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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7008325" data-attributes="member: 42582">The stat block does not explain how a devil "torments and consumes captured souls to fuel the mightiest of their infernal works, including evil constructs and terrible invocations". And saying "the same as PCs" is no answer. There are no rules for fuelling works with souls. (Contrast eg the 3E Book of Vile Darkness, which has such rules in the 3E context.)Can the devil fuel his/her construct with the power of souls before the PCs navigate from Avernus into the lower reaches of the Nine Hells? The only rules framework for answering this question is a skill challenge, which by definition is an exclusively player-side mechanic.That's my point. It doesn't need to say combat focused statistics, because that's what the stat block is: it's combat focused.Whereas, to run the skill challenge of negotiating with a Duke, one doesn't need the Duke's stat block.It's well-known that a skill challenge might take place within combat or overlapping with it (see eg DMG pp 72, 80). But nothing you have identified here says anything about corrupting water needing to be an ability called out in the dragon statblock.The notion of "fully corrupted" or "degree of corruption" has no mechanical meaning. The Purify Water ritual doesn't rely on any such notion: it has the following flavour text - "The lake, tainted by a now-dead demon that laired in its depths, becomes crystal clear and refreshing to drink" - and the following salient rules text - "You purify a volume of water."So as far as the ritual is concerned, either the water is tainted/impure or it is not. Either the dragon has corrupted it, or has not. More generally, I think you are missing the point of the significance of skill challenges to this topic: skill challenges are an abstract, closed-scene resolution system. Within such a system, questions like "Can the PCs do it in time?", or "Are they working fast/hard enough?", or "Will the dragon, devil or whomever get some friends to help with the building/corruption before the PCs get there?" are all answered via narrating outcomes of player skill checks (which may include auto-successes or failure removal, eg in the sorts of circumstances the DMG and DMG2 talk about). From the mechanical point of view, therefore, there's simply no such thing as the dragon having greater time to "fully corrupt the water". That's all just colour.I am not saying that the "adding on of desired non-combat abilities to monsters is unique to 4e". I'm saying that monsters in 4e don't have non-combat abilities (like corrupting water, or building infernal constructs fuelled by souls, or training their followers in sword play, or organising village festivals) in the sense in which some AD&D and 3E monsters do have such abilities in their stat blocks.For instance, the GM deciding that a pond is corrupted because a black dragon has laired in it, or that crops are failing and animals dying because a Glabrezu has taken up residence nearby, is not adding an ability to any monster; any more than narrating that the villagers are having a festival is adding an ability (what would it be? Party: provided the villager is within 3 sq of at least one other villager, the villager may sing, dance and/or consume beverages). It's all just narrating fiction.Maybe this is the fundamental confusion. In 4e, the GM describing a situation in the fiction (eg a polluted pond, a barren apple grove) and then the PCs responding to or resolving that situation by means of a skill challenge, isn't "rule zero". It's one of two core resolution mechanics for the system (the other being combat).</blockquote>

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