D&D 5E DM's: How Do You Justify NPC's Having Magic/Abilities That Don't Exist in the PHB?

[Lanefan]

I think "yes" for trad. I don't think I agree for classic. If you look at early D&D modules (think WPM, or ToH, or Castle Amber, for instance) they are full of magical effects, tricks, puzzles etc that - while not necessarily "magical" magic - are often wacky, sometimes whimsical, and rarely bound by any system or logic.

Indeed, and it's a fun challenge (once!) to try to design any sort of underlying logic behind it all that allows these things to happen.

This is the same general spirit, and the same general era, that generated many of the classic and bizarre monsters (ochre jellies, owlbears, umber hulks, etc).

I think the systematisation, and associated "setting as king", is one of the markers of the transition from classic to trad as the dominant ethos in D&D play. And it's still with us.

Thing is, you can have both the wacky and whimsical (which I love) AND an underlying physics system that ties it all together. I know because, in my own half-baked way, I've done just this.

 

[pemerton]

in my authority as a scene-framer, I have no necessity to adjudicate my own framing as somehow being mechanically derived. The magic is a narrative, not a mechanic, and my responsibility is solely to allow the PCs fair attempts to overcome it, if hostile, and maintain some level of fictional consistency.

This!

 

[Lanefan]

Whereas @Lanefan's post (which I see as strongly advocating "setting as king") don't seem to regard situation as especially important at all. The GM is establishing a binding setting logic independent of any particular situation(s) it might yield.

Well put. Better than I could have said it!

Yes, setting comes first, and situations have to conform to it; not the other way around. Put another way, the setting is there as a consistent backdrop, just like our own world is there as a consistent backdrop to everything we do.

 

[pemerton]

What's interesting about the "Brute" ability is that it's really a "conceptual" ability, that is, it's reinforcing something intrinsic about the character and his position in the narrative.

Yes. This sort of thing was core to 4e on both the PC build and NPC/monster build side.

I'm not surprised that it's a bit more contentious in 5e, which seems to have a less self-consciously focused approach to both sorts of building.

 

[Lanefan]

When the designers consistantly through multiple books do not use classes to build NPCs, it's pretty clear this is a conscious design choice and not a case of "they got it wrong".

Just because it's a conscious design choice doesn't mean they got it right: they're quite capable of making wrong choices, and did so here.

 

[pemerton]

All of the above. And while the inhabitants of a setting may believe celestial motion works in a way that it really doesn't (e.g. everything revolves around the Earth), that doesn't mean they're right.

Gygax in his DMG gives an example of how to handle celestial bodies: a character flying to the moon on a pegasus. Clearly Gygax didn't think it was a default for D&D that celestial motion is the result of gravity as it is in the real world. Nor, from that example, did he think that earth's gravity governs motion within its orbit as it does in the real world.

I've seen magnets strong enough that, were I wearing metal armour, I probably couldn't pull away from.

I doubt they were naturally occurring minerals.

Obviously you (and others) can approach D&D and FRPGing however you like. But these things that you claim are defaults, are not; and this notion that consistent fiction is not possible without establishing the sort of setting details you prefer, is false.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Gygax in his DMG gives an example of how to handle celestial bodies: a character flying to the moon on a pegasus. Clearly Gygax didn't think it was a default for D&D that celestial motion is the result of gravity as it is in the real world. Nor, from that example, did he think that earth's gravity governs motion within its orbit as it does in the real world.

I doubt they were naturally occurring minerals.

Obviously you (and others) can approach D&D and FRPGing however you like. But these things that you claim are defaults, are not; and this notion that consistent fiction is not possible without establishing the sort of setting details you prefer, is false.

Then why don't we question gravity as a matter of course? Or the ability to breathe air and not water?

 

[pemerton]

Then why don't we question gravity as a matter of course? Or the ability to breathe air and not water?

I do question gravity as a matter of course in FRPGing, in the sense that I don't assume that the same thing that explains the motion of celestial bodies is also what explains why things fall to earth.

If, by "gravity", all you mean is that things fall to earth, that's not physics, it's just folk knowledge. Likewise most FPRGs proceed from the assumption that animals have sex and thereby produce children; but I would never assume that the explanation for that is the sort of biology and biochemistry that operate in the real world.

Trope are all that's required. Likewise with the "lodestones" that trap people in armour: they're not based on any actual theory of magnetic forces. They're just a trope. (Similarly, Bruce Wayne being rich doesn't mean that Batman comics embrace any actual theory of finance, wealth management etc.)

 

[TwoSix]

Then why don't we question gravity as a matter of course? Or the ability to breathe air and not water?

I think we accept that we use our shared understanding of how gravity generally functions (stuff falls down, and gets faster and hits harder if it falls farther) in the game, because fantasy isn't really about exploring alternate gravitational states.

But I don't know if people generally assume their fantasy world is actually a sphere, and that the space outside the world is actually heliocentric. Lots of fantasy doesn't work that way!

 

[TwoSix]

Trope are all that's required. Likewise with the "lodestones" that trap people in armour: they're not based on any actual theory of magnetic forces. They're just a trope. (Similarly, Bruce Wayne being rich doesn't mean that Batman comics embrace any actual theory of finance, wealth management etc.)

Exactly this. Trope and genre knowledge are the real physics behind a RPG setting.