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

[Micah Sweet]

If the PCs research an NPC, then, to me, that NPC has already 'entered play'.

Oooh! Let's call it 'Quantum DMing' where the world is in a state of uncertainty until the PC observe it, collapsing the wave function the opposite could be called 'Tolkien DMing' maybe?

Schrodinger's NPC.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Schrodinger's NPC.

my NPCs are alive until the PCs open the box(room) then they die

 

[Minigiant]

All I gotta say. As a person who attempted who attempted to run a stated up PC as an NPC enemy...

Yuck

That ship has sailed. PC building rules are too complicated these days and character playing rules are so finicky as a DM to generate fun that you do not want PC-Like Monster.

You might say you want it but you don't want it.

 

[James Gasik]

I mean character classes are a metagame construct anyways. Even if most players (and even some settings) use them as a shorthand, an outdoorsman with fighting ability need not be a Ranger (he could be a scout, a woods guide, a hunter, or a game warden, as an example), even if he somehow picked up a few Druid spells.

Not every holy warrior in plate armor is a Paladin or a Cleric, and not every spellcaster who made a deal with Asmodeus is a Warlock. On the flipside, if I have a Lawful Good Cleric who wears plate armor and deals radiant damage when he hits someone upside the head (thanks to his level 8 Domain feature) and he is accepted into an order of holy knights, there's no reason he can't be called a Paladin, even if he isn't one.

I'm reminded of an Order of the Stick comic where Miko the Paladin tries to explain how she belongs the Samurai caste of her culture, despite not having any levels in a class called Samurai.

So in summary, just because player character Wizards function one way, does not necessarily mean all Wizards in the world function the same way. Wizard PC's are balanced (presumably) to be PC Wizards.

Canon NPC's having unusual abilities is nothing new- even in first edition, Hall of Heroes flailed trying to explain why Drizzt Do'Urden could dual wield scimitars and murder everything in sight by giving him special rules.

Elminster has always had a host of special abilities (depending on edition) that include Clerical access, improved combat ability, Azure Flame (which is totally not Spellfire, honest!), and psionics, among other things.

Shield of Innocence is an Orog Paladin of Torm, despite Paladins being human-only when he premiered. Similarly, Pikel Bouldershoulder was a Dwarven Druid when such things weren't kosher either.

And Olive Ruskettle was going around calling herself a Bard when she totally wasn't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

IMO you are missing a major part of what makes things truly cool, which is why I allow every major bad guy one major twist that's not on the statblock, which I refer to as the "I am not left handed" moment. If you watch any heist movie the protagonists plan everything out in detail - and then something goes pear shaped. And the rest of the movie is about how things actually get back on track and have to deal with the new information. It's the one thing this boss was keeping in reserve just in case, and is deliberately keeping secret. It's not a counter to everything - but is a gamechanger (the last one was that the boss had made a deal with PCs of players who could no longer make it and summoned them as reinforcements; the boss did get away but that was thanks to Plane Shift on their statblock).

But I always keep in mind that the job of a DM is close to that of a pro wrestling heel; to be booed and to sell it as if the face will lose - but in the end to go down. And let's face it "I am not left handed either" was insanely cool and could not have happened without the setup where the game was changed. But each boss only gets one; this isn't Calvinball and I'm not trying to win, just to massively ramp up the tension. It also has to be unique. I also don't use it with what is already a phase-changing boss (like a 4e dragon) as that ramp up has the same purpose.

As much as I am still very, even extremely opposed to secretly editing things on the fly...this is the only defense I have ever seen of the practice which I can't immediately counter. So, at the very least, congratulations on giving me something to think about. I cannot say if this has changed my mind or not, but it's something I'll have to chew on for a while. That's no mean feat in this context, as I'm sure other folks around here could tell you. I am if anything RABID in my opposition to anything that even remotely looks like it could be considering broaching the subject of attempting to fudge.

I will say, IF you did this for me, I would enormously value it if you put in effort (preferably in advance, but in-the-moment improv is sometimes necessary) to justify how and why such a thing could be, and (assuming the players are successful at investigating it, which is not guaranteed) permitting the PCs to learn how to prepare against or co-opt such powers for their own use in the future. Because that, I think, may be why I'm not instantly opposed to this. Again, I don't oppose any and all forms of changing a statblock after it enters play. I oppose secretly changing it in ways the players are denied the ability to know about. It doesn't have to be shouted from the rooftops, but changes to things that are already known or observed should...well, be knowable or observable. Anything less is pulling the rug of the world out from under the players; you cannot make informed decisions when the world is always changing in ways you are not even permitted to find out about. Again, I don't trust even myself with that kind of power (and, frankly, I have literally no idea why people would stick around for a game where the DM admits to fudging damage and/or HP—the two are mathematically equivalent—or other such things, other than to avoid a social problem...and that reads to me like being trapped in a game, never a good thing.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

All I gotta say. As a person who attempted who attempted to run a stated up PC as an NPC enemy...

