Disclaimer time…

This feature is the result of a rather intense discussion that popped up in my supporter Discord server. While it was certainly a productive discussion, there came a point where it was clear we weren’t all going to reach a point of agreement on everything. That’s fine. I don’t care. People can disagree with me. I can disagree with others. The world keeps spinning.

But it puts me in a bind here.

You see, the discussion made me realize that some people may be misreading or misunderstanding monster statblocks in roleplaying games. And I don’t mean misreading the stats or the mechanics. I think people might not grok what stat blocks mean and what they don’t about the monsters they represent. This is especially problematic in modern Dungeons & Dragons, and I want to clear it up because the monster design in modern D&D is one of the things it gets righter than any other game out there. D&D’s monster design is one of the things that keeps pulling me back whenever I switch systems.

Some folks might think I’m using my site to win an argument I couldn’t win in my Discord. I’m not. I would never do that. I don’t care about proving myself right. That’s not high on my list of motivations. I want to empower people to run the best damned games they possibly can, but only inasmuch as they want my help. That’s why I actually do walk away from arguments once it seems like they’re just going in circles. I don’t prize winning enough to burn that energy. I can only tell you what I think. You can use it or you can not. I will listen to and consider disagreement, but if it doesn’t sway me, that’s not because I’m refusing to listen. It’s just that I don’t think the argument was strong enough.

Not that any of this shit matters, and not that this is even really about the argument. This is me seeing a few people holding a misconception that I think needs fixing if you want to run the best damned game you can, and assuming other people in the world might have the same misconception.

Meanwhile, rest assured that I settled all this shit up privately with the primary antagonist in that little debate, and that I am tackling this topic with permission.

The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

There’s this excellent blog called The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, and its publisher, Keith Amman, has also made a whole thing of writing books. Good for him. Check that shit out.

The blog offers Game Masters strategic and tactical advice about running different monsters at the Dungeon & Dragons table. That’s great because most Game Masters have less tactical acumen than your average armchair League of Legends enjoyer. But the title actually hides a very clever point about how Game Masters, in their zeal to make the best decisions for their games, often fuck everything up.

Clever Game Masters often notice that there are definitely effective strategies and powerful synergies built into modern D&D stat blocks. Actually, there’s a lot of good game design baked into them, but I’ll get back to that. The problem is that when a too-smart Game Master sees strategies and synergies on the statblock for some brainless nothing like a spider or a zombie or a sentient blob of acid, they conclude that the monster is just too stupid to use such strategies. So, they play the monster stupid. Which is stupid.

Does being smart and sentient give you better tactical acumen? Yes. Wait, actually, no. It gives you a higher potential tactical acumen, but unless it’s developed, it’s useless. See what I said above about most Game Masters, and also consider every player ever. Sentience doesn’t equal tactical acumen. Moreover, intelligence is actually a bigger boon to strategy than tactics. What it does is let you consider more complex long-term decisions and make more complex value judgments. The moment-to-moment fight-or-flight-and-how-best decisions that comprise tactics aren’t as much a function of intelligence.

Spiders, for example, are amazing hunters. Evolution has been iterating on the spider’s hunting prowess for 300 million years. Longer if you count pre-spiders. You, meanwhile, with all your intelligence and free will, you didn’t even finish that Skillshare coding class so you could make a video game in Unity, get rich like Team Cherry, and quit your shitty job. Zombies don’t know much, but they know how to consume and eat the dead. Evil magical spirits are optimizing them for that shit.

That’s the point behind Amman’s clever blog name. It reminds you that your monsters know how to use their abilities and skills to best effect. It’s similar to my old adage: build your combat encounters fair, but play them to win. As a Game Master, use the best damned tactics you can. Playing stupid isn’t reasonable or realistic; it just makes your game suck.

Keep that in mind as you read the following discussion. Specifically, take note that Game Masters often fall into the trap of sabotaging their games because, in trying to be too smart and with the best of intentions, they often end up doing really stupid-ass things.

The Shackled Hag

Angrican @KirielNailo, who prefers to be called Kiki, came into my supporter Discord server and sought help with an issue of a lack of Game Mastering foresight.

