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

[Bill Zebub]

You can add those things before the NPC enters it play and it is not fudging, but if you do so later it absolutely is. And yes, of course the players won't know, and they don't know your dice rolls behind your screen either.

But if you keep doing this, you're basically running the game by fiat and it lessens the agency the players have. And if that results a fun game and everyone likes it, then that's absolutely fine. But let's not try to pretend that there isn't a trade-off happening.

Let’s unpack that.

Why is it not “fudging” to make up the NPC moments before an encounter? You might be (or probably are) tuning it to the abilities of the party to make an exciting encounter, as opposed to assigning abilities without regard to the PCs. That sounds like fudging to me.

How about before the session? Same thing.

So I think your personal rule, that NPC abilities are set in stone when initiative is rolled, to be perfectly valid and if it makes you and your players happy, great. But there is nothing magic about the start of the encounter that makes changes on one side of the line “fudging” and the other side of the line “not fudging”.

 

[James Gasik]

I think it comes down to whether or not you feel that it's fair play. Does it stretch verisimilitude to have an enemy who is perfectly prepared to counter the party? Who has all resources available, and is protected from their tricks?

I'm not saying that it's impossible to imagine, but how often can this or should this occur? If the party's tactics are known, have been observed, or the party is relatively infamous, or they leave enemies behind to tell the tale, I can see this happening, but only to a point.

Let's not forget that, outside of Clerics and Druids, most spellcasters have set spell lists- even a Wizard who could know every spell, is not likely to have every spell at their disposal. So even if they know what they are up against (as in, they literally woke up that day and went, I'm fighting that party of adventurers today!), perhaps they shouldn't have the correct spell loadout?

And non-spellcasters really can't change their tactics up much, since their choices are usually locked in, so tailoring responses to deal with them can feel like dirty pool- like they're being punished for not being able to change up what they, unlike a spellcaster, who might be able to switch out their entire spell list if their enemies become too savvy about their abilities.

Finally, what do you do if your players are exceptionally sly, and take steps to obfuscate their battle tactics? Like disguising the Wizard as the Rogue with illusion magic and vice versa?

These are the things that go through my mind when I create adventures. I assume that any given spellcaster has used some magic throughout the day (as the players sure have!), and that, unless they do have some kind of advance warning, their battle plans are fairly generic things like "disable spellcasters first, and have minions press the healer types".

Even if they do, they'd need a long rest to fully swap out their spell lists, so it's the rare enemy who can be perfectly prepared for the players.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, so to speak. If the players can consult sages and use divination magic to find out what they are up against in advance, or they frequently try to employ advance scouting or interrogate captured enemies, that's one thing.

But if they surprise an evil Wizard in his lair, who had no idea who they are, then they get the advantage of catching them off guard.

I also don't give enemies extra hit points if the players got in a lucky crit or high damage rolls- there's always more adventures, and more enemies. Let them have their victory, even if it seems "cheap". There is always next time, and the pendulum will swing the other way eventually.

But that's just my way of playing, I hate throwing "gotcha" encounters at my players that they had no way of preparing for. For me, half the fun of the game is rewarding the players for making good strategic and tactical choices. I try to give them access to as much information as possible- if they refuse to use it, well, that's on them. But I won't stand for anyone at my tables to say I was ever unfair.

Beating up on players who had no way to know the evil queen is actually a disguised medusa (as an example) strikes me as about as fun as stealing a small child's ice cream and eating it in front of them.

In the end, though, it comes down to how your players feel. If they like the odds being totally against them, and want the thrill of overcoming unknown enemies with devastating tactics (and I know such people exist!), then by all means, ad hoc everything! I personally don't, however, and I run the game accordingly. Sometimes this means my careful plotting is stymied, and in the moment, that is rough, but my mantra has always been, "take a breath, step back, and ask yourself how this affects the game world*. You always have more challenges you can use."

*as in, sure, you might have easily defeated an enemy. But are they the minion of an even greater enemy, who will take note of the fact that the players are obviously strong threats? And will they step up their plans, or take steps to deal with the players in short order?

 

[Irlo]

I think it comes down to whether or not you feel that it's fair play. Does it stretch verisimilitude to have an enemy who is perfectly prepared to counter the party? Who has all resources available, and is protected from their tricks?

To be fair, nothing Bill Zebub wrote indicated that their improvisations are implemented to perfectly counter the party or nullify their abilities or stratagems. That wouldn’t add to the fun, most of the time.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Let’s unpack that.

Why is it not “fudging” to make up the NPC moments before an encounter? You might be (or probably are) tuning it to the abilities of the party to make an exciting encounter, as opposed to assigning abilities without regard to the PCs. That sounds like fudging to me.

How about before the session? Same thing.

So I think your personal rule, that NPC abilities are set in stone when initiative is rolled, to be perfectly valid and if it makes you and your players happy, great. But there is nothing magic about the start of the encounter that makes changes on one side of the line “fudging” and the other side of the line “not fudging”.

