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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dkyle" data-source="post: 6063547" data-attributes="member: 70707">I'm making a distinction between "what appears in the Monster Manual", and "what a DM uses in his campaign". The statblocks in the Monster Manual are just building blocks for making combat encounters, because fun, engaging, balanced combat encounters are the difficult part of running a game. That doesn't mean monsters, in actual practice, need to be all about "fight, fight, fight". It's easy to take a balanced monster and make it impossible (or just more difficult) to defeat in combat, until the players have done X, Y, Z. It's very much not easy to take a monster that's not designed to be fought, and make a balanced combat encounter out of it.There is indeed nothing wrong with having such creatures. There's just little point in having them as statblocks in the MM as such. Let the DM decide how to take the Monster Manuals's statblocks designed for fun and balanced combat encounters, and adjust them to have whatever plot armor he wants them to have. If you want to have means other than combat mechanics to defeat monsters, then do it! I don't see why you'd need a book to tell you how to make a monster that can't be fought head-on.Now, I could see including "non-combat challenge" monsters in the MM, but they should be clearly marked as such, and would be there to provide tools for a different sort of encounter. You might even have an entry for "story golem", which is effectively invincible until the players acquire the right item, in which case you jump to the "combat golem" statblocks, which provide mechanics appropriate for building a fun combat encounter with the golem.That may well be true in the way you run the game. But once the players do decide to fight something, then the statblocks are there to be fought. There's no other reason to have them there.The presence of fightable statblocks in the monster manual does not imply that all monsters encountered in your game must be fightable, or "meant to be fought".  The monster manual is there for you to use as you see fit.  And it seems to me, that a toolbox full of components for fun, balanced encounters is far more useful than one that has components that sometimes aren't useful to that end, but you have to figure that out yourself. Again, taking a balanced statblock, and turning it into whatever non-fightable (or unwise to fight) monster you want is easy. At most, you shouldn't need any more than a few quick ideas in the accompanying text about how a dryad might behave outside of combat, and how the PCs might need to do something first before they can reasonably fight a dryad using the provided statblock.And then if a DM just wants a woodsy spellcaster, and isn't particularly interested in it being a major mythological being, they have a statblock they can use like any other, without actually limiting your desired take on the dryad in any way.</blockquote>

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