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

[James Gasik]

Yes, it's sort of like saying that.

The Red Dragon Sorceror rises imperiously from her throne and, with a snarl and a flourish of her staff, sends forth a blast of fire. Moments later, Lameo the Regular Sorceror ignites some bat guano. Boom.

One fireball does 37 damage. The other does 40 damage. Which came from the Red Dragon Sorceror with Elemental Affinity?

There has to be some metric characters can use in-universe to determine if one tactic is more effective than another, otherwise no one would have ever progressed beyond the rock as a weapon of war.

 

[Maxperson]

1) It's silly to try to assert a default on the newest interpretation of a game that had already been extant for 40 years at the time of the 5e PHB release, especially when that game had already been forked into multiple, sometimes opposing, playstyles over time and previous edition releases.

Each edition is discrete when it comes to defaults. 2e defaults attacks to THAC0, while 3e defaults to class +s to hit. If you're going to try and look at D&D as a single edition spanning 40 years, then no you aren't going to see any defaults.

2) People try to assert "default" to somehow mean more correct, as though there's some secret "silent majority" of D&D players that agree with their playstyle assertions. The whole point of discussing playstyles is to learn tricks that make play at your own table better, not to try and assert some definitional orthodoxy.

I almost never see this happen. What happens is that someone comes with a question for how X works in the game. People default to the default to explain how X works. That's not saying that homebrew/house rule Y or optional rule Z are worse(or better), it's just how the default works. The default may or may not agree with their playstyle assertions.

 

[TwoSix]

This behavior is especially cancerous because it completely sidesteps the point of the game as a set of rules meant to assist in developing a shared narrative between the DM and the players. It's fine to have debates about RAW, but the 'default', or the position expressed in the official rulebooks, should by no means be seen as the only way to play D&D. Heck, the 5E DMG explicitly says otherwise!

Agreed. No one actually plays "default". It has all the real-world utility of calculations using a spherical cow.

There's no need to appeal to the "default". Just explain what works for your own games and why you prefer that way of playing.

 

[Irlo]

There has to be some metric characters can use in-universe to determine if one tactic is more effective than another, otherwise no one would have ever progressed beyond the rock as a weapon of war.

Yes. I don't think that metric can be damage as measured by hit points. That's too abstract.

 

[SkidAce]

Does she stay exactly as she was, thus forever working differently in her mechanics than any other PC Fighter? (and if yes, then in the interests of fairness I then have to allow every Fighter access to those same mechanics, as I've just set a precedent) Or does she snap-change to mirror the mechanics and abilities of PCs, without any training or in-game reason or rationale behind it? Remember, in the fiction the PCs already know what she can and can't do; that's probably why they recruited her!

Or (middle ground) she keeps her ability, and starts a fighter school to teach her techniques to others.

 

[Maxperson]

It's fine to have debates about RAW, but the 'default', or the position expressed in the official rulebooks, should by no means be seen as the only way to play D&D. Heck, the 5E DMG explicitly says otherwise!

This is what happens. People often(usually) misinterpret the arguments of RAW as how a person does things. This happens to me almost every time I argue RAW. I change a great deal in my personal game, but my house rules have no place in a RAW discussion. People read my arguments and just assume that I'm arguing how I want it to be done. And then when I tell them otherwise, they generally either ignore how I personally do it or just don't believe me. That's on them.

I've almost never see someone argue default just to support their pet way of doing things.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I mean why? isnt that what imaginations are for...

Not in 3e, the only edition of D&D ever.

 

[pemerton]

That's like saying that no one can tell that a Red Dragon Sorcerer's fireball hurts more, so no one can know that their Elemental Affinity exists as an ability.

In reply, I feel that your post is like saying hp are meat.

Or, as @TwoSix suggested upthread, that the action economy of the game is also the reality of the fiction, such that it's some weird stop motion world.

To address the NPC gladiator matter more directly: when the GM rolls a successful hit with a gladiator attack, and rolls the bonus damage dice, how many blows did the gladiator strike? What does that correspond to in the fiction? Does it matter whether the damage dice result is low or high? Does it matter whether the hp loss to the victim drops them from (say) 50 hp to 40 hp or (say) 11 hp to 1 hp?

D&D combat is so unrelentingly fortune-in-the-middle - ie we can't say anything very definite about what is happening in the fiction, either action or consequence, until all the dice are rolled - that trying to treat any particular mechanical component as representing something in the fiction seems ridiculous to me.

To try and illustrate the point another way: there was a version of the 5e playtest rules that gave martial PCs bonus damage rather than bonus attacks. Does anyone think that the fiction of what PC warriors do when they fight opponents would be different in a rules framework that went down that pathway? It seems clear to me that these are all just different mechanical devices for permitting players to play puissant warriors.

 

[Hussar]

Except one does extra damage for no good reason.

There is a perfectly good reason though.

It’s 100% grounded in gamism though.

So you want an explanation for something that fundamentally cannot be explained any other way.

 

[pemerton]

Which would be fine if those mechanics were consistent.

In the 4e adventures I've converted and run, there's always at least one or two monsters or foes using cool magic items that aren't then listed as part of their treasure; the intent being (as far as I can determine) that the PCs don't get to use these same items they just got beaten up by even if one or more of the PCs is an exact match for the foe just defeated (e.g. a PC Hobgoblin Fighter vs an NPC Hobgoblin Fighter-equivalent).

Where's the consistency in that? Or the logic, both in-setting and meta?

The logic is clear. It's the same logic that explains why Aragorn wields Anduril, Flame of the West; why Boromir's sword is sent over the Rauros with his body, rather than being looted by Legolas to upgrade his poxy Elven knife; why Captain America is the one who uses the shield, and Magneto is the one who wears the psi-resistant helmet.

4e is not, at its core, a game about upgrading your PC by taking the gear of defeated foes. It's got a different orientation. (In terms of game structure, this difference is expressed via the treasure parcel system, which is not directly connected to encounters and certainly not combat encounters, but rather is only indirectly connected to encounters by being directly indexed to levels gained.)

And of course it's trivial to come up with post hoc, in-fiction explanations should they be needed: the weapon only works in the hands of a Hobgoblin warrior anointed by the blood of a sacrifice to Maglubiyet (like a Hobgoblin version of a Dwarven Thrower or Holy Avenger); or only someone schooled in the macabre arts of <whatever makes sense at the time> can wield this <whatever item is in question>.

EDIT: I see that @Vaalingrade and @Garthanos made similar points.