D&D 5E save or boring

[devincutler]

Except at mid levels Dispel Magic is available, and if you use the proper spell slot there isn't even a check; it automatically works. So I might be inclined to submit that if your players don't like the already nerfed save or suck mechanic in 5th edition (in every instance I can think of you get a save every round), all they have to do is cast a dispel magic and it will automatically be gone.

Seems there is no real reason for anyone to sit out except for player choices being made.

 

[Celtavian]

I tend to build enemies with condition removal abilities or high saves. I tend to look at combat as "survival of the fittest." When I see an encounter designed that couldn't possibly survive contact with a competent adventure group, I modify that encounter so they could survive, usually be adding condition removal abilities or resistances to a creature or creating a party that works together to fight against similarly armed parties. Even though D&D isn't realistic, I still like to use realistic ideas like the arms race. The reality is that some solo high level fighter without magical support has no chance of ruling anyone but some small group of relatively in effective thugs. He has no chance of ruling a kingdom or even a fiefdom without magical support because the first creature that shows up with magical support will unseat that person. I've never seen the point in designing enemy encounters with powerful martial NPCs with no magical support because they have next to no chance of success. There is no reason to believe they could have obtained any power in a world where magic exists. It would be the modern equivalent of holding power with no guns or no air power against a nation with air power. It's not likely save in very primitive areas no one really wants to occupy.

I take that thinking and design encounters accordingly. That means lots of counters which the players have to bypass to succeed. They end up in a chess match where no one player will be effective alone. So a player that does something like remove an effect from another player on his turn feels useful because the battle is likely to turn on such an action given the strength and capabilities of the enemy. I never make key battles short unless something ridiculous happens like an enemy rolling a 1 at the wrong time. Over a long, challenging battle, it's pretty rare that a player has time to disengage.

And make sure you can run combat fast. Running combat slowly is one of the main causes of player apathy. Players get really bored when a DM doesn't appear to know what he's doing. Reading monster entries during play, choosing actions slowly, and the like cause players to disengage. Pacing is important when running a game and keeping players engaged.

 

[Xorne]

Well, except that the endangered player has no agency. And 99% of the time, "do more damage" is still the correct response to that question. The best way to save the character is to kill the baddies as quickly as possible - which was also the goal at the beginning. Either that, or you try to have the enemy coup-de-grace the timed-out-character, in which case it really was a save-or-die, and then everyone feels bad. Still, I think your advice is good, and maybe there's a way to turn those situations into more dramatic ones.

This isn't even a save or suck situation, but an endangered player has agency if the DM gives them agency. My group was facing down a large group of cultists, led by the city captain and the paladin barrels headlong up to him, getting surrounded. The rest of the party is battling toward him, but for a time he and the captain are squared off and they are both wailing on each other. It becomes apparent that the cultists are going to lose hard, and the captain declares that he might fall this day, but he shall take the paladin with him!

The captain drops the paladin; the paladin fails a death save; the rest of the cultists are falling rapidly, and one player (going before the captain) has a chance to act first. Instead of grabbing the paladin and dragging him away, or shoving the captain, or doing anything to save the paladin, he swings at the captain, hitting him, but failing to kill him.

The captain, surrounded by the heroes, and doomed, buries his sword in the paladin, auto-critting, driving him to instant death.

Player agency.

And yeah, the player that could have drug him to safety felt bad. That's good. But if a downed character doesn't motivate the players to protect/aid them--you probably need to make it clear that it's bad to leave a player down/helpless and undefended.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I had hoped this thread would be more about people's experiences with mid-level save-or-stuck spells, and how they felt about them, and how that compared to my experience. ... I was wondering if other people had experienced something similar and how they dealt with it. .. But can people who are trying to help fix my problems at least confirm that they think the spells are fine as-is? Just so I understand your perspective. Thanks again, all!

Save-or-else spells have never been just fine, they're problematic (they have that in common with multiple attacks, for instance), and the game has, at best, made them less so at times. Heck, saving throws, themselves, were an attempt to make a completely game-play-problematic effect like a deadly poison or spell that turns the victim into a toad more manageable.

5e is closer to the less problematic side because it does offer saves every round, but those saves can be excessively hard or easy to make depending on level (spell saves, for instance, scale with caster proficiency and stat, both of which are always going to apply and generally be as high as possible), proficient saves (most PCs gets proficiency to only ~1/3rd of saving throws, and the stat involved may be one he never gets around to boosting), magic resistance, etc. As always in 5e, it's incumbent on the DM to step in and make rulings in favor of fun, which might mean removing or limiting such an effect from a monster, making a monster outright immune, fudging saves (in either direction, depending), or whatever seems to work best for the campaign & the group.

 

[iserith]

The thread title is a little dramatic, but now that 5.0 is a little older and campaigns are a little more along, how are people feeling about spells that are not save-or-die, but rather save-or-can't-do-anything? (Mid-campaign spells, typically.) I find they tend to create two weird situations that turn gameplay a bit "meh" for us:

First, if the party casts a save-or-win spell (we have a bard with hypnotic pattern, for example - and now polymorph), it means that this character either single-handedly destroys the encounter... or, they wasted a turn. Thanks to how human beings work (perception bias and whatnot), even a 50/50 split on this means the player tends to believe they waste turns far more often than they save the day... which means they think combat is boring and they aren't good at it. Or, they trivialize the encounter, which is fine - but also a bit anticlimactic, especially when it's some sort of boss. Or you run into the even worse situation, where suddenly all bosses are curiously immune to charm or whatever... Thus negating this character's One Big Thing. It's a tricky line to walk, in my opinion.

