If your PC has the ability to turn into a fly, then the game has deliberately given them some amazing stealth and scouting capabilities. I say this is working as intended.
How does a DM deal with players who look for these wild ideas?
I think it’s fine to think outside of the box and metagame. But does it end up in a slippery slope where it feels like the players just want to outthink every encounter where it’s just a rube Goldberg set of plays?
Imo this is firm “you can get away with it exactly once” territory. It’s clever, so it should be rewarded. But after the once every lord will mysteriously have anti-shape shifting wards.
I immediately thought about guards with wands of detect magic. Then I realized we’ve reinvented the TSA.
Personally I think the players coming up with some cool new trick for each encounter sounds pretty good. The problem is when they find one cool new trick that works for everything. Like, casting Create Water in someone’s lungs sounds awesome the first time you do it, but you don’t want a whole campaign of just that. But even if the players agree that that would be boring, it’s hard not to do that without justifying why it wouldn’t work, and if it wouldn’t work every time, why would it have worked the first time?
Create water doesn’t work inside a person because all living things inherently have enough magical ability to resist spells cast on or in their person. Damage dealing spells have to be specifically designed to work on people, or they have to be able to attack someone by applying an external force.
If you’re not a fan of this type of behaviour, I recommend playing a TTRPG that isn’t D&D.
D&D has gotten a bit of an “LULLZRANDOM!!11!!” reputation, possibly because of the content creators needing something whacky to get views, or just because of how mainstream it is. If you need to stand out in a crowd of thousands being extreme, novel, or whacky has the lowest effort for the highest reward.
If everyone at the table finds the game fun, then you are playing correctly. I find this behaviour exhausting and would tell the players that it needs to stop unless someone else wants to GM.
What would examples of alternative TTRPGs be? And what characteristics would they have that would prevent the “LULZRANDOM We’re breaking the system” type of gameplay?
I’m thinking maybe crunchier and more in-depth rules ala Pathfinder or GURPS, since the barrier-to-break is much higher due to having to read more, but I’m just guessing as a relative ttrpg novice here haha
I am not here to shit on D&D. If you’re having fun, then it’s the right game for you and your table.
D&D is a rules medium game that is based around combat, but isn’t great at combat being balanced at combat where every PC is basically immortal. The game itself doesn’t really set a tone, which makes different people have different expectations of what the game “should” be.
Because of it not-quite-being-great at anything, people tend to want to push limits, or add homebrew.
Edit: A rules lite system with a set tone will also prevent this level of silly, if that’s not what you want
I would instead lean more into the FATE direction. They are more open for interpretation and thus allow the DM more control.
Spells there don’t necessarily specify transforming your weapons. The DM would maybe allow it but doesn’t have to. Some of those games don’t even have a spell list, so no definitive way to know, your spell idea works or even exists (unless you did it before).
If you’ve got the right DM for it, they lean into it, because everyone’s having fun.
But say by adventure 10, they’re still trying to beat the system. It feels exhausting trying to create a story like “A vampire council, but they have anti-magic doors so you can’t disguise yourself. And also no rats. And you can’t teleport in there. And summoning a devil or warping the castle is forbidden. And…”
In a world where magic exists and anti-magic countermeasures are a thing do you think any reasonably powerful person wouldn’t have them in place? It seems like you’re trying to come across as ridiculous but all of those sounds like pretty reasonable precautions in a magical world.
Always look a gift horse in the mouth
Are flies beasts in 5e?
I know that wouldn’t fly in 3e.
There is a honeybee statblock in Wilds Beyond the Witchlight. Also a regular spider in the Monster Manual, which could work just as well. Apparently the average spider in the Forgotten Realms is poisonous enough to have a 15% chance of immediately killing an average commoner with a single bite
Nah, more dangerous. People rarely die of spider bite down here in Australia. Been like 8 deaths to the world’s most deadly spider over recorded history. Sure, that number is probably artificially low cos back in the old days some bites would’ve just been written off as a heart attack etc, but it’s still surprisingly low compared to say deaths by cow etc.
