Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Wilder" data-source="post: 1736592" data-attributes="member: 5122">Fair enough, but this does fall under my exception for "psychopaths."  Extrapolating, I'll gladly add in another exception: being trained to CDG.Both instances, however, differ substantially from what I understood the original question to be asking ... namely, whether or not an otherwise normal fiendish animal, encountered in a more or less natural state, can or would CDG.I don't disagree.  Again, "rabid" falls pretty solidly into my "psychopathic" exception. Well, "normal" animals in D&D are considered to be more aggressive and less fearful than normal animals in RL.  (This is actually addressed by the designers somewhere; possibly in the Monster Manual.)  One could conceivably cite this intentional difference between reality and fantasy as a reason to make CDGs by animals -- fiendish or not -- more prevalent.Personally, to the extent that I buy into D&D animals being more aggressive at all, it's only so far that they're more willing to fight, and more willing to fight for longer.  Otherwise, my animals generally behave more realistically than D&D suggests.  (For instance, a brown bear in my game might very well run away after having been the target of a thunderstone, unless it's rabid or otherwise supremely pissed off.  And a normal animal will only fight to the death if defending young or if it otherwise has no choice.)  But that's personal preference, and, as I implied, actually outside "D&D animal behavior" as it seems to be intended.As an aside, to reveal my personal bias, I'm pretty much against DMs using CDG on PCs in general.  I once had a beloved 12th-level PC CDGed by a 3rd-level warrior.  The warrior knew, utterly, that he was going to die at the hands of the rest of the group in the next round, yet chose to CDG rather than run or surrender.  CDG is not a heroic way to die, and thus is rarely good for D&D.  When I have a villain who uses CDG, I make every attempt to demonstrate his propensity by having him CDG a handy NPC or whatever.  In any event, my players now know that an enemy who CDGs is really, really bad news.Jeff</blockquote>

Verification