My group is playing dungeon of the mad mage and they came across the severed left hand of an arch-mage (the 9th level of the dungeon). One of the players asked me how was the hand able to cast spells that require a verbal component with out a mouth. I made the excuse that Halester can do whatever he wants, but I am curious as to how this is justified. My understanding is if there is a verbal component to a spell, and you can not speak, the spell won't work. Thoughts?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
‘A’OHE PU’U KI’EKI’E KE HO’A’O ‘IA E PI’I – (No cliff is so tall it cannot be climbed.)
Given the absence of a statblock for "the arm", as it were, I might suggest that the Innate Spellcasting ability is the culprit here. This ability can contain the phrase:
It can innately cast the following spells, requiring no components:
It's the severed arm of a clone of an archmage that has been turned into an undead guardian. Of course it can cast spells that require a verbal component. (See how easy that was?)
This game is comprised of dragons and make-belive elves. It's not supposed to follow the rules of our world. It can even disregard it's own rules if the result is cool enough. How does this break verisimilitude for your PCs? Or is this just your players metagaming about something?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Does it have spells on its spell list that have verbal components?
Edit: Yes, it does. It uses a modified Archmage stat block. It would be entirely reasonable to say that the hand cannot cast these spells -- it learned them when it was still a living wizard, with a whole body. Without its spellbook it can't prepare new ones, and I'm guessing Halaster isn't giving it access to that.
That said, the adventure really ought to specify that it can't cast them, or just remove them from the list.
The player(s) in question can be a rules lawyer and sometimes has the attitude, “if the npc can do it why can’t I?” With me, I would just like to know the reasoning, if any, so I can explain it (or, do I have to homebrew a reason).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
‘A’OHE PU’U KI’EKI’E KE HO’A’O ‘IA E PI’I – (No cliff is so tall it cannot be climbed.)
The player(s) in question can be a rules lawyer and sometimes has the attitude, “if the npc can do it why can’t I?” With me, I would just like to know the reasoning, if any, so I can explain it (or, do I have to homebrew a reason).
That's bad behavior, and should be stopped. NPCs are allowed to use different rules from PCs all the time. But anyway.
There's no logic to this monster. It just works because the designers didn't feel like going the extra mile to make it make sense under scrutiny. Or it doesn't work at all, depending on your perspective. A hand can't perform verbal components. This hand specifically is stated to not be able to speak, as if that wasn't enough. I'm guessing the writers on DotMM didn't expect anybody to pay attention to this, which is reasonable I guess. Nobody I've ever played with would've probably noticed. In fact we played this adventure and encountered this creature and nobody asked this question.
Most spells require the chanting of mystic words. The words themselves aren't the source of the spell's power; rather, the particular combination of sounds, with specific pitch and resonance, sets the threads of magic in motion. Thus, a character who is gagged or in an area of silence, such as one created by the silence spell, can't cast a spell with a verbal component.
Technically, the ability to say words is not necessary, provided you can create the specific pitch and resonance through another mechanism. If your players push, you can just say that the hand is tapping, cracking its knuckles, scraping, and taking other actions that produce the pitch and resonance necessary for the spell to work. That way, the hand is still using a sound-based mechanism for casting the spell, and thus can be stopped with the Silence spell or the like, but they do not need the physical ability to speak. If your party asks "well, why can't we do that then if we are gagged," you can simply respond "the creature has evolved/is magically modified to be able to make the specific pitches and frequencies necessary to cast the verbal component of the spell--your bones, fingernails, and flesh are simply not tuned properly to make this work."
Or you could just do one of those things where you draw eyes on your forefinger, make a fist, and then use the forefinger and thumb as a mouth.
Most spells require the chanting of mystic words. The words themselves aren't the source of the spell's power; rather, the particular combination of sounds, with specific pitch and resonance, sets the threads of magic in motion. Thus, a character who is gagged or in an area of silence, such as one created by the silence spell, can't cast a spell with a verbal component.