You've got to understand that the idea of 'fudging' has been thoroughly and aggressively villainized on this forum in recent months. You're just plain not going to make headway using that word.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Nothing's preventing a better DC system in conjunction with skill point though. And never EVER gating something behind skill ranks.

I am genuinely not convinced that a different skill point system would actually fix the problem. It's having to navigate between the Scylla of 3e's punishing system and the Charybdis of "put points wherever you want, because it doesn't matter."

I have no personal knowledge of 4e, so I can't really agree or disagree with you on if it's true of 4e. I did hear more than once in 4e discussions that DCs were supposed to scale with the group, and we all know that since I heard it on the internet, it must be true!!!

I have two thoughts on this.

First, I think that you are partially correct when you say that it's not about treating the rules as suggestions with no validity. The "rules" are valid. However, it's also clear that they are also just suggested rules. I went through the DM last year I think it was and listed a huge number of times it calls the rules guidelines(suggestions). I'll list just a couple now.

"Chapter 3, "Creating Adventures," provides guidelines for designing combat encounters using experience points."

"AS THE DUNGEON MASTER, YOU AREN'T LIMITED by the rules in the Player 's Handbook, the guidelines in this book, or the selection of monsters in the Monster Manual. You can let your imagination run wild."

And of course at least a half dozen times spread throughout the DMG where it says that the rules serve the DM, not the other way around. All of that indicates to me that the rules are suggestions for the DM to build on or override when he feels it should happen, not just when some serious issue comes up. They are encouraging house rules.

Second, 5e seems to be deliberately designed to force rulings. There are far too many "rules" or "guidelines" that are written vaguely and/or with common situations involving that rule that are just plain missing.

The designers are forcing rulings over rules in this edition.

As for your 5e book quotes, yeah, I know that's what it says, and I'm not happy about it. The deliberate vaguess is worse, because that means actively trying to design a game that isn't functional by itself.

Sure, I get that desire, and that’s probably why scaling proficiency bonus gradually worked its way back into 5e. But if you do have scaling bonuses, you either need to accept that things will get easier as you level up, or to have commensurately scaling challenges. And in the latter case, either the challenge must be tied to the fiction (so eventually the doors you deal with as challenges will be adamantine) or not (so despite the numbers having increased, everything remains exactly as challenging as it ever was).

Again, the way to dodge the horns of this dilemma is to actually include variety. Send the players to a location where some of the doors are just wood and others are adamantine, and give them that chance. Or, say, have the Paladin get captured by opponents who vastly underestimate her. Etc. Judicious use of weak opposition lets the rising tide actually be noticeable.

This might seem off-topic, but I'm wondering if it gets at the root of some of the disagreement:

When you "prepare" spells for the day, is your character aware of the # of slots, levels, etc.? That is, do the game rules map 1:1 to the principles of magic as understood by the characters?

My answer is no. But if one's answer is yes, then that would lead to different conclusions about stat blocks (and many other things).

In general, I assume the answer is yes, but would be willing to hear out an explanation from the DM why that isn't the case.

I probably wouldn’t do this myself, as I prefer using human judgment over a hard rule.

I mean, the rule can be very simple. If there's no interesting consequences for failure, just tell the player it happens (perhaps with gusto, if they heavily outclass the obstacle.) If there's no benefit to success, give them the opportunity to back out. (My players quickly learned to listen when I say, "Did you really say/do that?" or "Are you sure?" The former is mostly for separating OOC from IC, while the latter is my ritual phrase for such moments. I don't say it very often, because 99% of the time my players are cautious to a fault rather than too aggressive, but I know my players notice. Sometimes they even say yes, they really are sure!)

If so many people got the wrong idea about 4e, even those who ran it for a reasonable amount of time, how clear could its design ethos have really been?

Well, it would have helped if they both (a) actually read it (many did not, as their blatantly false claims demonstrate, e.g. claims that healing surges allow infinite healing), and (b) actually used quotes from the text rather than aggressively misinterpreted paraphrasing and summarizing. E.g. people still to this day claim that every combat encounter in 4e is required to be keyed to the party's level exactly. This is not only false, but trivially easy to disprove simply by reading the relevant sections of the 4e DMG. There is no ambiguity here; the book explicitly says not to do that, and instead to give a wide variety of combats (in encounter level, number and types of opponents, and terrain on which the encounters occur) so that the players have a rich and varied experience. This isn't hidden. It isn't buried in a mountain of text. It's right there, on the surface.

This is why so many fans of 4e get so annoyed with the pushback 4e still gets. A ton of it is not merely wrong, but trivially wrong. Wrong in ways that anyone who had genuinely read the books should not be capable of.

