This is such a great concept and solid execution. Quantifying control has always frustrated me, a bit like quantifying support, so it’s super useful to have a system like this. Thank you
That's some sound logic! I was planning on that just getting reflected in the damage taken calculations, but I guess it does fit in. Something like blade ward could be calculated too. So I guess petrified would get brought even lower then, since I would subtract that number because it would be a positive benefit instead of a debuff.
@@DndUnoptimized Prone's disadvantage on attacks should also be factored in (especially with a general preference on average for ranged over melee spells and attacks - outside of the one using the effect)
One thing to consider is whether the target gets a 2nd save. For sleep and hypnotic pattern on the list they don't, but they do break on damage so it then also depends on how intelligent the monsters are
Indeed. So for spells that have a repeat save that is taken into account in the encounter CPR numbers, and if they can be shaken out or take damage to get a save the it decreases the amount each round too based on that modification table. But yes, you are right, they totally depend on the intelligence of the monsters, but shaking an enemy out also consumes an action, and that is control in itself.
I think you are really into something here! Like no other DND RUclipsr is doing something like this. I see a lot of build videos always talking about dpr but top players know that control wins the game. Like this is something we can actually use to compare different control builds. The real question is how can we integrate this with dpr in terms of value. I guess we could just add dpr and CPR together as your contribution to the party per round. That also brings the idea of stuff like buffs and healing which is probably closer to the outline you have now but for the party. (Like there isn't that much difference between haste and slow except slow can affect multiple people but also chances to succeed and escape the spell. It also points towards why protecting your concentration is vital because you can control the battlefield significantly for more rounds. This is really fantastic.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I'm glad it is interesting to some people other than just me. In terms of how to combine it with other aspects of character analysis, I was planning on having a three axis (or dimension) chart with lines 120 degrees apart. One line for DPR, one line for CPR, and one for survivability. Then it would be a triangle of you connect the points on the lines. Hard to describe, but I wasn't planning on adding the CPR and DPR numbers together since they are so different. Hopefully if I am able to make builds that are interesting to watch then the idea of CPR can spread. I feel like the optimization community is sometimes too focused on DPR because it's the only thing we know how to measure, so it's the only thing to optimize for.
1:50 I'd actually say that the highest measure of control isn't just unconscious, but literal *control.* As in dominate person. If they're not just out of the combat, but actively supplementing your action economy with their own- that is peak control. Taking this perspective could help with the hurdles you had with classifying CoT spells, by looking at how they affect the action economy. Perhaps in some calculation of actions lost vs. actions gained?
Thanks for the suggestion, that does make a lot of sense. The reason I went with unconscious is because of a few points. It's a defined condition in the PHB, and so has a solid breakdown that cannot change, it is also something that every player is pretty familiar with, and it had some debuff effects too, so now I can have a base idea of how to rank those types of things, especially advantage/disadvantage. Domination would give me "control" over their actions, but it won't provide the debuffs. Also I'd probably have to base it off a spell which makes it a little shakier for some reason, maybe it's just in my mind. But I do agree with you that it does feel like the ultimate control, more than unconscious. I'll think about if there's a way to break down the other control effects from it. CoT meaning concentration?
I’m a little surprised with the score given to Web, I thought it should be higher. Web is also an area of difficult terrain, so even if an enemy makes their initial save they’ll have to suffer a movement penalty. Furthermore, if a creature fails their initial save there’s a chance they use their action to break out, which is kinda the same thing as denying them an action since they didn’t attack or do something that affected the player characters. That said, I recognize that quantifying those effects isn’t easy due to their highly variable nature, but they’re certainly worth considering. In any case, I really appreciate you putting this together because control is something I’ve long wondered how to calculate and this is WAY better than any method I’ve come up with in the past lol
That is a good point, you are right, the potential to deny action with web is significant. Many enemies cannot stay in the web due to melee dependence, and most will not stay in the web even if they have ranged attacks. Thanks for pointing this out!
Fahrenheit is based on something concrete. Its the equipercentile division of temperature from the coldest temperature acheived in Lord Fahrenheit's laboratory to Lord Fahrenheit's body temperature.
Yep, Fahrenheit is supposed to be based in part on the human body temperature. It's just that the human body temperature has slowly cooled over the past 300 years, to the point that 97.9 is the average now and 100 is considered a fever.
I don't know that either the body temperature of one person on one day, or the lowest temperature he could reach in his lab are concrete. Surely it's based on something though. Eventually they fixed it based on the boiling and freezing point of water and that's pretty concrete, but those numbers sure are weird.
@@DndUnoptimized Even the boiling and freezing points of water depend on atmospheric pressure. The boiling point of water decreases by 0.5 degrees Celsius for every 500ft above sea level. For example, the boiling point of water in Denver Colorado is 94.5 degrees Celsius. And the earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level is always slowly changing as well.
This is really excellent work, something totally new like this in the optimization sphere is so rare at this stage in 5E's lifespan. What were your inspirations for this effort? I recommend you collaborate with other optimization creators like Tabletop Builds, Treantmonk's Temple or Pack Tactics to assist you in a deeper analysis. Really looking forward to more content on this topic and others like it. Bravo.
I really appreciate it! In terms of inspiration, I have just seen so many builds that do DPR calculations and then say, and "we do good control too". I always wondered if there could be a way to measure control that people might start optimizing for it instead of damage. Maybe that would add a completely new take to character builds and maybe it would lead to builds that would play better at a table full of non-optimizers too. I'm a big fan of Treantmonk and Pack Tactics and would definitely be honoured to discuss these kinds of things with them. I saw Pack Tactics comment on another of my videos so maybe one day they'll see this one too haha. Or I could reach out... I suppose... 😅 In terms of more content like this, I'm currently just planning on using this to analyze some builds of my own, maybe some builds from other channels if I can collaborate with them.
This is probably something very few people have even thought of, interesting concept to actually try to quantify control. I think, while the exact numbers may be a bit arbitrary, the system of measurement is at least close to accurate. Anything more accurate would have to take into account too many unknown factors. You did note that petrified may be considered higher due to not likely being able to get out of it. I would personally say prone condition should be lower due to the ease of removing it. I see your point in that the actual control effects it imposes is what you're really looking at, but unless the prone creature also has 0 speed, the attack rolls having disadvantage is probably never coming up. Easy enough to change the numbers for personal preference though for anyone in disagreement with your chosen numbers. Great video.
Yea I have never ever seen something to do this and I've looked around for it. I thought about making it so that the condition has less control points if it's easier to shake off, but that becomes pretty difficult to gauge. Yea you can often stand right back up after prone, but while prone you have those debuffs. And your team potentially has a whole round of those advantages even if you personally can't take as much advantage. In the end I thought, it is similar to DPR. Some damage types just don't work as well as others, and some ways of inflicting damage is less reliable, but it is up to the person who makes the build to know those facts and they aren't necessarily reflected in the DPR numbers.
Haven't even gotten a chance to watch the video yet, but I subscribed. This kind of thing is *impossibly* useful from a game design perspective in general
@DndUnoptimized I'm watching for the second time, and I think you're probably over-valuing Advantage numerically. Advantage is weird because how good it is depends on how high the target number is. The higher the target number, the less value you get from advantage. The median amounts to a +5, but that median is only the case when the target AC is in the ball park of 10. On the flip side, I probably undervalue it, as my house rule is that if you are receiving advantage from multiple sources, each extra "stack" of advantage adds +2 to the higher of 2 rolls.
@Timonsaylor yea, there is certainly a diminishing return as AC lowers. If a player is looking to optimize damage, often the first question that comes to mind is, how could I generate advantage? Running the numbers, it ends up making a pretty significant difference when standard ACs are used. Especially if GWM or sharpshooter is used.
@DndUnoptimized the diminishing returns is funky because Advantage is best when you're likely to hit the target anyway, but it becomes less valuable against higher difficulty targets. So, it ends up not mattering much (albeit for different reasons) on both extremes. Either way I'm gonna be taking notes from this video while I'm considering spell design for my current project.
If you consider a creature at 0HP to be unconscious you can calculate the effect of reducing hit points to how much control they grant is, and compare how much control "reduced" the HP of an encounter. Also, you can now properly scale sleep, to be 100%xrolled dice as pseudo damage. Assuming your team plays smart and ignores the unconscious enemies. So, successfully casting hold person in a deadly encounter against a single enemy causes a reduction of the encounter HP of 84%. Maybe add the probability of the enemy breaking lose, and you can see how the encounter HP gets affected. Main reason this would be HP reduction instead equivalent DPR, is because most effects do not stack, or if they do, they reset at the end of turn or such.
So essentially the numbers I've shown here would be the same, but instead of controlling 34% of an enemy, you would say that you control X% of the encounter HP? Depending on the level and the number of enemies I guess? That's an interesting idea. Then damage and control could kind of sit on the same field in some way. It unfortunately adds one more step to it where you calculate the control, then convert it to percentage of encounter HP, but I guess I'm doing the same for DPR ... Hmm
@@DndUnoptimized If you want to compare control to DPR then yes. It adds one more step. If you don't want to do the comparison you don't need to. To be fair that extra step is multilayered. Some calculations would be easy, like slowing enemies and such, others are more complicated with multi hit spells, and stuff like sleep complicates things as you count number of enemies out of the fight, but it becomes useless for fights against enemies with large amount of HP, like deadly encounter against 1 monster.
@@ODDnanref Yea it could definitely work if I could make a call on how many creatures are in the combat. Honestly I'm going to have to do a few CPR calculations for builds before I can see how much work they will be and how easily people will understand it. Those are the two I'm most concerned about. It's definitely a cool idea if I can kind of link DPR and CPR and might make it easy for people to understand. Thanks!