Technically, the ability to say words is not necessary, provided you can create the specific pitch and resonance through another mechanism. If your players push, you can just say that the hand is tapping, cracking its knuckles, scraping, and taking other actions that produce the pitch and resonance necessary for the spell to work. That way, the hand is still using a sound-based mechanism for casting the spell, and thus can be stopped with the Silence spell or the like, but they do not need the physical ability to speak. If your party asks "well, why can't we do that then if we are gagged," you can simply respond "the creature has evolved/is magically modified to be able to make the specific pitches and frequencies necessary to cast the verbal component of the spell--your bones, fingernails, and flesh are simply not tuned properly to make this work."
Or you could just do one of those things where you draw eyes on your forefinger, make a fist, and then use the forefinger and thumb as a mouth.
I played in a game where some NPCs were bug-like creatures that communicated by rubbing some hind legs together, much like a cricket. They had mouths for eating, but no vocal cords and breathed through tracheae on the surface of their bodies. They had no problem casting spells.
The player(s) in question can be a rules lawyer and sometimes has the attitude, “if the npc can do it why can’t I?” With me, I would just like to know the reasoning, if any, so I can explain it (or, do I have to homebrew a reason).
"If an NPC can do it, why can't I?"
Because NPCs work differently than players.
Remember, players can't see the stat block. They can't tell if it has an an ability or if the adventure lore says that before the players encountered the hand it had the lost ritual of y'all'd've cast on it allowing it to cast spells without verbal components-- they have no way of knowing and you as the DM aren't under any particular obligation to tell them. If they make a big stink about it, tell them "don't worry, trust me, it works." And if they say that's unfair, tell them "it's not supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be a challenge."
NPC's, specifically monsters, have always been able to do things the players can't. That's not new or groundbreaking, it just is. That's how you balance combat with 4 players against a single enemy, or how you offset the abilities of the players without just having to give the monsters all the same abilities and throwing the same stuff back at them all boring like. If a player doesn't like that a monster can do something they can't, tell them just to assume the monster has an inborn ability the player doesn't, or that the monster has secret knowledge that the player doesn't.
The player(s) in question can be a rules lawyer and sometimes has the attitude, “if the npc can do it why can’t I?” With me, I would just like to know the reasoning, if any, so I can explain it (or, do I have to homebrew a reason).
If you, as the DM, give a creature an ability - that's the reason. If your PCs have an ability granted them by a class/subclass/feat/magic item, that's the reason they can do the things they can. This is a simple concept all 'round. Things do what they say they do, they don't do anything that isn't described.
I might suggest that you not put too much effort into the "why the creature can do creature things", but instead focus on the actual issue of your rules lawyer. In my experience, people don't usually rally around descrepancies in the rules or the plot unless they are a joyless pedant who cannot suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy an entire episode of the Muppet Show or even an episode of The Mandalorian. If, perhaps, your player feels like there is a contest between them and you (the DM) that might be where the attitude stems from. That or they want to "win D&D".
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Maybe this is just the kind of thing that happens when mad archmages have too much downtime for their own good.
Maybe it's the result of deep sacrifice. Maybe, if your players dedicated enough resources, they could sacrifice their bodies so as to regress into the form of a spellcasting hand as well, if that's really the kind of thing they wanted to work toward.
Manshoon was big into cloning and had the resources of the Zhentarim at his disposal. Who knows how much sacrifice and value was poured into that thing.
Mixed bag between validating the player's criticism and defending the Monster's design, and this is lazy design. They did some mechanics for the "floating hand" monster giving it blindsight, a hover speed and specifically says "can't speak or hear" in the stat block's Language line. Otherwise, besides swapping banishment out for blight, this is the Archmage stat block. It's clear the designers gave no real consideration to v components despite deafening and muting the hand.
I wouldn't have caught this myself, but had I known I would have likely worked this into a monster that could only cast spells manually, so to speak, as a sort of fun design challenge, with the exception of finger of death, because obviously....
