The campaign wrapped up a few sessions later and I can't remember if the spell was used again.

Quote from: Haffrung;1057279The campaign wrapped up a few sessions later and I can't remember if the spell was used again.

I would think you would remember if you had to pick and prepare summons on the spot.

Why don't you ask your players if they remember using that spell again?

Quote from: RPGPundit;1056994Your assumptions  are asinine. I haven't had any contact with WoTC after I FINISHED my work for them after the core books were released. I have no reason to call them over anything.

So you have no idea whether they would return your calls; keep telling yourself that they would, "bucko". I stand by my observations of your comments in this thread; you haven't yet come up with an alternate explanation for your comments, since Crawford hasn't changed from the time you didn't rail about him, and you would have led with the SJW conspiracy if that were the real issue.

But maybe I can be more constructive; if it's really about bad rulings in Sage Advice, an easy solution would be to make alternate rulings on the same questions (including NOT making a ruling, but just discussing the appropriate considerations), or at least review the rulings that have been made. So you could help people to be better DMs, or you can engage in a lot more name calling; the choice will provide more evidence of what sort of person you are.

Quote from: Haffrung;1057264The RAW druid animal summoning spell was broken. It was evident to us the first time someone ran a druid in our most recent campaign. With their hordes of summoned beasts blocking monster movement and soaking up attacks, the party was curb-stomping most encounters they ran into. It was no fun. Even the player running the druid admitted it. I was ready to outright ban the spell when I came across the official correction. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Better than having to double the number of monster in every encounter in my campaign to account for a massively overpowered spell.

The Wall of Elk spell! (They're large, have 13 points so aren't totally trivial to blow away but soak enemy attacks regardless, and CR 1/4 so you get 8 of 'em.) It's not so strong against enemies with ranged or area attacks or who can fly or otherwise move past them without restriction, and counterproductive if it cuts off non-ranged allies from the fight, but it has an outsize effect on a large number of combats. And you can use Giant Bats instead if you need flyers (with blindsight, no less). Still useful even for my 19th level Moon Druid (they would mostly take the Help action). AL DMs, supposedly slaves of the official interpretations of Sage Advice, have never hesitated to let me choose the animal. The spell does say choose an option of number of beasts and CR, but it's not absolutely clear that choosing 8 beasts of CR 1/4 does not mean choosing a CR 1/4 beast of which you get 8 (that is, each option is shorthand for . An advantage of having players choose the beast is that you can put the responsibility on them of knowing the stats available on the beast they chose.

There's a post about it on D&D Beyond that is not bad; I think it's wrong about Dispel Magic (the spell is ongoing with a duration, so you could dispel it - at least at my table).

It might have been better to include in the spell a short table of standard stats for each CR, like they did in the Animate Objects spell, perhaps with various options for specific traits like flying or swimming speed.

Morrus at ENWorld re-posted this longish Twitter thread a week or so ago from D&D designer Mike Mearls talking about D&D and its overall design goals, and how that changed from previous editions. It covers the Who of who D&D 5E is designed for, the styles of play it encourages, and more:

Quote from: Mike MearlsWhen designing a game, consider the personality traits and behaviors the game encourages in its player. Then ask yourself if you want to make a game for a community that embraces what you're encouraging. That tweet is a nicer way of saying: If you make a game for [JERKS], be ready, willing, and able to deal with [JERKS]. It's also why D&D got out of the business of trying to "fix" obnoxious people.

3.5 and 4 were very much driven by an anxiety about controlling the experience of the game, leaving as little as possible to chance. They aimed for consistency of play from campaign to campaign, and table to table. The fear was that an obnoxious player or DM would ruin the game, and that would drive people away from it. The thinking was that if we made things as procedural as possible, people would just follow the rules and have fun regardless of who they played with.

The downside to this approach is that the rules became comprehensive to a fault. The game's rules bloated, as they sought to resolve many if not all questions that arise in play with the game text.

At the same time, 3.5 and 4 were driven by the idea that D&D players wanted as many character options as possible, presented in a modular framework meant to encourage the search for combinations that yielded characters who broke the power curve.

