We are brand new to D&D. Recently we finished up the first section of the starter set for 5E.
There was a point in the story where one of my PC's got really creative and wanted to cast Command out of combat (while sneaking) on a boss NPC, and then immediately command that boss to kill himself by shoving a javelin right into his head.
Since this was out of combat, and there were no turns, my player's rationale was that he could these things in succession since it was part the group narration, and just had to pass a difficulty check…
I felt this was too strong, and that I was probably missing something from the rules since I had only just bought this box the night before.
So as the DM I stepped in and said "no you can't do that… that can't be right, that's too strong." So I asked my player to roll a d20 to see if he was successful, which he was.
But I feel like I overstepped my bounds because I basically said "no" to my player because I didn't want this boss encounter to be bypassed so easily.
Was I in the wrong to try to stop my player from doing that crazy one hit kill?
How would this situation have played out if I had more experience with the rules?
Best Answer
I agree with Dan B's first point, but let's expand upon it.
The command is only a single word. "Suicide" could maybe work, though in my experience, it is rarely used as a verb . However...
As Dan mentioned, the command cannot be directly or obviously harmful to the target. Thus, "Suicide" or some one-word version of "stab self" would not work.
The Command only is followed for 1 round, or about 6 seconds. If you wanted to cause the target to do multiple things in succession, it would require several successful castings of the spell with different Commands to accomplish more intricate behaviors.
So, ultimately, you were right in your ruling. You cannot make a target do anything obviously harmful with Command.
Now, getting a target to APPROACH across a trap that he hasn't spotted... ;)