D&D 5E New Spellcasting Blocks for Monsters --- Why?!

[Helldritch]

I am not saying that low level spells lose utility.

I'm saying that action economy prevent use of low level spells during combat because D&D Combats are "short". So the mage would have to use them as reactions or precombat buffs.

And this is problematic as the spell slot chart was designed for 6-8 encounters. I realized this after casting shield for the 5th time and nuking the party into submission.

Ahem.... Last game with group number one saw a fight with a shadow dragon. The group is 11th level, 6 characters strong. My players are optimizers through and through (in this group) with 20 to 40 years playing with me. That little fight lasted... 24 rounds. Yep 24 rounds. And the dragon is still alive but fled. 3 characters died, one died because I used magic missile to kill him so that the cleric could not revived him. So yep, low level spells can be of utmost importance even at high and ultra high levels. And this dragon was a standard dragon with spell.casting ability as an option. Let's just say that I caught them with their pants down. And that dragon will come back at them with minions next time. Unless they find its lair first...

Yes the game is based around the 6-8 encounters and fights lasting around 5 rounds on average. But this is an average. Some fights last less, others last a lot longer. And again, a monster can appear more than once and the spell slot system is much better to simulate resource attrition than the stat block that they are going for.

 

[Bill Zebub]

NPC designed the same as PC is a stupid design. I don't care about your versimilitude because, as a PC, unless I look at the stat block, I'll never realize the difference. I don't really care if an enemy can do something I can't.

Very much this.

I find this stance that PCs and NPCs must follow the same rules for verisimilitude to be very strange.

 

[Seramus]

I don’t disagree with you on this matter, I’m just saying I don’t think it’s going to happen. Calling it a new edition is too big a risk. It’s just going to be “optional rules updates.”

Just the term 5E D&D has enough popularity and traction that it warrants a 5.5 release to hang onto the 5E term for another half decade or full decade. Calling it 5.5 (or something similar) is going to be the better marketing decision. So I agree completely.

Or heck, even 5.1! But that is probably too incremental.

 

[Synthil]

And why would NPCs have to follow the same rules as PCs, when not even PCs follow the same rules as other PCs? Warlocks have already different spell slots than wizards or clerics. Land druids get slots back on a short rest, Moon druids don't. Slots are a model designed to calculate the spent power of a character over an adventuring day. Characters that don't adventure don't need that model applied to them. Just as you don't need the theory of relativity for Newtonian physics calculations.

 

[Undrave]

I can't help you if the only thing you consider an acceptable design is the PCs are guaranteed to walk in and win on the first try.

I oppose to design where the ONLY solution is a specific SPELL, leaving no room for ACTUAL creativity. We encountered a Clay Golem once, reduced the max HP of the two front liners, people who's HP is basically a major class feature. None of us could get Greater Restoration at our level. What CREATIVE solution did we used to solve it? We paid a guy the next town over. That's it. It drained some of our treasure and that was that. It wasn't interesting and it felt very frustrating to just not get any options on how to solve the problem.

How many players and DM's will gravitate to the new hotness that is intellectual pablum and how many will stick with something that requires more brainpower to play.

WOW. The Elitism is so thick I can't even cut it with a knife!

The basic foes are quite nice for my needs as they are in the MM right now. If I need to make a change it is what? A minute or two? A spell selection here and there and voilà ! It is done.

But with this new stat block, I will need to take the DMG and adjust things, retrofit the whole stat block to respect both the intent and the appropriate CR.

Jist take Vecna, at the base it is a caster, a lich. Now I need to add spell slots, choose the spells and new abilities and compare these new abities to the current stat block and the evaluate with the guidelines in the DMG if I did a good approximated job.

With the classic stat block, if a spell is not to my taste, I simply pick an other one of the same level and I am done and good to go. Whether you acknowledge it or not, for those that play with the MM and 5ed starting design, this is a huge change. Much more drastic than the alignment change they attempted a few books ago.

Vecna's a Big Bad, I don't see how much trouble it is to tweak your Big Bad to your liking. Are you REALLY going to go through every damn spellcaster monster if they're already designed to work well enough? And the new stat block includes spells with a number of casting per day, why not just change those to a different spell of the same level the same you've done before? That doesn't sound hard at all and I don't think it would affect CR at all (CR is garbage anyway). Feels like you're blowing it out of proportion.

Counterspell would be so much more interesting as an unlimited use, but risky, class ability.

Yes! That! Every class should have it's unique Reaction, with Opportunity Attack as the only genric one. Give Counterspell to the Sorcerer as their 'schtick' but if they fail the counter they take damage or something.

And at which point will we stop having 5ed and start having something entirely different in scope and play but still called 5ed? At some point, it will simply be a false representation. Let's be done with 5ed and move on to 6ed already as the game is starting to no longer look like what I bought.

Only nerds who like to get tribal about it care about editions. If the common customer enjoys the game they're not gonna care if it somehow morphed into 6e along the way. Marketing knows that.

 

[Helldritch]

There’s some irony to phrasing it that way when the counter-argument is essentially “it’s too much trouble for me to pad out the spell list.” The other way the game has been played for 50 years is that DMs freely modify content to suit their tastes, instead of feeling bound by official content.

