I still think D&D could benefit from having lower cost counter spells that only work in specific situations like versus certain schools of magic or versus certain monster types.
Control never left when I still played.
I think he was more saying how some classes assumed a offense or defense or utility buff at certain levels so when you were designing a subclass for those classes you had to create a subclass feature which matched that or it would stray to powerful or to weak in one of the elements in the game's assumption.
So, going back to 1e?
It was intentionally above the curve. But the curve was in the wrong place, leading to fireball being fine-ish anyway.
PCs have similar hp, yes – slightly more because the floor is higher (rogues and bards have d8s, and sorcerers and wizards d6s, but that's a marginal change). But monsters have WAY more hp. A CR 3 monster typically has between 50 and 90 hp (interestingly enough, most seem to either be in the 50s or 80s, with few in the 60s and 70s), with occasional outliers lower than that. At CR 5, it's more like 80-120 (using 5.0 numbers). In the face of hp totals like that, the 25-30 of an unsaved fireball is just going to tickle.
I think you generally see less countermagic in Magic these days because of the pre-eminence of Commander as a format. Counterspells show up less there because one-for-ones are inherently less useful in a multiplayer format. You still see some of them played, but more as emergency buttons ("No, I'm not going to let you reanimate your whole graveyard.") than as a primary strategy.
Yeah. It’s wild. I know they play the games they’re designing, but it almost seems like they’re in their own bubble with no contact from the wider community at all. One optimizer or power gamer on the design team could have pointed all this out. Same with the boss monster math / resting nova thread. Or even listening to the power gamers and optimizers during the playtest would have caught so many of these things.
It’s not just Commander. Designs have been pushing individual cards doing more and more things - enter triggers, cast triggers, attack triggers, generating various artifact tokens that can be sacrificed for additional benefits, not to mention bonkers stuff like Nadu and Vivi. Even in 1v1 magic, one-for-one exchanges just mostly aren’t worth it, except to answer a threat that will kill you if it isn’t answered immediately.
But you don't base the game mechanics around the one power gamer. Most people are not min-maxers, just like most video game players are not speed runners. You base it around the fun a group of people have. You base it around the feeling of being fair and levelled. Not the lone guy at the game store that wants to only play a character that will always do max damage. (PS - A few monsters with resistance to their gimmick instantly equalizes things for some encounters. The others, let them do their thing.)
