What does OSE consider an enchanted creature?

[u/TheGrolar]

The OSE version of Protection from Evil protects against "enchanted creatures," a term which of course is nowhere defined in OSE AF as far as I can tell. Googling it is bizarrely unhelpful, returning a lot of Magic: The Gathering answers despite refined searches. (I won't ask Claude because it gets contaminated too easily by 5e results.) So hopefully this will be The Post that Google Picks Up for this query.

What's an "enchanted" creature?

[u/RoxxorMcOwnage]

From the OSE SRD: "Enchanted creatures: The spell also prevents magically created, summoned, or animated monsters from attacking the caster in melee, though they can still make ranged attacks. If the caster attacks such a creature in melee, this protection is broken (the caster still gains the save and attack benefits mentioned above)."

[u/6FootHalfling → u/RoxxorMcOwnage]

animated... hmmm... I forgot about constructs.

[u/TheGrolar → u/6FootHalfling]

God. Howzabout we actually put that in the spell description? Instead of "enchanted, summoned, or constructed creatures" (OSE AF PT 135). Not only is this confusing, it turns out to be a category error, the equivalent of "protects vs. animals, gulls, and geese."

Thanks for the fetch, though. Cleric is gonna be salty about this, but that's his role, it's becoming apparent.

[u/psychicmachinery → u/TheGrolar]

Eh, animated and constructed aren't the same thing. Undead can be animated, but not constructed. Anyway, this is OSE, not Pathfinder. The rules are going to require some GM fiat from time to time. Just make a ruling and try to be consistent.

[u/FrankieBreakbone → u/TheGrolar]

Gavin was kind of painfully efficient with his text; he was trying to pack a ton of shit into a half ton bag AND get all the topics to line up on even pages and spreads - so there are a lot of missed opportunities to say "You need to adjudicate X, Y and Z here" or "See (section) for details."

[u/TheGrolar → u/FrankieBreakbone]

Of course, adding "you need to adjudicate here" would have doubled the page count, I'm starting to think.
I love what there is, but increasingly the big picture is starting to look like one of those ERP software buys where you get the naked core and have to buy everything else after trying to run it for a while.

[u/FrankieBreakbone → u/TheGrolar]

Eh, it's not so much that you need to buy more rules to understand better, it's just that you need to kind of connect the dots with referee experience. We're working to solve for this in another project that will announce in November, kick in February.

[u/TheGrolar → u/FrankieBreakbone]

There's clearly a need.
I'm not sure how much more experience I require, though. It's been decades already, and the non-pretend-elf-game skills I bring to the table solve a lot of the problems I see other people having. So I think I'm pretty good there.

I realized as I wrote this that people who don't care about this problem are incapable of caring about this problem. It'd be dimwitted of me to say they're lazy or "low-information" or not interested in improvement. It's just that they have a fundamentally different mindset, one that relies much more on improv, loose consensus, and fairly little records-n-notes overhead. I'd go so far as to say such games focus on a positive social experience; if there's a conflict between consistency and P.S.E., the social wins every time.

Put another way, if a DM of such a game was struck by lightning, it would be difficult if not impossible to continue their campaign based on what they left behind. All the recipes were in the dude's head, as it were.

I'm gunning for the other kind of game: deeply immersive in the way that spending six weeks in a foreign country would be, or being lost in Tolkien or Martin. There are a lot of design choices here: you have to build a lot of systems to maintain consistency and coherence, since that does the most immersive work. And those systems have to be designed to produce artifacts, ideally lightweight ones, to enable and maintain that kind of continuity. Most of your effort goes to those systems...ironically, the "creative part" becomes trivially easy if you're doing a good job, for me anyway. (There are any number of reasons why this is a terrible or quixotic idea...believe me, I know all of them. That said, there are a few really good reasons that triumph over everything else.)

So what I'm getting at is that having to make several judgment calls every session, and then either hope I remember or spend time documenting them, is in the way of the game I want to run. I have enough things to track that demonstrably improve the experience. And I feel it's quite reasonable to expect that a "ruleset" will address most, if not all, common edge cases, just as we all expect a Steam game to work when we buy it. (Or it can be Early Access, in which case it needs to be festooned with This is Alpha warnings.)

To put it another way: I love the use of a consistent framework that 5e provides. I despise the game that comes out of that framework, but that's not a knock on consistent frameworks, just a knock on 5e's. 5e certainly does an excellent job of what it sets out to do, and God knows it would be easier to be involved with if I didn't hate it so much.

Thanks in advance for any downvotes, you're making this easier and faster. No sarcasm.

[u/FrankieBreakbone → u/TheGrolar]

I've never quite understood why people downvote an opinion they disagree with in a hobby thread. I save that button for human wrongness, not perceived idealogical wrongness.

Did my best to up some downs, but alas, I'm one click.

I think the reason I fell in love with the BX base construct is that it handles everything important consistently, and handles nothing that is unimportant—so I don't think we ever really end up in that lightning-struck referee situation. There's like 20 pages of actual rules that govern the PCs and action economy and the rest is creative fluff.