So it’s a little hard to take seriously an argument that on the one hand “you noob casuals are unable/unwilling to do a little hard work” and on the other hand “a tweak to official stat blocks is ruining the game”.


/worldstiniestviolin

You get it wrong. Modify and applying what was from the the start is easy. All it takes is a little time. It can even be done while watching your favorite TV show.

But retrofitting the new stats block is a whole new ball game. Just like adding fixed stat to new races is nigh impossible without serious help/discussions with your players. Should an Owl folk receive +1 or +2 wisdom and what should be its other stat? Intelligence or constitution? Or something else?

With Vecna, what do you keep? What do you remove? And when you have done your work, you take the DMG and check if your intuition was good and If the resulting CR is close to what the devs tried to reach. And if you are off, you start again until you get it right. Harder than just saying, what prestigidiation? No way, Vecna earned that finger of frost. No shield spell? No way, I'll remove expeditious retreat... This is what the new stat block is imposing on us. Like it or not, they have not made our life easier, quite the contrary and they have lowered the versatility of the casters once again. The game is poorer this way than the other way around.

 

[Reynard]

I oppose to design where the ONLY solution is a specific SPELL, leaving no room for ACTUAL creativity.

'Creativity" in this context usually means players throwing stuff at the wall hoping the DM will just give them the win. No thanks. You need a specific spell to defeat the Tarrasque (Wish), why not Vecna? Or how is it different than needing a special weapon, or need to toss the ring in the right volcano? Sometimes quests come with victory conditions.

 

[Seramus]

Honestly, I prefer the new system over giving monsters spell slots. However, my big caveat is that I need the monster text to say (at least somewhere) that X or Y is a spellcaster (when appropriate) and it's reasonable for them to have prepared different spells if the DM wishes. While that should be obvious to more experienced DMs, I can absolutely see many DMs who might feel like they cannot alter the spell list. Similarly, I can see oodles of people being shouted down in forums for changing spell lists with the word "homebrew" thrown at them like they are dirty heathens.

 

[Nuclear Monkey]

I apologize if this is long winded, but I've been thinking about this stat block thing for a while and feel it's a symptom of a larger problem at WOTC. I don't think they really know who their audience is.

Way back in 2014, WOTC released 5e based on a not so great reaction to 4e (and the resulting loss of market share). Player feedback led them to create a game with much simpler mechanics then 4e. At the same time (by blind luck), streaming content begins to take off. So here's WOTC with a known IP and with a ruleset that is easy to use and easy to understand. The result, 5e takes off on streaming.

At the same time WOTC uses a licensing model to distribute content digitally (either as a pseudo-pdf equivalent on D&D beyond or as a VTT with Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds). So now they have streaming and multiple revenue streams through licensing that enable on-line and streaming play.

Then 2020 happens.

So, WOTC, through luck has positioned themselves to enable on-line play with minimum expenditure of resources on their part. Sure, they are developing content, but platform maintenance, billing, and customer service are all being serviced by the license holder. Better yet in addition to the revenue stream generated by the license, they're taking in revenue from purchases of WOTC content on the licensees platform. So, low overhead and lots of cash coming in.

This whole time, the player base is exploding. These new players (and some old) start looking at some aspects of D&D content and have issues with how race and culture are portrayed. Feeling a need to be response to the player base WOTC begins the process of making changes to what race means from a mechanics standpoint and changing lore.

So here's where I think WOTC made their first incorrect assumption about who their player base is. Historically, a majority of D&D books went to individuals who never used them for the purpose of play. I was one of those way back during 2e. However, I would argue that with the rise of streaming, VTTs, and COVID that these customers are dinosaurs. If they're not completely extinct, they are not long to the world. It's easier than ever now to find a game. In the content re-write, I think WOTC missed an opportunity to service the current customer. Think how great it would have been if rater than re-writing lore, WOTC just deleted it all and replaced it with instructions as to how to run a monster to achieve their determined CR score. To run your game, do you really care what spider god an elf worshiped to give a +2 to deception? Or would you rather have a monster stat block that had explanations of how to maximize the monsters play potential like that supplied by Keith Ammann?

As for stat blocks, are they really too complicated. I look at D&D beyond and the VTTs and I see that its pretty easy to navigate even extremely long stat blocks. On top of this, understanding that in a typical encounter a monster will take between 3-6 rounds of actions its not hard to plan out what they'll use in an encounter. (Wouldn't it be great if WOTC supplied instruction as to what a monster would do in an encounter!) I really don't think the modern player, who has all these resources in front of them is intimidated by long stat blocks. As further evidence of this, Matt Coville just ran a kickstarter that makes stat blocks more complex and it made 2 million dollars.

So the TLDR version. WOTC doesn't know it's player base, is misreading what the problems with the game are, and aren't making changes that will make the game better.

At least there's always third party content!

 

[Reynard]

So the TLDR version. WOTC doesn't know it's player base, is misreading what the problems with the game are, and aren't making changes that will make the game better.

That is a very silly thing to contend. they are in constant contact with their player base and privvy to all kinds of information we are not. If WotC isn't doing what you think the game needs, chances are you are the one out of touch. [insert skinner gif]