Tonight, for the first time in over a month, we were able to play the D&D campaign in which I am a player, rather than DM. We fought a plant creature from The Creature Codex, one of Kobold Press' 5E monster books, called a Jinmenju. My best friend, who is the DM in that campaign, has talked about running that monster for a long time, and so while I didn't want to meta-game, as soon as I heard some of its description (specifically, a tree with fruits that look like heads and that charms creatures into sitting beneath it until they waste away) I knew what we were looking at. But I made a point not to look at the stat block.
Finding the tree surrounded by dozens of starving villagers from the severely depopulated town we had stopped in, we made an attempt to talk the tree into letting people go, but it wasn't going to happen, so we fought it.
We did win. But it occurred to me that the design of this monster is something I'd try to avoid.
Now - to be fair - we rolled like dogshit on a bunch of saves. The Jinmenju has two lair actions, which each replicate different spells - Charm Person and Confusion - against basically everyone nearby. It also has a legendary action (that takes two actions) that can inflict the incapacitated condition on creatures that are near its roots (it's immobile, but can manifest roots around it to attack people in melee).
Had it not been for a lucky roll when I got Confused and the tree (and the DM) forgetting that I had failed against the Charm Person effect, I would have not been able to do anything during that fight. One of our paladins literally got to do nothing the entire fight.
It...
Story-wise, it was a cool and creepy monster.
As a combat encounter, it was frustrating.
The dice tell a story, of course. And sometimes, things go wrong. But I think this fight - and again, largely due to bad luck on dice rolls (though as I only have +2 to Wisdom saving throws and the DCs here were 16, I was kind of bound to fail most of them) - demonstrated to me how some monsters, or rather, some mechanics, can be un-fun.
In MCDM's Designing the Game series, there's a video about The Null Result, and another about how they're thinking about the Attack action in their in-development monster-hunting fantasy TTRPG. Talking about this, Matt Colville identifies a problem in D&D, which is that it really sucks when you wait for your turn, roll an attack, and with too low a number, nothing happens.
The solution he presents, which may or may not make it into their system, is one in which a failed attack causes the creature who has been attacked to counter-attack (or, in strict game language, simply "counter"). Even though it's bad, it means that something, at least, happened on your turn.
If missing with an attack feels bad, stun, incapacitated, and even charm effects can be even worse, because you didn't even get the chance to make an attack roll. The only option is failure.
(In another video they also talk about using 2d6 as their default "decision-making dice" as opposed to a d20, which cuts down on swinginess, but that's another topic.)
And in this fight tonight, it didn't feel great. Again, I might not have felt this way if we had rolled better on our saves. The damage the monster did to us was strong, but not overwhelmingly so.
But so much of the combat was spent being unable to do things.
Not to be a total cultist for MCDM, but I think one of the principles in their monster design in Flee, Mortals was to generally avoid things like Stunning or Incapacitating player characters. The book uses the Dazed condition, which it looks like official D&D content will also bring in with the 2024 Core Rulebooks. Dazed means you have to choose between action, bonus action, and movement, which is a big limitation, but you still get to make a decision and do something on your turn.
Even a creature like a Night Hag (MCDM's version being an actual Fey with sleep-themed powers) has charming and mind-affecting effects, but these don't prevent the characters from doing something: Vicious Visions (a 1/day bespoke spell) is a cone-charm spell, but it also causes affected creatures to see allies as enemies, and then the effect ends if they damage another creature. So, the player is charmed and can't attack the hag (or her allies) but the player gets to do something, and doing that something is going to, on one hand, hurt an ally, but on the other hand, get them back in the fight. Likewise, the Night Hag's "Aren't You Tired?" reaction lets them impose some big restrictions, removing reactions and giving disadvantage on attacks, but the character still gets to at least try to do stuff.
And I think this is a smart way to make monsters fun to fight. "Crowd control" is a longstanding tradition in RPGs, but especially in the slow-paced world of tactical combat games like D&D, removing a character's ability to do anything cuts into that fantasy of being a hero.
It's not about not wanting to fail - a game (and a story) needs the stakes of failure to make the successes feel good.
But if you're in a state where, after fifteen minutes you finally come back around to your turn and... you can't do anything, we just skip it, that doesn't feel like you're participating in the story. It's a cutscene.
I don't think this is an obvious problem. But I do appreciate that the folks at MCDM seem to have noticed it, and I think it'll be a big part of the way that I homebrew monsters in the future. The game's fun when you get to do things. Not doing things... generally not fun.
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