D&D 5E [D&D 5e] Planescape- In Through the Out Door (Full)

[Unsung]

Question to the group, and before I roll: by the rules as written, pretty much all spells that grant a saving throw are subject to magic resistance; spells that require an attack roll, on the other hand, are not. This makes things roughly even, but seems a little weird in terms of what exactly is happening in-universe.

What I mean is, in previous editions, conjuration effects (like web or Melf's acid arrow) were not subject to magic/spell resistance, the idea being that although they were brought forth by magic, the created material was not, itself, magic. That no longer holds true in 5e, and while I can live with that, I wanted to broach the subject with you guys-- you're all casters of some stripe (however belatedly, in Shandrizar's case). Are you okay with the RAW, and if not, what might a useful house rule look like?

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

I'm fine with the rules as written.

 

[CanadienneBacon]

I prefer RAW for this game. Part of the point of my playing 5e this year is to examine the rules mechanics.

That said, that's only my preference. I will happily bend to group majority will on this.

 

[Pembinasa]

...That does seem REALLY weird, and both counterintuitive and inexplicable. Graydon had picked that spell explicitly because conjuring up a stack of entangling webs shouldn't be affected by 'magic resistance', though that can be forgiven by him coming from an earlier edition.

Admittedly, in my reading of the rules I didn't see the interpretation being cited, and would very much like to take a look at that. There's no intention of doubting or second-guessing the DM on this, but for my own peace of mind could I please be shown the relevant passage? I hate misunderstanding the rules we play by.

As to house rules, it might seem self-serving but I simply don't see how nonmagical effects (especially non-damaging effects) would invoke magical resistance. Resistant to being immobilized or being set on fire or having your mind forcibly altered, sure(although I personally think those should all be different forms of resistance); but how do you magically resist the existence of cobwebs? If you reshape the ground beneath the feet of someone, can they magically resist falling down ?

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

In the case of web, the spell creates a magical substance that vanishes when the spell expires. I can see a spell that reshapes the ground (an object that was already there and is therefore not magical) having full effect on a magic resistant critter, though, since the ground is the target of the spell, not the critter.

 

[Unsung]

5e tends to take a blanket approach to its rules. There's not really much left to interpretation:

Magic Resistance. The [yugoloth/death knight/tarrasque/various others] has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.

That's it, the whole rule. It doesn't even get its own paragraph entry at the beginning of the book like regular damage resistance or darkvision. The thing is, bounded accuracy does tend to make this scale pretty well. A monster's saving throw proficiencies (or lack thereof) do tend to count for more, but if the save DC is high enough then a reroll isn't necessarily going to save them.

However, mechanical elegance aside, I can still sympathize with the point that resisting magic doesn't necessarily explain how an enemy can ignore a sticky web, grease slick, or for that matter the heat generated by a fireball.

Allowing conjuration (and/or evocation?) to bypass magic resistance could cut both ways, of course. It makes the effects more powerful, but the same used to be true for enemies as well. But at that point, the possibility of PCs gaining their own magic resistance, through items or spells, was a definite possibility.

It is possible to just ad hoc this sort of thing-- I'd tend to favour verisimilitude over rules in those cases, though, and I know that's not what everyone's comfortable with. So I thought I'd better bring it up.

 

[Pembinasa]

Except it has no magical properties, it's just cobwebs. Not magic cobwebs that animate and drag you inside them, in which case I would agree.

Similarly, based on these rules you could create a Wall of Stone and drop it on someone, and they'd get to resist rocks- but you conjure up a crossbow bolt and shoot them with it, no resistance at all.

I would prefer to favor verisimilitude as well, weird mechanics breaks the illusion for me- and I'm perfectly willing to take the possibility of having this coming back to bite me if it makes for a more realistic experience.

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

I'd rather go the other way - wrap the story around the rules quirks. But, I'm fine going with the majority on this.

 

[Unsung]

In the case of web, the spell creates a magical substance that vanishes when the spell expires. I can see a spell that reshapes the ground (an object that was already there and is therefore not magical) having full effect on a magic resistant critter, though, since the ground is the target of the spell, not the critter.

It *could* just be a matter of where the effects of the spell end and mundane reality begins anew. The magical fire is real enough to ignite dry tinder, but the magical resistance of a creature in some way corrodes the effects of the spell around them before it can reach them. Likewise, if the webs *are* magical, then perhaps they do partly cease to exist while the creature is stepping through them.

Magic resistance doesn't have to work the same way for all creatures, either. A demon, a creature of evil sustained by the power of belief in Planescape terms, ignores magical effects by virtue of only existing partway in this reality anyway. A death knight is probably plastered in runes and wards of the same kind which bind its soul to its undead husk. The tarrasque, meanwhile, is just so tough as to largely ignore magic in much the same way as anything else.

If it sounds like I'm advocating for both sides here, it's true, I am. I'm fine with either outcome, but I want to stick by whatever we decide.

