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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Envisioner" data-source="post: 7932397" data-attributes="member: 6749263">This may be true of D&D players who are at least somewhat knowledgeable with regard to optimization, but it may well not be true of the enemies you’re fighting, which are designed in the way Wotco thinks is correct, not the way the players build a character with the intent of overcoming them.In this case it’s mostly concerning because it increases the difficulty of playing without a battlemap, something that I may or may not be up to constructing on this forum software.  If I did construct a map, I’d then have to keep updating it whenever you cast a spell that changed the terrain, or whenever that spell expired and the terrain went back to its previous form in that particular area, while possibly still being altered elsewhere.  There are already spells like that which I have to worry about, but at least keeping it restricted to the corebook puts a finite limit on the number of them that I have to work with.This sort of thing is encouraged; the difference is that it makes the game easier rather than harder.  Lateral thinking is good; detailed tactical scenarios are difficult to analyze, even if they’re not constantly changing on an in-game second-by-second basis.  If this was a video game that I had programmed to write itself, I’d be on board with spells like Erupting Earth, but my tools are limited, so anything that turns a long drawn-out battle into a quick funny story gets thumbs-up, while unnecessary complications are best avoided.Well these are both pretty frightening scenarios, but also fairly awesome ones.  I sense that I will have to work around your character with a certain degree of finesse, but I think I can handle it.  After all, I won’t be stupid enough to have a shadow dragon attack you outdoors during the day….This is exactly the kind of thing that will be instrumental in this encounter path, which does seem to feature several fights that are above the Challenge Rating of the party at the time.  (Granted there are also much easier battles sprayed about willy-nilly; I hope you won’t go full HAM on all of them...)If the 5E monster manual fails to indicate that a monster has darkvision, but it clearly should based on its environment and such, I reserve the right to rule that it does.  This kind of trick will work sometimes, but not always.Well, the Forgotten Realms is not a Tippyverse.  If you do too much of this kind of thing, Elminster might show up and haul you away for a series of lectures in why breaking too many genre conventions is a bad idea. (There’s an entire speech in the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting which is about exactly this subject; there’s a reason why Szass Tam is still around even though Elminster doesn’t want him to.)  If we were playing in my setting, which is a little bit more of a Tippyverse (though still far short of that extreme), I’d have a different approach, but would still not let you have complete free reign.  In many cases, it’s difficult to define a problem until it comes up, so I might allow you to exploit the wording of an ill-considered spell once to effortlessly trounce one Beyond Deadly encounter, but then immediately after that, Mystra herself shows up and puts the whammy on you, and that spell works differently from now on. In my CW, this sort of thing has been done in advance as much as possible, whereas with FR I’m stuck dealing with an obnoxious number of bad precedents set by canonical materials, but all of that goes out the window as soon as we go IC.I firmly disagree with that statement.  Level 6 is not the peak of achievement; level 20 is, so you're less than a third of the way there.  To use basketball as an analogy, you’re still only in the High School leagues, you’re simply above the Rookie level. You’re probably past food being a serious problem; shelter is still an issue that has the potential to come up, if not ordinarily, then certainly due to the action of monsters and spells and such.  And because granting free Rests means getting your spell slots back, they can't even be balanced by increasing the spell grade; you might need to wait until 17th level to get Grade 9 slots, but you're still meant to have a finite number of them, so spells that grant you a rest need to be balanced very carefully, to ensure that they don't perfectly solve every problem you'll ever encounter.Given that the animal stats are balanced by the (admittedly flawed) CR system, I’m not too worried about any of this, except maybe for tactics such as sending disposable animals down every hallway to check for traps (which might eventually get Mielikki annoyed with you, so I don’t recommend getting into the habit of it).I did eventually think of that, which is why I approved the spell.  But even if it doesn’t break the game completely, it can lead to surreal and annoying scenarios that break immersion and undercut the feel of the game.  I’ve decided to accept the risk in this case, but I have to think about these things.Once again, this is based on the assumption that the publishers and writers of these books are hardcore character optimizers, rather than people who are working on deadline and don’t have the mental energy to think through every potential implication of the wording they’ve settled on for one of twenty spells they have to pound out that day. The intended effect of the D&D rules is to create a milieu for sword-and-sorcery adventure games, in which the genre conventions of fantasy literature tend to be upheld in most cases, with a fair but not infinite degree of wiggle room.  To use a common 3E example, the point of the Glitterdust spell is to give a potential defense against invisible creatures; the fact that it also served to blind everyone, and thus could frequently solo a monster of high CR simply because it didn’t happen to have a good save versus this particular effect, was a result of unintended consequences.  And the GM is absolutely, no matter what, ALWAYS within his right to fix these problems.  As long as he’s not doing it arbitrarily just out of spite for players that he dislikes, the players should trust that he’s working hard to create an entertainment experience that they’ll enjoy, and not complain every single time he takes one of their toys away, just because he didn’t plan ahead well enough to realize that he should never have given them that particular toy in the first place.</blockquote>

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