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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9553288" data-attributes="member: 6790260">IMO, you should 100% always do the latter.It is easy, I find almost trivially easy in most cases, to take a well-designed mechanical structure and give it the flavor and character it requires in order to feel grounded and tangible and fitting.I find it damn near impossible under most circumstances to take a collection of things something "should have" because of its nature/origin/whatever, and ensure that that collection is actually fun and exciting to interact with. That approach far, far too often leads to exactly the problems of many early 5e creatures (and many 3e ones as well): Fat Sack of HP syndrome, Rocket Tag, and a host of other problems.Naturalistic reasoning is good and useful, cannot be discarded, and is essential for making the game rich and meaningful, rather than being Stats & Spreadsheets. But rigidly requiring that absolutely everything must start from purely naturalistic reasoning? That frequently leads to things that aren't actually fun to play against.And, separately, turning a set of numbers into a naturalistic story is actually an awful lot of fun for me, personally. Like, let's take the example given upthread, the Ancient Green Dragon's "Corrosive Miasma". This action occurs as a retaliation, either due to using Legendary Resistance or taking an attack at range, so that conditions part of the story, perhaps absorbing, reflecting, or redirecting an attack. I think I like redirecting better, as that fits best with it being triggered upon being hit by a ranged attack. It's a "miasma", an effluvium, something just barely visible but clearly noxious and unpleasant. Why not pockets of acidic, toxic swamp gas? That ties it into the lair concept. A Green Dragon has no care whether there are pockets of acidic gas just below the surface, in fact they like having them there. If the pockets are distributed around more or less at random, or fed from underground fermentation or the like, then it's reasonable that you could even have the same spot belch multiple things, or two nearby spots back to back, as the gases under the ground achieve a new dynamic equilibrium. If you want to be really fancy, you might add the option for players to be able to set off the gases as well...but I don't think that would help them against a Green Dragon. Given the nature of "lair actions," it might even be the case that these gas pockets are sustained or amplified by the dragon's magic, hence the connection to Legendary Resistance.So, there's our naturalistic explanation: Because this Ancient Green Dragon has laired long in this land, it has infused some of its acidic, toxic essence into the land. It can call on this effect, whether by absorbing the power of a spell or by redirecting a physical attack to set it off. Without the dragon, the gas pockets aren't volatile enough to achieve this end, and if the dragon were driven off or killed, the land would pretty quickly cease to be such an acidic cesspit.As for the "separate Bite and Claw attacks" vs "Rend", I just...I don't get that criticism. I really don't. I cannot grasp why that matters. It would be like saying that because Monks just have "Flurry of Blows" without having specific punch/kick/elbow/knee/etc. attacks, Monks cannot be naturalistically understood. Of course they can! We're just simplifying the abstraction (since "bite" and "claw" were already abstracted anyway) in a way that saves a great deal of space.</blockquote>

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