@@DndUnoptimizedAll optimization is generally based on "reduce the potential of enemies to hurt you" by preventing them from acting or by reducing the impact of their actions. So thinking about Control and Damage as ultimately an attempt to reduce an enemy's future actions makes them highly comparable. Related to this, most optimization in the community is too narrowly focused. Rather than maxing out Damage or AC, the most broken characters generally follow this model of optimization: 1. Get them "above curve" for their DPR and defenses, so the combat math of normal encounters favors them on average. Once they're above curve, don't invest more resources in that. Instead: 2. Give a few incredibly powerful 'encounter-altering "Panic Buttons" - opportunities to hit well above their average. This is key for reacting to intensely bad luck or taking on an unusually powerful foe. Usually this isn't just "hit harder" but something that also changes the dynamic of the encounter. Control effects often fit best in this area. 3. Low cost luck mitigation. One you're above the power curve you want a few cheap options to undo unusually bad RNG. Effects that let you reroll dice as well as mechanics like Shield and Healing Word are classc examples. 4. Once you've checked the above 3 boxes with the least possible character investment, the rest of the investment should go into "ooops, I win" options. Options that are unusually powerful in specific circumstances, allowing you to occassionally bypass challenges with far less resource investment per long rest than expected. For example, Spike Growth is an "Oops, I Win" spell against any low level melee-only swarm; if deployed in a chokepoint enemies often can't cross it without instantly dying. Being Immune to Charm effects as a passive ability can also be an "Oops, I Win" moment - as can many utility spells like Shape Water. In short, the most powerful characters in practice often get above the curve in damage and survivability with as few spells, feats, or other character progression investments as possible; then sink the rest of their options into a diversified toolset that can be unusually effective in a wide variety of situations. This is because RPG designers often make situational options extremely powerful in order to justify taking them over reliable options, so maximizing your opportunities to have a relevant situational option while still being above the curve for average encounters; plus a few panic buttons and luck mitigators, means you are extremely likely to break the resource investments expected of players in any given adventure. That was the real power of circle of the moon druids in 5e, they could invest nearly all their spells and feats into "oops I win" options as their combat wildshape covered the basics. The fact combat wildshape also doubled as a situational "oops I win" itself due to certain animals being unusually effective was a delicious bonus.
@@danfelder8062 that is a very interesting analysis of character optimization. I don't think I can really disagree with any of those points, but I've never seen them summed up like that before. Seems like you have a good handle on optimization.
This is awesome. As long as you're being consistent, it's good. I think sleep needs a nerf since it's based on HP and you'd need some way to calculate that, but you mention it's an outlier so you're covered there.
Thanks! Glad you like it. I haven't included a way to qualify sleep, but it is well known to be very powerful at low levels and extremely weak after that. There aren't many spells in the game that use an enemy's current HP to determine if it's a hit or miss. Personally I think it's a bad mechanic and hope it gets wiped in the new update. I might end up making a video on some of the spells CPRs and comparing them, but not in the queue yet. Thanks for watching!
@DndUnoptimized For Sleep and the few other ones like it, you COULD use the level you get the spell and the average HP of a monster of that CR as the %. For example, Sleep is a 1st level spell. It does 100CPR to 5d8 or 20HP Average HP of a CR 1 mobster is 32 (my guess, I have no idea). 20/32 = .625 CPR = 62.5 You've already done those numbers previously in your 'what is good damage' video so I don't suspect it would be a huge jump to add this piece.
@@vinspad3 that is a good idea. I guess by that logic power word kill has a 0% chance of working then haha. I think it is a poorly functioning spell anyway. I'll have to think about the implications of it since you could whittle down the HP before using these types of spells.
@DndUnoptimized lol - pretty close to 0. 100 / Average HP at CR 17 is pretty low and makes it rather poor spell. Oof. I *might* get stuck going through all this in my spare time...
I have to leave for work soon, so I will come back to this tonight. Since I don't have time to watch the whole thing right now I only skimmed it. I love it so far, but did notice two things you might want to add. Briefly, I didn't notice you making a distinction between types of enemies. This is important, because what shuts down a melee enemy (movement) might not be as effective against a spellcaster, and what might remove better than 90% of an enemy spellcaster`s options would have absolutely zero effect on a melee attacker. Heavy obscurement should be included with Blindness and full cover as far as enemy spells go. If they cant see you, they don't have line of sight and cant use them. 95%-98% of spells shut down, depending on which supplements the DM is using. On my brief skim, I didn't notice you mention Silence. Look at the number of spells that have a verbal component that silence just completely shuts down, including Dispel and all teleports. Yet this has little to no effect on melee attacks... This distinction is important, but once you factor it in then you really have something here!
Glad you like it so far, and your skimming seems to have been pretty effective. For heavy obscurement, I'm not quite sure I get your meaning. It says they suffer from the blinded condition, so it doesn't add anything different. Full cover would be almost the same as blocking line of sight, they can't be targeted by spells or attacks. Attacks is the differentiator. Related to distinguishing between type of enemies you are 100% correct, and I discussed it a little in the video about how blocking line of sight for a caster is extremely detrimental, but doesn't really affect melee combatants (unless disadvantage on attacks also gets applied), but they don't necessarily to hand in hand. Although I agree, and am aware of it. I'm not really sure how I would make this distinction. I could have two tables, one for casters, one for non-casters. Honestly this could be really interesting to see and compare, because I suspect casters are a lot more resistant to control than martials (could add this to the martial caster divide). Two problems with that, that would mean I get two numbers for each condition/spell and then we don't get a singular number to rank them. Second, what happens when it's an enemy that is both a spellcaster and can attack pretty effectively? This is actually quite a lot of monsters, they have spell casting (or spell like effects) and weapon attacks. Do we then make a table for those? The other way I can think of to do it would be to calculate what percentage of monsters have spells and what percentage have decent weapon attacks (because even mages have some weapon attacks) then use that to normalize, ie, if 30% of enemies have spells, and I think blocking line of sight would be worth 35 control points for them and 0 control points for weapon attacks, then we end up with it being 10.5. Two problems here. First, that's a lot of work where we might end up with a very similar number (the numbers I used were my actual best guess numbers and we ended up almost dead on) and that percentage will change as books are released, and second that percentage of monsters that have spells will probably vary over CR, so do I make a table of it per CR or just have it be not as applicable at high and low levels? (Still somewhat a problem now, but if I use percentages it feels more obvious) In the end I went with a method similar to the second one with one table and averaging it out between combatants, but didn't do a percentage, did a best guess. Do you have another idea on how I could add this differentiation?
@@DndUnoptimized I don't have any ideas yet, and am still thinking about it. That`s why I didn't add anything to my post last night as I have nothing truly constructive to add, YET. All I can do right now is to point things out in the hopes it helps. I absolutely think you are on to something awesome here. I normally play a Bladesinger Control Wizard. I rarely take damage spells, mostly control and utility. Hilariously enough, I do FAR more damage through my control spells than I ever do through blast spells... The phrase Fish in a Barrel comes to mind. I prefer to think of it as spell Layering rather than combos. One of my favorites is to layer Transmute Rock to Mud, Grease, and either Slow, Web, or Sleet Storm (for dealing with casters) depending on the situation. I also make sure all of my party members have a ranged attack option... I do know from first hand experience that what shuts down my spellcasting is NOT what shuts down my Melee abilities. For me this means I have Two teleport spells. That way if I run into anything that would shut down my movement, like the above combos for example, and would thus keep me out of melee, I can absolutely get out of it and still be useful. Most movement based control spells don't shut down my spellcasting however. You need to use other things to do that, which you already covered. Same with being grappled, I just Misty Step. You do need to come up with a way to distinguish between spellcasters and non spellcasters on your control score. How? I currently have no flippin clue. Yet I have to do it in game as a control Wizard or my party either gets burnt to a crisp, or get their faces eaten. Yes this is part of the Martial/Caster divide. The best idea I had last night was to weigh Line of Sight, and Silence far more heavily for spell casters, and movement restrictions far less. By how much? Don`t know. Both a loss of line of sight and Silence are absolutely debilitating for any spell caster, removing well over 90% of their spells as an option. I would say that it`s almost approaching the same significance as taking away their action and bonus action. Not quite but close. The main differences seems to boil down to whether or not I even NEED to move into melee range to do damage, and whether or not I have access to my spell list. Other things like being incapacitated work about the same, again mostly because it takes away my actions i.e. my ability to cast spells. Disadvantage is something of a mixed bag depending on the spell list. So I now have disadvantage on casting spells that have saving throws like Fire Ball... Uh... Okay... But on something like Scorching Ray that has a spell attack roll that`s actually pretty significant. I would have suggested using two different lists because of just how different casters and melee are, but like you said there are a lot of creatures, and players, that can do both... Myself included. This is where I run into problems trying to make a suggestion. My solution in game is to simply layer enough different effects to cover it, but that doesn't really help you with coming up with a CPR score.
I forgot to mention silence, and yes it is a pretty brutal condition on casters but not impactful at all for melees (unless you for some reason specialize in thunder damage, like armorer artificer). If probably give it the same score as line of sight due to that, but maybe even less because monsters seem to be moving away from spells and into spell like abilities which don't have components. Sounds like your bladesinger is pretty powerful and hard to fight! There are so many caveats and ways to avoid issues as a caster if you have the right spells prepped. I'll think if there is a reasonable way that is easy to understand and use which can differentiate between these types, but I think it might just have to come down to the user's understanding of conditions. Just because a spell is ranked high CPR doesn't mean it will be more effective than a lower ranking one. You could say the same thing about damage but it definitely hits harder here.
