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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justice and Rule" data-source="post: 8398445" data-attributes="member: 6778210">We've had this discussion before, but I think the problems that are talked about here are features, rather than bugs.One of the things that we've been trained to think is that for every problem in the D&D world, you can basically hit it with a good enough sword and it will go away. It demystifies the spiritual and makes it so that your best priests have to be great warriors to do incredible spiritual feats.What haunts do is force players to be cautious when confronted with spirits. Maybe you can hit it with a sword... or maybe you can't. Stuff gets weird when you are oscillating between the living and the dead. That lack of obviousness gives an uncertainty that I want more of in these sorts of games: the villagers talk about an old haunted house. Is it an actual active spirit, or is it a haunt? That's something you might not be able to find out until confronted with it.But also that design space allows us to create useful positions for non-casting religious figures. Suddenly the village elder doesn't have to be a 5th level Cleric, he can just have a high level in Religion or Occult to actually know things and get things done. A well-known Priest doesn't have to be a Divine Caster, he can just be an ordinary man whose faith is strong.While I agree that potentially less-obvious solutions might frustrate players, at the same time that's up to you in how you build them. The DMG has a bunch of examples and while I don't like all of them, I think the main point is that they are meant to show the versatility of the design space you can operate in. When you create a haunt, you can make the design more obvious or be more generous with how you hand out information. There's nothing that stops you from allowing novel ways of handling it as a GM if you feel they are appropriate; no trap listing is going to definitively list all the different ways one might be able to handle a trap. That goes double for haunts, which you can arguably create a bunch of different ways to handle depending on how the players want to approach it. Maybe it doesn't initially list a Diplomacy DC, but if a player comes up with a good idea in it... why not? There just isn't a need to be as rigid as you would be with traps because traps are often bound to the physical world, while haunts obviously aren't and can even have some level of sentience.</blockquote>

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