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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 8661622" data-attributes="member: 6802765">Where the current version of counterspell becomes tactically interesting is its short 60' range limit and requirement for off-turn line-of-sight. That gives PCs and NPCs who know counterspell an interesting tactical choice between staying within range and line-of-sight to try to shut down enemy spellcasters with counterspell, or trying to open the distance and use full cover to protect themselves from enemy spellcasters and archers.Additionally, counterspell is one of the main advantages to building a melee-capable spellcaster, since getting up in an enemy spellcaster's face makes it much harder for them to retreat out of counterspell range.True, counterspell is tactically boring in close-range fights with no sources of full cover. But lots of tactics become boring in that style of encounter--it's not a problem specific to counterspell.From my perspective, it relates to the (complicated and controversial) notion of what qualifies as fair play at the table. If, in advance of introducing the NPC, the DM gives the Evoker knock, either by custom-designing the Evoker or by adapting a statblock to create a custom NPC, I don't think anyone would object--designing NPCs is clearly within the DM's wheelhouse under almost any paradigm of fair play.But if the DM introduces the unmodified statblock into play, some tables would consider it a violation of the social contract for the DM to give it knock on the fly. Even tables that generally are fine with the DM tweaking things on the fly might object to the DM retroactively giving a captured NPC knock, since that tweak would operate to directly counter the agency the players expressed when they chose to capture the NPC. (Such a table might be fine, however, with an on-the-fly substitution of some other spell that makes the game more fun without retroactively negating the players' chosen strategy.)The objection to the new-style statblocks lacking most utility spells is thus twofold: (1) the existing statblocks can't be dropped in at such tables without advance modification to flesh out their non-combat abilities; and (2) adding utility spells to new-style casters is more complicated than simply swapping out spells known was on the old-style casters.In addition, I would add a separate third objection: (3) the NPCs' out-of-combat abilities are what determines how capable the NPC is of forcing the combat encounter to occur at the time and place of its choosing. At tables, like mine, where encounter location is determined dynamically based on the IC strategies and capabilities of the combatants (rather than being prewritten by the DM) not knowing the out-of-combat capabilities of the new-style casters means I can't just drop them in, because I don't know what tools they have to try to shape an imminent encounter to their own advantage.From my standpoint published opponents have two main purposes: (A) to give the DM an opponent that can be dropped in on the fly; and (B) to ease the process of creating custom opponents by allowing modification of existing opponents rather than starting from scratch. For tables where issues 1-3 apply, the inability to drop-in the statblocks unmodified and the increased effort required to modify them make the new-style statblocks less useful than the old-style statblocks. As I understand it, that's the key source of the objection to not including non-combat abilities in the new-style statblocks.(Personally, I found the old style caster statblocks hard to use for idiosyncratic reasons particular to my playstyle, but I find the new-style statblocks even worse, for the reasons described above.)</blockquote>

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