Once you step out of trying to imagine a Platonic "Well Designed Adventure" and look at the more practical al question of utility for how most people apparently play, the perspective shifts a fair bit.
There seems to be an idea here that every building is perfectly built, that every THING needs to be perfect and optimized. That's just not how the works works.
It's funny that my analysis of this encounter from
Radiant Citadel is characterized as a desire for a Platonic ideal (no small comparison from an Action Philosopher) or an overdeveloped need for optimization. All I did was read the environment that Justice Arman asked me to imagine and refer to the rules he told me to use. Right away, I saw problems with what he proposed and the instructions he gave me to run this encounter.
If the designers of the game don't want me to use the rules they're telling me to use in their published products, then they shouldn't make specific references to those specific rules. As I said earlier, just tell me that everyone's using a "flying carpet" rather than a
carpet of flying. If I were a game designer, though, I'd want my professional reputation to rest on the ability to create fun using the rules of the game. Isn't that the point of being a
game designer? If some DMs out there want to use my published design loosely, ignoring the parts they don't like, there's nothing I can do to stop that. But I wouldn't be trying to design with those DMs in mind. Why not write for the people that do use the rules? You're serving more of the audience that way.
This is all very nice but have you stopped to consider that maybe these mages don’t have misty step and fly? They have a flying carpet… so why would they waste a spell slot with fly when the flying carpet isn’t requiring concentration and can hold multiple people.
I understand designing heists that assume players might have access to key spells. However the NPCs capabilities are entirely within the DMs capabilities. Criticising an adventure for this is a bit weaksauce in my opinion. One of the my biggest criticisms of wizard discussions in 5e is that they assume all spells are ubiquitous. Just because PCs simplify their growing spell knowledge by gaining 2 spells per level it doesn’t mean NPCs act the same.
You may not have understood what I wrote. Maybe you don't have
Radiant Citadel.
I know that the wizards have
misty step and
fly because WotC tells me they do. There's a CR6 Mage stat block published in the Basic Rules that is being referenced by the designer in this encounter. When I go to the published stat block to run these mages, I see those spells listed as their standard memorized spells.
As for the
carpet of flying, the wizards didn't arrive with it. Part of the text of the adventure reads:
"These two [wizards] have squeezed through a window in the [backroom] that's disguised from the outside. They've riffled through the space and found not just the samovar they've been searching for but also a
carpet of flying [the merchant] has been trying to sell for months. The rug merchant foolishly scribed the rug's command word , 'baalaa', on the carpet's tag."
They only have the
carpet because they conveniently found it in the shop. Of course, for
this bit of narrative to work, the wizards would have had to cast
detect magic to notice the magical carpet. Fortunately,
detect magic is one of the spells listed in the Mage stat block and it would make sense for them to cast it, since the samovar/McGuffin they're looking for is magical.
What's frustrating is that Arman could have made this point without wasting much space. He might have written:
"These two [wizards] have squeezed through a window in the [backroom] that's disguised from the outside.
They cast detect magic and found not just the samovar they've been searching for but also a
carpet of flying [the merchant] has been trying to sell for months. The rug merchant foolishly scribed the rug's command word , 'baalaa', on the carpet's tag."
It's a small change, but it signals that the game designer knows they're designing an encounter to be used with the rules of D&D. EDIT: What I mean is that it would signal that the designers understand the rules they're telling the DM to use.
I agree that the encounter described sounds... "under optimized." But locate object is not an "I win" button -- you get 10 minutes to get within 1000 feet of something you have seen within 30 feet. Hope they did not put it in a lead-lined box!
Agreed, but "let's use
locate object" is the right mindset to design for. An earlier comment suggested that D&D's design team shouldn't be expected to design scenarios or encounters that function as puzzles that need to be solved. I agree that
some scenarios don't need that sort of design, but heists seem like a bit of an exception. The heists we love from TV and movies
do present a sort of puzzle that the protagonists have to defeat in a clever way. Remember how elaborate the plan is in
Ocean's Eleven? It requires that an
acrobat with an
oxygen supply be smuggled into the vault to work it from the inside. They detonate a
small EMP device, for Pete's sake.
I certainly don't think that the
Golden Vault designers need to have a specific, particular sequence of actions for success in mind when designing their heists. But they need to have tried their best to account for the spells and resources that a D&D party might bring to bear. EDIT: The best designs would those where the designers
do understand that the PCs might want to use a particular spell or ability and call that out to the DM. In other words, understand what tactics the players might use and explicitly build paths to success based on those tactics (and be sure to tell the DM about it so that they can be on the lookout for opportunities to reward the PCs).
They have to give me the sense that they
tried, a feeling that I absolutely didn't get in this encounter from Justice Arman. Show me that you thought of some (most?) of the ways the players might throw a wrench into my plans. Well, they've not even
my plans, are they? They're the plans that the designer has given to me! That's what I need as the DM behind the screen when I'm actually running the scenario.
Unfortunately for them, D&D's design makes this a difficult thing to do! So they get some leeway. But if I'm going to leave it to the professionals, I want a professional job.
