D&D (2024) What is With Poison?, and Other PHB Conundrums.

[Micah Sweet]

You can run into this with lots of spells. I had a Bard player lose his mind when he tried to use Command on a Gnoll and I asked him "hey, can you speak Gnoll?".

That at least makes logical sense with a verbal command.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Okay? I don't see the comparison. Like, yes, it can fail. Gnolls are pretty notoriously monsters in 5e* though, so you should be prepared for the possibility that they don't speak common.

Meanwhile, we can now have beings that look like humans, move like humans, speak like humans, dress like humans, and do pretty much everything else humans do...and which have been classified as humans...but which are now classified as fey or aberrations or whatever. That's where the issue lies. I don't see any meaningful chance of a rug-pull experience with trying to cast command on a gnoll, whereas I can see that happening frequently with these new "updates."

*Which mildly annoys me. I've never played one and have no intent to start, but it's just...why jettison the cool gnoll lore and gnoll PC possibilities? Particularly in the edition that's been striving to present more nuanced views on frequently vilified races, like orcs and drow!

The nuanced views appear to apply only to orcs and drow. Perhaps because the handling of those species got the most flak?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Frankly, it's been quite hard to keep track of threads on the forum lately due to the insane swarm of spambots. So...I wouldn't be surprised.

Seems relevant here too, in light of the Crown of Madness description.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean poison was also overpriced in 3e as well. The problem with things like poison is, yes its only +1d4, but in a world of bounded accuracy its +1d4!!!

Aka there aren't a lot of ways to boost your damage (especially non-concentration methods), so having something that can do it on tap is actually quite useful, and so they make it ridiculously expensive to ensure every player isn't just poison poison poison all the time....because many players would if it was cheap.

Poison is one of those things that's very hard to balance in dnd, as pcs don't suffer the same story restrictions as npcs in many campaigns. PCs get all the best stuff, and so if they have a poison guy by gum they are going to milk that person for every bit of poison they are worth if the stuff is cheap

Story restrictions are a table question. IMO they should have nothing to do with how the basic rules work.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Discovering that something that looks and acts human is not in fact human is way more interesting than whatever benefit I was planning to get from charming or holding them.

It's not like they're shapeshifters. The only way you find out they're not humanoid is (maybe) when you waste the spell slot and literally nothing happens. Nothing dramatic or exciting about it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

to inhibit a flood of everyone just adding poison to their weapons maybe it ought to require proficiency in poisoner's kit to properly poison a weapon, thus letting players access the whole list of poisons but stemming the ability to exploit it.

So no logical non-gamist reason? Bummer.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I really don't like how Sleep got changed from having a unique mechanic in 2014, to being another "save or suck" spell in 2024. I've commented about it before, and I'm sure I will again, but I love how 2014 Sleep has no save, and the hit points mechanic rewards PCs whittling away at monster HP before sending them into insta-snooze.

It's at least interesting, even if I prefer the TSR versions.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Thankfully, your experience is not universal experience.

I know that from a lot of your posts you seem to end up getting stuck playing with apparently some absolutely horrid DMs all the time... but my experience has never had the same amount of fockery you seem to deal with. So while I can appreciate the hell you go through, I also do not take it as a mirror to the gaming world on the whole.

I don't think it's fair to assume most DMs don't follow the rules. I've been burned on that before, and done the burning once or twice.

 

[Smackpixi]

It's not like they're shapeshifters. The only way you find out they're not humanoid is (maybe) when you waste the spell slot and literally nothing happens. Nothing dramatic or exciting about it.

In retrospect, I think he meant humanoid, which would be, yeah whatever, Githyanki not humanoid, ok. But my first reading, not really knowing what everything is now was thinking about stuff like yuan-ti pure bloods. Were humanoid, if not now, being able to out them, interesting.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But that's exactly what the rules say. If you attempt to cast the spell on a target that doesn't qualify, the spell fails. That's the whole point.

Edit: To be clear, if things were meant to work the way you describe, they would be written differently. For example, they would specify things like "You pick one humanoid you can see..." or similar. Doing it that way, you'd never even be allowed to attempt the spell in the first place, because it just isn't capable of targeting a non-humanoid creature. Your action is aborted before you even attempt it.

The way crown of madness is written is very intentional: trying to use it on a non-humanoid results in the spell being functionally wasted, even though it did in fact fire. This is, quite clearly, the design intent of this spell. There is no reason to include the explicit statement that a non-humanoid automatically succeeds on the saving throw if it weren't intended that a non-humanoid would automatically succeed, and thus waste the spell.

Although, if it did require you to target a humanoid, it would functionally act as a counter-intuitive, off-label humanoid detector...