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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Asisreo" data-source="post: 8490857" data-attributes="member: 7019027">But Out-of-Combat abilities don't actually matter, do they? Like, actually matter? Unless your understanding of fun is to do something unexpected to the DM and possibly surprising them, what do Out-of-combat abilities really do?Let's take 2 commonly magical Out-of-combat abilities: Flying and teleportation. Both are a means of transportation, going from one place to another. But we can agree it would be wasteful to use those abilities in an open grassland with no time limit because the cost of walking is nothing and the cost of spellcasting is something. So their purpose is to bypass an obstacle. There's 2 types of obstacles: required obstacles and nonrequired obstacles. Required obstacles mean the game cannot progress unless its overcome. It could be a combat, a locked door, etc. Nonrequired obstacles mean that there's some way to continue the game without overcoming the obstacles. Required obstacles have to be something that can be overcome by any configuration of party. Why? Because you can't accurately predict the party composition. Even if you made the encounter after the party was formed, a player may abruptly decide he wants to change character or she might die midway through unexpectedly. So if your Required obstacle involves a Flying enemy, you must have a bow in the room. If the required obstacle involves fitting through a hole, there must be a way to shrink. Nonrequired obstacles can really be anything. A giant spike pit trap, an ancient red dragon, even the BBEG could be a nonrequired obstacle depending on the goals. Flying and Teleportation can only bypass nonrequired obstacles. If the party confronts an obstacle that must be handled by these two abilities and they don't have access to them, the game should still have a means to progress. So, while fancy, magic in out-of-combat scenarios are using up resources to increase the odds of your ideal situation. But any given ability for out-of-combat stuff is not required to progress the game. Okay, you may like the idea of "increasing your odds of your ideal situation," but that's still DM fiat. You might be able to charm the shopkeeper to have a good chance of getting a good haggle...but the DM might just secretly get annoyed that you're charming an NPC and improvises the fact that the shopkeep is too poor to even try haggling and they'd have to say no even to their best friend. "Increasing your odds" implies that the result is random, but it isn't. So really, in the case above, casting Charm Person didn't really do anything. And you might think this is abuse of DM power, but the DM might have felt that if that behavior was permitted, all interactions will start with a Charm Person spell. Although, the reason why a DM would do it doesn't matter. They have the authority to say "because I said so." So I don't see explicit abilities that more important. Anything in the game can be vetoed, RAW. So the sense of empowerment spells bring is an illusion, and so is any "disparity" between casters and martials.</blockquote>

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