Thanks! You are right about losing concentration, that is a definite control effect. I should add that in somehow. I'll have to think about this for when I revise it (whenever that happens).
@@DndUnoptimized so I'm not as good at math but kind of based on vibes me and my friend figured on average since there are few creatures who actually concentrate, itd probs be a lil worse than a reaction, so in my calcs ive set it at 4 and changed action to 36 to keep the nice 100 on unconscious
An additional modifier might be the CR/level of the creature being affected. Higher level/CR means higher stats or being more likely to not be affected. Using sleep as an example, at higher levels, creatures have more hitpoints and are less likely to be affected at all.
If you are casting spells on a higher level creature then the to hit chance or save chance will help take that into account. You are right, I should have some something with sleep though to do it based on a certain CR's average HP though.
I like your methodology, and commend it as a good first step. I do have some comments on the valuation though, the first of which is that you forgot one condition which needs to be accounted for: dead. No, that's not a joke. It is a particular version of the unconscious condition that persists without any further actions or saves. This needs to be accounted for, as many spells do damage, but some kill outright. I'd leave unconscious as 100, and label dead as 200. The other comment has to with effects that affect attacks vs saves. Attacks are BY FAR the most common way an opponent functions. This should cause the conditions that create advantage/disadvantage to be weighed significantly higher. On a similar note, any time a condition can be applied via an opposed check, it becomes the MOST reliable way to apply and retain the condition. Expertise and advantage/disadvantage are extremely easy to come by for these. Even a gargantuan sized creature can be reliably grappled and drug.
Thanks for watching and for the well thought out comments. Let me attempt to address those. First, dead is certainly better than unconscious in gameplay, but in terms of control over the enemy, if you were to knock them unconscious forever or have them dead forever there is no difference. The condition control numbers don't care how easy it is to recover from or get into. When calculating the actual CPR, you multiply the chance to land it by the control score, so you end up adding in the chance of landing it at this point. Ie, if you have a 95% chance to successfully grapple, then you multiply the grapple condition score by 0.95. And then, if it is difficult to get out of, the condition may persist through multiple rounds, boosting your CPR. Does that make sense? Attacks are definitely more common than saves, but if you lower a saving throw, it can often be used for an extremely debilitating effect that matters far more than an attack roll. So it's kind of frequency vs potency in my books. I'll think about this though because I'm working my way up to a revision of this at some point. Thanks!
Nice job! One nitpick: incapacitated does not preclude movement. Speed 0 is often tacked onto incapacitated, but it is not inherent to the incapacitated condition.
I think frightened gives *a lot* more control than grappled. Grappled by its nature always leaves the target within range of something they can hit, so it often will not reduce damage dealt by the target at all, it just makes them easier to be hit, lets you deal damage to them using stuff like spike growth, and enables tanking. meanwhile frightened will entirely remove opponents from the fight if the party uses positioning, and even if the target has something in range to hit, they deal less damage.
Definitely fair points. I think it really depends on how the person uses frightened and how the person uses grappled. Grappling is great control, especially if you can shove prone too. You can keep enemies away from your weak allies and pull them away if they are too close, you can forcibly keep them out of reach from other allies, and then the forced movement to drag in and out of effects. Also, it eats up an action to attempt to break free. Frightened (almost?) never uses an action to attempt to break free, and if the enemy is within range of another ally, you are just providing disadvantage on attacks. You need a way to push them away, or all of your allies to move away in order to prevent any attacking at all. But if you manage to frighten someone who is on the other side of all your allies, then yes, you've prevented them from closing in on melee and they need to use ranged attacks if they have any. And ranged attacks are usually worse too. I can see the case for frightened being stronger. Maybe I'm over valuing forced movement in my numbers, or undervaluing constraining enemy movement. If you were as a player to choose to be frightened save ends or grappled, I'd probably choose frightened because it keeps my action economy. (Unless I have misty step or something). But these points are probably not fair because I'm not taking into account how easy the condition is to get out of when I use these numbers.
Interesting way to quantify it and it feels about right in terms of actual effectiveness and I am glad you included Haste. The interesting part I wonder about Haste is what you think the best way to quantify sorcerers twinned spell is? If it doubles CPR then Twinned Haste, my go to on my current character, is most likely the most powerful control spell for Sorcerers. Personally this feels right as it is a proactive spell and in the right party makeup increases outgoing DPR while reducing incoming on two other characters whereas other spells in your list either cannot be twinned or have multiple chances to save from. The issue from just blanket doubling I have to admit is the effectiveness of each component of your scores on a character by character basis, +2 ac is life saving on some characters yet just increasing an already impossible to be hit number higher on others. Definitely something for me to think more about as I progress to higher level spells and the choices become harder to quantify in battle.
For me, I would double it since it is being applied twice. I'm certain twinning haste would generally be considered a very powerful move by most people, except those people who hate haste. I like haste because it makes people feel awesome and that's the whole point. Nobody is more grateful to you than the barbarian you hasted!
This is really interesting. Do you have a spreadsheet or something you could share? Would love to apply this to some spells I'm considering for my bard (Nathair's Mischief, Slow, Confusion).
@@CozyBanx took a little longer than I expected, got caught up doing other channel work. I added a link to a spreadsheet in the video description, hope it works. Let me know if you want other info on there.
I don't really see why paralyzed isn't a 100 tbh. The only thing it's missing is prone, but being prone wouldn't confer any more disadvantages since they already can't move and attacks against them already have advantage, in fact being prone would be better for them since then ranged attacks would not be made at advantage
Yea, you are right, they are very close and being prone certainly may not be a good thing if you are getting hit by ranged attacks. I wasn't sure how to manage the prone condition giving disadvantage to ranged attacks but advantage to melee attacks since that control may cancel each other out. In the end I decided to go with it from a melee perspective, because most of the time it is inflicted to gain advantage on attacks (or slow them down). Maybe the prone condition is ranked too high. As a consequence of this, the disadvantage of prone is not considered for paralyzed. Being knocked prone with unconscious requires the user to stand up, which is what the extra 6 is from.
Grappling an enemy requires you to be within melee range of them. Some other effects don't require that. I think that the ability to apply said condition at range should also affect the ratings.
That is true, but I don't think it's possible to rank based on distance since many conditions can be applied in melee or close or far range. I go with the DPR calculation strategy where you just calculate the chance to hit and the average damage, and we have the analogous parts for Control.
7 месяцев назад
I would like to see a analysis for a Mark of Warding/Order Cleric 1/Abjurer Wizard X Build as a tank. Check CCMC 5min builds for specs. It would give you the opportunity to showcase your assumptions for sustainability and control, as I would suggest to use a big control spell to force enemy attacks on you. Should be moderate controll and good survivability...
I think you're wrong about prone. Since most parties rarely have more than one frontliner, and that frontliner is usually the one wasting his action on prone (instead of attacking with advantage) it's actually more of a buff for the enemy as your warlock, ranger, wizard's spells now have disadvantage
You should probably reduce the points value for buffs/debuffs that are restricted in some way. Advantage only on melee attacks, or advantage and disadvantage to one type of saving throw, or an additional action that can’t make multiple attacks, are definitely less powerful than their universal counterparts. Auto failing saves is probably also deceptively overrated, because all the effects I can think of that apply it already have an incredibly high control value. You aren’t getting much out of restraining a paralysed enemy, for example, especially in the short number of rounds a 5e fight has. Edit: Also, regarding sleep, it functions closer to effective damage than any control effect imo. Much of its high rating is coming from an assumed 100% success rate, which is massively diminishing past low levels as enemy hp balloons. Edit 2: I’ve also been wondering about action adjusted metrics for both damage and control. There’s a roughly linear effect between how early in a fight damage is dealt or control is applied, and its impact on the fight. I don’t think it’s compatible with your damage metric, but it might be compatible with this control metric.
Good points. I do decrease the value of control points for haste to only half of an action, and I have been decreasing advantage/disadvantage by half if it ends up only applying to the next attack. Auto failing saves is so rare and the saves it applies to are not the ones that you REALLY want the enemy to fails. I think I might change disadvantage to saves to 12 and keep auto fail saves at 12 too. Regarding sleep, yes, it is obviously better at lower levels, or only viable at low levels. I'm sure I could come up with some way to get it to work with average HP by CR or something like that, but we all know that sleep is very powerful at low levels, so when this does work during those levels it is a very powerful control. For weighting the values based on the turn in combat we have, I have considered this for both control and damage, but I think it makes too many assumptions. I already do so many things in a different way than other creators and explaining it takes forever so going even further into stuff like that makes it more difficult for me when making content. If you can find a good scale that seems to work then let me know and I'll take a look, but I hope to keep things simpler if possible (probably an astonishing thing for me to say considering my videos).
I feel like Incapacitated should be 100 (or at least incapacitated + 0 movement). Like if you Hypnotic Pattern 3 creatures, what could they possibly do while under its effects? The rest (e.g. auto crits and other debuffs) feel like "extra's". This wouldn't change the relative values but imho it feels like a clearer baseline.
That's an interesting point. I can see what you mean since incapacitated and no movement disables their actions. The reason I did unconscious is two fold. It's the worst condition, and it is a superset of many conditions so I could use unconscious to get a handle on all of the debuffing effects too. If I just used incapacitated as a base, the values for debuffs wouldn't be tied to the values of the action denying.
