NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6375245" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'm a pretty improv-heavy DM. What I know about a clay golem -- or any monster -- before using it is limited to its direct narrative hooks ("made by priests, goes berserk"), and those give me a reason to potentially include the creature. Everything else needs to run smoothly from that. I am not going to study statblocks and analyze abilities during play, I am going to decide if the critter appears for story reasons and let the cards fall as they may.Which means I'm not interested in seeing my "level 9 cleric's bodyguard" suddenly turn into "and now the fighter has less HP than the wizard forever unless I fix it because my party doesn't have a greater restoration available to it and now I have to fix this and this is not the story I was interested in telling, I just wanted my evil cleric to have a bodyguard, uuuuuuuugh." I imagine that the designers understand that not everyone does extensive monster research before deploying their beast and so the design of the game will allow this to be removed by any party "naturally" (a party that faces it will have the resources to deal with it, much like petrification or instant death or whatnot), it's just not clear from the PHB and the MM where that removal is coming from (which leads me to guess it's in magic items that are "on by default"). The alternative is that the designers believe that every monster will be used with full consciousness and awareness of all its abilities, which doesn't seem realistic. I know the MM was written as much to read as to play, but that level of awareness seems like a high barrier to entry to just use a monster.</blockquote>

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