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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 7557763" data-attributes="member: 12377">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. <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> </ul>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.)</blockquote>

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