Or, you have the opposite, where the monsters cast on the players - which in my opinion is the worst of all. This means the player has to save, or skip one or more turns - which is awful. It's helpless + frustrating + disengaging all in one. I've never seen a phone get pulled out faster, and when the phones come out, that player is going to take a long time and a lot of effort on my part to come back. On the other hand, pretty much all monster attacks can be categorized as a) does damage to one or more PCs, b) incapacitates a PC in some manner. And when I'm running a game, just throwing around damage every turn gets to be a chore - not to mention how slow it can get when you have lots of baddies. It also tends to encourage simplistic thinking - "ok, who do I hit this round" - as opposed to interesting play - "I drop the chandelier on his head to capture him!" - because every round is just a series of numbers until the battle is over.

Part of this is definitely due to our playstyle, as we tend to have fewer battles against bigger foes (especially since our particular party can do things like kill a CR 13 purple worm in one round at level 9 - it was their 4th encounter of the day). We just don't have time to play out more than ~4 or 5 battles in one session, and most of them aren't big combat players (it's just not their favorite), so combat is fewer and further between - which means One Big Thing spells have a MUCH bigger impact, and players losing a turn is a larger percentage of all combat rounds being done that night.

I've tried upping the number of bad guys so One Big Thing spells don't do as much, but then if the One Big Thing spell doesn't hit - oh boy. They are screwed. Plus, it just takes forever to run so many monsters. Ultimately, what ends up happening is that we just run even fewer encounters... but that just makes both problems bigger.

Anyway, just wondering how others have navigated these spells and whether or not they have been as much of an issue.

It sounds like there are a few underlying issues at work here. But I don't think the way these spells work in D&D 5e is one of them. As you remark, it has a lot to do with how you play - low combats per day which result in short "workdays" and perhaps the way you're designing and presenting your challenges. I'm also curious how long it takes for someone's turn to come back around. In a 4 person group that meets face-to-face, 3 minutes is about as long as it should be between a given player's turns. If someone can't pay attention and stay engaged for 3 minutes, that's odd in my view.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

First...: Nope. Never had a problem with it in my game. *shrug*

Second...: Players whipping out cell phones in the middle of a game when they no longer have the "special little snowflake" capability (re: their character gets taken out for a bit) are not, IMHO, "adults". They're a different thing that also starts with the letter "a". >:| In my book it's the same as having a conversation with someone and you are in the middle of a sentence, explaining your take on the "War on Terror", when the other person suddenly whips out their phone and starts checking their text messages and/or playing Angry Birds. It's the epitome of rude behaviour, IMNSHO.

Third...: Try letting them do some "meta-gaming" when their' character gets K.O.'ed for a bit. Explain it however you want, like the other character(s) suddenly getting that gut feeling, or intuition ("Use the Force, Luke!"). The OOP (Out Of Play) player can start suggesting things to other players, and looking stuff up for them (spells, effects, etc). The more players that get OOP'ed, the more input the remaining players have. This will keep it a "group thing", and keeps the OOP player(s) involved. Of course, you, as DM, are SOL unless you don't mind letting a dead characters player help you run the bad guys (looking up spells, special abilities, etc for you and offering suggestions on how to kill the other PC's... ). This would be rather adversarial, however, and your players have to be mature enough to handle it.

Lastly...: I read your OP and thought "Huh...sounds like he/they are focused on the end-result as opposed to the getting-there side of things. From my perspective, the player who has his PC's spell thwarted didn't just "wast a spell"; they had the opportunity to make a choice. This is something that is rather unique to RPG's...that one can make decisions that will affect the story and the outcome of a characters role in it. If they had no choice, then it would be a 'waste'...but they did have a choice. That choice was to cast that spell, or another one, or use an ability, or pull out a weapon, or run away, or throw a bag of marbles on the ground, or...or...or... It was the choice that was the "cool thing", not the result. The result is the reward...and yeah, I see failures as rewards. Everyone at the table has created a collective imagining of the story because of that players choice and the result of it...for weal or woe... and that is the important part. If your players are focused on the end-result more than their choices...well, (insert "Well there's yer problem!" meme).

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Lanefan]

::shrug:: I guess I'm just used to sitting out for a while for any of a number of reasons:

- my character failed a save vs. a disabling spell and is out for the duration
- my character is dead (out for indeterminite time) or unconscious (out till someone cures me, 'cause I ain't curing myself!)
- someone else is doing their thing e.g. scouting, and I'm not involved (to forestall all those who will dive in and say this should never happen, this is NOT a bug but rather an accepted part of the game)
- I'm roleplaying my character. To explain, if there's a lengthy in-character argument going on about something my character couldn't care less about (example: who gets a particular treasury item that my character can't even use) I'm as good as out other than to now and then ask - both in and out of character at the same time - "Are you guys done yet?"

Note however that I mitigate all this considerably by usually playing two characters.

And yes, if my characters are in one half of the party (figuring out how to fly an airship*) and the other half (trying to decipher writing on walls in a room at the other end of the dungeon complex*) is what's being looked after at the moment I'll pour myself a drink and pull out my phone or something; particularly if my characters in theory shouldn't know what the other half of the party is doing until and unless we meet up again.

* - example taken from the game I play in, two sessions ago

Lanefan

 

[S'mon]

5e combat is so fast that I've not seen any problem with PCs being taken out of the action, even for the whole fight. I don't mind a player sitting out for 10 minutes. When it's two hours then it's a problem.

 

[Jessica]

I don't think banning cellphones will do much at all. It's a symptom and not the cause of the problem itself. In a similar situation(being KOed or CCed), since I own a burner I tend to just read splat books instead.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*