D&D 5E Suggestion: Broken?

[Dausuul]

What's vague about it? If somebody said it to you, would you really have any trouble understanding what they were telling you to do?

It's vague because it boils down to "Go away," and that's friggin' vague. Where to? For how long?

I don't mind interpreting the odd corner case, but I'm not going to spend a lot of thought on very basic details--that's the player's job. I will warn you that your command is excessively vague, and if you can't be bothered to clarify, I will shrug and take the interpretation most favorable to the monster, which is that as soon as it is out of sight, it has f***ed off, the stated course of action is complete, and the spell ends.

If you want the aboleth to stay away longer, you need to tell it how long and how far. And, depending on how long and how far that is, you may have a harder or an easier job framing that suggestion in a reasonable-sounding way.

 

[FireLance]

IMO (and YMMV) suggestion is too open-ended and needs to be given the same treatment as command. In addition, I think suggestion should have two separate effects, depending on casting time.

With a casting time of 1 action, suggestion works as an improved command. Duration is Concentration, up to 1 minute. The caster can issue any typical command from the list in the command spell, and can change the command as a bonus action on the caster's turn. The target can make a new saving throw at the end of each of its turns, and the spell ends on a success.

With a casting time of 1 minute, suggestion functions as described in the PHB, with the caveat that the target should view any significant loss as unreasonable. A knight might allow a beggar to ride his warhorse for a while, but he probably wouldn't give it away.

 

[Gadget]

I have always viewed the spell as allowing the spellcaster to assume the role of an Iago/wormtongue like character in the short space of time to affect a change in the behavior/perceptions/desires of the target. While that interpretation is still somewhat vague, I lean hard into "reasonable" part of the spell description and the caster must have some sort of (however flimsy) plausible justification for the suggested course of action. You get more out of it the more you know about your target. So a safe "These aren't the droids you're looking for, move along" would always work, trying "the other trooper is sleeping with your wife, better shoot him" would not necessarily work out. Maybe the target knows the other trooper is gay, and this is not plausible, or he doesn't have a wife. So, the more the caster knows about the target's situation, relationships, outlook, wants and desires, the more powerful it becomes.

So, in normal D&D usage, I try to keep it from being quite so open ended. Having a knight give her warhorse to the first beggar she meets kind of requires the caster to make this plausible. If it is a virtuous knight, maybe appealing to her better nature by suggesting this would help alleviate suffering and help purify her soul. A ruthless knight might require a suggestion couched in terms of it being a sacrifice required by dark powers to grant potent boons, etc.

I believe the Sage ruling mentioned above about requiring a verbal component beyond the actual suggestion itself (i.e. some chanting arcane syllables) is to prevent the spell from being too easily applied in social situations with third parties present.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I skipped some of the pages here so someone might have mentioned it, but there have been the same two examples of reasonable suggestions that don't involve self-harm given in other editions of the game (1e through 3e). These are suggesting that a pool of acid (presumably the PC knows it's acid and the target doesn't) is cool water and a refreshing dip would be nice, and suggesting that a red dragon stop attacking the party so they can team up to loot a certain rich treasure elsewhere.

Make of that what you will, but those were fairly consistently given as examples (though not in 5e).

 

[Dausuul]

These are suggesting that a pool of acid (presumably the PC knows it's acid and the target doesn't) is cool water and a refreshing dip would be nice...

The problem I always had with those examples is that your presumption (that the target doesn't know it's acid) is not stated. So this suggestion can be read as "It can make someone decide to go for a swim when they otherwise wouldn't," or it can be read as "It can rewrite someone's knowledge of reality." And in fact the latter was the interpretation I originally took from it.

5E rewrote charm person and command and did a pretty good job of nailing down what they can and can't do. Suggestion could use a similar treatment.

 

[Maxperson]

Here's the Sage Advice on the spell.

"Is the sentence of suggestion in the suggestion spell the verbal component, or is the verbal component separate?

Verbal components are mystic words (PH, 203), not normal speech. The spell’s suggestion is an intelligible utterance that is separate from the verbal component. The command spell is the simplest example of this principle. The utterance of the verbal component is separate from, and precedes, any verbal utterance that would bring about the spell’s effect."

The suggestion is an utterance, which is a spoken word or one said aloud. While it would be reasonable for a DM to issue a ruling that allows Suggestion to work via telepathy, it's not a spell that inherently works that way.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

The problem I always had with those examples is that your presumption (that the target doesn't know it's acid) is not stated. So this suggestion can be read as "It can make someone decide to go for a swim when they otherwise wouldn't," or it can be read as "It can rewrite someone's knowledge of reality." And in fact the latter was the interpretation I originally took from it.

5E rewrote charm person and command and did a pretty good job of nailing down what they can and can't do. Suggestion could use a similar treatment.

Yep, it’s unclear and I originally interpreted it that way too. But after thinking about it I think it is contextually much more likely to mean they don’t know it’s acid. Otherwise it would be an example of telling them to do something obviously harmful rather than not. You could just as easily suggest that stabbing yourself might be a fun new experience.

If you assume they don’t know, then both examples refer to something a person might normally do—just not necessarily something this creature would do in this circumstance. That might be a useful interpretative metric. If it’s something nobody would normally do, it’s unreasonable.

 

[Dausuul]

If you assume they don’t know, then both examples refer to something a person might normally do—just not necessarily something this creature would do in this circumstance. That might be a useful interpretative metric. If it’s something nobody would normally do, it’s unreasonable.

Agreed, the examples are actually quite illustrative if you add that key bit of context. The focus on what sounds reasonable is part of the problem, because it focuses on the suggestion in isolation: "A refreshing dip in that pool of clear water would be nice" sounds reasonable but might not be reasonable if you know the water is acid.

On the other hand, I wouldn't say it should be a course of action the creature "considers reasonable." You can too easily argue that if the creature considered the action reasonable, it would already be doing it. Rather, I would say the spell won't make a creature take actions that it believes are against its own interests.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

On the other hand, I wouldn't say it should be a course of action the creature "considers reasonable." You can too easily argue that if the creature considered the action reasonable, it would already be doing it.

Absolutely. Its kind of like a success at 3e diplomancy. You can't get them to kill themselves, but you can go a lot further than the social interaction rules in 5e would let you.

Rather, I would say the spell won't make a creature take actions that it believes are against its own interests.

I think that might be a bit too restrictive. Just using the social interaction rules in the DMG, you can potentially get a hostile creature to do something that doesn't require any risks or sacrifices. I think suggestion intends for you to go beyond that, with the hard limit of not doing something they think is likely to get them killed or seriously harmed, and the soft limit of "reasonable". Making "reasonable" mean essentially "non-contextually reasonable", I think handles the situation fairly well.

One tough issue is using the spell to interrogate prisoners, suggesting it will go better for them if they cooperate. Such a mess of potential issues, that I actually had to think through and come up with guidelines for, since one of my players did exactly that. I don't want this broadly applicable 2nd-level compulsion style spell to be a better interrogation tool than the 2nd-level divination zone of truth that is designed for exactly that purpose, but at the same time I don't want to just say all criminals are more afraid of their boss than of you so it would be asking them to kill themselves. I basically decided that it would depend on the actual relationship with their boss, and that usually what it means is you can get them to give away pieces of information that it's "reasonable" to think won't get them killed, but you can't get them to spill all the beans.