These two aims play together in an extremely terrible way, at least from a design perspective. Your core system has to cover everything... meanwhile you are adding more cases and content to your game. Good luck with keeping those things in balance!

IMO, the basic design premise suffers from a fatal flaw. It misses out on a ton of the elements that make RPGs distinct and doesn't speak to why people enjoy D&D in the first place.

With 5th, we assumed that the DM was there to have a good time, put on an engaging performance, and keep the group interested, excited, and happy. It's a huge change, because we no longer expect you to turn to the book for an answer. We expect the DM to do that.

In terms of players, we focus much more on narrative and identity, rather than specific, mechanical advantages. Who you are is more important than what you do, to the point that your who determines your what. In broad terms - and based on what we can observe of the community from a variety of measures - we went from a community that focused on mechanics and expertise, to one focused on socializing and story telling. Mechanical expertise is an element of the game, but no longer the sole focus. Ideally, it's a balanced part of all the other motivators. If balanced correctly, every has their fun. Enjoyment isn't zero sum.

As D&D is descriptive rather than prescriptive, individual groups had different experiences. However, that was the design trend and what we saw in the community as a whole. It's been interesting to see things change with the change in rules and the flood of new players.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1057125One day I'll meet this mythical kind of person. As of yet, those who do not care about the rules tend to be terrible roleplayers too at my tables.

A lot of these people are enthusiastic newbies who really get into the "my PC can try to do anything I imagine" aspect of RPing. They often don't method act that much, and only think about the rules as an afterthought but they treat the world as if it's a real place and make decisions for their PC based on what they know about the world and what would make sense for someone to do if they were in that situation, and then only afterwards translate that into rules terms, often clumsily. This is often a complete non-starter with metagame heavy indie games and they need some hand-holding to translate their actions into game terms in crunchy conventional games, which can be aggravating.

That's why with the actual groups I have I like stripped down OSR games since they work fine if some players know literally nothing about the rules (run some D&D games with my students sometimes and teach them nothing about how to play before throwing them into a dungeon) even though I'd enjoy playing a more metagamey or crunchy game if everyone at the table was a clone of me.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1056999So you're just bitter they changed what you suggested, then?

Actually, MECHANICALLY speaking and in terms of business model, they're doing EXACTLY what I suggested.  Instead of creating a flood of splatbooks with new feats and powers leading to massive rules bloat, or putting out dozens of products a year and creating a glut of material, they've successfully stuck to doing a handful of mostly adventure-focused books a year. That was precisely what I told them would keep 5e functional, and frankly I'm astounded they've managed to stick to that and didn't let avarice get the better of them.

Quote from: rawma;1057313So you have no idea whether they would return your calls; keep telling yourself that they would, "bucko". I stand by my observations of your comments in this thread;

Why the fuck would I care if they answered my calls or not? I have no business with them whatsoever. I'd be a really shitty employee to have designing corporate-approved formulaic adventure-path products.
(for the record, I  never called them, Mearls came to me directly with the offer to consult, something I had not expected).

Quoteyou haven't yet come up with an alternate explanation for your comments, since Crawford hasn't changed from the time you didn't rail about him, and you would have led with the SJW conspiracy if that were the real issue.

When we were working on 5e, Crawford barely appeared on my radar at all. He was a third-class figure in the process, the guy who did the grunt work. I never interacted with him and barely ever heard his name.

It's clear that since then he's been using his SJW credentials to rise in influence in the office, and is probably gunning for Mearls' job.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1057703When we were working on 5e, Crawford barely appeared on my radar at all. He was a third-class figure in the process, the guy who did the grunt work. I never interacted with him and barely ever heard his name.

It's clear that since then he's been using his SJW credentials to rise in influence in the office, and is probably gunning for Mearls' job.

I suspect he just said: "Hey Mike, I know you hate dealing with rules crunch - why don't I take on Sage Advice?"

Which then let him establish himself as the guru of 5e.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1057125One day I'll meet this mythical kind of person. As of yet, those who do not care about the rules tend to be terrible roleplayers too at my tables.

Half the people I play with don't give a crap about the rules, and they're fine roleplayers. And judging the design goals of 5E - making the game about story and adventure at the table, rather than mechanical expertise - and given the enormous success of 5E, I'd suggest your experience is anomalous. It's the people fixated on rules and mechanics who tend to be the dicks and make the game narrow and inaccessible.

