D&D (2024) What is With Poison?, and Other PHB Conundrums.

[DEFCON 1]

Given how absolutely, profoundly DM-dependent 5e is, no, I don't think this is "mountains out of molehills." Even good 5e DMs would--and have!--done this in my experience.

Thankfully, your experience is not universal experience.

I know that from a lot of your posts you seem to end up getting stuck playing with apparently some absolutely horrid DMs all the time... but my experience has never had the same amount of fockery you seem to deal with. So while I can appreciate the hell you go through, I also do not take it as a mirror to the gaming world on the whole.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Thankfully, your experience is not universal experience.

I know that from a lot of your posts you seem to end up getting stuck playing with apparently some absolutely horrid DMs all the time... but my experience has never had the same amount of fockery you seem to deal with. So while I can appreciate the hell you go through, I also do not take it as a mirror to the gaming world on the whole.

Well, note what I said there. Even the good DMs--and I have had just a few good 5e DMs--would have taken that sort of approach. Indeed, at one point it did happen just so: an opponent was a Construct but I was not aware of this fact, so a spell effect simply failed to function. (Sadly, the spell was pretty heavily neutered despite being one of my strongest and one I had only just picked up, because it was both a Construct and immune to the frightened condition.)

So like...this isn't just "man you have really bad luck with DMs." Even the good ones would, and in at least one case did, do this.

 

[the Jester]

Thankfully, your experience is not universal experience.

I know that from a lot of your posts you seem to end up getting stuck playing with apparently some absolutely horrid DMs all the time... but my experience has never had the same amount of fockery you seem to deal with. So while I can appreciate the hell you go through, I also do not take it as a mirror to the gaming world on the whole.

I think characterizing a DM actually knowing and following the rules as "horrid" and "fockery" is a profoundly weird take, verging on ridiculous.

I expect my dms to basically know and follow the rules. I wouldn't expect them to allow charm person to work on a non-Humanoid. That's expecting them to cheat in my favor. No thanks.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think characterizing a DM actually knowing and following the rules as "horrid" and "fockery" is a profoundly weird take, verging on ridiculous.

I expect my dms to basically know and follow the rules. I wouldn't expect them to allow charm person to work on a non-Humanoid. That's expecting them to cheat in my favor. No thanks.

The 'horrid' and 'fockery' were not referencing DMs in general (whether they follow rules or not), but rather the ones that Ezekiel has had to deal with over their time with the game (as anyone who reads a lot of their posts know they've had to deal with a lot of crap DMs.)

And in any case, my comments were referencing back to a statement they made that said that a DM would make a player lose the spell if the player said they were casting a charm effect on a goblin (now that they aren't humanoid and thus not a valid target.) If that was actually the case, that's the kind of 'fockery' that I was referring to from whom I would then consider to be a 'horrid' DM.

The DM not let the spell work on the goblin anymore? Fine! Cool. But punishing the player because the player hadn't read the new MM to realize goblins were now fey? Bad DM as far as I'm concerned, and not in any way a normal situation or one that most players would ever have to deal with.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The 'horrid' and 'fockery' were not referencing DMs in general (whether they follow rules or not), but rather the ones that Ezekiel has had to deal with over their time with the game (as anyone who reads a lot of their posts know they've had to deal with a lot of crap DMs.)

And in any case, my comments were referencing back to a statement they made that said that a DM would make a player lose the spell if the player said they were casting a charm effect on a goblin (now that they aren't humanoid and thus not a valid target.) If that was actually the case, that's the kind of 'fockery' that I was referring to from whom I would then consider to be a 'horrid' DM.

The DM not let the spell work on the goblin anymore? Fine! Cool. But punishing the player because the player hadn't read the new MM to realize goblins were now fey? Bad DM as far as I'm concerned, and not in any way a normal situation or one that most players would ever have to deal with.

But that's exactly what the rules say. If you attempt to cast the spell on a target that doesn't qualify, the spell fails. That's the whole point.

Edit: To be clear, if things were meant to work the way you describe, they would be written differently. For example, they would specify things like "You pick one humanoid you can see..." or similar. Doing it that way, you'd never even be allowed to attempt the spell in the first place, because it just isn't capable of targeting a non-humanoid creature. Your action is aborted before you even attempt it.

The way crown of madness is written is very intentional: trying to use it on a non-humanoid results in the spell being functionally wasted, even though it did in fact fire. This is, quite clearly, the design intent of this spell. There is no reason to include the explicit statement that a non-humanoid automatically succeeds on the saving throw if it weren't intended that a non-humanoid would automatically succeed, and thus waste the spell.

 

[the Jester]

And in any case, my comments were referencing back to a statement they made that said that a DM would make a player lose the spell if the player said they were casting a charm effect on a goblin (now that they aren't humanoid and thus not a valid target.)

Right- a dm knowing and following the rules.

The DM not let the spell work on the goblin anymore? Fine! Cool. But punishing the player because the player hadn't read the new MM to realize goblins were now fey? Bad DM as far as I'm concerned, and not in any way a normal situation or one that most players would ever have to deal with.

Players have no business reading monster books, frankly. That's one of my objections to the new type changes- they overturn decades of players' knowledge with no good way for a player to know in advance that isn't completely based on out of game knowledge.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Look, if the two of you are perfectly fine having the DM screw over the players like that because "that's how the rules are written"... go nuts. Doesn't bother me none. But no one should then complain that rules are written that way, because any DM worth their salt changes the rules to fit their game. Don't like the rule? Don't use the rule!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Look, if the two of you are perfectly fine having the DM screw over the players like that because "that's how the rules are written"... go nuts. Doesn't bother me none. But no one should then complain that rules are written that way, because any DM worth their salt changes the rules to fit their game. Don't like the rule? Don't use the rule!

You're literally using the straight-up Oberoni Fallacy to tell me I'm not allowed to complain. Nope, not gonna fly.

It is perfectly valid to complain, "These rules, if used as clearly intended, require poor DM behavior. They should not have been written that way." That neither requires me to commit to "every DM should absolutely obey the letter of every rule ever written, forever, never ever ever ever EVER EVER EVER changing a single thing, no matter how obvious, nor required, nor trivial", nor to "Oh, so there's no problem then, because the DM can just house-rule around it!"

This is a badly-written rule. It should not have been written that way. It very clearly was written with the intent for a result to sometimes happen which I think is blatantly bad DMing practice. This is not an accident of the rules that careful, judicious application of Rule Zero is there to address. This is active and intentional, reflecting the purpose that the designers put into these rules.

That's bad. Complaining about it is not ridiculous or unfair or stupid or pointless.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Look, if the two of you are perfectly fine having the DM screw over the players like that because "that's how the rules are written"... go nuts. Doesn't bother me none. But no one should then complain that rules are written that way, because any DM worth their salt changes the rules to fit their game. Don't like the rule? Don't use the rule!

Yeah, but I think it's also on the rulemakers to not make rules that must be disregarded for the game to be fun. I mean...

 

[the Jester]

Look, if the two of you are perfectly fine having the DM screw over the players like that because "that's how the rules are written"... go nuts. Doesn't bother me none. But no one should then complain that rules are written that way, because any DM worth their salt changes the rules to fit their game. Don't like the rule? Don't use the rule!

The solution isn't to change the rules on targeting or have the DM disregard them; the solution is to have not changed the types of all the Humanoids into non-Humanoids in the first place.

Yeah, I'm going to complain about it. It's a dumb change that didn't improve the game at all and was made for no good reason.

That's one of the many reasons why I am inclined to stay closer to the 2014 rules than the current ruleset.