You see, Kiki’s D&D players were preparing for their initial fight with an arch-hag as described on MM(2024) 21. Currently, Kiki’s players didn’t have the magical gewgaw that made the wannabe Baba Yaga killable, so they were walking into a fight they couldn’t finish. You see, every arch-hag has a secret weakness that saps them of the magic that makes them unkillable. Without it, you can stab, slash, shoot, poison, pierce, and torch an arch-hag all you want; it won’t kill her dead.

What Kiki’s players did have, though, from an earlier, unrelated adventure, was a set of dimensional shackles as described on DMG(2024) 254. Dimensional shackles are enchanted prison jewelry you can slap on an incapacitated foe that can’t be removed and prevent the foe from using any kind of teleportation ever. Kiki had forgotten this item was floating around the party stash.

The problem is that an arch-hag’s invulnerability is mechanically encoded in a trait called spiteful escape. If the arch-hag is reduced to 0 HP, but that particular witch bitch’s kryptonite isn’t present, she’s instead reduced to 1 HP and instantly teleports away to a secret, extra-dimensional hidey-hole for a fortnight to plot her revenge. She also bestows a nasty curse on all those present as she disappears, cackling across the veil of reality.

So Kiki was afraid of the players finding some way to temporarily incapacitate the hag for a round and then slapping those dimensional shackles on her and then… well… and then what? That was what Kiki wanted to know. Then what?

There followed some discussion about Kiki using the power of Game Mastering fiat to just say dimensional shackles don’t work on arch-hags. It’s kind of like how Gygax prevented elves from detecting secret doors in Tomb of Horrors. “It doesn’t work because screw you, that’s why.”

But then, I showed up, the hero that gaming needs, but doesn’t want, but definitely deserves, because it knows what it did. I pointed out that there’s nothing to fiat away and no problem to worry about. Actually, there might be a problem, but it’s the players’ problem.

The only thing dimensional shackles do is block teleportation. That’s it. They do not bind, restrict, or inconvenience their victim in any other way. The picture even shows they have really long chains. They’d be a pain to wear and probably uncomfortable, but they wouldn’t stop you from doing anything other than teleporting away.

So, say the players do manage to get those shackles on Баба Стерва¹ there? What now. Well, she can’t use her various teleporty powers like dimension door and plane shift. But what if they then drop her to zero hit points? Well, she’d instead drop to one hit point because she can’t die, and then… she’d stick around. She wouldn’t even fall over. The players will have managed to trap a now furious and desperate unkillable immortal that can still claw them and throw lightning and curse them and try to hypnotize them to take off the shackles and counter their spells and everything else.

That is not the story of heroes who found a cheaty way to win; it’s the story of heroes realizing that they miscalculated badly. And man, did I ever want to be there to see it play out. Because it’d be hilarious.

My analysis, though, raised an interesting question, and this is where Kiki and I and several others ended up in a very serious disagreement, which I eventually bowed out of because it was just going in circles. This is also where I think lots of Game Masters have a blind spot when it comes to interpreting the meaning behind stat blocks.

Kiki noted that, with the dimensional shackles on, Strega Stronza² was no longer forced to disappear, cackling and cursing on the way out, and then spend a fortnight licking her wounds and plotting her revenge. She could effectively hold her ground forever. The party would have to either flee or die. So, would not a particularly wily arch-hag not obtain some dimensional shackles of her own and put them on voluntarily to prevent her spiteful teleport from carrying her away from a fight she couldn’t lose.

I agreed that, technically and game mechanically, that was a correct read, but that 魔女アマ³ would never do that. No sane arch-hag would voluntarily wear dimensional shackles even if she knew she could remove them at a moment’s notice. It wouldn’t make strategic or thematic sense, and it was bad from a gameplay perspective.

No arch-hag would seek to circumvent her own spiteful teleport because it’s not a compulsion, it’s a choice. It’s just not a choice you, the Game Master, are allowed to make.

Because sometimes, the monsters know better than you.

¹ Baba Sterva (Баба Стерва), lit. “witch bitch.”
² Strega Stronza, lit. idem.
³ Majo Ama (魔女アマ), lit. as per supra n. 2.

