Stop Giving Monsters Spell Slots I'm Begging You

A little under a year ago, in the summer of 2023, my friend Marshall asked me for advice on picking a tabletop game for him to run. I threw Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (the best game ever), and I was talking about the monsters, using the Lich as my example. In particular, here I want to look at the special abilities: notice how the Fourth Edition lich has five separate ones, each contained in a few sentences at most. It all fits in that one column. It does what it says it does.

Compare that to the versions from Fifth Edition or Old School Essentials. Rather than have discrete special abilities, each Lich instead uses the same spellcasting rules as the players, complete with using the same spells! Heck, in OSE it goes even further and it just says they cast as a 14th-level Magic User. This means that at any given turn, the DM playing the lich can have up to a dozen options, and also (due to Law of Lifetime of NPCs) the lich might not get to fire off all of its cool stuff before the encounter is over, one way or the other. 5th Edition and Pathfinder (both editions) are rampant with this, and frankly, I hate it. It led me when I ran those games to avoid encounters with spellcasters entirely, or else just not use them to their full potential. 

This approach does have its advantages, obviously. It allows for greater verisimilitude in some cases, because everything is playing by the same rules. It also works narratively, reinforcing (in this case) the Lich’s role as a fallen wizard. But I also just…can't be bothered to flip through the Player’s Handbook, especially since my table usually has one of those. Two if I’m lucky. This is part of why Monster of the Week and other games like it blew my mind as a young man. You could just say how many hit points a monster had, and what their special abilities were. It’s basic stuff, I know, but growing up in the incredibly rigid structure of Pathfinder 1E’s Organized Play program, it was a revelation. …oh right, this is an OSR blog, huh? I should probably post some OSR stuff. Lots of OSR stuff (from my beloved Black Hack to Cairn to even other OSE monsters) are great about this, and honestly, I think that framework as a whole is just better for slapping on special abilities. Natural language debate aside, the looser structure of the rules just generally allows for more bespoke weird bullshit. Which I guess is my point. Whenever you want a monster or trap or whatever to have a fancy special effect, just make it its own thing instead of flipping through the spell list.

Also, thank you to Personable Thoughts for the OSE Lich screenshot, so y'all don't have to look at an ugly cell phone photo! His stuff is great, go check it out.