Quote Originally Posted by kyoryu View Post
I think this is actually a good analogy for how Talakeal’s players feel about the game as a whole. It seems that monsters pull out random-seeming abilities frequently with no warning or foreshadowing or clue, and that the results of doing so are fairly frequently lethal. Whether it’s new abilities, legendary actions, or novel sets of immunities, these abilities seem to lead to player loss a large amount of the time, and based on what I’ve read, don’t seem to be communicated well. Not communicated well ends up, from the player POV to be “random feeling” and leads to caution.
Is this not normal?

I personally have (almost) never played under a DM in any system that didnt make heavy use of homebrew monsters and / or templates, and most modules I have read have atleast one unique monster with some sort of gimmick.

Even if sticking clearly to published monsters, D&D has so many with so many crazy abilities that unless the DM actually lets the players have an open set of monster manuals during the game they will still be caught of guard frequuently as even the biggest nerd cant memorize them all.

In this particular case the monster was just a bog standard ghost with no special abilities or customization whatsoever.