D&D 5E MM Excerpt: Bone Devil

[Roger]

Abilities that Bone Devils have that are not revealed by the preview:

* Exhaustive knowledge of the complete works of Boney M

 

[Agamon]

I, for one, am glad they decided not to add the percent chance to create a suddenly ridiculously overpowered encounter.

Friends don't let fiends' friends summon friends of fiends.

 

[Celebrim]

Well, if that's the whole entry, it's definitely simplified. In some ways I'm ok with that, in some ways I'm not.

Good: At will greater teleport is gone. That has always been problematic. Likewise gone is the ability to self-summon at a certain percentage chance, leading to unexpectedly varying degrees of difficulty in the encounter. It's much better for a DM to be able to set the number appearing rather than to only know the number appearing in an encounter to within +/- 35%. Likewise, gone is the overlapping fear aura that makes running large numbers of monsters difficult. If you have 7 monsters with aura/gaze attacks, then it's pretty much guaranteed everyone will fail thier save against one.

Bad: Things aren't fixed, they are just gone.

This is going to lead to situations where in order to make the monster interesting, you'll have to invent the new versions and fix them yourself. While the overlapping fear aura mechanic needed to go, it's not at all clear that the general idea of 'this thing is scary especially up close' needed to go. While the teleport needed to go, the general idea of 'this thing has extremely high mobility and evasion skills' needed to stay. Gone is the list of options that make non-combat interaction with the creature more interesting. Powers like teleport, dimensional anchor, fly, invisibility, major image, and wall of ice gave the creature depth. They provided fodder for making the creature proactive and having non-fiat plots to utilize its powers to accomplish evil deeds. It was stealthy. It was mobile. It could deceive people. It could cope with high level magic and respond in kind. It could trap people and cut off escape, and alter the environment in interesting ways. By creating illusions and walls of ice, it was practically its own lair generator. These all provided opportunities to spotlight the creature in something other than a straight up combat role. Likewise, while self-summoning and percentage chances of summoning working was problematic, the ability to summon minions itself made the monster more interesting as a BBEG.

You can do this all yourself, creating scenarios where the illusions are there, the ice walls are there, the minions are there, and there is a backstory of the monsters nefarious plot where it does things off stage to NPCs that aren't on the stat sheet, but I personally think that's less satisfying and that its certainly as a stat block less thought provoking.

 

[Agamon]

You can do this all yourself, creating scenarios where the illusions are there, the ice walls are there, the minions are there, and there is a backstory of the monsters nefarious plot where it does things off stage to NPCs that aren't on the stat sheet, but I personally think that's less satisfying and that its certainly as a stat block less thought provoking.

Why is it less satisfying? Does it feel like "cheating" because you're just making things up instead of sticking to what's written down? Or maybe not cheating, but arbitrary?

I guess I can see that. But I like the fact that I can make simpler monsters more interesting myself, on a case-by-case basis. The statblock in the book is the simple, average version of the monster, but it might not be the stats or abilities for any individual monster, especially if they are important and not just something sitting in the way of our heroes. And doing things off stage, as you say, is the perfect opportunity to be creative.

 

[Derren]

Does it feel like "cheating" because you're just making things up instead of sticking to what's written down?

Because it is in a way cheating.
When the players have equipped themselves specifically to kill devils, do you make them more "interesting" to have a longer/better combat? But what happens then when they, expert devil hunters, are unprepared to handle the special abilities you give the devils?

Such short notice alterations are OK in a Combat as Sport scenario which happen separate from the rest of the game, but they make it impossible to run a Combat as War scenario unless you decide on each and every addition way before the monster appears.

 

[Agamon]

Because it is in a way cheating.
When the players have equipped themselves specifically to kill devils, do you make them more "interesting" to have a longer/better combat? But what happens then when they, expert devil hunters, are unprepared to handle the special abilities you give the devils?

Such short notice alterations are OK in a Combat as Sport scenario which happen separate from the rest of the game, but they make it impossible to run a Combat as War scenario unless you decide on each and every addition way before the monster appears.

You missed the rest of my post. What's written down is typical, so a devil-slaying party will be well equipped to slay a typical devil.

And they'll still be well equipped to slay an atypical one, too, for that matter. I'm not talking about removing devil abilities and replacing them with construct or ooze or undead abilities. I'm talking about adding to the what's typical to make it special, if making it special is a good idea.

And it's less about abilities during the fight as it is off-stage stuff. Summoning minions to send after the party or teleporting away after a confrontation.

It's not about surprising or stumping the players, it's about making memorable NPCs.

