D&D 5E New Spellcasting Blocks for Monsters --- Why?!

[DND_Reborn]

I apply a strict rule of:" If it is not not written, it does not have it." Period. Acting any otherwise would simply be cheating in my POV. So no, I would not add powers or items to a foe in the middle of the fight. If the group dies, it dies. If it kills my BBEG swiftly because of luck, great tactics or both, so be it. Easy fights or hard kne will not be modified because I feel like it. I do not fudge and roll.on the open. A gritty realism game we play and doing this, modifying a creature on the fly, would be disrespectful to my players.

I do the same. If I didn't create the foe with certain features, they don't just "get them" in the middle of a fight because I want them to. There was a thread a while ago about DMs doing such things--and I also totally consider it cheating.

After all, players don't get to add stuff to their characters in the middle of fight either, do they?

Really? Oof. That seems very limiting.

Not at all. It just means you play in an established "world" for the game instead of fluid one.

If I was playing with a DM who changed things "mid fight", I would leave. Changing things after the session, or making changes for next time if it fits the world's narrative (like a caster swapping prepared spells) is fine--but in the middle of a fight? No way.

 

[Voadam]

That's my point.

Npc Mages are expected to nova. But they have resources of a PC designed not to nova.

Therefore if you give them full slots, either they never use 50% of their slots or they use cheesey tactics to spend all their slots and TPK the party.


So why give them 100% of their slots if they can't use it without TPK?

Slots are just a flexible mechanic that map a bit to Vancian history and have resource management implications.

They are not designed for just x encounters per day, they are flexible. Slots are designed to be able to nova as an option. PCs nova. That is part of the flexible design. Encounter and at will powers are generally a better design to consistently enable multiple encounters in a day than a per day slot design that can blow everything in encounter one.

The NPCs using their resources is not cheesy, it is realistic for their expected situations of being violently overwhelmed by PCs. Whether it is a TPK is a matter of CR evaluation and the party power and the situation, not inherent to slot design versus x/day spell lists.

 

[Helldritch]

Really? Oof. That seems very limiting.

No, it simply means that the foes the charcters will encounter will have been prepared in advance. While I love improvising in role play, in combat it is an entirely other mind set.

 

[Reynard]

No, it simply means that the foes the charcters will encounter will have been prepared in advance. While I love improvising in role play, in combat it is an entirely other mind set.

Ah. I misread the comment. I thought it was "only as the rulebook says."

 

[Helldritch]

Ah. I misread the comment. I thought it was "only as the rulebook says."

With all these posts, it is easy to lose track
I know that I sometimes do.

 

[dave2008]

It should take me about the same. Apply that to a whole MM2 when it comes out... I do that with all casters in adventure books. That is a lot of work imposed on me and anyone else doing it.

I only modify monsters I am using (and have done so since the start of 5e), so no need to do all the MM. I also don't us published adventures. However, copy paste is your friend. I created some generic spellcasting templates and I can just copy paste those onto monsters & npcs as needed.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Matt Coville just ran a kickstarter that makes stat blocks more complex and it made 2 million dollars

This argument does not hold water. First of all, Matt Colville has stated in multiple videos that he hates 5e's previous way of handling spellcasting monsters. He has been advocating for this exact same system that WotC is implementing years before they did it.

Furthermore, his new monsters are only "complex" in the sense that they're not the dumbed-down sack-o'-hitpoints versions that the Monster Manual is full of. They're much more similar to the more recent versions of monsters (which have better action economy, more interesting abilities, abilities that function similarly to Bloodied, and limited spell lists that don't use spell slots) than the old ones from the early days of 5e.

Do you know why that Kickstarter was successful? Do you know why WotC is changing how their monster stat blocks function in order to do the same thing? Because they're closer to 4e's monster design. Both of them are taking inspiration from the same thing (D&D 4e) and tackling 5e monster design in slightly different ways. It isn't about "complexity", because plenty of newer monster stat blocks are complex. Complexity is fine. Manageability is an entirely different matter, and WotC is changing their stat blocks to be more manageable.

