D&D 5E Legendary Resistance shouldn't be optional

[James Gasik]

I often see DM's who feel very unhappy about characters abilities that require the player to make what is, in effect, an out of universe decision. A monster likely doesn't know exactly what failing a given save will do to it, but the DM can make a value judgment about it.

I don't have any problem with this personally- but it is something to consider. The ability to pick and choose what saving throw you choose to succeed is a gamist element that potentially interferes with verisimilitude.

 

[tetrasodium]

But that's the intent.

Intent doesn't matter if the execution falls so far short. "well officer my intent was to drive the speed limit" is unlikely to improve the ticket they are writing.

The problem with making them triggered is that the more specific a trigger condition is the more likely the DM is to forget, especially in a big combat that has mooks or lair actions. It's a lot of moving parts.

No not really, they just need to have a smallish pool of trigger conditions across all/most monsters that the GM can burn into their mental muscle memory.

The old SR:Yes/No had the added benefit of the GM only needing to know a true/false condition plus a DC. All of the edge cases for this that & the other spell including the actual check was shifted to the player casting against the SR making it easy for everyone because the player only needs to worry about their one single PC while the GM has a whole rack of hats plus potentially other monsters

 

[TiQuinn]

It's not really about difficulty, it's about consistency and moving a potential point of at the table friction to something mediated by rules. If you want increased difficulty, just increase the amount of LR, like you would give a monster more HP, or make the conditions more critical effects.

Not sure I like complicating the rules further and making stat blocks that much longer just because some tables have friction. Those tables need to figure out better lines of communication if that’s an issue for them.

 

[ezo]

Legendary Resistance should specify triggering conditions, and not require a GM judgement call. Instead of choosing the saves to avoid, LR should have text like "the first X times a failed saving throw would cause Y or more damage, or inflict conditions A-G, treat this monster as if it succeeded instead."

The exact conditions could vary from with monster CR, but making it not an active choice, players can much more consistently engage with LR as an alternate health pool, and feel like they're burning resources towards defeating their targets.

Nah... it just adds a level of annoying complexity for the DM. If you want "guidelines" to help DMs make the most of LR, that would be nice, but otherwise you're just hamstringing DMs.

Players already feel like they are burning resources to remove LR... that is the point.

Otherwise, it allows players to metagame what the conditions are for the LR, either to purposefully trigger LR or to know how to avoid it.

All in all, I can't see really any upside to making LR work with specific triggering conditions.

Frankly, this sounds like a case of a player who's annoyed that their favorite "gotcha" spell or feature was nullified by LR and wants to ensure it doesn't happen to them again.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Frankly, this sounds like a case of a player who's annoyed that their favorite "gotcha" spell or feature was nullified by LR and wants to ensure it doesn't happen to them again.

This is such a ridiculous attitude and undermines your entire argument by making it seem like you see everything as petty beefs and can't conceive/believe that someone would make a genuine argument to improve an aspect of that game. I mean, such attitudes are common, but they're also almost always projection of a rather straightforward kind. Not saying yours is, but when I see this attitude in videogames, it does tend to be, as you can often go back through their posts and see them habitually accusing others of only arguing for changes because they want to benefit from them.

Not a good look anyway.

 

[the Jester]

Hard disagree. That changes LRs from "let's make this fight last as long as a boss fight should" to "how many crappy saves can we trigger with meaningless effects to drain those LRs?"

Automatically triggering LRs misses the point of LRs.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That changes LRs from "let's make this fight last as long as a boss fight should"

My experience is that most DMs are not good at using LRs in a way that makes a boss fight longer in an interesting way. They tend to either blow them all fairly near the start, or hold them back and just use them to ruin good/expensive/rare abilities the PCs use. I've also seen PCs be extremely successful just by not using an CC or save-requiring effects and focusing absolutely everything on maximizing damage, because they you avoid the LRs entirely, especially if the DM is trying to play it smart and thus trying not to use the LRs on non-CC damage spells. Or just using stuff with no save.

So I'm very unconvinced by this argument. LRs are also at odds with most of 5E's design, because they're skill-based, knowledge-requiring, and adversarial. They feel much more 4E-ish, honestly.

I think something like the systems that @Charlaquin proposed would be much better - for example being able to break a larger or indefinite number of CCs, but taking some damage each time they do it, or just other defences like the Strahd one she described.

 

[Zaukrie]

My experience is that most DMs are not good at using LRs in a way that makes a boss fight longer in an interesting way. They tend to either blow them all fairly near the start, or hold them back and just use them to ruin good/expensive/rare abilities the PCs use. I've also seen PCs be extremely successful just by not using an CC or save-requiring effects and focusing absolutely everything on maximizing damage, because they you avoid the LRs entirely, especially if the DM is trying to play it smart and thus trying not to use the LRs on non-CC damage spells. Or just using stuff with no save.

So I'm very unconvinced by this argument. LRs are also at odds with most of 5E's design, because they're skill-based, knowledge-requiring, and adversarial. They feel much more 4E-ish, honestly.

I think something like the systems that @Charlaquin proposed would be much better - for example being able to break a larger or indefinite number of CCs, but taking some damage each time they do it, or just other defences like the Strahd one she described.

Most DMs? How many games are you in?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Most DMs? How many games are you in?

Might want to read the first two words of the quote. If that doesn't help you, I'm not sure I'm in a position to lol.

 

[Reynard]

My experience is that most DMs are not good at using LRs in a way that makes a boss fight longer in an interesting way. They tend to either blow them all fairly near the start, or hold them back and just use them to ruin good/expensive/rare abilities the PCs use. I've also seen PCs be extremely successful just by not using an CC or save-requiring effects and focusing absolutely everything on maximizing damage, because they you avoid the LRs entirely, especially if the DM is trying to play it smart and thus trying not to use the LRs on non-CC damage spells. Or just using stuff with no save.

So I'm very unconvinced by this argument. LRs are also at odds with most of 5E's design, because they're skill-based, knowledge-requiring, and adversarial. They feel much more 4E-ish, honestly.

I think something like the systems that @Charlaquin proposed would be much better - for example being able to break a larger or indefinite number of CCs, but taking some damage each time they do it, or just other defences like the Strahd one she described.

I am unconvinced that "most DMs" are too dumb to use LRs correctly. But even if that were the case, the solution isn't to create an even more boring, easily sidestepped version of the rule for those poor benighted souls.