The Stat Block as Game Code

The arch-hag’s stat block clearly says the arch-hag has no choice about the whole spiteful teleport thing. It’s a triggered ability. It must happen. Or does it…

What the stat block actually says is that you, the Game Master, must make the spiteful teleport happen. It tells you nothing about why it happens or whether it’s a compulsion or a curse or a choice the arch-hag makes. Except that the text does make it clear that this is the arch-hag’s doing.

Consider this from MM(2024) 20…

Even if the arch-hag is brought low, its preparations allow it to magically slip away and begin plotting its revenge.

She’s not forced to vanish, she’s allowed to. The preparations she voluntarily made by her foresight, based on her motives and her own strategic reasoning, make it possible for her to escape at that particular moment. Or, in theory, any moment. Except it’s the moment when the combatants go from annoyance to potential problem.

The arch-hag always makes that choice; you, the Game Master, are not allowed to say otherwise.

It all makes perfect sense when you read all the crap that’s written before the statblock. When you read how arch-hags think, what they value, and how they fit into the world. They’re not warriors; they don’t like to fight. Even if they can win on the technicality of being totally unkillable, that’s still not how they want to spend a day if they can avoid it. They’re also pretty mean-spirited bitches. They prefer torment to death, psychological torture to physical pain, cursing instead of killing, and they’re pretty damned vengeful. For a mortal, death is a release; the real torment is living with the consequences of whatever deal you made.

So hags will fight when cornered or if they can make quick work of a nuisance, but if the battle goes on too long or they’re hitting a stalemate or if there’s a risk the party has some hidden ace up their assholes, she’s gonna nope the hell out and stay away until the heat meter resets. By choice. That’s how she do.

That thing about her not being able to return for 2d6 days? It’s not her being hedged out of reality. That’s the game telling you, the Game Master, that she’s going to hide out for at least that long. That’s how long it takes Archibelda Haggenstine — I ran out of foreign languages from which I knew both the word for ‘witch’ and the word for ‘bitch’, sorry — that’s how long it takes Archibelda Haggenstine to feel safe enough to return to her lair. Again, you don’t get to override her.

The Best Way to Play the Monster is the Right Way to Play It

As I said, I love the monster design in modern D&D. One of the things I love the most about it is that, when the monster’s designed well — whether I designed it or WotC did or some other creator — its personalities and its best strategies are coded into the design. If you play the monster to win, it will behave as that monster should. The better you are at playing to win, the more personality the monsters have.

Flip a few pages ahead to MM(2024) 37. See the berserker there? It has advantage on attacks and saves when it’s bloodied, right? Normal-brained Game Masters recognize that berserkers are more dangerous when they get hurt. Duh. Galaxy-brained Game Masters, though, recognize that, unless you’ve got a single berserker working alone, and when do you ever have that, berserkers will not avoid damage if they’re not bloodied. Strategically, as a Game Master, I want all my berserkers on the field bloodied. So, if an action risks an opportunity attack, I should eat that attack. I shouldn’t avoid it. Which means a berserker’s actions can’t be controlled just because you’re threatening them with a pointy stick. Isn’t that how berserkers be?

Smooth-brained Game Masters, though, play berserkers the way they play everything else: absolutely always avoiding opportunity attacks.

Different monster traits and abilities make you play the monster differently, assuming you’re trying to actually kick the motherloving crap out of your player character party. Compare the way you play creatures like blood hawks with the pack tactics trait to how you play something like a mammoth that gets to knock foes down on a charge and gets a bonus trample attack on anything it knocks down. Consider your thought process when playing a ghoul. Do you use multiattack to bite twice, or do you claw once? If you’ve got a group of ghouls — and who ever heard of one ghoul — the best move is usually for the first ghouls in the wave to try to paralyze someone and then, once someone’s paralyzed, the other ghouls double-bite the hell out of it. Advantage on two attacks plus more than double damage? Hell yes! Yes please!

