Some DMs will say: "don't read the Monster Manual." If you're playing a game in which you're going into the lair of a green dragon and one of the players pops out the Monster Manual to read up on all the abilities that a green dragon has and goes "ok, let's make sure to do a Heroes' Feast so that we can negate the dragon's breath weapon," a DM might feel that's unfair - that the players have taken knowledge from outside the game and used it to overcome (or at least seriously mitigate) one of the challenges they had come across.
But is it unfair?
D&D, especially when it comes to combat, is a strategy game. Its combat is highly tactical, with each action and decision representing calculated risks that the player makes. My Paladin is going to go up to that dragon and hit it with my weapon because I've decided that the risks of getting into melee range of the dragon (namely, getting hit with its melee attacks or its breath weapon) are worth it because the damage I can do to it might help us take it down faster than it can take us down. Maybe I'm going to be even more specific, though, not only approaching it but also making sure that I am standing on the opposite side of the dragon from my Wizard friend - figuring that it can breath on one of us, but not both. That is a tactical decision that, yes, comes with its own risks (by opening distance between us, our Cleric healer might not be able to get to both of us should they need to) but is also probably a sound decision.
Fighting smart comes in two related but separate concepts - tactics and strategy. My paladin's actions in the above example are tactics - the small-scale, in-the-moment decisions that affect the outcome of the fight. But strategy is larger-scale, a question of logistics and planning and broader movements. A General is interested in strategy, leaving tactical decisions to officers that they trust to lead their troops. A lieutenant might concern themselves with how the soldiers under their command will take some river crossing, but it's the general who determined that they needed to control that river in the first place.
For a TTRPG, there's only so much that a DM/GM can do to plan things out - if I'm a DM and I've got some ancient lich who has been orchestrating a plot to take over a nation by instigating a war, I think we can generally assume that most DMs aren't actually as smart as the lich that they're trying to portray.
As such, there's some shorthand. This often involves a kind of "schrodinger's hallway" solution - the illusion of an open world with many options that ultimately lead to the same destination.
I'm getting a little off-topic here.
Going to our first hypothetical, having a player sit there with the Monster Manual in hand, looking up the stats on any monster the DM hints is coming, feels like cheating.
But for some of us, we cannot help but read the Monster Manual in our head. I was a DM well before I was ever a player, and I can tell you that I've memorized that, for example, a green dragon both produces and is immune to poison damage. I know that nearly every devil is fully immune to fire damage and will often be resistant or immune to nonmagical weapons that aren't silvered, whereas a demon tends to have resistance to fire, cold, and lightning damage and its "physical resistance" is typically not affected by whether the weapon is silver or not. I know that acid, while very useful against both of these, will be worthless if you find yourself facing yugoloths, as those neutral evil fiends from Gehenna are immune to it.
Experienced players of D&D will internalize a lot of this information, especially if they've ever run a game of D&D. How, then, do you deal with this?
My answer: you don't.
I think it's fine for players to know a monster's weaknesses and resistances. Yes, when I play a low-intelligence monk, it might be hard to explain why my character would know not to hit the black dragon with acid, but then, he's not likely to do that anyway, given his class.
The point is, this game is not going to be a perfect simulation of a fantastical reality, and we are piloting characters who also benefit from our own knowledge. As a player, you can do your best to simulate the ignorance of the character, but I don't think that you should be required to. Let's not set ourselves up for a situation in which the DM is left suspicious of whether the player is only coincidentally never using damage types the thing is resistant or immune to, or if they're making that choice intentionally - instead, let's just accept that a knowledgeable player will play smart.
But is this an unfair advantage? To a brand-new player, it might be a surprise to learn that not all dragons breathe fire, and they might get very excited when they hit a blue dragon with a lightning bolt, only to find that it does exactly zero (when they could have use fireball and gotten the full effect.)
There are two ways I think we can approach this.
One is that there are tons of ways that experience makes a player more effective. A new player might see a cantrip like True Strike (which at best I think is something a legendary spellcaster might use with a legendary action before casting a powerful spell attack on their turn) and erroneously think it's a good one to pick up, while veterans would see it as a mostly useless trap. I think a good DM will let the player make that mistake, but then be lenient with them if they wish to, say, swap out that cantrip for something better. That same DM might not be so forgiving when a veteran player does the same.
The other thing, though, ties into what I think is an issue with Intelligence-based ability checks in general.
DMs are often too precious, if you ask me, about the specifics of mechanics of their monsters. As a result, a character having a high intelligence and proficiency in various knowledge-based skills often winds up getting, at best, some lore fluff when they succeed on a check. Let's say that the characters go into a hollowed-out tree surrounded by bloated, foul-smelling corpses. I think any decent Nature check should allow the player to know that this is the lair of a green dragon. But that's usually as far as it goes, regardless of how well the person rolls.
I think successful intelligence checks should provide actionable information. If the Artificer gets a 28 on their Intelligence check to see what they know about green dragons, it's all well and good for you to say that they're manipulative and deceptive, like to live in forests, and are generally bad news, but I think you owe it to that player to give them a peek behind the curtain - clearly, what they, as an adventurer who is likely to face a green dragon soon, wants to know, is important information on how to kill it. So, with a good check like that, I think you should be willing to tell them that the dragon's breath is a poisonous cloud and that the dragon itself is immune to any such toxins. You could also throw in that a dragon's breath is unpredictable, sometimes coming back mere moments after their last one, or sometimes taking a few more seconds to recuperate, during which a dragon will either fight with tooth and claw or will take to the skies and create distance until they can unleash the devastating breath again.
The whole fun of the game is the way that these characters develop skills and abilities that allow them to overcome the monstrous obstacles set in their way. As a DM, you're not trying to beat the players. You're trying to present them with exciting challenges that will feel very cool to overcome.
And knowledge is one of the skills that they bring to bear.
That doesn't mean you can't shake things up for your players. I think a DM should assume that at least some players will be able to identify anything you throw at them, especially if they know that the player is an experienced D&D veteran and/or has DM'd before. If you're worried that you can't surprise them, you're not being imaginative enough.
Let's take that green dragon lair. You've got a hollowed-out tree that leads into an underground cavern. Every sign points to the monster within being a green dragon. But when the party gets down to the bottom of it, what if it's actually a Beholder? The Beholder petrified the dragon and took over its hoard, claiming the stony dragon as its own property. Or maybe, there's a powerful illusionist who invented the dragon, and the reason why all the signs point to a green dragon is because this wizard had reasons to make it seem there was one.
Here, the DM can use the party's expectations against them.
And let's also not forget that not every monster is as easily prepared for. A green dragon does have Heroes' Feast as a real Achilles' heel, with the immunity to poison damage and the frightened condition taking some major pieces out of the green dragon's playbook.
But the very preparation that a party makes to face down a particular kind of foe could even tip that foe off. If a spy in the employ of a green dragon sees the party buying a big jeweled chalice, they might suspect its purpose. They report back to the dragon and the dragon responds by having her hoard moved elsewhere and then getting the kobold engineers in her employ to rig the entire lair to be nothing but a death trap.
Now, the challenge is completely different - rather than an angry, poison-breathing dragon, the party finds whirling blades and falling rocks and then, at the end, just a big old pile of barrels filled with smokepowder. A challenge requiring a quick tactical reassessment.
I guess my point here is that I don't find "knowing stat blocks" to be a game-breaking example of metagaming. Embrace it. Build around it.
No comments:
Post a Comment