing will not be coming from the fighter types.

Going from dealing 30% of the group’s damage to 40% still means that your not dealing as much as the wizard. It just means that you might be saving the wizard a spell or two per day.

IOW no big deal.

 

[jgsugden]

Generally, bless is cast in combat. You can cast it in advance of combat, but that rarely works out in most campaigns. If you can't cast it in advance, you lose a round of being directly influential in the combat to create indirect benefit for 3 PCs.

When cast in Rd 1 of combat, it has no immediate effect on the game state. Nobody is falling down because you cast bless. Then, it will have an impact on roughly 1 in 8 attacks for the impacted PCs, and 1 in 8 saving throws for the impacted PCs. The first time or two it turns a miss into a hit offsets the loss of likely damage that the cleric could have created by casting guiding bolt (which deals damage and gives advantage on another attack). Thus, it is unlikely, from an offensive perspective, that bless will be a net benefit beyond the effectiveness of casting guiding bolt until round 3 or 4 (offensively). If you assume the guiding bolt missed, then that changes things .... but gudiing bolts usually have a better than 50-50 chance to hit, so the chances of being better off with bless immediately are less than 50%.

This means that until the point where bless has turned enough misses into hits to offset the impacts of a guiding bolt, enemies may stay on their feet longer and get an extra attack/spell that they might otherwise not have been able to take. That offsets the benefit of the defensive side of bless - enemies are up longer, allowing them to get the extra attempt to deal damage or cast a spell that offsets the extra saving throw that might be made.

Bless, to me, is a great spell when fighting a high HP solo (legendary) enemy. However, it isn't great in most other situations - merely good - and in a short combat ... downright bad.

 

[FrogReaver]

Generally, bless is cast in combat. You can cast it in advance of combat, but that rarely works out in most campaigns. If you can't cast it in advance, you lose a round of being directly influential in the combat to create indirect benefit for 3 PCs.

When cast in Rd 1 of combat, it has no immediate effect on the game state. Nobody is falling down because you cast bless. Then, it will have an impact on roughly 1 in 8 attacks for the impacted PCs, and 1 in 8 saving throws for the impacted PCs. The first time or two it turns a miss into a hit offsets the loss of likely damage that the cleric could have created by casting guiding bolt (which deals damage and gives advantage on another attack). Thus, it is unlikely, from an offensive perspective, that bless will be a net benefit beyond the effectiveness of casting guiding bolt until round 3 or 4 (offensively). If you assume the guiding bolt missed, then that changes things .... but gudiing bolts usually have a better than 50-50 chance to hit, so the chances of being better off with bless immediately are less than 50%.

This means that until the point where bless has turned enough misses into hits to offset the impacts of a guiding bolt, enemies may stay on their feet longer and get an extra attack/spell that they might otherwise not have been able to take. That offsets the benefit of the defensive side of bless - enemies are up longer, allowing them to get the extra attempt to deal damage or cast a spell that offsets the extra saving throw that might be made.

Bless, to me, is a great spell when fighting a high HP solo (legendary) enemy. However, it isn't great in most other situations - merely good - and in a short combat ... downright bad.

It reads to me as if you are valuing equally over the whole encounter. An enemy casting a control spell on round 4 isn’t nearly the same as casting that spell on round 1. If bless is up on round 1 it will make a much larger difference in that encounter than if the enemy gets 1 extra round in which he uses that same control spell on round 4 (IMO starting tier 2 bless is likely to cause more damage than an equal level guiding bolt *some exceptions apply)