 

[Xetheral]

For me, the new stat blocks are a huge improvement in terms of usability during encounters. For prep work, it’s sufficient to note somewhere that Vecna is a 17th level Wizard (or whatever) because then I can work out for myself how many spell slots he has and what spells he might have access to outside of an encounter.

Oh wow! You'd let Vecna have the spell slots of a 17th level Wizard before the encounter, and then switch to the new-style statblock for the encounter itself?

Normally spell slots spent in advance to shape an upcoming encounter are balanced by the fact that those slots aren't available during the encounter itself. But with your approach that isn't a limitation any more--it sounds like Vecna would have the flexibility and limited-use power of old-style statblocks with the at-will abilities and slot-independent spellcasting of the new-style statblock. Out of curiosity, do you roleplay Vecna as being aware of the fact that he isn't dependent in-combat on his out-of-combat spell slots? Or do you roleplay him as (unnecessarily) trying to conserve them for the fight? Or is how you roleplay Vecna out-of-combat (and the decisions he makes on using his out-of-combat spell slots) simply irrelevant to the eventual difficulty of the encounter?

Oh! Ok, now I see what you mean. Yeah, this could certainly pose a challenge to some ongoing campaigns. For me, I think it just wouldn’t really come up. Anti-spell abilities become a bit less useful, it doesn’t particularly need to be addressed in the fiction. But, if your group is especially concerned with that kind of process simulation then yeah, I’d recommend not introducing these changes until your current campaign wraps up, and incorporating them into the next one from the start (if you want to incorporate them at all, that is).

(Emphasis added.) To follow-up in the same vein as my questions above, what are your expectations for how the players roleplay their PCs with this mechanical change? For example, let's say the PCs suspect (rightly or wrongly) that the BBEG might be a Rakshasha and the PCs know IC that Rakshashas are famously immune to most spells. One of your players approaches you out of game to ask whether it would be reasonable IC for them to start recruiting NPC spellcaster allies who know how to cast non-spell magical attacks that bypass the Rakshasha's defenses. Would you encourage them to pursue such an effective strategy? Tell them their PC is unaware of the spell/non-spell distinction IC? Ask them to refrain from recruiting allies for game balance purposes? Something else?

 

[dave2008]

This argument does not hold water. First of all, Matt Colville has stated in multiple videos that he hates 5e's previous way of handling spellcasting monsters. He has been advocating for this exact same system that WotC is implementing years before they did it.

Furthermore, his new monsters are only "complex" in the sense that they're not the dumbed-down sack-o'-hitpoints versions that the Monster Manual is full of. They're much more similar to the more recent versions of monsters (which have better action economy, more interesting abilities, abilities that function similarly to Bloodied, and limited spell lists that don't use spell slots) than the old ones from the early days of 5e.

Do you know why that Kickstarter was successful? Do you know why WotC is changing how their monster stat blocks function in order to do the same thing? Because they're closer to 4e's monster design. Both of them are taking inspiration from the same thing (D&D 4e) and tackling 5e monster design in slightly different ways. It isn't about "complexity", because plenty of newer monster stat blocks are complex. Complexity is fine. Manageability is an entirely different matter, and WotC is changing their stat blocks to be more manageable.

Well said.

 

[Minigiant]

Slots are just a flexible mechanic that map a bit to Vancian history and have resource management implications.

They are not designed for just x encounters per day, they are flexible. Slots are designed to be able to nova as an option. PCs nova. That is part of the flexible design. Encounter and at will powers are generally a better design to consistently enable multiple encounters in a day than a per day slot design that can blow everything in encounter one.

The NPCs using their resources is not cheesy, it is realistic for their expected situations of being violently overwhelmed by PCs. Whether it is a TPK is a matter of CR evaluation and the party power and the situation, not inherent to slot design versus x/day spell lists.

The Point is the NPCs novaing is fine.

However the NPCs novaing 100% their resources is no way intended as doing so will push to TPK.


So giving a NPC caster 4/3/3/3/2/1 when the game is only designed for them to use 3/2/1 is designing for aesthetics over function.