I think Blinded is worse than invisible. Invisible blocks line of sight on not just 1 creature, but all creatures towards you. I don't know how you would calculate the additive effect of having control over more than 1 creature. I also think in general, buffs are stronger than debuffs, but that could be modified by multiplying these scores by the % chance they have to go off.
Hey I'm so glad you watched and it made enough sense to you. Your comments about blinded vs invis all make sense. You could say the same argument for blinded though, it blocks their sight against all your allies while invisible just blocks it against you. As for buffs vs debuffs I totally agree that people often favor them because they have a 100% chance of success. Generally they are weaker than the debuffs, so taking into account chance to hit they somewhat even out in these control numbers. Gotta run more on many spells to see generally though.
Two things that I noticed you missed/messed up. 1. NEGATIVE control is not properly included - effects that increase the target's power/actions (such as invisibility or haste). Currently those are treated the same as control effects, which results in odd things like the implication that making your opponent invisible will somehow harm them, and how petrification was the same value as stunned despite being worse. The solution is just to use negative numbers for those. 2. Grapple's forced movement scales based on movespeed, the implications of which you didn't really cover. A haste'd Tabaxi monk using step of the wind is gonna get CRAZY control value off of grappling compared to a bog-standard 30 movespeed person and that should be mentioned somewhere.
Negative control doesn't quite exist the way I calculate it here. If you turn someone invisible, you are exerting control, but it is assumed that positive traits are placed on allies and bad effects are placed on enemies. Negative control would be hindering your allies or buffing your enemies. If you have an outlier like a tabaxi monk and are calculating their control, then you can recalculate grapple since it becomes significantly different. You are right, I should have mentioned that in the video. Though, in actuality, except in cases like spike growth, once you hit a certain grapple distance, there are diminishing returns, and dragging someone 5 squares vs 20 squares isn't that different.
Cool video. I think you're actually under-valuing grapple/prone since it's a contested check instead of a hit. Most enemies don't have proficiency in Athletics, let alone Expertise, so I'd say your probably of landing it is closer to 80% than 60%
Thanks! Yes, you are right. I originally calculated things using the real saves and bonuses expected for a level 5 player, but I figured it would be easier to follow if I just used a set probably of success for every circumstance.
IMO, line of sight and disadvantage on saving throws should be worth more. Line of sight is required for most spells and many abilities, and disadvantage on saving throws can quickly take an enemy out of the fight if they don’t have legendary resistance
That's true. Those are two that I debated on for a while. Maybe I should just have auto fail saves be 12 and disadvantage also be 12. There aren't many abilities that auto fail saves, so it might not pose a problem. Line of sight is something that I could modify without changing the entire structure, so I'm more free on that for sure. I could boost it to 12 to be on par with Adv/Dis. It's hard because for attacks it doesn't do much. But for spell casters is usually devastating.
That's definitely an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I don't think manacles have a solid enough definition for use in combat as written in the book. You end up having to make a lot of assumptions. For example it doesn't say what action it takes to put them on if the target needs to be willing or have a certain condition, and most of all wearing manacles doesn't technically provide any condition. So if you have home brew rules for it, it would be the condition control value multiplied by the chance of getting them on, then decrease that score by the chance of them breaking out each turn.
This is interesting and feels like something that can be missed. I do think you are using the wrong term though. Many of these effects are general debuffs as opposed to actual control effects and debuffing an enemy's defences is really buffing the DPS of the party. Debuffing movement tends to be useless unless it prevents the target attacking, which is essentially removing their action, or sometimes if it traps them in a hostile effect. So I like the metric but fell it is misnamed and should include party buffs to - you mention haste but nothing else.
Yea I could see it renamed something else perhaps. This includes debuffs, buffs, and pure control, but in essence it is all battlefield control to me. Some buffs and debuffs end up being categorized as damage though. Movement speed is one of those things where the less you reduce it the less impactful it is but the more you reduce it the more impactful it is. It's hard to give numbers to all these things because it's so variable based on the situation unfortunately. DPR has lots of variables too, but a lot less. Hopefully it's helpful give rough ideas, I definitely need to iterate on it to continue refining.
I love the concept, but I think there a few elements here that don't work. 1. I think you overrated everything in unconscious that wasn't action denial. Action denial is probably closer to 60-75% of the value of that condition by itself. Prone is irrelevant to the condition so I don't think we should include it in our proportions. 2. Non save effects(either guaranteed effects or skill check effects like Web and Bigby's Hand) have additional value due to legendary saves, so I'd give those a 20 or 25% value bump. 3. Effects that either don't allow or have highly restricted conditions for repeated saves such as Wall of Force and Fear respectively are more valuable because you can budget for them in the fight as you go (eg: you don't have to pay attention to the positioning of your party to counter a dragon's breath if you know for a fact it's gone for 1 hour). That needs a 10-20% multiplier on its own, plus factoring in the cpr it produces over those extra turns. I'd probably rate CP for the first five rounds of an effect normally, then do a 75% penalty on subsequent turns up to 10 rounds, then 25% to round 15, then 0 or 1% after that, as few if any fights last past round 15. Wall of Force may be 1.2X CPR on its first few rounds, because it is X valuable plus 20% for reliability, but it is not 720X CP over it's total duration. This would make Wall of Force 12X value, so probably around 600 CP total if you wanted to calculate that. 4. This isn't a note about CPR or CP per effect, but an important element here is synergies, so not exploring how layering affects CPR leaves a lot of crucial data unanalyzed. All in all, great video, I hope to see the formula iterated on, either in the above ways or in some other way you consider!
By note 3's math, btw, you'd want to calculate each effects: CP on turn 1, CPR, and total CP, as each would tell you valuable insights into its performance. Obviously a spell with ludicrous total CP but garbage CP on turn 1 is not a garbage spell, and a spell with so so CP on turn 1 but no duration might be garbage.
@@joshbecker4214 You really dove deep into it! Thanks for taking that time. I agree with a lot of your points. I struggled to find the right number for denying action, and it was originally a lot higher than 40%, but with all the extra debuffing effects that can be applied, it is really tough to gauge how valuable an action is if they have disadvantage on all attacks, or can't move. It becomes very dependent on the situation. As for prone, the fact that they need to spend half their movement to stand up again IS there, so I think it has to be taken into consideration. Obviously it is not the most important thing, but it helps us give value to the rest of the effects. The goal is not to be perfect, but to give a reasonable idea without too much bloat and tables. I definitely want to iterate on it, but don't want to make more videos on it yet because I have a big queue of other things I want to do. Maybe I'll make new versions on spreadsheets and share them on a Discord Server so people can discuss it.
@@DndUnoptimized Yeah, cutting down on bloat is a fair reason. I still think the action denial is the majority of the value, but I tend to think of it as action denial first, disadvantage I only consider if the action exists. If you see the disadvantage coming in first, then the action denial, that makes sense, but I think you should apply the strongest debuff first and look to see if subsequent, lesser debuffs still do something, etc. Otherwise, fair points.
Ok but how much control per round PER LEVEL should a control mage be expected to produce. This is assuming that we are trading damage for control. Same thing for Martial control characters (which do exist)
That's a hard one. SHOULD do is really tough to say since there isn't really something to base it off of, like damage vs monster HP. Parties can do 0 control and still be quite successful. My ranking is 25 for moderate control, 50 for good control, 100 for amazing control. Obviously martial controllers are more difficult to do than casters, but there are definitely a lot of control options, albeit weaker than spells by a fair margin. The most obvious is grapple and prone, which by itself is quite powerful and can get into the moderate control territory.
I would argue that deafness should be roughly equivalent to 'disadvantage on ability checks' as it messes with perception checks it also messes with communication, but I'm not sure how much that matters(would depend on the situation)
Yea, I suppose it technically gives negative effects to some ability checks, but I've never ever seen it come up. It really feels like you are not benefitting at all so I gave it 0, but I guess a 3 or 1.5 might work. There have to be some situations where it can be useful or they wouldn't put it in the game.... Right? Thanks for the suggestion!
This is such a great concept and solid execution. Quantifying control has always frustrated me, a bit like quantifying support, so it’s super useful to have a system like this.
Thank you
Thanks! Yes, quantifying control and support are things I've always wanted to see when I listened to builds so I thought I should make one.
13:24 I’d say that resistance to all damage is about equal to auto critical as one doubles damage and the other halves it
(Any/all)
That's some sound logic! I was planning on that just getting reflected in the damage taken calculations, but I guess it does fit in. Something like blade ward could be calculated too.
So I guess petrified would get brought even lower then, since I would subtract that number because it would be a positive benefit instead of a debuff.
@@DndUnoptimized Prone's disadvantage on attacks should also be factored in (especially with a general preference on average for ranged over melee spells and attacks - outside of the one using the effect)
One thing to consider is whether the target gets a 2nd save. For sleep and hypnotic pattern on the list they don't, but they do break on damage so it then also depends on how intelligent the monsters are
Indeed. So for spells that have a repeat save that is taken into account in the encounter CPR numbers, and if they can be shaken out or take damage to get a save the it decreases the amount each round too based on that modification table. But yes, you are right, they totally depend on the intelligence of the monsters, but shaking an enemy out also consumes an action, and that is control in itself.
Absolutely fantastic breakdown, love the way you're looking at control in an entirely new light. Keep up the great work
Thanks! It might be going totally overboard, but it seemed like it was worth an attempt at the very least!
I think you are really into something here! Like no other DND RUclipsr is doing something like this. I see a lot of build videos always talking about dpr but top players know that control wins the game.
Like this is something we can actually use to compare different control builds.