So if a player "caught" this, I'd say, yeah it's not the best design but I'm not about to mess with CR by messing with the spells ... it's easy to handwave some sort of presumption that liches over time actually become imbued with innate magic and so this hand's spell capacity are more representative of the magic it is infused with rather than traditional spell casting. As for the equal opportunity objection, the players Wizard is more than welcome to pursue lichdom as a calling but it may take a while to get there, and even longer to get the decades/centuries/millenia of magical practice to get to the point of Manshoon.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Magic is a strange and wondrous thing. The world as we know it still has things that don't know. Research is a way that we can know those things. Mages are creatures that excel at research.
Perhaps this mage has achieved this spell effect in a different way from those that were taught to the PCs. A different teacher may have taught it with a different focus but achieved a similar result. Different gestures may take the place of the more common verbal component. Different words may take the place of a gesture.
The metamagic effects from the sorcerer class get little explanation but achieve a similar result. The same type of situation could be applied here.
Yes, "Its magic" is a reasonable answer but looking at the game system as a whole should provide some insight into possible answers.
The hand took the subtle metamagic feat and the wizard used a wish to give it an infinite number of spell points?
The hand creates sounds needed for casting by snapping its fingers? (there is nothing in the rules to suggest that the V,S,M components required for spells are actually the same for each caster - they could well be different, even unique for each caster or even for each casting of a spell - up to the DM)
The hand is a spontaneous spell caster using innate spellcasting and doesn't require any components because it was built/designed/created that way?
---
Basically, the explanation is up to whatever the DM cares to imagine. NPCs often have different ways to operate than players that can be justified by "magic" much of the time.
My mostly serious response has anyone considered going down the helping hands route from the film labyrinth (clip of them available on YT if you want to have a look)? Basically tthe hands use their fingers or other helping hands to make mouths to talk.
(The not so serious bit)....Alternatively the next time they crop up give them a special action called 'Insulting Gesture' (its a hand, this shouldn't be too hard to guess what the gesture is), target makes a charisma save on a failure the target is stunned for one round as they are so offended by what they have seen.
The hand took the subtle metamagic feat and the wizard used a wish to give it an infinite number of spell points?
The hand creates sounds needed for casting by snapping its fingers? (there is nothing in the rules to suggest that the V,S,M components required for spells are actually the same for each caster - they could well be different, even unique for each caster or even for each casting of a spell - up to the DM)
The hand is a spontaneous spell caster using innate spellcasting and doesn't require any components because it was built/designed/created that way?
---
Basically, the explanation is up to whatever the DM cares to imagine. NPCs often have different ways to operate than players that can be justified by "magic" much of the time.
Who knows? The wizard Manshoon, depending on timing, may have had the entire resources of the Zhentarim at his disposal so there's no way to know what extents of assets may have been used to get what he wanted/needed.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
My group is playing dungeon of the mad mage and they came across the severed left hand of an arch-mage (the 9th level of the dungeon). One of the players asked me how was the hand able to cast spells that require a verbal component with out a mouth. I made the excuse that Halester can do whatever he wants, but I am curious as to how this is justified. My understanding is if there is a verbal component to a spell, and you can not speak, the spell won't work. Thoughts?
‘A’OHE PU’U KI’EKI’E KE HO’A’O ‘IA E PI’I – (No cliff is so tall it cannot be climbed.)
Well, not having a mouth doesn't mean it can't speak, but it should likely have a special trait that says it ignores verbal component requirements.
It could be innate casting or the head may be somwhere else?
Given the absence of a statblock for "the arm", as it were, I might suggest that the Innate Spellcasting ability is the culprit here. This ability can contain the phrase:
It's the severed arm of a clone of an archmage that has been turned into an undead guardian. Of course it can cast spells
that require a verbal component. (See how easy that was?)This game is comprised of dragons and make-belive elves. It's not supposed to follow the rules of our world. It can even disregard it's own rules if the result is cool enough. How does this break verisimilitude for your PCs? Or is this just your players metagaming about something?
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Does it have spells on its spell list that have verbal components?
