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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4175255" data-attributes="member: 710">The designers said more like "Outside of combat, people do all kinds of crazy stuff. It's impossible to put all this into rules. Let's not do it, then."You know, the only part that benefitted from the rules here is the fact that the rules seemed to suggest that Aboleth could have Minions they control. But since their abilities for this did not suit your needs, you had to change it anyway. The same could have been done without any predefined rules. Just an entry in the fluff. "Aboleth typically use telepathically controlled minions to do their work". That is actually what was true for the 3E Mind Flayer. But there, it was pretty annoying to have such a line, since most monsters explicitly had all their non-combat stuff in their long list of spell-like and supernatural abilities. But in 4E, we just need to unlearn that everything in fluff must also be represented in crunch. As long as something does not directly influence the interaction with the PCs, leave it out of the stat block and leave it to the flavor text. You do not need the rules to explain the interaction between NPCs. It will not hurt the playability of the game, and (see also your own example) the DM is free to change this stuff anyway. Only when things begin to affect players you have to use rules, otherwise you can't "play" the game, and you sure as hell can't do it in a fair and balanced way.</blockquote>

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