The real question is how can we integrate this with dpr in terms of value. I guess we could just add dpr and CPR together as your contribution to the party per round. That also brings the idea of stuff like buffs and healing which is probably closer to the outline you have now but for the party. (Like there isn't that much difference between haste and slow except slow can affect multiple people but also chances to succeed and escape the spell. It also points towards why protecting your concentration is vital because you can control the battlefield significantly for more rounds.
This is really fantastic.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I'm glad it is interesting to some people other than just me.
In terms of how to combine it with other aspects of character analysis, I was planning on having a three axis (or dimension) chart with lines 120 degrees apart. One line for DPR, one line for CPR, and one for survivability. Then it would be a triangle of you connect the points on the lines. Hard to describe, but I wasn't planning on adding the CPR and DPR numbers together since they are so different.
Hopefully if I am able to make builds that are interesting to watch then the idea of CPR can spread. I feel like the optimization community is sometimes too focused on DPR because it's the only thing we know how to measure, so it's the only thing to optimize for.
1:50 I'd actually say that the highest measure of control isn't just unconscious, but literal *control.* As in dominate person. If they're not just out of the combat, but actively supplementing your action economy with their own- that is peak control.
Taking this perspective could help with the hurdles you had with classifying CoT spells, by looking at how they affect the action economy. Perhaps in some calculation of actions lost vs. actions gained?
Thanks for the suggestion, that does make a lot of sense. The reason I went with unconscious is because of a few points. It's a defined condition in the PHB, and so has a solid breakdown that cannot change, it is also something that every player is pretty familiar with, and it had some debuff effects too, so now I can have a base idea of how to rank those types of things, especially advantage/disadvantage.
Domination would give me "control" over their actions, but it won't provide the debuffs. Also I'd probably have to base it off a spell which makes it a little shakier for some reason, maybe it's just in my mind. But I do agree with you that it does feel like the ultimate control, more than unconscious. I'll think about if there's a way to break down the other control effects from it.
CoT meaning concentration?
The way done in the video, you can equate unconscious to 0HP and do a DPR to control comparison.
@@DndUnoptimized CoT = Control over Time
@@ZarHakkarI swear I replied to this a long time ago. I guess it didn't go through, but I should have realized what CoT means lol
I’m a little surprised with the score given to Web, I thought it should be higher. Web is also an area of difficult terrain, so even if an enemy makes their initial save they’ll have to suffer a movement penalty. Furthermore, if a creature fails their initial save there’s a chance they use their action to break out, which is kinda the same thing as denying them an action since they didn’t attack or do something that affected the player characters.
That said, I recognize that quantifying those effects isn’t easy due to their highly variable nature, but they’re certainly worth considering. In any case, I really appreciate you putting this together because control is something I’ve long wondered how to calculate and this is WAY better than any method I’ve come up with in the past lol
That is a good point, you are right, the potential to deny action with web is significant. Many enemies cannot stay in the web due to melee dependence, and most will not stay in the web even if they have ranged attacks. Thanks for pointing this out!
Fahrenheit is based on something concrete. Its the equipercentile division of temperature from the coldest temperature acheived in Lord Fahrenheit's laboratory to Lord Fahrenheit's body temperature.
Yep, Fahrenheit is supposed to be based in part on the human body temperature. It's just that the human body temperature has slowly cooled over the past 300 years, to the point that 97.9 is the average now and 100 is considered a fever.
I don't know that either the body temperature of one person on one day, or the lowest temperature he could reach in his lab are concrete. Surely it's based on something though. Eventually they fixed it based on the boiling and freezing point of water and that's pretty concrete, but those numbers sure are weird.
@@DndUnoptimized Even the boiling and freezing points of water depend on atmospheric pressure. The boiling point of water decreases by 0.5 degrees Celsius for every 500ft above sea level. For example, the boiling point of water in Denver Colorado is 94.5 degrees Celsius. And the earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level is always slowly changing as well.
True, it does change based on pressure as well as how pure the water is. Certainly those factors need to be controlled for measurements to be standard
This is really excellent work, something totally new like this in the optimization sphere is so rare at this stage in 5E's lifespan. What were your inspirations for this effort? I recommend you collaborate with other optimization creators like Tabletop Builds, Treantmonk's Temple or Pack Tactics to assist you in a deeper analysis. Really looking forward to more content on this topic and others like it. Bravo.
I really appreciate it! In terms of inspiration, I have just seen so many builds that do DPR calculations and then say, and "we do good control too". I always wondered if there could be a way to measure control that people might start optimizing for it instead of damage. Maybe that would add a completely new take to character builds and maybe it would lead to builds that would play better at a table full of non-optimizers too.
I'm a big fan of Treantmonk and Pack Tactics and would definitely be honoured to discuss these kinds of things with them. I saw Pack Tactics comment on another of my videos so maybe one day they'll see this one too haha. Or I could reach out... I suppose... 😅
In terms of more content like this, I'm currently just planning on using this to analyze some builds of my own, maybe some builds from other channels if I can collaborate with them.
Love it. Can't wait to see a ranked spell list.
I'll add that to the backlog!
This is probably something very few people have even thought of, interesting concept to actually try to quantify control. I think, while the exact numbers may be a bit arbitrary, the system of measurement is at least close to accurate. Anything more accurate would have to take into account too many unknown factors.
You did note that petrified may be considered higher due to not likely being able to get out of it. I would personally say prone condition should be lower due to the ease of removing it. I see your point in that the actual control effects it imposes is what you're really looking at, but unless the prone creature also has 0 speed, the attack rolls having disadvantage is probably never coming up. Easy enough to change the numbers for personal preference though for anyone in disagreement with your chosen numbers. Great video.
Yea I have never ever seen something to do this and I've looked around for it.
I thought about making it so that the condition has less control points if it's easier to shake off, but that becomes pretty difficult to gauge. Yea you can often stand right back up after prone, but while prone you have those debuffs. And your team potentially has a whole round of those advantages even if you personally can't take as much advantage. In the end I thought, it is similar to DPR. Some damage types just don't work as well as others, and some ways of inflicting damage is less reliable, but it is up to the person who makes the build to know those facts and they aren't necessarily reflected in the DPR numbers.
21:10 Wall of force also blocks movements if you close them in a dome
Yes it does. I used 60 control points there because it's 48 for all actions and 12 for movement so I got you covered!
Haven't even gotten a chance to watch the video yet, but I subscribed. This kind of thing is *impossibly* useful from a game design perspective in general
Thanks for the sub and let me know what you think when you've watched it.
@DndUnoptimized I'm watching for the second time, and I think you're probably over-valuing Advantage numerically. Advantage is weird because how good it is depends on how high the target number is. The higher the target number, the less value you get from advantage. The median amounts to a +5, but that median is only the case when the target AC is in the ball park of 10.
On the flip side, I probably undervalue it, as my house rule is that if you are receiving advantage from multiple sources, each extra "stack" of advantage adds +2 to the higher of 2 rolls.
@Timonsaylor yea, there is certainly a diminishing return as AC lowers. If a player is looking to optimize damage, often the first question that comes to mind is, how could I generate advantage? Running the numbers, it ends up making a pretty significant difference when standard ACs are used. Especially if GWM or sharpshooter is used.
@DndUnoptimized the diminishing returns is funky because Advantage is best when you're likely to hit the target anyway, but it becomes less valuable against higher difficulty targets. So, it ends up not mattering much (albeit for different reasons) on both extremes.
Either way I'm gonna be taking notes from this video while I'm considering spell design for my current project.
@@Timonsaylor agreed about advantage and the effects of high and low probabilities.
Glad you've enjoyed and hope it's useful to you!
If you consider a creature at 0HP to be unconscious you can calculate the effect of reducing hit points to how much control they grant is, and compare how much control "reduced" the HP of an encounter.
Also, you can now properly scale sleep, to be 100%xrolled dice as pseudo damage. Assuming your team plays smart and ignores the unconscious enemies.
So, successfully casting hold person in a deadly encounter against a single enemy causes a reduction of the encounter HP of 84%. Maybe add the probability of the enemy breaking lose, and you can see how the encounter HP gets affected.
Main reason this would be HP reduction instead equivalent DPR, is because most effects do not stack, or if they do, they reset at the end of turn or such.
So essentially the numbers I've shown here would be the same, but instead of controlling 34% of an enemy, you would say that you control X% of the encounter HP? Depending on the level and the number of enemies I guess?
That's an interesting idea. Then damage and control could kind of sit on the same field in some way. It unfortunately adds one more step to it where you calculate the control, then convert it to percentage of encounter HP, but I guess I'm doing the same for DPR ... Hmm
@@DndUnoptimized
If you want to compare control to DPR then yes. It adds one more step. If you don't want to do the comparison you don't need to.
To be fair that extra step is multilayered. Some calculations would be easy, like slowing enemies and such, others are more complicated with multi hit spells, and stuff like sleep complicates things as you count number of enemies out of the fight, but it becomes useless for fights against enemies with large amount of HP, like deadly encounter against 1 monster.
@@ODDnanref Yea it could definitely work if I could make a call on how many creatures are in the combat.
Honestly I'm going to have to do a few CPR calculations for builds before I can see how much work they will be and how easily people will understand it. Those are the two I'm most concerned about.
It's definitely a cool idea if I can kind of link DPR and CPR and might make it easy for people to understand. Thanks!
@@DndUnoptimizedAll optimization is generally based on "reduce the potential of enemies to hurt you" by preventing them from acting or by reducing the impact of their actions. So thinking about Control and Damage as ultimately an attempt to reduce an enemy's future actions makes them highly comparable.
