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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mkill" data-source="post: 5806010" data-attributes="member: 55985">As DM, I want the rules to support me in telling a compelling story. I don't want to spend my time bending and breaking the plot to accomodate for PC abilities that were unintentionally designed to powerful. Design the rules in a way that anticipates or avoids such problems, or give the DM tools to deal with them.5E is a good chance to look over all abilities that can have huge effect on plots, such as scrying, divination, speaking with dead, raising the dead, teleportation and planar travel, disguise, mind reading and mental domination. (Did I miss any?)Each of them should be available from a certain level, but they also need chance of failure and countermeasures within the rules that allow a DM to preserve his plot without making him look like he is sabotaging PC abilities to railroad.If the PCs find an item on the dead high priest that masked his fall into evil and corruption, and that item is known to exist, it looks like the NPC foiled the PCs, not the DM. Compare to "you can't Detect Evil here" "Why?" "Because I say so".Different example: In an Eberron campaign we had a big plot arc with a number of NPCs being Changelings. My PC was a changeling too. Now, it turns out that Changelings don't get means to notice their own kind in the rules (such as a bonus to Spot or Sense Motive). The changeling NPCs had plot on their side, so they were able to identify my PC if they wanted, but my PC could not notice another Changeling better than other PCs. A playtest could have anticipated that.</blockquote>

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