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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7704929" data-attributes="member: 996">Effects in 5e either roll to hit or they force saves, they rarely do both.  The Knight's Mark requires a successful hit, so there's no gamist 'need' for a save.  As far as the logic of it, HPs represent a whole range of fictional visualization, including morale and the like, a creature that's not immune to fear that's hit by the Knight's attack has clearly been affected by the Knight.  An alternative would be to have the target of the Knight's attack make a WILL save every time, hit or no.  But, combining the two would make the ability needlessly complicated.First of all, the mark mechanic doesn't make the game less entertaining, it makes combats more dynamic and interesting (reducing the tendency towards optimal focus fire which otherwise makes combats predictable and targeting decisions no-brainers) rather it's a PC like the Knight marking or a monster (everyone marking any time like the optional module, I'm not so sure about - I've never run an all-Defender party in 4e, let alone vs an all-Soldier group of monsters!).  Secondly, there's nothing arbitrary about my examples, they're all fiction-first/mechanics-second.  It's the DM's role to decide on the abilities & immuniyies of the adversaries he presents, and it's very much his job to rule on how such things interact.  If you decide a monster can't be distracted from it's quarry, making it immune to fear makes sense, if that focus isn't to the tune of lacking fear entirely, it might be reasonable to make it only non-magical fear.  It still doesn't make huge amounts of sense in fiction that marking would do /nothing/, but as it's currently written, immunity to fear flips it off entirely.  It'd be more versimilitudinous for immunity to fear to remove the attack penalty, but not stop the reaction attack 'punishment' (if anything, negating the penalty should give the punishing attack advantage, as the marked enemy is willfully dropping his defenses against the Knight to make an all-out attack).  (... hm... actually, that'd have some interesting tactical consequences - opening up distance in any way to escape the Knight just long enough to deliver such an attack without the enhanced consequence... probably too much tactical detail for standard 5e, but, then, standard 5e doesn't include the Knight...)Very different from a lone BBEG marking, yes, but it'd actually make the fight more true to the fiction if the Black Knight had a solid mechanic to make its bodygaurding effective.  So that sounds like an argument for monsters that mark - again, the DM can just add that to the monster block or include it in a new monster, if it makes sense to him.  Yep, I'm getting increasingly hopeful on the whole topic...</blockquote>

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