Related to this, most optimization in the community is too narrowly focused. Rather than maxing out Damage or AC, the most broken characters generally follow this model of optimization:
1. Get them "above curve" for their DPR and defenses, so the combat math of normal encounters favors them on average. Once they're above curve, don't invest more resources in that. Instead:
2. Give a few incredibly powerful 'encounter-altering "Panic Buttons" - opportunities to hit well above their average. This is key for reacting to intensely bad luck or taking on an unusually powerful foe. Usually this isn't just "hit harder" but something that also changes the dynamic of the encounter. Control effects often fit best in this area.
3. Low cost luck mitigation. One you're above the power curve you want a few cheap options to undo unusually bad RNG. Effects that let you reroll dice as well as mechanics like Shield and Healing Word are classc examples.
4. Once you've checked the above 3 boxes with the least possible character investment, the rest of the investment should go into "ooops, I win" options. Options that are unusually powerful in specific circumstances, allowing you to occassionally bypass challenges with far less resource investment per long rest than expected. For example, Spike Growth is an "Oops, I Win" spell against any low level melee-only swarm; if deployed in a chokepoint enemies often can't cross it without instantly dying. Being Immune to Charm effects as a passive ability can also be an "Oops, I Win" moment - as can many utility spells like Shape Water.
In short, the most powerful characters in practice often get above the curve in damage and survivability with as few spells, feats, or other character progression investments as possible; then sink the rest of their options into a diversified toolset that can be unusually effective in a wide variety of situations. This is because RPG designers often make situational options extremely powerful in order to justify taking them over reliable options, so maximizing your opportunities to have a relevant situational option while still being above the curve for average encounters; plus a few panic buttons and luck mitigators, means you are extremely likely to break the resource investments expected of players in any given adventure.
That was the real power of circle of the moon druids in 5e, they could invest nearly all their spells and feats into "oops I win" options as their combat wildshape covered the basics. The fact combat wildshape also doubled as a situational "oops I win" itself due to certain animals being unusually effective was a delicious bonus.
@@danfelder8062 that is a very interesting analysis of character optimization. I don't think I can really disagree with any of those points, but I've never seen them summed up like that before. Seems like you have a good handle on optimization.
This is awesome. As long as you're being consistent, it's good. I think sleep needs a nerf since it's based on HP and you'd need some way to calculate that, but you mention it's an outlier so you're covered there.
I also like that you included Haste and would be very interested in how other buff spells would stack up.
Thanks! Glad you like it. I haven't included a way to qualify sleep, but it is well known to be very powerful at low levels and extremely weak after that. There aren't many spells in the game that use an enemy's current HP to determine if it's a hit or miss. Personally I think it's a bad mechanic and hope it gets wiped in the new update.
I might end up making a video on some of the spells CPRs and comparing them, but not in the queue yet.
Thanks for watching!
@DndUnoptimized For Sleep and the few other ones like it, you COULD use the level you get the spell and the average HP of a monster of that CR as the %.
For example,
Sleep is a 1st level spell.
It does 100CPR to 5d8 or 20HP
Average HP of a CR 1 mobster is 32 (my guess, I have no idea).
20/32 = .625
CPR = 62.5
You've already done those numbers previously in your 'what is good damage' video so I don't suspect it would be a huge jump to add this piece.
@@vinspad3 that is a good idea. I guess by that logic power word kill has a 0% chance of working then haha. I think it is a poorly functioning spell anyway.
I'll have to think about the implications of it since you could whittle down the HP before using these types of spells.
@DndUnoptimized lol - pretty close to 0. 100 / Average HP at CR 17 is pretty low and makes it rather poor spell. Oof. I *might* get stuck going through all this in my spare time...
Very cool idea.
Thanks! We'll see how it plays out after using it a bunch.
This is amazing!
You're amazing, keep up the good work ^.^
Thanks for the vote of confidence as always! Appreciate you coming and watching
I have to leave for work soon, so I will come back to this tonight. Since I don't have time to watch the whole thing right now I only skimmed it. I love it so far, but did notice two things you might want to add.
Briefly, I didn't notice you making a distinction between types of enemies. This is important, because what shuts down a melee enemy (movement) might not be as effective against a spellcaster, and what might remove better than 90% of an enemy spellcaster`s options would have absolutely zero effect on a melee attacker.
Heavy obscurement should be included with Blindness and full cover as far as enemy spells go. If they cant see you, they don't have line of sight and cant use them. 95%-98% of spells shut down, depending on which supplements the DM is using.
On my brief skim, I didn't notice you mention Silence. Look at the number of spells that have a verbal component that silence just completely shuts down, including Dispel and all teleports. Yet this has little to no effect on melee attacks...
This distinction is important, but once you factor it in then you really have something here!
Glad you like it so far, and your skimming seems to have been pretty effective.
For heavy obscurement, I'm not quite sure I get your meaning. It says they suffer from the blinded condition, so it doesn't add anything different. Full cover would be almost the same as blocking line of sight, they can't be targeted by spells or attacks. Attacks is the differentiator.
Related to distinguishing between type of enemies you are 100% correct, and I discussed it a little in the video about how blocking line of sight for a caster is extremely detrimental, but doesn't really affect melee combatants (unless disadvantage on attacks also gets applied), but they don't necessarily to hand in hand.
Although I agree, and am aware of it. I'm not really sure how I would make this distinction. I could have two tables, one for casters, one for non-casters. Honestly this could be really interesting to see and compare, because I suspect casters are a lot more resistant to control than martials (could add this to the martial caster divide). Two problems with that, that would mean I get two numbers for each condition/spell and then we don't get a singular number to rank them. Second, what happens when it's an enemy that is both a spellcaster and can attack pretty effectively? This is actually quite a lot of monsters, they have spell casting (or spell like effects) and weapon attacks. Do we then make a table for those?
The other way I can think of to do it would be to calculate what percentage of monsters have spells and what percentage have decent weapon attacks (because even mages have some weapon attacks) then use that to normalize, ie, if 30% of enemies have spells, and I think blocking line of sight would be worth 35 control points for them and 0 control points for weapon attacks, then we end up with it being 10.5. Two problems here. First, that's a lot of work where we might end up with a very similar number (the numbers I used were my actual best guess numbers and we ended up almost dead on) and that percentage will change as books are released, and second that percentage of monsters that have spells will probably vary over CR, so do I make a table of it per CR or just have it be not as applicable at high and low levels? (Still somewhat a problem now, but if I use percentages it feels more obvious)
In the end I went with a method similar to the second one with one table and averaging it out between combatants, but didn't do a percentage, did a best guess.
Do you have another idea on how I could add this differentiation?
@@DndUnoptimized I don't have any ideas yet, and am still thinking about it. That`s why I didn't add anything to my post last night as I have nothing truly constructive to add, YET. All I can do right now is to point things out in the hopes it helps. I absolutely think you are on to something awesome here.
I normally play a Bladesinger Control Wizard. I rarely take damage spells, mostly control and utility. Hilariously enough, I do FAR more damage through my control spells than I ever do through blast spells... The phrase Fish in a Barrel comes to mind. I prefer to think of it as spell Layering rather than combos. One of my favorites is to layer Transmute Rock to Mud, Grease, and either Slow, Web, or Sleet Storm (for dealing with casters) depending on the situation. I also make sure all of my party members have a ranged attack option...
I do know from first hand experience that what shuts down my spellcasting is NOT what shuts down my Melee abilities. For me this means I have Two teleport spells. That way if I run into anything that would shut down my movement, like the above combos for example, and would thus keep me out of melee, I can absolutely get out of it and still be useful. Most movement based control spells don't shut down my spellcasting however. You need to use other things to do that, which you already covered. Same with being grappled, I just Misty Step.
You do need to come up with a way to distinguish between spellcasters and non spellcasters on your control score. How? I currently have no flippin clue. Yet I have to do it in game as a control Wizard or my party either gets burnt to a crisp, or get their faces eaten. Yes this is part of the Martial/Caster divide. The best idea I had last night was to weigh Line of Sight, and Silence far more heavily for spell casters, and movement restrictions far less. By how much? Don`t know. Both a loss of line of sight and Silence are absolutely debilitating for any spell caster, removing well over 90% of their spells as an option. I would say that it`s almost approaching the same significance as taking away their action and bonus action. Not quite but close. The main differences seems to boil down to whether or not I even NEED to move into melee range to do damage, and whether or not I have access to my spell list. Other things like being incapacitated work about the same, again mostly because it takes away my actions i.e. my ability to cast spells.
Disadvantage is something of a mixed bag depending on the spell list. So I now have disadvantage on casting spells that have saving throws like Fire Ball... Uh... Okay... But on something like Scorching Ray that has a spell attack roll that`s actually pretty significant.
I would have suggested using two different lists because of just how different casters and melee are, but like you said there are a lot of creatures, and players, that can do both... Myself included. This is where I run into problems trying to make a suggestion. My solution in game is to simply layer enough different effects to cover it, but that doesn't really help you with coming up with a CPR score.
I forgot to mention silence, and yes it is a pretty brutal condition on casters but not impactful at all for melees (unless you for some reason specialize in thunder damage, like armorer artificer). If probably give it the same score as line of sight due to that, but maybe even less because monsters seem to be moving away from spells and into spell like abilities which don't have components.
Sounds like your bladesinger is pretty powerful and hard to fight! There are so many caveats and ways to avoid issues as a caster if you have the right spells prepped.
I'll think if there is a reasonable way that is easy to understand and use which can differentiate between these types, but I think it might just have to come down to the user's understanding of conditions. Just because a spell is ranked high CPR doesn't mean it will be more effective than a lower ranking one. You could say the same thing about damage but it definitely hits harder here.
