Sometimes when you translate something into another medium, a weakness you might have overlooked is exposed.
It’s like when you draw a face and spend hours on it, only to mirror the image and see how stupid it looked.
I feel this a little too much.
The same thing happens to me when I look in the mirror. Wait, drawing?
Take a picture of your own face, to see how it actually looks like for others, and not in a mirror.
Truly fucks you up
Haha yeah, I see myself on video a lot, so I’m used to it.
Sometimes it’s only a weakness because of the different medium. Like there’s really nothing wrong with Produce Flame in 5e, but the wording of it would make it difficult to port into the digital medium.
So true. I try to think in these terms when it comes to issues at work that folk can’t find a workable solution to. Not quite creativity, just approaching the problem from a different angle.
So…a bad designer finally played his own game? He doesn’t seem to understand produce flame is meant to be light but with an emergency hit button, but it’s good he’s finally realized spellcasting sucks in 5e. What are the odds he figures out the big issues, though?
What I’ve found (in multiple systems across different companies) is spells and other class abilities that are in any plentiful amount will eventually have duds in them, and eventually printing schedules means you can’t fix/test them all. So you send them off, hope they don’t break the game, and make errata later if they are truly broken. This is a case where they had time to fix them, eventually.
He was also constrained by some of the history of the game. There have always been spells in D&D which are better or worse. It’s become a bit of a joke that the first spell taken by any wizard is Magic Missile. Why? Because it’s been one of the most useful 1st level spells for wizards since early D&D. So, into the spell book it goes, and it was very often the one spell a first level wizard memorized.
I’m just glad that the designers are willing to take a critical look at their own work and say, “you know what, this sucks, let’s fix it”.
I liked cloud of daggers. Moving it is good, because it’s absolutely possible to basically burn it and not have it be that useful past a turn or two, but just taking away positions for enemies to be has value.
Maybe not compared to something higher level like Hunger of Hadar I used a lot with my warlock later game, which covers more ground and affects movement as well, but making it harder for a caster/archer to sit behind a doorway and harass you is useful the way I played.
I used cloud of daggers as well. It was useful for choke points or, in the rare circumstance, of immobile enemies.
Fun for team kills where your barbarian throws an enemy bodily into the cloud. Bonus points if the enemy just ran out of it earlier that round. Or, void bulb - I always go out of my way to pick those up.
Good
