this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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IMO this is one of those things that the player should be told to roll a relatively easy Knowledge check for first, unless it's being presented as a new development in-universe (and then the DM should probably have engineered a less lethal way to introduce it). Wizard schools presumably hand out "creatures not to nuke" lists to their students...
The only time that I've seen this monster introduced into a story is through the "story" that's built into Strixhaven. I use that word very fucking loosely because they leave an enormous amount of work to the DM. At any rate, that story is across several years in a magical Hogwarts-y school. In Year 2 or 3 they gain access to this big boggy area and have to go looking for shit. While spending time out there they can come across tracks and stuff of these monsters. I think there's something that also says a professor is supposed to mention something vague about these types of monsters.
In that case the expectation is that the players have just been paying attention to the game in general.
Otherwise yeah I agree in having a roll although only if the player asks for one. If they fire off the spell first without thinking and then inquire I would still allow the roll but the spell is cast. Only thing you'd get from that is advantage on the dex save.
Hahaha. We just spent several months of game time (and several years of real time) taking a succubus-esque thing around with us because we didn't listen to some NPCs at the very beginning and thought she was just a hostage we were rescuing. The GM spent so much time slowly building her up and making her ever so slightly more evil to see when we'd finally notice. Turns out it took literally mind controlling one of our named NPCs that worked in the circus. Boy, did we feel bad afterwards. We still didn't know she was a succubus, we thought she was just an asshole, so we fired her. The GM let us know afterwards. There was no detail about her in the book other than the initial encounter, we were just supposed to kill her.
So yeah. Paying attention. We don't really do that...
This is the kind of thing I love.
My problem is all my friends have kids now, so I can only get them together like once a month, but then a third of the time someone is sick so we delay, but now it's two months sober our last session and nobody can remember why we were angry at that ferret the druid is now holding not why it has the wizard's hat.