D&D 5E (2024) NPCs, and the poverty of the core books

[AlViking]

We must play very different D&D. I've seen 15th level 5E parties get wiped within a handful of rounds.

I was a lucky roll away from permanently killing a couple of 19th level characters in my last campaign. Even at 20th level there were some close calls.

 

[TiQuinn]

I was a lucky roll away from permanently killing a couple of 19th level characters in my last campaign. Even at 20th level there were some close calls.

Yeah, I found as the game went on, we were either steamrolling encounters pretty easily or we were in for the fight of our lives. Getting something that was in-between tended to be the harder trick.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm fascinated with this. There is no ability an NPC can have that a PC cannot? No Vistani with the gift of plot device prophecy, no dragonslayer or witch finder with abilities to hunt certain monsters at the cost of others? All offshoot subraces (drow, derro or Cynidicean) must be PC options? There are no ancient magics beyond the ability of PCs, no ancient artifacts they cannot use or weild? Unless it's tied to a specific monster type, everything from anti paladins to witches is in the table for PCs?

Seems wild gonzo.

You don't seem to be understanding what @Lanefan is saying. He is not saying that a PC elf should have Vistani racial abilities. He's saying that if a PC plays a Vistani, they should also have the ability. He is also saying that if a PC takes the Dragonslayer or Witch Hunder class/subclass, the PC can have those abilities, too.

What shouldn't happen, though, is an NPC elven wizard being given the ability to snap his fingers and animate any object as an ability. Not without it also being open to PC wizards or elven wizards as a possibility. If the DM is going to give his NPC elven wizard that ability, the DM should also come up with how the NPC got the ability and balance it with the possibility of the PCs figuring out how to get it, too.

So perhaps the NPC elven wizard summoned a demon who required the sacrifice of 100 virgin cats and a portion of the wizards mind, causing permanent damage. Since he's a wizard, it wouldn't be intelligence, but perhaps the NPC took a permanent -6 to wisdom on top of killing the 100 cats in order to get the ability. A PC may or may not balk at the process if he learns how to do it, and he may fail to learn the process, but there should be a chance of figuring it out and potentially gaining the ability.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Once they've met that technique, though, it becomes a known thing in the setting (and one might sometimes ask, quite reasonably, how and why it wasn't known before, depending on how it's introduced) and thus theoretically a player's next character might have undergone said years of training and learned that technique.

For example if the PCs go up against the Monks of Kai Shan (who are all Human) and those Monks have cool fighting abilities never seen before, even if the Kai Shan Monks were previously completely isolated from the outside world (unlikely). their secrets are out now; never mind a player might want to have her next character be a Kai Shan Monk.

So, sure, you get to surprise the PCs once. But after that, whatever you surprised them with becomes part of the setting. Kind of like introducing a brand new spell to the setting.

Nope. Sorry, but as the DM it is my call if the Kai Shan Monks have trainees, and whether a player can play one, and there is no reason to assume that their techniques proliferate just because the PCs have met one of the monks.

Hell, an ability can simply be one of a kind. Only this one person has ever done it, and spent thirty years perfecting their craft to be able to do it, and it is partly the training and partly something unique to them like a quirk of physiology. This is literally how the actual real world is in actual real life, why would I make a fantasy world less fantastical than real life by demanding that there no unique talents in the world?

 

[Chaltab]

You don't seem to be understanding what @Lanefan is saying. He is not saying that a PC elf should have Vistani racial abilities. He's saying that if a PC plays a Vistani, they should also have the ability. He is also saying that if a PC takes the Dragonslayer or Witch Hunder class/subclass, the PC can have those abilities, too.

What shouldn't happen, though, is an NPC elven wizard being given the ability to snap his fingers and animate any object as an ability. Not without it also being open to PC wizards or elven wizards as a possibility. If the DM is going to give his NPC elven wizard that ability, the DM should also come up with how the NPC got the ability and balance it with the possibility of the PCs figuring out how to get it, too.

So perhaps the NPC elven wizard summoned a demon who required the sacrifice of 100 virgin cats and a portion of the wizards mind, causing permanent damage. Since he's a wizard, it wouldn't be intelligence, but perhaps the NPC took a permanent -6 to wisdom on top of killing the 100 cats in order to get the ability. A PC may or may not balk at the process if he learns how to do it, and he may fail to learn the process, but there should be a chance of figuring it out and potentially gaining the ability.

What if I say they have notes about how they did it but they're the indecipherable, idiosyncratic scrawlings of a singularly gifted savant?

I get wanting consistency but there are some things PCs just shouldn't have access to. Just as there are PC abilities that NPCs shouldn't get, if for no other reason than because the DM only has so much mental bandwidth and needs to run ever other monster.

 

[Distracted DM]

I'll add a 4th one:

4. One key thing going wrong that starts a cascade of problems that eventually wipes out the party.

The only TPK I've ever DMed was like this: the one key thing that went wrong was the party's main Fighter was first into the room, failed a save, and immediately got dominated against them. He pretty much wiped out each of the other characters as they entered the room (via climbing down a ladder, so they were coming in one per round). The Fighter then became the enemy's puppet until he died of starvation a week or two later.

As TPKs go, this one was pretty solid: the PCs managed to put a grand total of 3 points of damage into the enemy in that fight.

If the A5E berserker in my Age of Worms game was ever turned against the rest of the party, they'd have zero chance. Fortunately for them he has proficiency in every mental save and a helmet that gives a bonus vs such things

 

[Micah Sweet]

If the A5E berserker in my Age of Worms game was ever turned against the rest of the party, they'd have zero chance. Fortunately for them he has proficiency in every mental save and a helmet that gives a bonus vs such things

...and nothing can stop him.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Get it right before you introduce it, not after. Once you've had an NPC cast it in play, you've set and locked in the precedent.

A crypt thing isn't a PC-playable species, thus it's irrelevant what it can do.

But an NPC Elf casting a spell the PCs have never seen, that's different. That spell becomes part of the game the moment it's cast against the PCs, and adjusting it between the time the NPC uses it and the time the PCs get to use it is the ssort of shenanigans that give DMs a bad name.

Put another way: you just can't design things like a new arcane spell for a single-use encounter, because by intentional design arcane spells are intended to be learnable and repeatable and thus will never be just single-use. Therefore, it's incumbent on the DM to get that spell sorted and balanced before the NPC ever casts it at the PCs.

I'm fascinated with this. There is no ability an NPC can have that a PC cannot? No Vistani with the gift of plot device prophecy, no dragonslayer or witch finder with abilities to hunt certain monsters at the cost of others? All offshoot subraces (drow, derro or Cynidicean) must be PC options? There are no ancient magics beyond the ability of PCs, no ancient artifacts they cannot use or weild? Unless it's tied to a specific monster type, everything from anti paladins to witches is in the table for PCs?

Seems wild gonzo.

I’ll be honest even as a very permissive DM, to me the world becomes less believable and less interesting and fantastical if everything anyone does has to be rationalized in the mechanics-as-physics.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Are you sure? I have to be skeptical, because I'm telling white lies if I make arguments based on my personal experience, so the fact that this is achievable at all must be subject to skepticism.

Well the last time we had the monster creation discussion, I asked for a product that fills the void of more complete monster creation rules and got TotV as the answer.

 

[nevin]

We must play very different D&D. I've seen 15th level 5E parties get wiped within a handful of rounds.

Very very rarely compared to earlier editions. It is the safety wheels version of DND.