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

[pemerton]

I actually like the idea of material components in theory, but find their application in practice to usually be...really bad. There's some interesting possibilities with some of the "metamagic components," where components don't permit spells, they rather enhance them, but it would need more work to be an actually interesting system as opposed to just a raw power-up.

<snip>

I wish there were cool systems using material components for spells

Torchbearer.

 

[Helldritch]

Butting in here. That's actually not really true. The game assumes you can take that many encounters before you're tapped out of resources. But there's nothing that says that the PCs have to use up every resource they have in a day. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you have to stick to the XP budget. The DMG specifically talks about the XP budget being used to determine how many monsters to sic on the PCs, but that's less helpful if you give XP for social encounters, and utterly meaningless if you use story or session-based advancement instead of XP.

You know that a car needs blue water. You are not obliged to put blue water in it. But do not blame the car when its windshield is so dirty that you have a car accident.
You know that you do not need anti-virus or VPN to run your computer. You are not forced to. But do not blame your computer when you get it highjack because you did not use anti-viruses or VPN.

The same goes with the EXP Budget. You are not forced to use it. But do not blame the game if you do not follow the guidelines about it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You know that a car needs blue water. You are not obliged to put blue water in it. But do not blame the car when its windshield is so dirty that you have a car accident.
You know that you do not need anti-virus or VPN to run your computer. You are not forced to. But do not blame your computer when you get it highjack because you did not use anti-viruses or VPN.

The same goes with the EXP Budget. You are not forced to use it. But do not blame the game if you do not follow the guidelines about it.

More importantly for the argument made, the XP budget doesn't care if the DM actually hands out that much XP when the fight is over. Like, even CR rules don't care about that (despite my dislike of both 3e and 5e versions thereof.) Just because you know a fight is worth N XP doesn't mean you're somehow forced to give the players that much. At worst, it might make you realize you're giving your players more or fewer levels than they "should" have given the fights they're going through, but 4e already has quests and SCs for granting XP so combat never was the sole source to begin with (you'd expect characters to level up faster.)

 

[Faolyn]

You know that a car needs blue water. You are not obliged to put blue water in it. But do not blame the car when its windshield is so dirty that you have a car accident.
You know that you do not need anti-virus or VPN to run your computer. You are not forced to. But do not blame your computer when you get it highjack because you did not use anti-viruses or VPN.

The same goes with the EXP Budget. You are not forced to use it. But do not blame the game if you do not follow the guidelines about it.

Strangely, I've never once worried about the XP budget when running either of my games--and I've been running them both for years--and I've never had the game "crash" or "get hijacked" even once. And it's not because I'm some magically perfect DM, who runs a magically perfect game, either.

 

[Arilyn]

Strangely, I've never once worried about the XP budget when running either of my games--and I've been running them both for years--and I've never had the game "crash" or "get hijacked" even once. And it's not because I'm some magically perfect DM, who runs a magically perfect game, either.

Me too. Don't even look at it! Everything seems fine.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Torchbearer.

Can you expand on that?

 

[Bill Zebub]

I don’t understand why some people care so much about the accuracy of CRs. The game is so swingy, anyway.

I only vaguely pay attention to the CRs, and I haven’t used the DMG calculations for encounter difficulty in…years. I just pick some monsters that seem cool. Sometimes it turns out harder than expected, sometimes easier. But always fun.

 

[James Gasik]

It would be nice to have a better estimate for the strength of an enemy when designing encounters than just "winging it". One thing I notice a lot in these discussions are people who, being experienced DM's, naturally go "I know what I'm doing, I can judge the appropriate challenge".

Which is fine. But what about inexperienced DM's? CR and encounter design needs to work without the benefit of years of experience, for anyone attempting to learn how to run the game without either making it a cakewalk, or murdering their parties.

 

[Minigiant]

I don’t understand why some people care so much about the accuracy of CRs. The game is so swingy, anyway.

I only vaguely pay attention to the CRs, and I haven’t used the DMG calculations for encounter difficulty in…years. I just pick some monsters that seem cool. Sometimes it turns out harder than expected, sometimes easier. But always fun.

Because we think about newer and inexperienced DMs.

There are a load of monsters is in the MM that are secret cakewalks and TPK machines which can ruin confidence in the game or themselves.

 

[Reynard]

I don’t understand why some people care so much about the accuracy of CRs. The game is so swingy, anyway.

I only vaguely pay attention to the CRs, and I haven’t used the DMG calculations for encounter difficulty in…years. I just pick some monsters that seem cool. Sometimes it turns out harder than expected, sometimes easier. But always fun.

5E isn't particularly swingy outside of low levels and even then it's only really in the whiff factor. They removed pretty much anything that might allow a single die roll to upend whatever is happening at the time.