Edit: Yes, it does. It uses a modified Archmage stat block. It would be entirely reasonable to say that the hand cannot cast these spells -- it learned them when it was still a living wizard, with a whole body. Without its spellbook it can't prepare new ones, and I'm guessing Halaster isn't giving it access to that.
That said, the adventure really ought to specify that it can't cast them, or just remove them from the list.
Edit: Which it doesn't.
The creature has a stat block. It’s from the dungeon of the mad mage-the left hand of Manshoon. https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/left-hand-of-manshoon
‘A’OHE PU’U KI’EKI’E KE HO’A’O ‘IA E PI’I – (No cliff is so tall it cannot be climbed.)
The player(s) in question can be a rules lawyer and sometimes has the attitude, “if the npc can do it why can’t I?” With me, I would just like to know the reasoning, if any, so I can explain it (or, do I have to homebrew a reason).
‘A’OHE PU’U KI’EKI’E KE HO’A’O ‘IA E PI’I – (No cliff is so tall it cannot be climbed.)
That's bad behavior, and should be stopped. NPCs are allowed to use different rules from PCs all the time. But anyway.
There's no logic to this monster. It just works because the designers didn't feel like going the extra mile to make it make sense under scrutiny. Or it doesn't work at all, depending on your perspective. A hand can't perform verbal components. This hand specifically is stated to not be able to speak, as if that wasn't enough. I'm guessing the writers on DotMM didn't expect anybody to pay attention to this, which is reasonable I guess. Nobody I've ever played with would've probably noticed. In fact we played this adventure and encountered this creature and nobody asked this question.
Verbal components are defined as follows:
Most spells require the chanting of mystic words. The words themselves aren't the source of the spell's power; rather, the particular combination of sounds, with specific pitch and resonance, sets the threads of magic in motion. Thus, a character who is gagged or in an area of silence, such as one created by the silence spell, can't cast a spell with a verbal component.
Technically, the ability to say words is not necessary, provided you can create the specific pitch and resonance through another mechanism. If your players push, you can just say that the hand is tapping, cracking its knuckles, scraping, and taking other actions that produce the pitch and resonance necessary for the spell to work. That way, the hand is still using a sound-based mechanism for casting the spell, and thus can be stopped with the Silence spell or the like, but they do not need the physical ability to speak. If your party asks "well, why can't we do that then if we are gagged," you can simply respond "the creature has evolved/is magically modified to be able to make the specific pitches and frequencies necessary to cast the verbal component of the spell--your bones, fingernails, and flesh are simply not tuned properly to make this work."
Or you could just do one of those things where you draw eyes on your forefinger, make a fist, and then use the forefinger and thumb as a mouth.
I played in a game where some NPCs were bug-like creatures that communicated by rubbing some hind legs together, much like a cricket. They had mouths for eating, but no vocal cords and breathed through tracheae on the surface of their bodies. They had no problem casting spells.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
EXTENDED SIGNATURE!
Doctor/Published Scholar/Science and Healthcare Advocate/Critter/Trekkie/Gandalf with a Glock
Try DDB free: Free Rules (2024), premade PCs, adventures, one shots, encounters, SC, homebrew, more
Answers: physical books, purchases, and subbing.
Check out my life-changing
"If an NPC can do it, why can't I?"
Because NPCs work differently than players.
Remember, players can't see the stat block. They can't tell if it has an an ability or if the adventure lore says that before the players encountered the hand it had the lost ritual of y'all'd've cast on it allowing it to cast spells without verbal components-- they have no way of knowing and you as the DM aren't under any particular obligation to tell them. If they make a big stink about it, tell them "don't worry, trust me, it works." And if they say that's unfair, tell them "it's not supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be a challenge."
NPC's, specifically monsters, have always been able to do things the players can't. That's not new or groundbreaking, it just is. That's how you balance combat with 4 players against a single enemy, or how you offset the abilities of the players without just having to give the monsters all the same abilities and throwing the same stuff back at them all boring like. If a player doesn't like that a monster can do something they can't, tell them just to assume the monster has an inborn ability the player doesn't, or that the monster has secret knowledge that the player doesn't.