Yuck

That ship has sailed. PC building rules are too complicated these days and character playing rules are so finicky as a DM to generate fun that you do not want PC-Like Monster.

You might say you want it but you don't want it.

I can't agree with the "I know better than you do" attitude, but as an opinion I respect it.

 

[Minigiant]

I can't agree with the "I know better than you do" attitude, but as an opinion I respect it.

It's less "I know better" and more "I am listening to you ask for two things that are opposites of each other. Therefore you do care about one of them above the other by a lot"


That's why I say often that I see it all the time. It is the class fan of obscure thing that isn't popular wanting it to become popular but without catering to more people to become popular.

 

[Charlaquin]

I would start with "How did you like the fight" but sure... why not?

Normally it would be more organic a conversation though not just a matter of fact statement. Like when someone says "Oh man when I disintegrated him and you said 'use my last charge on my ring of 9 lives' I was like 'damn...' I would normally say "yeah, that ring only existed to keep the fight going." and see what they said.

in fact the ring of 9 lives example happened with a 3e game... and 1 player (not even the one who threw the dis) was a bit annoyed and thought like you, but when the other players asked what we would have done if the fight ended round 1 he did come around a bit...

That’s cool. Most folks I have heard from on these boards who are fine with this kind of thing have said they wouldn’t want to know the DM was doing it. But this makes much more sense to me.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

like any and every tool in my DM tool box there is a right and wrong time to use fudgeing and adding... and I am human I make mistakes I can tell you there have been times I didn't and should have and times I did and should not have. However it annoys me when people make broad sweeping clames that a tool is never the right one to use... especially when I go out of my way to KEEP saying "it depends on the table" and people like to pretend they know MY table, and MY friends better than I do.

I just see fudging as fundamentally refusing to play fair. The numbers are meaningless, the rules are meaningless. Nothing I as a player choose or attempt truly has any weight. For literally whatever reason the DM thinks is justified, the world can and will warp around their new concept. I will never be allowed to know how things actually worked out. My tactics and strategies always and eternally have the giant asterisk of "assuming the DM actually plays by the rules." Even if the DM never, not even once, chooses to do things that make life harder for me (such as adding HP to a boss, which is literally exactly the same as taking away damage from previous player rolls), they're still denying me the ability to earn my victories and learn to play better. I'll never truly know, and thus never truly he able to trust, that I succeed because I perform well; if it's hidden from me (as most advocates STRONGLY recommend, to the point of "never EVER tell your players you fudge, literally actively lie to them to conceal it") then I'm actively being deceived, and if it's only soft hidden, as in the DM admits to doing it after the fact but not while doing it, then I'll never really be able to feel like I'm playing a game. It will always feel, at root, like I'm being pulled through the DM's novella and any victories I earn are just what story beats she needed to tell.

That's why I cannot accept any form of fudging. If it's secret, it's unacceptable. If it isn't secret, as in, if the players can actually find out in the moment that it is changing and either respond immediately or learn how to respond in the future, then it's not fudging, and I have no problem with it.

I expect every DM to play fair. That means either playing with your cards face up (no concealment at all), or giving me the chance (even if it ends up not working out) to find out what the cards are. Anything else is not playing fair; it would be pretending that there are rules and limits, and then breaking those rules and limits whenever and wherever you feel like it.

 

[Faolyn]

And yet, just read the DMG carefully. The exp budget for the day should not be spent on to only one encounter and when you take everything into account you get, you guessed it. 6-8 encounters per day. Which is exactly an other relic of 4ed. If you missed it. How many young DM missed it? I almost missed it myself. It is only because we playtested 5ed when it got out that we found out. And we were people with 20 to 40 years into the hobby. Imagine someone new...

Butting in here. That's actually not really true. The game assumes you can take that many encounters before you're tapped out of resources. But there's nothing that says that the PCs have to use up every resource they have in a day. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you have to stick to the XP budget. The DMG specifically talks about the XP budget being used to determine how many monsters to sic on the PCs, but that's less helpful if you give XP for social encounters, and utterly meaningless if you use story or session-based advancement instead of XP.