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

In the same vein, a slaad could have everything magical sort of warp around it and snap back in to place when it leaves the area of effect.

A golem could mindlessly walk through it as if it weren't there.

And so on.

 

[Pembinasa]

And honestly, while those do sound like very interesting ways to describe the fluff, it also makes spells less and less relevant in the process- because it's coming of more as negating their existence than just being better at shrugging them off. If we do go ahead with this, I suppose making it a struggle of essential 'who can believe harder in the way things are' would be interesting and topical- but it opens up a whole big can of worms as well, as to whether you even need the spell in the first place and what happens if the whole team focuses on believing in one spell, and so on.

I'm not opposed to visiting those options or exploring them, but making them a standard aspect of combat is a bit much, don't you think? That kind of reshaping of the way things work shouldn't be cheapened like that, especially when a simple patch to an ill-thought-out rule could be applied instead.

 

[Unsung]

I don't think frequent in-character discussion of such things is out of the question when it comes to the factions, buuut the rules of the game will generally remain stable. Once we decide what they are, that is.

I don't think the rule itself is poorly conceived, but a little light rules hacking is assumed with this edition. It might not be the rule for every group. Thing is, it's not quite that simple a patch, since it does make one school of spells that much more powerful-- there'd have to be a tradeoff somewhere.

 

[Shayuri]

Well, in fairness as well, the effects of spells rarely equate to 'real world' examples. The Web spell doesn't create cobwebs, or any other substance that could be considered nonmagical. It's properties are exceptional, and magical. The same with Grease.

A case could be made for exceptions to magic resistance in circumstances where a spell creates an ongoing effect that 'indirectly' affects the targets, like Grease and Web and so on. By indirectly, I mean the magic creates 'stuff' and the properties of that 'stuff' are what force the save.

The core RAW for 5e however are written for simplicity and speed. They leave it to individual GMs and groups to add complexity. I think this is a wise course of action.

Myself, I'm fine either way. Accepting RAW means a great many discussions are averted before they begin. House ruling it means my character's spells are more potent.

It's win win, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Pembinasa]

If they had explained it and its limitations, I wouldn't be nearly so concerned with this rule; as is, "all magic except the type that shoots at you' doesn't seem very well-considered to me.

As to the spells like Web and Grease, I really would disagree that the results of these spells would be exceptional or magical, as they don't do anything outside the scope of mundanely-made versions of the same thing. Grease doesn't need exceptional qualities to be slippery, that's just how grease works. Cover a floor with semi-congealed bacon grease, you get the same effect as the spell- an effect the spell was explicitly trying to duplicate since its first appearance in D&D. In previous editions it was specifically called out as nonmagical- and while they don't use that word in this edition's readout, they don't claim it to have any magical properties- it's just grease, nothing special.

A similar rationale exists for Web. It used to be just a big spiderweb like you've seen in Zelda games, and now it's usable without endpoints by stretching it across the ground going five feet high. If you stacked regular cobwebs five feet high and tried to walk through them, do you really think you'd have any different results than the spell? They aren't tangling because magic, but because cobwebs. These aren't Evard's Black Tentacles, here.

Indirect effects that need no magical input to function (Grease yes, Spiritual Weapon no) shouldn't be affected by a condition that already nerfs the entire magic system as it is, which I do see as bringing character classes defined by their magic down to being borderline useless in fights featuring that condition. (Seriously, when you do the math it shows spellcasters might as well just be twiddling their thumbs more than half the time.) I look at it as restoring basic functionality to these classes, who need SOMETHING worth doing in those situations.

I guess I'm too warmed up over an interpretation of an unclearly-established rule, and in the end it doesn't matter whether a bunch of skeroloths make their saves or not. But it feels like we're jumping through hoops when it would be so much easier and more sensible to just go around. Bending the way the universe works to justify a rule interpretation, instead of letting in a little real-life logic? Why?

 

[Shayuri]

Well, the rule couldn't be clearer. If it's a spell or other magical effect, the advantage to saves applies. The clarity and simplicity of the rule is its selling point.

The question is, are we happy with it?

Real life logic doesn't apply, unless we decide it does. The effects of spells can be as innately magical as we decide, the influence of magic resistance as applicable as we choose. There's no real substance that's comparable to the stuff of a Web spell, and it's explicitly magic as the result of a spell being cast, so immediately logic and physics are out the window.

That doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means I disagree with the idea of approaching the question from a perspective of, "How would it -really- work?" That way lies madness.

Rather, lets start with the rule as written, and decide what, if any, internally-consistent change we want to make. Ideally, we can avoid a lot of 'trickle down' consequences, where we have to rewrite how a bunch of spells work because in changing a handful, we implied laws of physics that require alterations to dozens more.