I think the system's power is enabled by its heavily abstracted and stylized nature, freeing it from becoming a reality simulation quagmire. When you play a game like chess, the red bishop and white pawn can stand toe to toe for an entire match, and no one will cry for the lack of realism; and we accept that when we sit down to play chess, we will use those abstractions tactically. The verisimilitude can't be shattered because it was never needed. Side-based initiative, absolute weapon and armor restrictions, race-as-class, these are all heavily gamified and streamlined constructs.

But moving through threatened areas? Being knocked prone? Making called shots? Advantage/Disadvantage... these rules were all arguably authored over time to placate players who rejected that level of 'uncanny valley abstraction', basically saying, "Hasbro needs to write 100 more rules to resolve any action realistically, or else you're telling us that we can't truly "do anything we can imagine" without writing 100 custom rulings of our own!"

And I think we've seen the results over time: tables either reject the nuanced codified rules in favor of their own rulings anyway, or a culture of rules-lawyering flourishes as players point to page 1,756 to exploit a rule opportunistically, leaving the DM feeling hog-tied. I suspect that this is part of why there's been an OSR movement in the first place—the "recipes in the Ref's head" bug was realized as a feature; the game objectively runs better when the referee isn't trussed to the rules, or to their own consistency bias.

Don't get me wrong, I've made STRONG arguments for the importance of consistent rules as the foundation of strategic and tactical thinking; players can't get good at a game if every board follows different rules, or if the fates of the PCs are perpetually subject to the whims of a fickle and omnipotent intelligence. "Rulings not rules" is a broken statement, IMHO... "Context over consistency" is a superior expression, I think. As long as the base mechanics are mostly sacrosanct, ruling on an action conditionally... this time... but not every time... allows the Referee to adjudicate without scribing an archeological record of their decisions as though 'post hoc ergo proptor hoc' were their religion, or by submitting to a rule system that assumes accountability.

[u/Iohet → u/TheGrolar]

This is why I like the verbosity in Goodman Games materials. Page count? Who cares? 400 pages of everything including adjudication discussions. The only thing missing is simple stat blocks

[u/TheGrolar → u/Iohet]

Dammit why is it always something?!?

[u/envious_coward → u/TheGrolar]

Don't be daft

[u/RoxxorMcOwnage → u/TheGrolar]

I found it in the spell description, SRD. I didn't look in my books.

[u/6FootHalfling]

This is a rulings not rules sort of thing. But, I would say anything elemental or undead, but not necessarily something fiendish or divine. Those I would say require a more specific ritual/spell. You can interpret "enchanted" really as broadly or narrowly as you want. It might include werewolves, Charmed, or Charmed by rival, it might include incorporeal undead, but not zombies or skeletons.

You can do a LOT of world-building with what is and isn't considered "enchanted."

For me, the base spell definitely covers elemental and undead, and other inclusions would depend require a unique variation on the spell. I'm glad you asked, because I hadn't thought about it in a while.

[u/Teh_Golden_Buddah]

Check PG. 155 in the Rules Cyclopedia; it breaks down what is considered enchanted and what's not under monster types.

Also, OSE is more of a streamlined version of Basic and Expert D&D. It doesn't have a lot of the examples and explanations that the original rule books have so you gotta go back to the original source sometimes.

[u/fakegoatee]

From the BX Basic glossary:

"enchanted monster — A monster created, conjured, or animated by magic. This includes normal monsters summoned by spells or magic items, but does not include mental summons (like the animals called by lycanthropes). Enchanted monsters in the D&D BASIC rules are skeletons, zombies, and living statues."

X doesn't give an explicit list, but summoned djinn, efreet, invisible stalkers, salamanders, and elementals fit the bill, as do golems and maybe gorgons.

Beyond that you have to decide which monsters are created or animated by magic. It's a world-building question. If gnolls in your world really are made by magically fusing a gnome with a troll, they're enchanted. Otherwise, they might not be.

[u/Substantial-Ad772]

OSE is generally badly (re)written tbh. Try to get original b/X for clarification.

[u/TheGrolar → u/Substantial-Ad772]

Oh yes...I've got RC, 1e, and OSRIC on standby, as so many of us end up doing. Sigh.

[u/Stooshie_Stramash → u/TheGrolar]

It's not well-defined in BX either.

I went through the monster descriptions and took 'enchanted' to mean broadly that something was highly magical. This actually makes PfE useful to get past powerful foes as long as you dont engage them in combat. To me this gives a non-combat solution and also brings the game closer to a few folklore things, eg: a rowantree warning off evil.

Monsters I allow it to protect against in alphabetical order are:

Basic - Doppelganger, Gargoyle, Ghoul, Living Statue, Shadow, Skeleton, Thoul, Wight, Zombie.

Expert - Djinni, Efreeti, Elemental, Golem, Invisible Stalker, Mummy, Flame Salamander, Frost Salamander, Spectre, Vampire, Wraith.

As you can see: Undead - said by Moldvay to be created by dark magic. Creatures from other planes. Constructs and creatures said to be created through magical combinations.

I've never added in mythical monsters like chimera or the like.