It ain’t just about strategy, though; it’s also about personality. Sure, the arch-hag can stand toe-to-toe tanking attacks in a physical fight with anything, barring fear of hidden magical whammies, but she still doesn’t want to. She might fight for a little while to protect her lair and because it’s a quick way to solve an adventurer problem, but she doesn’t want to live her life like that, Moreover, even if the risk is really low that the party might reveal some trick or get a lucky incapacitation-and-eternal-imprisonment gambit off, the stakes are too damned high to gamble on that. So, naturally, Baba Isewe goes from, “More pathetic would-be heroes here to take me down? Fine. Let’s do this quick; I’ve got a pot of Gehennan nettle tea on,” to, “Actually, screw this, I’m out. Curses on all of you and know that you will live to regret this for a good, long time,” if the fight goes on for too long.

This is why the exceptions-based approach to monster design invented in 4E is so great. Don’t build monsters like characters, build them like Magic cards. Most only need to last a few rounds anyway, but they need to be distinct in those few rounds. The bigger, more powerful ones just make them more complicated. Maybe Commander cards. I don’t know. I gave up on that cardboard crack years ago. Even with some of the monsters in the 2024 version of the Big Book of Baddies being a bit lackluster, there’s still a lot of gold there, and the principles still apply when you make your own monsters.

Protecting Your Game from You

Despite all the crap I say, I love you guys. In a totally platonic, non-threatening, don’t sue me kind of way, that is. My audience is the best. But you’ve got the same problem that all smart, well-intentioned Game Masters have: sometimes, you’re too smart for your game’s own good. You try to do clever things with the best of intentions, and you break shit. That’s why Keith Amman and I have to keep reminding you not to play your monsters the way you think their Intelligence score demands, but rather play them like they evolved to win a fight.

Build fair, play fair, but play to win.

Of course, if you don’t do that, your game will still be fine. If your berserkers avoid opportunity attacks and your mammoths tank-and-spank, you’ll still show your players a good time. It ain’t no big deal.

But sometimes, it is a big deal. Sometimes, if you play the monster wrong, you can do real damage.

Let’s go back to the arch-hag again. Let’s just pump Strega Gabbiani for all she’s worth. It’s easier than finding another monster to talk about, even if my clever name jokes are getting really strained.

Arch-hags ain’t monsters, they’re villains. They can’t be defeated simply by punching them often enough and hard enough. That makes sense. Arch-hags are creatures of legend. There’s probably only one — or maybe three — in your world at all. She can’t just be a boss fight.

But what happens when the players have their initial confrontation with Winifred Sanderson? They’re supposed to fight her, realize they can’t win, and then retreat to find the secret to killing her once and for all, right? The problem is that players are notoriously thick about getting that message. They don’t decide to flee until it’s already too late. Meanwhile, if you’re throwing an arch-hag at your players, they’re probably at a high enough level to stay in that fight for a long, long, loooooooooooooong time. They can’t kill her, but they can sure keep trying for a lot of game rounds. That gets old fast.

Consider, alternatively, what happens when a Game Master tries to use an arch-hag as a standard boss fight. Say they didn’t do the pre-game reading or ignored it as fluff text and said, “I know how to run a boss fight; that’s all this is.”

To smart Game Masters, spiteful escape is just a tool that lets them set up that initial encounter or protects the players if they skip the research and rush the boss. You can let them do that. But it’s also a safety feature to tell clueless players, “you can’t win, and you’re not allowed to keep trying,” and stop clueless Game Masters from punishing players for playing the adventure in the wrong order, as well as to protect players from a Game Master who tries to use an arch-hag as a standard dungeon boss. That’s why it tells the Game Master the hag can’t come back for a few days and why it curses the player characters. The Game Master is forced to rethink the situation and give the players some room, and the players are likely to retreat and waste some resources lifting curses and, in so doing, probably learn a thing or two about hags from the wise priest that uncurses them.

What happens, then, if you, as a Game Master, use your optimization skills to circumvent spiteful escape with dimensional shackles because you think the hag would treat spiteful escape as a weakness to overcome instead of a best practice strategy. You’re gonna make a mess.

Advice Sucks

“But Angry,” say you all, “Why not just tell Game Masters this? Smart people listen to good advice.”

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Hahahaha. Hahaha. Ahhh…

Thanks. I needed that.

