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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6911022" data-attributes="member: 996">The Mind Flayer's psionic blast has generally been instantaneous.  Hold Person is now concentration.   Do 5e Mind Flayers concentrate on keeping a mind blast target stunned?  (I honestly hadn't glanced at Mind Flayers yet, they haven't come up.)"counters?"  Encounters? or something else?  But I guess it's relative:  5e stepped back pretty far from what 4e did with spells, both in terms of availability (only 3 or 4 daily attack spells even at the highest levels, very limited flexibility to change them out) & power (no scaling, balanced with non-magical 'powers') and in more abstract/consistent jargon, like levels (a 4e spell's level was the level at which it was acquired, while 5e is back to spells having a separate 'spell level' on a cantrip+1-9 scale vs the 1-20 scale of character level).Not that there weren't things retained.  Though called cantrips, 5e kept the at-will spells that were standard in 4e (though introduced in 3.5 in the form of the Warlock class and Reserve feats) while restoring something much closer to the large number and high power of traditional Vancian daily slots.  It also retained ritual casting that didn't expend said slots, allowing casters to use spells out of combat without sacrificing options/power in combat.  Overall, the effect is, I think very obviously and intentionally, much closer to classic D&D, though giving casters even greater flexibility and availability (3.5 spontaneous casting and 4e at-wills for all), even if it is arguably off the extreme highs of 3.5 'Tier 1' casters.As subtle as that current is, no, it probably won't go 'against' it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  But 5e has returned to monsters with magic resistance and anti-magic zones and dispel magic as a significant option (and added a counterspell rule), so the idea that magic/not-magic is little more than a ribbon doesn't quite fly in my mind.  If 'dispel magic' were driven by mechanics rather than fluff as in 4e, and no de-facto source 'needed to be balanced' by being subjected to arbitrary shut-down, perhaps the distinction of psionics-as-magic/not-magic could safely be left to the player or treated as little more than a ribbon.  As it stands, there are those who feel strongly one way or another, and magic or not has mechanical consequences, so the system really should strive to present DMs with both options - and ways of make either workable (or even balanced, if desired).Well, there is the timing issue, D&D coming almost a half-century after the heyday of pulps and the death of Lovecraft.  But, yeah, at the time D&D was being written, Tolkien & Lovecraft & Howard were all experiencing a bit of a resurgence, and it was very much in the iconoclastic, quirky spirit of the 70s to just munge things together.</blockquote>

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