The incapacitated condition also stops you from concentrating so I think that should probs have a value. Love this video keep it up
Thanks! You are right about losing concentration, that is a definite control effect. I should add that in somehow. I'll have to think about this for when I revise it (whenever that happens).
@@DndUnoptimized so I'm not as good at math but kind of based on vibes me and my friend figured on average since there are few creatures who actually concentrate, itd probs be a lil worse than a reaction, so in my calcs ive set it at 4 and changed action to 36 to keep the nice 100 on unconscious
An additional modifier might be the CR/level of the creature being affected. Higher level/CR means higher stats or being more likely to not be affected. Using sleep as an example, at higher levels, creatures have more hitpoints and are less likely to be affected at all.
If you are casting spells on a higher level creature then the to hit chance or save chance will help take that into account. You are right, I should have some something with sleep though to do it based on a certain CR's average HP though.
I like your methodology, and commend it as a good first step. I do have some comments on the valuation though, the first of which is that you forgot one condition which needs to be accounted for: dead.
No, that's not a joke. It is a particular version of the unconscious condition that persists without any further actions or saves. This needs to be accounted for, as many spells do damage, but some kill outright. I'd leave unconscious as 100, and label dead as 200.
The other comment has to with effects that affect attacks vs saves. Attacks are BY FAR the most common way an opponent functions. This should cause the conditions that create advantage/disadvantage to be weighed significantly higher.
On a similar note, any time a condition can be applied via an opposed check, it becomes the MOST reliable way to apply and retain the condition. Expertise and advantage/disadvantage are extremely easy to come by for these. Even a gargantuan sized creature can be reliably grappled and drug.
Thanks for watching and for the well thought out comments. Let me attempt to address those.
First, dead is certainly better than unconscious in gameplay, but in terms of control over the enemy, if you were to knock them unconscious forever or have them dead forever there is no difference. The condition control numbers don't care how easy it is to recover from or get into.
When calculating the actual CPR, you multiply the chance to land it by the control score, so you end up adding in the chance of landing it at this point. Ie, if you have a 95% chance to successfully grapple, then you multiply the grapple condition score by 0.95. And then, if it is difficult to get out of, the condition may persist through multiple rounds, boosting your CPR. Does that make sense?
Attacks are definitely more common than saves, but if you lower a saving throw, it can often be used for an extremely debilitating effect that matters far more than an attack roll. So it's kind of frequency vs potency in my books. I'll think about this though because I'm working my way up to a revision of this at some point.
Thanks!
@@DndUnoptimized excellent thought process.
Nice job! One nitpick: incapacitated does not preclude movement. Speed 0 is often tacked onto incapacitated, but it is not inherent to the incapacitated condition.
Correct, incapacitated is just no action, bonus action, and reaction.
Ah, you point that out further in. Cool.
You had me doubting myself for a bit haha.
Line of sight may be a bit low
I think frightened gives *a lot* more control than grappled.
Grappled by its nature always leaves the target within range of something they can hit, so it often will not reduce damage dealt by the target at all, it just makes them easier to be hit, lets you deal damage to them using stuff like spike growth, and enables tanking.
meanwhile frightened will entirely remove opponents from the fight if the party uses positioning, and even if the target has something in range to hit, they deal less damage.
Definitely fair points. I think it really depends on how the person uses frightened and how the person uses grappled. Grappling is great control, especially if you can shove prone too. You can keep enemies away from your weak allies and pull them away if they are too close, you can forcibly keep them out of reach from other allies, and then the forced movement to drag in and out of effects. Also, it eats up an action to attempt to break free.
Frightened (almost?) never uses an action to attempt to break free, and if the enemy is within range of another ally, you are just providing disadvantage on attacks. You need a way to push them away, or all of your allies to move away in order to prevent any attacking at all. But if you manage to frighten someone who is on the other side of all your allies, then yes, you've prevented them from closing in on melee and they need to use ranged attacks if they have any. And ranged attacks are usually worse too.
I can see the case for frightened being stronger. Maybe I'm over valuing forced movement in my numbers, or undervaluing constraining enemy movement. If you were as a player to choose to be frightened save ends or grappled, I'd probably choose frightened because it keeps my action economy. (Unless I have misty step or something). But these points are probably not fair because I'm not taking into account how easy the condition is to get out of when I use these numbers.
Interesting way to quantify it and it feels about right in terms of actual effectiveness and I am glad you included Haste.
The interesting part I wonder about Haste is what you think the best way to quantify sorcerers twinned spell is? If it doubles CPR then Twinned Haste, my go to on my current character, is most likely the most powerful control spell for Sorcerers. Personally this feels right as it is a proactive spell and in the right party makeup increases outgoing DPR while reducing incoming on two other characters whereas other spells in your list either cannot be twinned or have multiple chances to save from. The issue from just blanket doubling I have to admit is the effectiveness of each component of your scores on a character by character basis, +2 ac is life saving on some characters yet just increasing an already impossible to be hit number higher on others.
Definitely something for me to think more about as I progress to higher level spells and the choices become harder to quantify in battle.
For me, I would double it since it is being applied twice. I'm certain twinning haste would generally be considered a very powerful move by most people, except those people who hate haste.
I like haste because it makes people feel awesome and that's the whole point. Nobody is more grateful to you than the barbarian you hasted!
Haste can be a 100% control spell on allies
Just started the video but love this idea.
Hope you love it at the end 😅
This is really interesting. Do you have a spreadsheet or something you could share? Would love to apply this to some spells I'm considering for my bard (Nathair's Mischief, Slow, Confusion).
I can try to compile it nicely and put it in a spreadsheet. I'll update you when you it's done.
@@DndUnoptimized That'd be really cool thanks!
@@CozyBanx took a little longer than I expected, got caught up doing other channel work. I added a link to a spreadsheet in the video description, hope it works. Let me know if you want other info on there.
@@DndUnoptimized Thanks, I started adding a few modifiers of my own (like save type) that I had been thinking of and took it from there.
I don't really see why paralyzed isn't a 100 tbh. The only thing it's missing is prone, but being prone wouldn't confer any more disadvantages since they already can't move and attacks against them already have advantage, in fact being prone would be better for them since then ranged attacks would not be made at advantage
Yea, you are right, they are very close and being prone certainly may not be a good thing if you are getting hit by ranged attacks. I wasn't sure how to manage the prone condition giving disadvantage to ranged attacks but advantage to melee attacks since that control may cancel each other out. In the end I decided to go with it from a melee perspective, because most of the time it is inflicted to gain advantage on attacks (or slow them down). Maybe the prone condition is ranked too high.
As a consequence of this, the disadvantage of prone is not considered for paralyzed. Being knocked prone with unconscious requires the user to stand up, which is what the extra 6 is from.
Grappling an enemy requires you to be within melee range of them. Some other effects don't require that. I think that the ability to apply said condition at range should also affect the ratings.
That is true, but I don't think it's possible to rank based on distance since many conditions can be applied in melee or close or far range. I go with the DPR calculation strategy where you just calculate the chance to hit and the average damage, and we have the analogous parts for Control.
I would like to see a analysis for a Mark of Warding/Order Cleric 1/Abjurer Wizard X Build as a tank. Check CCMC 5min builds for specs. It would give you the opportunity to showcase your assumptions for sustainability and control, as I would suggest to use a big control spell to force enemy attacks on you. Should be moderate controll and good survivability...
I was thinking that I should make a tank soon. I'll take a look at their build and see how it stacks up. Thanks!
I think you're wrong about prone. Since most parties rarely have more than one frontliner, and that frontliner is usually the one wasting his action on prone (instead of attacking with advantage) it's actually more of a buff for the enemy as your warlock, ranger, wizard's spells now have disadvantage
That's a fair take for sure. Maybe I should just have the advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out
You should probably reduce the points value for buffs/debuffs that are restricted in some way. Advantage only on melee attacks, or advantage and disadvantage to one type of saving throw, or an additional action that can’t make multiple attacks, are definitely less powerful than their universal counterparts.
Auto failing saves is probably also deceptively overrated, because all the effects I can think of that apply it already have an incredibly high control value. You aren’t getting much out of restraining a paralysed enemy, for example, especially in the short number of rounds a 5e fight has.
Edit: Also, regarding sleep, it functions closer to effective damage than any control effect imo. Much of its high rating is coming from an assumed 100% success rate, which is massively diminishing past low levels as enemy hp balloons.
Edit 2: I’ve also been wondering about action adjusted metrics for both damage and control. There’s a roughly linear effect between how early in a fight damage is dealt or control is applied, and its impact on the fight. I don’t think it’s compatible with your damage metric, but it might be compatible with this control metric.
Good points. I do decrease the value of control points for haste to only half of an action, and I have been decreasing advantage/disadvantage by half if it ends up only applying to the next attack.
Auto failing saves is so rare and the saves it applies to are not the ones that you REALLY want the enemy to fails. I think I might change disadvantage to saves to 12 and keep auto fail saves at 12 too.
Regarding sleep, yes, it is obviously better at lower levels, or only viable at low levels. I'm sure I could come up with some way to get it to work with average HP by CR or something like that, but we all know that sleep is very powerful at low levels, so when this does work during those levels it is a very powerful control.
For weighting the values based on the turn in combat we have, I have considered this for both control and damage, but I think it makes too many assumptions. I already do so many things in a different way than other creators and explaining it takes forever so going even further into stuff like that makes it more difficult for me when making content. If you can find a good scale that seems to work then let me know and I'll take a look, but I hope to keep things simpler if possible (probably an astonishing thing for me to say considering my videos).