 

[Ranes]

...I like the fact that I can make simpler monsters more interesting myself, on a case-by-case basis. The statblock in the book is the simple, average version of the monster, but it might not be the stats or abilities for any individual monster, especially if they are important and not just something sitting in the way of our heroes. And doing things off stage, as you say, is the perfect opportunity to be creative.

We've always been able to make things up on a case-by-case basis. But the bone devil has always been able to fly and turn invisible (among other things), until now. Our starting point for being creative was a creature that could do these things. Now it's one that can't. Shouldn't there be creatures that can turn invisible and fly by default in 5e? Should such things always be left to individual DMs ready to take on the oh-the-humanity complexity from now on?

 

[Celebrim]

Why is it less satisfying? Does it feel like "cheating" because you're just making things up instead of sticking to what's written down? Or maybe not cheating, but arbitrary?

Well, in a nut shell, yes.

a) As a GM, I don't trust myself to run a scenario fairly between the players and an NPC if the NPC has the power of plot.
b) As a player, I don't trust the GM to run a scenario fairly between the players and an NPC if the NPC has the power of plot.
c) As a designer, I see that many of the worst excesses of 1e/2e were owed to the fact that NPCs were different the than PCs. For example, NPCs could create magical items, traps, or objects with arbitrary abilities because 'plot'. PCs in the same situation had to leap through fantastically high hoops. It was a methodology that excused keeping DMs fully in control of the 'plot' and the sort of solutions that were acceptable.

But I like the fact that I can make simpler monsters more interesting myself, on a case-by-case basis.

Yes, but this is not a feature. You can make monsters more interesting whether they are simple, complex, interesting, or uninteresting. The point is that I pay the professionals 'big bucks' so that I don't have to do so myself. Equally, a stat block that is complicated I can always cut down to something simpler if I need to. For example, I regularly run 3e monsters without worrying about all the skill points and whether or not I've got every single stat exactly right.

More to the point, while you or I may well be able to do fine without a rule book at all, drawing upon our vast experience to create scenarios more complicated than 'Enter the scenario', 'Kill the monster', 'Take the monsters stuff', and 'Leave the scenario', I'm not all convinced that this sort of presentation encourages someone with less experience to do or imagine anything else. This sort of presentation suggests to me that monsters are for killing in straight forward hack and slash combat and I don't see how it would suggest anything else. That isn't all bad, but it's not all good either.

Beyond the lack of inherent creativity in the monster and the fact that that burden is shifted on to the GM, I'm beginning to see a trend toward one dimensional high level monsters. Coming from my 1e/3e background, this worries me that there is insufficient play testing at higher levels. Against creative players with high level PC's, it's often the case that the PC's' are able to leverage absolute advantages against particular strategies. Generally when designing a monster meant for high level play, I take care to give the monster alternative strategies beyond its core strategy. When looking at this monster or even more so at the Tarrasque, I'm looking at a monster with few options if its core strategy doesn't work. What does it do against PC's that have both ranged attacks and move faster than it? Even so much as giving the Tarrasque a borrowing speed, something that doesn't complicate the monster much, at least gives it options that reduce the chance that the Tarrasque is reduced to being a chump. While 5e may be reducing the options of high level PCs somewhat, I doubt they are so reduced in practice that against a creative player won't at times make them trivial.

This creates a problem. A DM encountering the problem of the Tarrasque going down like a chump is going to be tempted to create (or more transparently argue for) a borrowing speed on the fly - particularly if they didn't foresee the problem with the stat block ahead of time. But this is in fact metagaming, and quite rightly can be perceived by the player as cheating/ruling in favor of the NPCs and that undermines trust. Even more so, if the DM gets creative off stage with the powers of a bone devil, when faced with a similar situation you are risking ruling that the monster has power of plot on stage. (See some 1e and almost all 2e module writing.) That sort of problem I think was very much tied to the simple stat block doesn't let the monster do things it reasonably ought to be able to do, but on the other hand if you can invent what the monster can do, does it have any real restrictions other than what the DM wants?

 

[Agamon]

We've always been able to make things up on a case-by-case basis. But the bone devil has always been able to fly and turn invisible (among other things), until now. Our starting point for being creative was a creature that could do these things. Now it's one that can't. Shouldn't there be creatures that can turn invisible and fly by default in 5e? Should such things always be left to individual DMs ready to take on the oh-the-humanity complexity from now on?

Yikes, melodrama is not necessary. I just said I liked more simplified monsters. I didn't pee in anyone's corn flakes.

First, 5e is a different game, expecting it to be the same as an earlier edition isn't sensible. Second, yes, I think 5e will have creatures that fly and turn invisible by default, I'm not sure where I stated otherwise. I think it already does.

 

[Schmoe]

Ug. Not even a single spell-like ability? Thumbs down from me.