 

[Pembinasa]

While I disagree that the product of a spell has to be inherently magical, as if a castle made by ritual-casting permanent Wall of Stone would be vulnerable to a Dispel Magic forever after, I do get the idea- that we're free to decide for ourselves what the adjudication of rules-to-gaming-existence is. (And if I tried to start comparing the spell to what Spider-Man shoots out then I'd probably be on the way to going cuckoo. )

But I do disagree with starting from the rules instead of starting from the world. The basic underlying rules of just about every kind of fiction, D&D included, is 'like real life except where we say otherwise.' Even in Sigil, fire still works, water still has three forms, and physics applies to the basic structures of life except where explicitly overridden by magic. Nowhere is that rule less in evidence than Planescape (except maybe Spelljammer), but that doesn't stop it from being the baseline we build from; even if gravity in Sigil works more like a space station than a normal planet, a rock still falls from your hand to the ground in the normal way unless interfered with.

That kind of mental shorthand is baked into the rules and gives the setting verisimilitude, and verisimilitude matters for convincing people that the situation is understandable enough to get the players invested in what's going on. If we uncouple physics from the system, we're basically telling basic cause-and-effect to take a hike- and suddenly we're playing in a Dr. Seuss book.

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

Web, to me, is inherently magical. A spell creates a substance which lasts only as long as the magic does. It does stuff a "real" web isn't capable of doing, at least not at that scale. The most telling factor is that, in 5E, it requires concentration to maintain. That means the caster is still actively maintaining the magic of the spell...willing the substance of the spell to remain in existence.

 

[Shayuri]

Pemb, I can't help but feel you're using my post to set up a straw man, and then slap it around a bit.

I'm not talking about subtracting cause and effect. Merely to recognize that magic, and the rules for magic, aren't obliged to adhere to physical law as we know it. Further, that trying to work out them out in too much detail at that level (a sort of 'laws of magic') could wind up making a whole lot more work than any of us want.

Of course, we're already verging close to that mark, for my 2 cents.

So rather than focus on the concepts behind it all, I will just focus on the results.

I'm fine with sticking with RAW. It's simple. Concise. And not too hard to get around. Giving magic resistant foes advantage on saves means there's a fairly broad cross-spectrum of countermeasures to reduce its impact. It would have been much worse if they simply had resistance to all damage from spells, for example.

I'm also fine if we decide on a relatively simple set of conditions, or individual exceptions, that limit magic resistance's effectiveness. I urge caution in assigning 'too much' realism to spell effects, as in my experience it tends to open the door to a lot of "well since being invisible makes light not affect me, now I'm immune to lasers" type of arguments which wind up being much more of a headache than adding to the game.

I'm not trying to pick on you, Pembinasa, in saying this. You haven't advanced any kind of argument like that yet, and I've no evidence you mean to. I am just cautious about creating a situation where it would be tempting to do so.

 

[Pembinasa]

That honestly is the whole kicker, to me. "It does stuff a real web isn't capable of doing"- if that was true, I wouldn't be disputing this. The difference between a Web spell and an equivalent amount of actual spiderwebs is that one can show up by wiggling your fingers, and that's it- even if you have to set the back of your mind to keeping it around. And if concentration isn't required for such an effect, does that make it less inherently magical? The Grease spell, for instance.

Shayuri, sorry if I made it sound that way. It looked to me like you were saying "this is all a game anyway, so why bother with physics?" Going with your actual statement, I agree magic shouldn't follow physics- that's the whole point of it.

As to other countermeasures, I'm curious as to what you have in mind- because right now things seem to be aimed at 'basic concepts cease to apply in a set radius around certain types of creatures.' Which is a great idea, and one I want to steal and use for a villain in one of my other campaigns- but not one I'm on board with as a standard rule.

 

[Shayuri]

Speaking in purely mechanical terms, here are the countermeasures as I see them:

1) Deny saves. Quite a few spells simply don't allow them. Speckle a few into our list, and we'll have reliable options against magic resistant creatures.

2) Inflict disadvantage. There a number of spells, class abilities and so on that can force creatures to save at disadvantage. In the case of magic resistant critters, that means they're merely doing so without advantage; nullifying their resistance. We'd need to use some teamwork to do that reliably, but that's what we are; a team.

3) Pump those DCs. Advantage is kind of a force multiplier...it's really effective for rolls you already have a good shot at. It's significantly less effective on rolls you need a lot of luck to hit. Admittedly, boosting save DCs is a lot harder in 5th Ed than previous...and for good reason...but with some item crafting and wheeling and dealing, we may be able to skew things in that direction.

3a) Target the Weak Spot. A corollary to the previous, another way to reduce the impact of advantage is to figure out which save bonus a creature is weakest at, and target that one. Reducing save bonus is equivalent to increasing save DC. Doing both is just devastating.

Any/all of these requires some planning, some coordination with fellow PCs, and most likely some conscious efforts to seek out specific items and objects of power...but these are all things adventurers probably should be doing anyway.