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

[Lanefan]

Why? Why can't magic be magical?

Because everything in the universe has some sort of underlying principle(s) of physics that allows it to function as it does. Magic is no exception.

 

[Garthanos]

I'm pretty sure you're referring to the Hobgoblin warcaster. That character is a caster of spells focused on war, as per the label.

well the letters over his head were not glowing bright enough I am sure.

 

[Lanefan]

Very much not the way I play. I'm constantly looking at new books and whatnot to add, change or otherwise modify a campaign. Heck, I'll do it in the middle of adventures, never minding in the middle of a campaign. Since my Candlekeep game started, I've added about three different monster books, material from probably half a dozen different setting guides that I didn't even know existed before I started the campaign as well as any number of new goodies, races, classes, and anything else that catches my eye.

I literally have zero idea what classes exist in a setting when the campaign starts because classes are not a thing in the game world.

Er...if classes aren't a thing in the game world, how can anyone's character be or become one?

Or are you using a class-less system for your game?

As for adding things, I'll add things as long as doing so doesn't and can't invalidate any play that has already happened, or any choices previously made by a player. Adding a new class out of the blue without a very solid in-game explanation invalidates every choice of class previously made, as in theory that class has existed all along and thus could have been chosen all along - it didn't just pop into being overnight in the setting.

Same for banning or changing things. Nobody in my game can cast 7th level spells yet and there's been very few if any cast against anybody, so they are for now still wide open to change and amendment should I decide to do so. As soon as someone can cast them, or the opposition starts regularly using them, they get much more locked-in.

I mean, there's a couple of common spells I want to ban right now but cannot, as they've already been used in the campaign (and still are, all too often!) and thus the precedent has been set. I have to wait until I reboot and-or design another setting before I can ban them.

Adding new items or monsters or spells is easy.

 

[teitan]

Easily, NPCs and Monsters don’t follow the rules that PCs do. Why? They’re designed for an encounter or two while PCs are designed as a continuous experience.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure but this has nothing to do with the fighter class. This could be a ranger mentor talking to a paladin neophyte.

Sure - a warrior talking to another warrior. Specific class or subclass doesn't matter much.

This is absolutely not an example of the bleed between mechanics and story, except possibly, if you are bing generous, a vague nod toward the idea of XP.

For me it's an example of how game mechanics can be put into non-mechanical in-fiction terms and still map properly. Most can, with a tiny bit of thought; there's a few where it takes more effort (hit points being one) but it can stil be done.

Here, it's the idea of level gaining and getting better at what you do through doing it repeatedly in dangerous situations.

 

[Garthanos]

Well that's certainly a take.

For the sake of argument: if I make a world with no arcane magic, then there simply won't be any wizard PCs or NPCs in that world. So the diegetic relevance of classes to worldbuilding is at least demonstrably nonzero.

You can go the opposite direction if there is a player who wants to be an X, I will see if I can manipulate my gameworld story to help enable that/ generally not too troublesome... or that character (and their supporting cast may be the only X-likes) . So new races done it many times, new classes this too, reflavored old ones great it makes it easy for the game and so on. Designing my game world I intentionally left significant parts of it un-nailed down so players imaginative directions can help fill it in.

 

[Lanefan]

Classes don't exist in world.

They are meta artifacts, balanced for players.

Take a look in the MM and the Druid. 4th level casting and no wildshape. Look at any and all of the NPCs in any of the monster books.

Classes not existing in-world is absolutely maintained by the official source.

Since PCs can do things that not all others of their "in-world" type can do, the same is true the other way.

They got it wrong, is all that's telling me.

 

[Lanefan]

Every culture in the real world has distinct visions of how magic works and every philosopher seeks his own way I do not like the idea of one being exactly perfect instead of self limited. Breaking ones preconceived notions and bias to walk another's way is not a sit down and memorize this incantation in x hours thing.

Not the way I envision it.... in particular I envision many different undocumented approaches to magic and many different cultural takes on it, and many individual talents which interact with it (that orc shaman maybe the only orc who ever gained that ability after participating in human sacrifice hundreds of times). Just open ended trivial copying of magics seems cheap.

There can be a bajillion different cultural approaches to magic, documented or not, but nothing says any of them have to be correct or even anywhere close. If a culture somehow comes to think praying to a particular star in the sky is how to access magic, and for some reason it works when they do, then that's how the culture's gonna do it.

You-as-DM, however, being the creator of your universe, do have to know how it really works underneath all the fluff. Why does praying to that star allow this culture to access magic while that other culture gets to it by standing in pools of water and a third accesses it by studying books? What's the common denominator here? What's the science behind it?

And yes, worldbuilding is in some ways an exercise in science.

 

[pemerton]

My 4e game play has involved plenty of strange phenomena, improvised rituals, and NPCs performing magical tricks that the PCs hadn't encountered before. More-or-less the opposite of what @Lanefan is advocating and what (I think) you are advocating.

Did you homebrew mechanics for those things?

For strange phenomena I mostly used the long lists in various books - DMG, DMG2, MotP, The Planes Above and Below, various modules, etc.

For NPCs' magical tricks, I mostly just used statblocks from the MMs, modules etc. I did write some of my own.