If you, as the DM, give a creature an ability - that's the reason. If your PCs have an ability granted them by a class/subclass/feat/magic item, that's the reason they can do the things they can. This is a simple concept all 'round. Things do what they say they do, they don't do anything that isn't described.
I might suggest that you not put too much effort into the "why the creature can do creature things", but instead focus on the actual issue of your rules lawyer. In my experience, people don't usually rally around descrepancies in the rules or the plot unless they are a joyless pedant who cannot suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy an entire episode of the Muppet Show or even an episode of The Mandalorian. If, perhaps, your player feels like there is a contest between them and you (the DM) that might be where the attitude stems from. That or they want to "win D&D".
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Lol.
Maybe this is just the kind of thing that happens when mad archmages have too much downtime for their own good.
Maybe it's the result of deep sacrifice. Maybe, if your players dedicated enough resources, they could sacrifice their bodies so as to regress into the form of a spellcasting hand as well, if that's really the kind of thing they wanted to work toward.
Manshoon was big into cloning and had the resources of the Zhentarim at his disposal. Who knows how much sacrifice and value was poured into that thing.
Mixed bag between validating the player's criticism and defending the Monster's design, and this is lazy design. They did some mechanics for the "floating hand" monster giving it blindsight, a hover speed and specifically says "can't speak or hear" in the stat block's Language line. Otherwise, besides swapping banishment out for blight, this is the Archmage stat block. It's clear the designers gave no real consideration to v components despite deafening and muting the hand.
I wouldn't have caught this myself, but had I known I would have likely worked this into a monster that could only cast spells manually, so to speak, as a sort of fun design challenge, with the exception of finger of death, because obviously....
So if a player "caught" this, I'd say, yeah it's not the best design but I'm not about to mess with CR by messing with the spells ... it's easy to handwave some sort of presumption that liches over time actually become imbued with innate magic and so this hand's spell capacity are more representative of the magic it is infused with rather than traditional spell casting. As for the equal opportunity objection, the players Wizard is more than welcome to pursue lichdom as a calling but it may take a while to get there, and even longer to get the decades/centuries/millenia of magical practice to get to the point of Manshoon.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
give the hand a mouth. as the dm you have the ability to augment the game to fit your structure. just give the hand a mouth
Magic is a strange and wondrous thing. The world as we know it still has things that don't know. Research is a way that we can know those things. Mages are creatures that excel at research.
Perhaps this mage has achieved this spell effect in a different way from those that were taught to the PCs. A different teacher may have taught it with a different focus but achieved a similar result. Different gestures may take the place of the more common verbal component. Different words may take the place of a gesture.
The metamagic effects from the sorcerer class get little explanation but achieve a similar result. The same type of situation could be applied here.
Yes, "Its magic" is a reasonable answer but looking at the game system as a whole should provide some insight into possible answers.
The hand took the subtle metamagic feat and the wizard used a wish to give it an infinite number of spell points?
The hand creates sounds needed for casting by snapping its fingers? (there is nothing in the rules to suggest that the V,S,M components required for spells are actually the same for each caster - they could well be different, even unique for each caster or even for each casting of a spell - up to the DM)
The hand is a spontaneous spell caster using innate spellcasting and doesn't require any components because it was built/designed/created that way?
---
Basically, the explanation is up to whatever the DM cares to imagine. NPCs often have different ways to operate than players that can be justified by "magic" much of the time.
My mostly serious response has anyone considered going down the helping hands route from the film labyrinth (clip of them available on YT if you want to have a look)? Basically tthe hands use their fingers or other helping hands to make mouths to talk.
(The not so serious bit)....Alternatively the next time they crop up give them a special action called 'Insulting Gesture' (its a hand, this shouldn't be too hard to guess what the gesture is), target makes a charisma save on a failure the target is stunned for one round as they are so offended by what they have seen.
Who knows? The wizard Manshoon, depending on timing, may have had the entire resources of the Zhentarim at his disposal so there's no way to know what extents of assets may have been used to get what he wanted/needed.