I feel like Incapacitated should be 100 (or at least incapacitated + 0 movement). Like if you Hypnotic Pattern 3 creatures, what could they possibly do while under its effects? The rest (e.g. auto crits and other debuffs) feel like "extra's". This wouldn't change the relative values but imho it feels like a clearer baseline.
That's an interesting point. I can see what you mean since incapacitated and no movement disables their actions. The reason I did unconscious is two fold. It's the worst condition, and it is a superset of many conditions so I could use unconscious to get a handle on all of the debuffing effects too. If I just used incapacitated as a base, the values for debuffs wouldn't be tied to the values of the action denying.
I think Blinded is worse than invisible. Invisible blocks line of sight on not just 1 creature, but all creatures towards you. I don't know how you would calculate the additive effect of having control over more than 1 creature.
I also think in general, buffs are stronger than debuffs, but that could be modified by multiplying these scores by the % chance they have to go off.
Hey I'm so glad you watched and it made enough sense to you. Your comments about blinded vs invis all make sense. You could say the same argument for blinded though, it blocks their sight against all your allies while invisible just blocks it against you.
As for buffs vs debuffs I totally agree that people often favor them because they have a 100% chance of success. Generally they are weaker than the debuffs, so taking into account chance to hit they somewhat even out in these control numbers. Gotta run more on many spells to see generally though.
Two things that I noticed you missed/messed up.
1. NEGATIVE control is not properly included - effects that increase the target's power/actions (such as invisibility or haste). Currently those are treated the same as control effects, which results in odd things like the implication that making your opponent invisible will somehow harm them, and how petrification was the same value as stunned despite being worse. The solution is just to use negative numbers for those.
2. Grapple's forced movement scales based on movespeed, the implications of which you didn't really cover. A haste'd Tabaxi monk using step of the wind is gonna get CRAZY control value off of grappling compared to a bog-standard 30 movespeed person and that should be mentioned somewhere.
Negative control doesn't quite exist the way I calculate it here. If you turn someone invisible, you are exerting control, but it is assumed that positive traits are placed on allies and bad effects are placed on enemies. Negative control would be hindering your allies or buffing your enemies.
If you have an outlier like a tabaxi monk and are calculating their control, then you can recalculate grapple since it becomes significantly different. You are right, I should have mentioned that in the video.
Though, in actuality, except in cases like spike growth, once you hit a certain grapple distance, there are diminishing returns, and dragging someone 5 squares vs 20 squares isn't that different.
Hi very interesting video. Just wanted to point out that in your linked google doc there are a lot of #REF! problems.
Oh shoot. Thanks for telling me. Hopefully the other spread sheets don't have that problem
Cool video. I think you're actually under-valuing grapple/prone since it's a contested check instead of a hit. Most enemies don't have proficiency in Athletics, let alone Expertise, so I'd say your probably of landing it is closer to 80% than 60%
Thanks! Yes, you are right. I originally calculated things using the real saves and bonuses expected for a level 5 player, but I figured it would be easier to follow if I just used a set probably of success for every circumstance.
Bro, Fahrenheit is great it's just %hotness 100°F it's 100% Time to stay hydrated and get inside.
If it's below 35% hotness consider putting on pants.
Haha well I'm glad it makes sense to you.
@@DndUnoptimized °F or °K 🇺🇲🇺🇲🦅🇺🇲🦅🦅🦅🦅🇺🇲
Ah, now Kelvin I can get on board with
IMO, line of sight and disadvantage on saving throws should be worth more. Line of sight is required for most spells and many abilities, and disadvantage on saving throws can quickly take an enemy out of the fight if they don’t have legendary resistance
That's true. Those are two that I debated on for a while. Maybe I should just have auto fail saves be 12 and disadvantage also be 12. There aren't many abilities that auto fail saves, so it might not pose a problem.
Line of sight is something that I could modify without changing the entire structure, so I'm more free on that for sure. I could boost it to 12 to be on par with Adv/Dis. It's hard because for attacks it doesn't do much. But for spell casters is usually devastating.
Welp guess im subscibed now.
Welcome aboard the crazy train haha
So let's talk about an enchantment wizard 2 thief rogue 3. And you can hypnotise them then BA manacles.
That's definitely an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I don't think manacles have a solid enough definition for use in combat as written in the book. You end up having to make a lot of assumptions. For example it doesn't say what action it takes to put them on if the target needs to be willing or have a certain condition, and most of all wearing manacles doesn't technically provide any condition.
So if you have home brew rules for it, it would be the condition control value multiplied by the chance of getting them on, then decrease that score by the chance of them breaking out each turn.
This is interesting and feels like something that can be missed. I do think you are using the wrong term though. Many of these effects are general debuffs as opposed to actual control effects and debuffing an enemy's defences is really buffing the DPS of the party. Debuffing movement tends to be useless unless it prevents the target attacking, which is essentially removing their action, or sometimes if it traps them in a hostile effect. So I like the metric but fell it is misnamed and should include party buffs to - you mention haste but nothing else.
Yea I could see it renamed something else perhaps. This includes debuffs, buffs, and pure control, but in essence it is all battlefield control to me. Some buffs and debuffs end up being categorized as damage though.
Movement speed is one of those things where the less you reduce it the less impactful it is but the more you reduce it the more impactful it is. It's hard to give numbers to all these things because it's so variable based on the situation unfortunately. DPR has lots of variables too, but a lot less.
Hopefully it's helpful give rough ideas, I definitely need to iterate on it to continue refining.
I love the concept, but I think there a few elements here that don't work. 1. I think you overrated everything in unconscious that wasn't action denial. Action denial is probably closer to 60-75% of the value of that condition by itself. Prone is irrelevant to the condition so I don't think we should include it in our proportions. 2. Non save effects(either guaranteed effects or skill check effects like Web and Bigby's Hand) have additional value due to legendary saves, so I'd give those a 20 or 25% value bump. 3. Effects that either don't allow or have highly restricted conditions for repeated saves such as Wall of Force and Fear respectively are more valuable because you can budget for them in the fight as you go (eg: you don't have to pay attention to the positioning of your party to counter a dragon's breath if you know for a fact it's gone for 1 hour). That needs a 10-20% multiplier on its own, plus factoring in the cpr it produces over those extra turns. I'd probably rate CP for the first five rounds of an effect normally, then do a 75% penalty on subsequent turns up to 10 rounds, then 25% to round 15, then 0 or 1% after that, as few if any fights last past round 15. Wall of Force may be 1.2X CPR on its first few rounds, because it is X valuable plus 20% for reliability, but it is not 720X CP over it's total duration. This would make Wall of Force 12X value, so probably around 600 CP total if you wanted to calculate that. 4. This isn't a note about CPR or CP per effect, but an important element here is synergies, so not exploring how layering affects CPR leaves a lot of crucial data unanalyzed.
All in all, great video, I hope to see the formula iterated on, either in the above ways or in some other way you consider!
By note 3's math, btw, you'd want to calculate each effects: CP on turn 1, CPR, and total CP, as each would tell you valuable insights into its performance. Obviously a spell with ludicrous total CP but garbage CP on turn 1 is not a garbage spell, and a spell with so so CP on turn 1 but no duration might be garbage.
@@joshbecker4214 You really dove deep into it! Thanks for taking that time.
I agree with a lot of your points. I struggled to find the right number for denying action, and it was originally a lot higher than 40%, but with all the extra debuffing effects that can be applied, it is really tough to gauge how valuable an action is if they have disadvantage on all attacks, or can't move. It becomes very dependent on the situation.
As for prone, the fact that they need to spend half their movement to stand up again IS there, so I think it has to be taken into consideration. Obviously it is not the most important thing, but it helps us give value to the rest of the effects.
The goal is not to be perfect, but to give a reasonable idea without too much bloat and tables.
I definitely want to iterate on it, but don't want to make more videos on it yet because I have a big queue of other things I want to do. Maybe I'll make new versions on spreadsheets and share them on a Discord Server so people can discuss it.
@@DndUnoptimized Yeah, cutting down on bloat is a fair reason. I still think the action denial is the majority of the value, but I tend to think of it as action denial first, disadvantage I only consider if the action exists. If you see the disadvantage coming in first, then the action denial, that makes sense, but I think you should apply the strongest debuff first and look to see if subsequent, lesser debuffs still do something, etc. Otherwise, fair points.
@@joshbecker4214 once I get a discord up and running I hope we can have a bigger chat about it!
Ok but how much control per round PER LEVEL should a control mage be expected to produce. This is assuming that we are trading damage for control. Same thing for Martial control characters (which do exist)
That's a hard one. SHOULD do is really tough to say since there isn't really something to base it off of, like damage vs monster HP. Parties can do 0 control and still be quite successful.
My ranking is 25 for moderate control, 50 for good control, 100 for amazing control.
Obviously martial controllers are more difficult to do than casters, but there are definitely a lot of control options, albeit weaker than spells by a fair margin. The most obvious is grapple and prone, which by itself is quite powerful and can get into the moderate control territory.
Line of sight may be a bit low
I would argue that deafness should be roughly equivalent to 'disadvantage on ability checks' as it messes with perception checks it also messes with communication, but I'm not sure how much that matters(would depend on the situation)
You know, I labored over that for a while, maybe you are right. Maybe it should be 12 like adv/dis
Yea, I suppose it technically gives negative effects to some ability checks, but I've never ever seen it come up. It really feels like you are not benefitting at all so I gave it 0, but I guess a 3 or 1.5 might work. There have to be some situations where it can be useful or they wouldn't put it in the game.... Right?
Thanks for the suggestion!
Yeah, I was thinking 3 for deafness, though Maybe 2