Most improvised rituals were declared by the player of the wizard/invoker, rituals being that PC's schtick. Where necessary, we would negotiate the details. Page 42, as an expression of the general simplicity and elegance of the 4e action economy and effect rules, made this very easy. Here's an actual play example of what I have in mind - its from Epic Tier play, but this sort of thing began in Heroic Tier:

The PCs in my 4e game, after defeating Torog, had confirmed (via divination rituals) rumours that frost giants were massing in the Feywild, as part of a plan to defeat the Summer Fey and steal the power of winter from the Raven Queen, to the benefit of Lolth. They therefore headed off to a place they had heard of but never visited - the Tower of Sunset, which undergoes worldfall every dusk, and then returns to the Feywild at dawn.

They knew that the Tower would have hags living in it, as they had (much earlier in the campaign) dealt with some of the hags' sisters. They didn't know that it was atop an earthmote floating alongside a cliff (with a path leading up, and a spring on the mote being the source of a stream falling over the side of the mote onto the rocks below). This could a suitably impressed response from my players, and turned out to matter later on.

When they arrived, an Aspect of Vecna was waiting for them. It wanted to bargain to get the Eye of Vecna back from the party invoker. (Backstory to this is here.) The Eye is in the invoker's imp, placed there both to achieve a power up, and to stop Levistus (who placed the imp with the invoker) using the imp as a spy (by creating a Vecna-ish shield of secrecy). Unfortunately the party's conflict with Torog, as linked to above, had led to the invoker choosing the Raven Queen over Vecna as recipient of the souls of the Underdark's dead In retaliation, Vecna had used his control over the Eye to strike down the imp, which meant that the imp was currently lifeless (and hence the Eye inactive).

The bargaining was unsuccessful, however, as in an earlier session the invoker had already agreed to help the rest of the party try and destroy the Eye if they could find a way; and he now held to that agreement. The Aspect threatened a bit, but the PCs stood their ground and (recognising a superior force) it teleported away.

The PCs then waited for worldfall of the tower. When it arrived, they got into an argument with its hag owners - the PCs insisted on entering the tower so they could cross over to the Feywild, but the hags refused to let them in. The PCs, and their players, (correctly) suspected the hags were helping the Winter Fey, and a home invasion ensued. The one surviving hag ended up agreeing to let the PCs in. But before even a short rest could be taken, the Aspect of Vecna reappeared bringing back up (undead cultists, lich vestiges and four demons under its control).

Despite having just come off the back of a 30th level encounter with the hags (and hangers-on), and having no recovery except action point refreshment (my one concession to a plea for something in lieu of a short rest), the players had no trouble dealing with this 28th level follow-up. In the first round the invoker dominated Vecna and made him dismiss one of his summoned demons. (I had described the demon appearing by means of gate. The player had his PC order Vecna to end the summoning. The established fictional positioning made this clearly feasible, and so it happened.) And then before Vecna's turn could come around again, the cleric-ranger stunned him with a reasonably newly acquired daily power. To add insult to injury, the chaos sorcerer rolled a 1, pushing Vecna 1 square. Vecna failed his save and went tumbling 100' to the ledges below the earthmote. Then something (I guess one of the demons?) hit the paladin and pushed him over the edge. At which point an Acrobatics roll was requested, to "do a Gandalf" (from the Two Towers film) and fall down on top of Vecna. The roll was successful, and the paladin dealt damage to Vecna with a successful basic attack, as well as taking damage himself for the fall.

While the other PCs cleaned up uptop, the paladin successfully solo-ed the now-bloodied Aspect, but (at the behest of the invoker) only knocked it unconscious (and then used his Marshal of Letherna daily utility to prevent any regeneration that might let it come back to consciousness). The invoker then came down and used an Undead Ward ritual, with the Aspect as a focus, to try and sever the connection between Vecna and his Eye. This was successful (between stats, feats and Sage of Ages the character has bonuses of around +40 to most of his ritual checks), so the imp came back to life, still powered up by the Eye but no longer subject to Vecna's influence.

 

[Lanefan]

Are you sure they arent hovering over characters heads in glowing red letters?

No, that's just the 21st-century version of the PC / NPC forehead stickers.

Somebody seems to demand this change... they "require" it because if the game isn't that way it is nonsensical inconsistency

Exactly.

and they want it elaborated why every single time. With many paragraphs if possible to not miss anything because you know imagination isn't good enough.

Imagination is great. It's why we do this.

However, in a typical RPG we're also trying to build a setting that's solid and consistent enough and has enough integrity that players can run their characters in it without fear of things not working in the setting physics (and yes, magic is 100% a part of a setting's physics) the same as they did in-game yesterday.

Flexibility is verboten

The type of flexibility you seem to be after where things are not elaborated and thus can change on a whim, yes. If my character does magical action X today and repeats the same action tomorrow, the same result should occur, much as if my character did physical action Y today and then repeated it tomorrow.

Expand that a step: if two characters are equally capable of doing some action and both character A and character B do it, the same result should occur for each one, right?

Now expand that to the setting as a whole.

Without this sort of consistency, in the fiction you've got Calvinball and at the table you've got a whole lot of very needless and avoidable arguments.