Duration/Existence of Spell-like/Supernatural Abilities in 5e?

[jgsugden]

As a player, you need to follow the rules as the books and DM explains them.

The DM has no requirement to follow any of the rules. The goal of the DM is to craft the best story he can for the players to advance... and that sometimes means making up new things. The DMG, the MM ... these are tools... but they are not the only tools a good DM uses.

This is where some of you start to say, "But...."

No. Just no. You can prespectfully rovide a DM feedback on what doesn't work for you, or you can decide not to play with a DM, but beyond that you need to trust the DM to make decisions on how to build a game world.

 

[77IM]

I think what it comes down to, and it's something @Gadget also alludes to in his point, which is well made and understood, namely that there is a fine line between DM fiat and creative application of the rules with all its exceptions by a DM. My view it that every time I see a clearly identifiable DM fiat, it breaks the purity of the game, or call it the theatre of the mind, a bit - like when the actor in a play is speaking to the audience directly.

I hear and generally agree with what hs been said above from a mechanical perspective, but from a narrator perspective, I would reserve rule breaking to the mightiest of bosses, that are individual NPCs or monsters, that stand out from the rule books because they have been created individually. I find it more difficult to accept the same when it's a standard rule book monster but modified in a way that breaks "fundamental" rules of the game... Rules that usually all MM monsters or NPCs adhere to...

Well said.

To wax philosophical, "a game is a series of interesting decisions." The rules exist to give us a baseline expectation that we can all share, while providing ample "wiggle room" within the rules to make things unpredictable.

• If there were no monster rules -- if everything were completely arbitrary at the whim of the DM -- players wouldn't have much ability to predict anything at all. A decision where the consequences are totally unpredictable is boring. In D&D, the classic example is "take the left corridor or the right corridor." Who cares? Flip a coin. There's no way to predict whether one way is better than the other. Likewise, with monsters, if the monster is just breaking rules left and right, the players start to feel that their actions are hopeless.
• If the monster rules were exactly precisely spelled out for everyone -- you could read the monster's spell block, and you knew the order in which it would take actions, and you even knew what numbers it would roll -- that would be kind of a boring fight. Well, that actually might be an interesting fight the first time, but it would certainly get old, I think; the game would reduce to a number-crunching activity. I think we've all been in fights where one player was like, "Oh this guy's a glabrezu; he's got 150 or so hit points, strong melee attacks, and casts confusion. We can totally take him." It kind of ruins the fun.

So a happy medium is to adhere to the monster rules in general and only add unique special abilities that make sense in the narrative, which typically means some kind of unique boss or exotic species. Like, don't let a monster cast a whole buncha spells in a turn unless it's a obvious why that monster is so fast. Good examples are displacer beasts and rust monsters; their unique abilities are so weird that even the people within the setting have given them special names.

(Also, if your PC enters a well-kept garden and sees a small grassy hill with a lone glabrezu, make sure you heard the DM correctly before you charge.)

 

[Gadget]

@77IM, Thank you for the very good and exhaustive reply! Thx for clarifying some of the rules also.

I think what it comes down to, and it's something @Gadget also alludes to in his point, which is well made and understood, namely that there is a fine line between DM fiat and creative application of the rules with all its exceptions by a DM. My view it that every time I see a clearly identifiable DM fiat, it breaks the purity of the game, or call it the theatre of the mind, a bit - like when the actor in a play is speaking to the audience directly.

I hear and generally agree with what hs been said above from a mechanical perspective, but from a narrator perspective, I would reserve rule breaking to the mightiest of bosses, that are individual NPCs or monsters, that stand out from the rule books because they have been created individually. I find it more difficult to accept the same when it's a standard rule book monster but modified in a way that breaks "fundamental" rules of the game... Rules that usually all MM monsters or NPCs adhere to...

Just my 2 cents.

I sympathize, but I can't help but see this view as predicated on the assumption that the Rules in PHB (for creating PCs) are somehow inviolate game-physics of the fantasy world, not merely the measured way that PCs interact with said world. It isn't merely "DM fiat" to have Monsters and NPCs built and run by slightly different rules than the PCs, all while sharing some terminology and mechanics for ease of use and smoother game play. D&D has never been about, or been particularly good at, representing PC vs PC type play; and this was largely true even in the 3.x era, the height of the game-rules-as-fantasy-physics-simulation era. As long as Monsters and NPCs are designed thoughtfully to give a decent challenge to PCs at a given CR (and much digital ink has been about how 5e monsters fair in this area), and fulfill their narrative role in a satisfactory manner, it's all good, imho. Consideration also needs to be given to how difficult it is to run and manage monsters in a game where the DM has many balls in the air and many demands on his/her attention and focus.