Look, it pains me to say this because I basically support myself by giving advice to supposedly smart people, but advice rarely works, and most people don’t take it. In fact, smart people are the hardest people to give advice to. Trust me. You people are smart, and you people drive me frigging crazy.

This whole thing was a multi-hour, multi-party, heated debate in my Discord server after all.

You can rely on advice and fluff and flavor text and essays and give people choices when the stakes aren’t high. D&D does a lot of that. Hell, that’s most of the entire Dungeon Master’s Guide these days. It’s just hundreds of pages of loose, wishy-washy, pussy advice. That’s why most people don’t even remember what’s in there. Advice is weaksauce.

So, when the stakes are higher, you build the advice into the fabric of the game so that you’ll follow the advice just by playing the game. That’s how we got to the excellent monster design we mostly have with the tactics, strategies, synergies, and personalities built into the statblocks.

But, when it becomes game-breakingly vital that you not get shit wrong, like, say, “this encounter will chew up hours of your game, and the players will take far too long to get the message, and no one will be happy in the end,” that’s when you use hard rules, guard rails, and failsafes. As much as you can, anyway. Because it is the nature of open-ended, tabletop roleplaying games with lots of abilities and monsters and magic items, that weird and problematic interactions will crop up from time to time. Yeah, dimensional shackles break an arch-hag if she decides to use them as a strategy. That doesn’t prove D&D is broken. It’s just sprawling and open-ended.

When players optimize too hard, you, as a Game Master, are rightly wary. It’s your job to be. Tabletop roleplaying games, by their nature, need a wary human brain to keep an eye on things because they’re too complex and too open-ended to not have someone keeping an eye on things. That’s the price you pay for the wonder and joy that is the open-ended roleplaying game.

If ever the optimizer voice starts whispering in your head and saying, “You know, you could combine this monster with this item, and…” you should be very suspicious. You should be more suspicious than you would be of a player with a third-party splatbook saying, “Can I take this feat for my guy?” I’m not saying that every such impulse to increase the challenge by combining interesting game effects is bad, but I am warning you that the devil quotes scripture, and he quotes it in your voice.

The Stat Block Tells You What Does Happen and That’s All

Let me bring this shit to some kind of conclusion and wrap this up with my customary neat little bow.

Monster statblocks do not tell you anything except what happens at the table. They tell you nothing else. They don’t tell you what the monsters can do or what they must do or how they think or why they do what they do. All statblocks tell you is what happened.

See, you might be thinking now that I’m saying that the arch-hag’s stat block tells you how all arch-hags ever must always behave, and that might rub you really wrong. It might rub you the way an analogy that will get me banned from every platform ever might rub you. But that isn’t what I’m saying. I mean, how many arch-hags are there in your world, even? Probably just one. Maybe three if you’re doing the coven thing.

But, again, all the stat block says is that, when the fight got to this point, Grand High Witch Anjelica Huston, magically noped the hell away with a cackle and a curse to plot her revenge, and then things went ominously quiet. It’s your job to explain why that happened.

Do you remember what I told you about running social interaction encounters? I said, “You don’t play the non-player characters; you’re not playing a roleplaying game. You resolve actions and describe the results.” When the players try to bribe the official, you determine the outcome using the rules of the game, and then you portray the result by way of acting out the official’s response. Sometimes, your resolution is down to a judgment call. Sometimes you say such and this is possible. Sometimes you say it isn’t. That’s based on what’s been planted in the game so far. Usually, though, for the good of the game, you use dice and the character’s skills to determine the outcome. But you are not, at any point, making the choices the character would make, like you’re a player playing their favorite self-insert fanfic Mary Sue avatar.

The same’s true for monsters in a fight. You do make strategic and tactical choices for the monster within the bounds of the rules, but when the rules take a firmer hand and say something must happen, that doesn’t mean anything other than that you don’t get a say in determining the outcome. In that case, the outcome is what it is, and it’s your job to make it make sense to the players.

You are executing a game. You are not roleplaying monsters.

 

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To all of my generous financial supporters, thank you for making this and every article possible. Without your support, I’d have to pull the plug on TheAngryGM.com. Thanks, especially, to Angrican-tier supporter KirielNailo for inspiring this discussion and taking my abuse like a champ.