Sad thing: I have not find a system, with a better balance of out of combat and in combat stuff.
Probably it is familarity, but we just like how the game is structured. We just don't need more out of combat rules. Maybe a bit more steuctured out of combat rules, because the DMG is sadly a bit unorganized in that regard, and improved rules are found in xanathar's guide and so on.

I find Dungeon World is quite balanced in this way. But it is also a much looser system than D&D ever has been. If you like rule structures for non-combat encounters, you might consider adapting 4e's Skill Challenge rules. The "Obsidian" houserule variant is a great place to start. SCs got a crazy bad rap in 4e but were actually a really good idea marred by (as was so often the case in 4e) EXTREMELY, PAINFULLY BAD examples given in the early WotC adventures.

Ok. But the players probably don't know what combat spells the NPC caster has either. So are you fine with adding new spells to the NPC in mid combat?

I am not, unless it is clear that they should have such things but it hasn't been specified what yet. If there was no way for the players to know prior to it being added, it's no different from the vast majority of other DMing where the DM improvises the content as they go.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The DM swapping out spells mid combat: this definitely feels like cheating to me. The cunning PC traps the enemy spellcaster behind a wall of force. The DM, annoyed at the player's cleverness, swaps out one of the enemy's spells for Disintegrate.

It doesn't matter that the players would never know, it goes against the unwritten rule to give the players a fair fight.

Swapping spells and abilities before the encounter: absolutely fine, I do it all the time.

 

[Hussar]

You can add those things before the NPC enters it play and it is not fudging, but if you do so later it absolutely is. And yes, of course the players won't know, and they don't know your dice rolls behind your screen either.

But if you keep doing this, you're basically running the game by fiat and it lessens the agency the players have. And if that results a fun game and everyone likes it, then that's absolutely fine. But let's not try to pretend that there isn't a trade-off happening.

But, in the case of our Deathlock Mastermind, what have I added? It's a warlock, casts as a warlock, and casts warlock spells. So, it could have invocations, right? Now, the stat-block does not list any invocations for our Deathlock. Nor, does it mention what kind of pact it has either, which also impacts what abilities this monster has. Neither are mentioned in the stat block though, so, does it have them or not?

I'd say a pretty reasonable reading would be to say that they had invocations, but, since the invocations aren't really going to come up that often (typically), they are just left in the background until needed. Which means, poof, if I need my Deathlock to turn invisible, I give him that invocation that lets him turn invisible in low light. Now, am I going to do this every time? Nope. Am I going to do this specifically to take away player agency or counter their tactics? Probably not. But, if there's some reason that I need that Deathlock to be invisible, I can do it.

So, in what way am I fudging? Oh, and let's not forget, that our Deathlock Mastermind also doesn't list pact spells either. So, we've got about 10-14 spells that aren't listed in the stat block that folks were holding up as a fantastic example of how the game makes caster stat blocks. It's listing half the spells it should have, and that's supposed to be fantastic game design. But, apparently, reducing the lich's spell list to half is very bad game design. Color me a bit confused here. Which is it? NPC's should follow PC rules or not?

Unless they're non-casters of course. In that case, anything goes and we don't have to worry about it at all.

But, in any case, how is adding in elements that the NPC has by the rules, fudging? I'm not giving this NPC some made up power that it couldn't have if it was a PC. I'm straight up following the rules.

Since when is straight up following the rules fudging?

 

[James Gasik]

To be fair, nothing Bill Zebub wrote indicated that their improvisations are implemented to perfectly counter the party or nullify their abilities or stratagems. That wouldn’t add to the fun, most of the time.

Sorry, I wasn't accusing them of this, but addressing the concept of "fudging" in general. I had gained the (possibly wrong, and for that I'm sorry) impression that, in this instance, the ad hoc assigning of abilities to the NPC opponents was done to challenge the party- which can lead to a scenario (as an example) where a caster doesn't have or use, say, magic missile, as several player characters have access to shield.

 

[Maxperson]

As for your 5e book quotes, yeah, I know that's what it says, and I'm not happy about it. The deliberate vaguess is worse, because that means actively trying to design a game that isn't functional by itself.

It is functional by itself. It's just flawed and has holes in it. Think of it like this. 5e is like the car that has windows that won't roll down, turn signals that don't work and brakes that are not 100%. Is it functional? Yes, the car will function to get you to where you are going. You may not be able to get fresh air unless you fix the windows, and you may have to start braking early in order to stop at the red light, and turn without signaling, but it does still function as a car.

In 5e the Tiny Hut spell functions, but we don't know if it has a bottom or not. Readied Action functions, but requires specific perceivable circumstances, but doesn't actually specify how specific it has to be or whether you have to make a perception check to perceives a perceivable situation. And so on.

 

[Minigiant]

You know what.
Would the problems be alleviated in Alternative magic like Invocations and Infusions become core in D&D?

Instead of Everything is Slot Based Spellcasting.