D&D General The Beautiful Mess of 5e

[Cap'n Kobold]

And Adventurer's Guild. We have to remember that a number of people never get to play home games, there only dnd may lie in gaming events and AG adventurers.

All of the broken stuff is available to them by default.

Not all. Silvery barbs for example, are not available for Adventurer's League.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm really torn on this topic.

I feel that spells should scale better. Heck, most class features should scale better.

However, I don't believe that making spells MORE powerful is the fix that spellcasters need. It's limiting the power of a few gamebreaking spells.

In the panel, Hypnotic Pattern gets brought up. I find Hypnotic Pattern leads to degenerate play (as Matt Colville would say). You end up with a gaggle of mesmerized foes. Players gather around one of them and then slaughter them in a single turn. Then onto the next. And the next. Meanwhile, I'm very focused on if the players might do anything unintentionally that breaks the spell effect. Not particularly heroic or fun. The game does not need more spells like that.

I think Hypnotic Pattern is particularly egregious for this because there are no repeat saving throws. Most save-or-stun type effects allow the subject to repeat the save every turn and end the effect on a success. The few that don’t are the best-in-slot options for their level, because they take a target out of the fight completely, with no risk of them coming back into it.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think Hypnotic Pattern is particularly egregious for this because there are no repeat saving throws. Most save-or-stun type effects allow the subject to repeat the save every turn and end the effect on a success. The few that don’t are the best-in-slot options for their level, because they take a target out of the fight completely, with no risk of them coming back into it.

Yup the holy trinity of HP, Fear, Slow depending on the situation.

 

[TheSword]

I think Hypnotic Pattern is particularly egregious for this because there are no repeat saving throws. Most save-or-stun type effects allow the subject to repeat the save every turn and end the effect on a success. The few that don’t are the best-in-slot options for their level, because they take a target out of the fight completely, with no risk of them coming back into it.

That’s not quite true because unless they are on their own or every foe fails the save they can be brought round very quickly. Not only that if you want to then attack them they are then back in room. So it’s not quite as simple as that.

 

[Zardnaar]

That’s not quite true because unless they are on their own or every foe fails the save they can be brought round very quickly. Not only that if you want to then attack them they are then back in room. So it’s not quite as simple as that.

Youre buying time though. They're wasting there turns waking peopke up.

Its a huge temp swing.

If my NPCs can cast magic missile do that instead targeting your own.

 

[Staffan]

Moreover, if upcasting was an optimal strategy for D&D damage spells, then why have the upper level damage spells at all? Just introduce spells like "energy rays", "energy ball", "energy cone" and make them fully generic in damage and/or damage type and just set those variables based on the level of the spell slot expended.
It might be effective form a mathematical standpoint, but it would pretty much suck the D&Dness atmosphere out of the room.

I mean, back in the day fireball was pretty much the go-to offensive spell even at higher levels.

But one can make higher-level blast spells better in ways other than just having bigger numbers. You can add various riders to them, bigger AOEs, selective damage, and things like that.

 

[Scott Christian]

This is the issue with D&D, and likely any game that strives to be the 'kleenex' of RPGs.

There is no possible way to 'balance' the game around

1. True Casuals.
2. Total RPG Theatre Kids who dont care at all about being effective.
3. Min-Max, Multiclass Dipping, Rules Lawyer Power Gamers.

Now, those may not all be at the same table, but if the game allows for all 3 to exist, and more besides, no way can it possibly be 'balanced' for all 3.

Instead, it all falls on the DM to balance the table, and encounters, but then Wizards doesnt even give you the rules for monster creation...oops.

Not disagreeing to just disagree, but D&D actually does a great job of balancing all three. I have literally played a yearlong campaign where one warlock took no damage spells, one paladin/warlock was min/maxed, one cleric was a good punching bag but little else, one barbarian was dex based and just speedy, but had little damage output, and the bard was the literal "theater player" that never did anything right as far as tactics.

We played. Had fun. One of us died, but it was at higher levels so we quested to get them back. And there was no real angst about min/maxer doing a lot of the work.

Caveat: We were all adults in our thirties and forties. So, we weren't competing and comparing nearly as much as we may have done in our twenties.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Not disagreeing to just disagree, but D&D actually does a great job of balancing all three. I have literally played a yearlong campaign where one warlock took no damage spells, one paladin/warlock was min/maxed, one cleric was a good punching bag but little else, one barbarian was dex based and just speedy, but had little damage output, and the bard was the literal "theater player" that never did anything right as far as tactics.

We played. Had fun. One of us died, but it was at higher levels so we quested to get them back. And there was no real angst about min/maxer doing a lot of the work.

Caveat: We were all adults in our thirties and forties. So, we weren't competing and comparing nearly as much as we may have done in our twenties.

Yeah, my players have a similar breakdown and it's fine.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Not disagreeing to just disagree, but D&D actually does a great job of balancing all three. I have literally played a yearlong campaign where one warlock took no damage spells, one paladin/warlock was min/maxed, one cleric was a good punching bag but little else, one barbarian was dex based and just speedy, but had little damage output, and the bard was the literal "theater player" that never did anything right as far as tactics.

We played. Had fun. One of us died, but it was at higher levels so we quested to get them back. And there was no real angst about min/maxer doing a lot of the work.

Caveat: We were all adults in our thirties and forties. So, we weren't competing and comparing nearly as much as we may have done in our twenties.

+1 for Mearls's statement of "role playing games aren't actually games, they're activities."

 

[Hussar]

Each of us get to decide if something's not working for us.

For me, the Twilight Cleric had way too much damage mitigation going on. It wasn't just healing, it was essentially giving every character a round-resetting damage threshold of 1d6 + cleric level. It also took a lot of time at the table because the cleric player had to remind each other player to roll for their temps at the beginning of their turn, effectively adding a new action on top of the already bloated number of actions a character gets in 5e (which also now got worse with all the non-action actions in D&D 2024). It also uses channel divinity which means clerics get two uses of it per short rest.

It was so borked in the game I ran that the player who had it was very open to work with me to nerf it into a single blast of temporary hit points when cast. Everyone at our table knew it was a problem.

I hadn't ever used the Peace cleric but heard enough complaints to also ban that one at my table whenever we allowed other Tasha's stuff. But I saw it at a convention where it totally broke an encounter that was meant as a PVP contest in which the winners got free tickets to the next convention. That was awful. You wouldn't think an extra d4 would matter but when you stack it with everything else, they were hitting 28s and 30s on their ability checks while everyone else was doing like 14.

It's always interesting to see different experiences.

See, I play on VTT exclusively. Something like a Twilight cleric doesn't add any time at all - the Twilight Cleric player just clicks a button and can do it while other people are doing their turns without interrupting anything. So, there was no "new action" for me at all. I can see how this would be a PITA at the table though. It's largely why we never use summonings at the table - just too much of a PITA.