D&D 5E DM's: How Do You Justify NPC's Having Magic/Abilities That Don't Exist in the PHB?

[Irlo]

The requirement for in fiction explanations should be their burden to bear. The rest of us who do not have such a need should not be burdened by that restriction.

No one is suggesting that you should be so burdened.

 

[Irlo]

But when I say an NPC casts one little spell not listed in the Player’s Handbook, well then everyone loses their minds!

Citation needed. Just one. Please provide one reference to anyone in this conversation who has panicked or lost their mind.

 

[Andvari]

Citation needed. Just one. Please provide one reference to anyone in this conversation who has panicked or lost their mind.

It’s just a movie reference.

 

[Irlo]

It’s just a movie reference.

Oh, sorry!

 

[Undrave]

I don't feel the need to justify that.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I will do that, but I don't really understand it. It seems to me that would lead to the thread being a series of independent conversations between the OP and those who espouse a certain variety of answer, with no cross-pollination because you can't disagree with other people's answers. Is that what we're supposed to do here? I honestly don't get it.

Also bear in mind that some participants are looking for rules guidance, and if you chime in with how you would homebrew things without saying that’s what you mean, it might be confusing.

 

[Lanefan]

So, again - you are seeking answers to the OP's question from third parties.

The OP did not, so far as I saw, limit answers to a world in which NPCs/monsters (the distinction is narrative) and PCs all work under the same rules. So, you don't really get to impose that requirement on the answers, 'cause it isn't your question. The 5e game rules by default, have NPCs and PCs using different rules - so the common answers will be in line with those rules.

And 5e gets this flat-out wrong if a DM wants to build an internally consistent world of which the PCs are an integral part.

Consider this example: the PCs are in town and meet an NPC warrior; they get to know her well enough and swap enough stories that they can largely figure out in-character how her "NPC rules" fighting styles differ from their own "PC rules" abilities. They also become friends.

Not long after this, the PC Fighter dies; someone says "Hey, let's go recruit that warrior we met as his replacement!", and so they do. Now that NPC has just become the equivalent of a PC in the party - and maybe even a full PC if the now-characterless player takes her over.

If ANYTHING about that character's mechanics change due to this move from NPC to PC, there's an insurmoutable design-level problem with setting consistency; because the character herself hasn't changed a bit in the fiction.

 

[Lanefan]

Maybe. Or maybe the guy took ten years cobbling it from various sources, and practiced every day for a year to get it down, then burned the source.

If he burned the source then he's not going to be able to memorize it again in the morning; and it seems an awful waste to go through all that effort just for a one-time use at some random moment when some adventurers happen by.

You can potentially discover it for yourself it you want to go through that process, but you'll not be adventuring. Besides, most of the time, you'll want to kill that guy, and let the knowledge die with him.

That's just it - if you're internally consistent with how arcane magic works, the knowledge doesn't die with him. It might die if you blow up his spellbook and-or his field notes and his was the only copy of said ritual, but that's different.

 

[Maxperson]

Citation needed. Just one. Please provide one reference to anyone in this conversation who has panicked or lost their mind.

I've lost mine. But to be fair, it was well before this conversation and likely before I ever got to this website.

 

[DEFCON 1]

If ANYTHING about that character's mechanics change due to this move from NPC to PC, there's an insurmountable design-level problem with setting consistency; because the character herself hasn't changed a bit in the fiction.

And that's when that particular DM who has the issue decides to make the NPC mechanics into mechanics the new PC can use and take. Nothing wrong with that, and is probably a good design challenge for the DM to take on. To me... that's quite surmountable.

But it's not something the designers of 5E themselves have to officially do for players, because it was not one of their design decisions when they made 5E.

My own personal take on the question is that random new abilities just "show up" in the game world all the time, every time a new player's guide like Xanathar's or Tasha's gets published or a new monster manual is released. Which means there are always these "background" abilities out there being used, that just aren't being highlighted by the PCs or the creatures they are fighting. So there's no problem whatsoever for PCs to not have the functionality to take these features-- either because they are specific monster abilities from the MM... or because they are PC abilities they just aren't aware of yet because they will only finally show up when a new player's guide gets published.