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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 7341538" data-attributes="member: 20323">Well, even if what you're saying isn't totally accurate – see [MENTION=37579]Jester David[/MENTION]'s reply regarding abilities of NPCs in the MM without direct PC parallels – I think you're speaking of the degree to which a NPC feature makes players take notice that "this breaks the rules of what I thought NPCs could do." Of course, that threshold is going to depend on the players at your table and, likely, experience with 3e.I think the best response is: Look to the narrative of what "legendary" means first, and incorporate that into play. I've been asserting this for a while, and would agree that the official books do a poor job of answering that question. [MENTION=12377]77IM[/MENTION] gives some fair examples of how to foreshadow Legendary Actions to your players that are unique to a particular individual NPC, such as the "ancient forbidden art of Weave-Splicing." And I'd argue this should be done for legendary monsters (e.g. beholder) equally as it should be done for legendary NPCs (e.g. warlord). It's fixating on the mechanics that causes designers to lose sight of this & IMO leads to the sort of player dissonance that's been described.Personally, I'd consider tweaking what "legendary" means according to the setting I was running. For example, in Ravenloft "legendary" could overlap greatly with "Dark Lord", while in Dragonlance it might refer to dragons & Dragon Highlords, while in Planescape it might be factols and proxies. Generally, if the the monster/NPC doesn't have a name, an interesting backstory, and some legends floating around about it, I would not treat it as "legendary."The clearest treatment of what "legendary" means that I've found so far in a D&D product was in the Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix 2, wherein it describes the "legendary" creature as the progenitor, the cloth from which all others were cut, the original as divinely created, e.g. THE Sphinx or THE Gorgon. I could see a similar model being applied to legendary NPCs... e.g. THE Mage of High Sorcery of Palanthus, Master of All Black Robes.</blockquote>

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