Quote from: Haffrung;1057751It's the people fixated on rules and mechanics who tend to be the dicks and make the game narrow and inaccessible.

Oh I have met these people. I have just never met their inverse.

Maybe I weigh doing things more heavily for roleplaying while others are satisfied with talking. Mechanically invested players are much more likely to be excited about doing things and know how to do things so more things get down.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1057756Oh I have met these people. I have just never met their inverse.

Maybe I weigh doing things more heavily for roleplaying while others are satisfied with talking. Mechanically invested players are much more likely to be excited about doing things and know how to do things so more things get down.

Ah I think there's two seprate things:
1. Making your PC a distinct character, method acting, getting in long conversations with NPCs, etc.
2. Immersing in the world and treating the world as if It was a real place and making decisions about what to do accordingly.

In my experience the people who never learn the rules don't tend to be that good at 1. but tend to be great at 2. Which is great, because I faaaaaaar prefer 2. in my players. I don't care if your character is named Bob and you character concept is "he's a fighter who's good at fighting and likes to fight" if you think in terms of world logic and come at the game with cleverness that doesn't depend on finagling the rules.

Sometimes you can just see the light go on in the heads of enthusiastic newbies. I remember one who went from walking into a room and declaring that they were going to "remove a trap because it says on my character sheet that I can remove a trap" and asking "how many times can I use a rope" to gathering stones to throw at random things to check if they were illusions similar things that were all about paying attention to the world and engaging with it, even if your PC is just a cardboard cutout.

Quote from: S'mon;1057740I suspect he just said: "Hey Mike, I know you hate dealing with rules crunch - why don't I take on Sage Advice?"

Which then let him establish himself as the guru of 5e.

If so, that was a terrible, terrible choice on Mearls' part, because he unwittingly set this smarmy little shit up to eventually overthrow him.

"Rulings not rules" isn't about interpreting the rules any old damn way you want, it's about expecting the DM to be able to make up something reasonable for things not covered by the rules at all, or be able to rationally handle corner cases that the rules don't really touch adequately. I think 5e's done that reasonably well. For one thing, the rules truly don't cover everything. If you want to build a pit trap to lure an owlbear into, there's no rule in 5e for how to do that. But there are enough tools for the DM to make a ruling that the players will find adequate. Overall, I think the relative freedom the DM has with skill checks, combined with the standard list of statuses, make it pretty easy to make rulings to cover situations not comprehended by the rules.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1058442"Rulings not rules" isn't about interpreting the rules any old damn way you want, it's about expecting the DM to be able to make up something reasonable for things not covered by the rules at all, or be able to rationally handle corner cases that the rules don't really touch adequately. I think 5e's done that reasonably well. For one thing, the rules truly don't cover everything. If you want to build a pit trap to lure an owlbear into, there's no rule in 5e for how to do that. But there are enough tools for the DM to make a ruling that the players will find adequate. Overall, I think the relative freedom the DM has with skill checks, combined with the standard list of statuses, make it pretty easy to make rulings to cover situations not comprehended by the rules.

It's also about not going out of your way to make rules that don't require any GM adjudication. My acid test for this is the command spell. IIRC in 3.5ed and 4ed you couldn't make up any verb you wanted because that would require the GM to have to adjudicate what the monster would do if you told them something strange. Which is bullshit. That's pretty much my acid test right now for whether an edition of D&D is worth playing or not.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1058442"Rulings not rules" isn't about interpreting the rules any old damn way you want, it's about expecting the DM to be able to make up something reasonable for things not covered by the rules at all, or be able to rationally handle corner cases that the rules don't really touch adequately. I think 5e's done that reasonably well. For one thing, the rules truly don't cover everything. If you want to build a pit trap to lure an owlbear into, there's no rule in 5e for how to do that. But there are enough tools for the DM to make a ruling that the players will find adequate. Overall, I think the relative freedom the DM has with skill checks, combined with the standard list of statuses, make it pretty easy to make rulings to cover situations not comprehended by the rules.

I also think 5e has done a good job of that, certainly compared to 3e.