It is tremendously important to recognise that Dungeons & Dragons is primarily a game that involves rules. While, as Gary Gygax notes, that the game in unlike Chess in that the rules aren’t cut and dried – they are, in many instances, cut and dried.

The genius of Dungeons & Dragons is that you can go beyond the rules.

However, without the framework of the rules – and, in particular, the combat rules – you end up in a situation of “please the DM”, otherwise known as the “Mother, May I?” syndrome.

This type of play is typified by any action the players do requiring the DM to sign off on it. It might be at its worst in situations like trap-finding, when the DM has a particular idea of how something can be found and if the players don’t use that exactly, they fail at the task.

The situation deteriorates when the players become aware that the DM is favouring one player over another. One player always solves the problems, the others rarely succeed.

When this become apparent, then why continue to play in that group? It may be conscious or unconscious on the part of the DM, but any situation where the players don’t have recourse to a set of rules determining their success admits this possibility.

Now, because the game is Dungeons & Dragons, the rules are never going to cover everything. There’s always a place for the DM to make judgement calls. I’ve made many good judgement calls over the years, and some absolutely terrible ones as well. (And, at the time, I’d insist they were the right ones. Only in retrospect did it become apparent what an ass I had been).

The answer is not to eliminate the DM from the equation. If you do that, you don’t have the genius of D&D. However, it behooves the DM to be aware of the potential for disaster, and to ward against it.

This has been brought to mind by a couple of recent events. The first is a DM reported as saying they don’t track hit points for monsters, instead letting the players kill them when it is dramatically appropriate. It’s hard to express what a terrible idea I think that is. All my experiences with power-tripping DMs rise up and revolt against it. It’s something completely antithetical to the game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Except when it works.

Because that’s the sort of combat that you get in the Amber Diceless RPG, which is my second-favourite RPG of all time! Hmm.

It’s still something I’m not fond of as part of D&D, but give the DM the right group and things are okay. (Though I would want the players to know about it in advance and be okay with it. Deceiving them that their character builds and dice rolls matter? Not something I endorse).

The second event is the announcement that Wizards are going to redesign the statblocks of monsters who can cast spells to include the details of their key spells. This is all well and good except that the examples we’ve seen omit one important detail – that these abilities are spells.

Now, you may have seen the headlines that Wizards are nerfing counterspell as a result. This is true, and were that the only side effect, I wouldn’t be as concerned.

However, because of how they’ve written the rules, it also means these “spells” are no longer magical either! (If you’re curious about why, check the Q&A in the Sage Advice Compendium about whether a dragon breath is magical). And that has a lot of problematic interactions because there are several abilities – like magic resistance and anti-magic aura that rather care about whether something is magical or not.

This then causes a disconnect – the game says the characters can care about stopping enemies spellcasters. But then it works against it by having opponents that are obviously spellcasters – that can’t be counteracted. This isn’t something I support.

It might be that the best solution for this is for the stat blocks to explicitly say what the abilities are. This is one thing that 3E did well: it used two-letter categories of Ex (Extraordinary), Su (Supernatural) and Sp (Spell-like) to categorise all abilities. Extraordinary abilities were non-magical. Supernatural were magical but couldn’t be countered. Spell-like were magical and could be countered.

With how counterspell and other anti-magic powers work, it probably would be useful to say “Sp5” or similar – counts as a 5^th-level spell.