Toad

Recently the Naked Man pointed out the spell Banishment to me and asked for my opinion on whether or not it is broken.  In 5th edition DnD Banishment is a spell that grants a saving throw and requires concentration to maintain, but while it lasts the target is removed from the world.  Just gone.  This is potentially useful to run away from a single powerful enemy, but most powerful in a fight where a single enemy makes up about half of the opposing forces.  If you have two giants to fight and you banish one of them until the other is dead, you are going to win.

That seems pretty powerful to me.  It isn't always useful but unlike most crowd control spells the target doesn't get a new save every round, they just have to suck it up.  I don't think crowd control spells are much good at lower levels because of this restriction.  That is a fine design though because honestly paralyzing people and then butchering them isn't that much fun really, and it is far worse when the characters have to sit out an entire fight on the basis of one save.

Banishment requires something the target hates as an ingredient and some people seem to like the idea of making that a real pain in the ass.  Force characters to find a particular item that has significance to the target in order to cast Banishment and suddenly the spell goes from really powerful to completely worthless most of the time.  Trouble is if you do this then it will feel terrible when the characters spend five sessions finding the single item that the evil wizard hates, and then the evil wizard just makes the saving throw and the Banishment is irrelevant.

I don't like that rule much.  It has some flavour going for it but it definitely encourages people to take forever doing everything and just isn't enough payoff at the end.  The spell just doesn't warrant that big a nerf.

You know what does warrant a huge nerf though?  Polymorph.  Both spells are 4th level but Polymorph is completely bonkers.  You can turn your opponents into sheep, effectively negating them the same way Banishment does, but you can use it for all kinds of other things too.  Your rogue is beat up and low on HP?  Turn them into a Giant Ape and watch them do way more damage than before and have a massive HP pool to soak damage.  Need to cross a chasm?  Polymorph yourself into a giant eagle and ferry the party across.  Need to swim?   Turn into a dolphin.  The spell has so many uses that it would be a great pick even if the combat applications were only so-so.

But instead Polymorph is a fantastic single target crowd control spell and a powerful buff in one.  It effectively gives wizards a monster sized heal that is, admittedly, difficult to control.  Add that to the noncombat effectiveness it has and you have a totally absurd spell.  Banishment just doesn't stack up, even though it is slightly better at getting rid of a single enemy for a long duration because of the difficulty of dispelling it.

I remember Polymorph Other and Polymorph Self from earlier editions and those were usually completely bonkers too.  In 3rd edition I recall turning into a Stone Giant to take advantage of their amazing physical stats and natural armour, and while the 5th edition version is less broken it is still a problem.

One issue I do have with the system is the way saving throws scale.  5th edition wanted to keep numbers flat explicitly and that generally is a good way to go.  However, one issue with this is impressing people with magic.  If a peasant doesn't believe that you are dangerous you can Fireball them and wipe out a whole room full of people no problem.  But if you want to turn them into a sheep?  They save a good portion of the time.  We actually had this come up in our recent session where we tried to intimidate people and it failed because they just saved against our crowd control spells. 

It feels like maybe crowd control spells should have notes in them that against people of sufficiently low HP they just work, no save.  Polymorphing a giant should be hard, but doing so to a 5 HP peasant should be trivial.  Heck, it might be better to move most or all CC effects to a HP based system like that.  It shouldn't much matter against serious fights but it would make things feel better against mooks and townsfolk I think.