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Yeah, they're both very bland.

For remove curse, there's an easy bandaid fix: Remove curse must be upcast to remove stronger effects. Sure, you can break the ring of power's hold over the knight, if you cast remove curse at 9th level. Otherwise, you have to follow the plot.

The plot route should be like all cursed items have a custom way of removing them. The sword of betrayal can be removed if you return it to the original owner's crypt. The stones of drowning can be broken if you bury them in the desert under a new moon. The ring of power can be destroyed if you throw it into the volcano where it was forged.

For counterspell, well... Make it an extended check with some options on each exchange. You both declare in secret if you're putting more spell slots or hp into the check, or folding. If you fold, the other person gets their way, but any extra resources they committed are wasted. If neither folds, you roll with bonuses based on what resources you put in. More spell slots or HP or hit dice give you some sort of bonus.

Probably get rid of counterspell as a spell on its own and just make this a thing you can do. Give wizards some more tactical depth. If you use the same spell you get a bonus to countering. If it's the same school, bonus.

Like all of D&D 5e, there's so much you could do that the game just doesn't.

Dispel Magic is the worst offender in my opinion. Imagine you spend one year casting the same spell at the same location, every day, so that it can become permanent. And then one green adventurer stumbles into your dungeon and tries out this new "Dispel Magic" spell he just learned. All your hard work and components gone.

"I cast remove curse." The DM dumps 6 pages of story on the floor and looks sad.

Edit: wait, this is instantaneous?
So like in a fight the BBEG sword is nasty, likely cursed. Cast Remove Curse on the sword. It removes the attunement to the sword. BBEG has a not-so-good weapon now, and likely loses some cool mechanics. Is that right?

You gotta have your game plan for why the curse isn’t solvable

Maybe it’s a disease, not a curse. Maybe it’s an evil magical sword, but it’s not cursed per se, it’s just an asshole. Maybe the magic that operates the McGuffin is set to detonate like a bomb if you make an attempt to disable it. You can feel the balance of energies, such that a slight slip will release an incredible conflagration. Do you really want to continue? You’ll have to do a wisdom check with a pretty high DC. If you’re down for that though, you might be able to remove the curse.

Yeah I know that’s not what it says in the books. This amulet isn’t from the books. Do you want to keep going with remove curse? Or try to find another way?

There are always solutions. Remove Curse is bullshit; IDK what they were thinking with it. But yeah you just gotta plan ahead a little bit. Let your players still have their agency; don’t just declare that it doesn’t work (unless you all wanna agree to house rule that it just doesn’t exist or something). Just plan your way around it. Best case is something like your players looking for some way to buff their wisdom enough so they feel confident taking on the Remove Curse, and then you all get to find out what transpires.

Counterpoint: The overwhelming majority of curses are either crippling or a complete nonissue. Something like mummy rot will quickly kill a character, and curses that impose penalties on stats or rolls either affect something they use, making the character almost useless, or doesn't, so doesn't matter. If you don't want the party remove cursing a specific curse, just make it more powerful than them.
Counterspelling is bad for a similar reason curses are bad, not remove curse - the overwhelming majority of counterspelling mechanics make it either too easy to too hard. Too hard and it's just not worth trying, and too easy makes combat a matter of who has more casters.

I am so done with D&D discussions. It's a 10 year old system at this point and the new version won't be meaningfully different. Heck, a lot of it's systems are actually as old as it and it fucking shows.

Play different games. There is an almost unlimited number of them out there. If you stop talking about D&D, if you stop giving it this singular attention, you will feel better and,who know,s the authors of D&D might be forced to actually make something good, as opposed to focus testing subclasses like pasta sauce flavors.

I'm baffled by both the fighting in these comments and the overall vehemence. If you want to put a cool cursed item in your game, just drop it when the players are still too low level to have remove curse...or make it subtle enough that they don't initially realize it's cursed.

EDIT: NVM I just realized you're all trying to ape the critical roll thing and didn't plan for getting player buy-in or homebrew

So...Just have curses be permanent? Why?