General RPG DiscussionDiscussion of all RPGs and non-system-specific topics. DM/GM/player issues, settings, etc. Rules discussion belongs in one the forums below.
I’ve been thinking about the combat encounters for the Bard Rock Band campaign (detailed elsewhere in my blog, below). Our houserules give an AD&D feel to a 3.x game, in that we’re giving xp for gold, having a slow experience point progression, and the magic will be of the weird, mysterious, wondrous sort. No magic items which give a numerical bonus will exist. We are also setting the game in Green Ronin’s Freeport, which is itself set in Wilderlands of High Fantasy.
In trying to give the game a Swords and Sorcery feel, like the Conan, Elric or Leiber books, one of the big elements is the monstrous foes faced by the heroes. I’ve noticed that quite often, the monstrous foes are fearsome, and the heroes don’t want to fight them, but are often forced to. When given the opportunity though, they will take the gold, avoid the monsters, and run away. There is never a theme in the novels of “If I kill this monster, I become a tougher fighter, and am then better able to kill more monsters, and get more gold.” They may want the gold and the lifestyle, but they don’t necessarily want to put themselves at risk to do so.
One problem with D&D and trying to recapture that feel of S&S books in the game, and generate those feelings of “Holy CRAP! I’m not fighting that! Run away!” amongst the players, is that the monsters are all well known. After 25 years of playing the game, you know that if you’re a 3rd level character, and you enter a room with 2 skeletons, you’ll likely mop the floor with them. No challenge.
Think about that for a second. In Sword and Sorcery novel terms, some evil wielder of foul arcane power, a master of the necromantic arts, goes through an evil ritual to raise the dead in a horrific form, and make them his servants. He lost part of his soul to do so. The foul beings stand before you, the antithesis of all of life. In D&D terms, the players say “Meh. Only skeletons. One HD. Arm the blunt weapons. Let’s kill them quick and take whatever crap treasure they have, and get to the next room where we can hopefully fight something stronger and get more XP.”
That’s a big disconnect between the two genres.
How to bridge that disconnect? Make every monster an unknown factor. In other words, ignore the monster manual statblocks. D&D gives very specific rules on game mechanics for everything. For the players, the rules give them a sense of what they are able to do, and when. It lets them know what the effects of their actions are going to be in game terms. It also gives them an idea of their chances of being able to pull off certain actions, such as skill checks. It’s fine that their players know their characters abilities and detailed specific effects of spells, their magic items, and actions. However, the rules should not give them a very certain idea of their chances of success in combat, except in very limited circumstances.
For example, a wolf is a wolf. A dog is a dog. A old man farmer is likely not a good fighter. Things that occur naturally should all be about the same in their stats, and are hence predictable. But when it comes to undead, dragons, things created through arcane means, horrific creatures, extra-planar creatures, etc., all bets are off. This is where we throw the rules out the window. Especially the rules on giving monsters “classes”, along with skills, feats, etc. A monster just has abilities. Special attacks and special defenses. Like it used to be in AD&D.
I thinking giving monsters classes, levels and progression equivalent to the PC’s is one of the biggest mistakes made in 3.x. It limited the game in terms of monsters to whatever the rules allowed. If the rules didn’t allow it, the monster couldn’t do it, unless you created a rule to allow it. And if you create the rule for the monsters, in an effort to appease the God of Balance, you had to make it available to PC’s too, and vice versa. Yeah, great way to stifle imagination. Imagination within rules is no imagination at all. Screw balance. The only predictable thing I want in my games is that the players are going to be nervous, excited, scared, and having fun.
That being said, Why can’t an owl bear have fire resistance? Why can’t a skeleton emit an electrical shock or life-stealing cold damage when hit? Why can’t trolls breed with giants, giving a subbreed of giants some regenerative ability? Why can’t there be 10 HD skeletons that just explode when reduced to 0 hp?
Our houserules do away with the 15 minute adventuring day, and the incentive to fight to move up in level (the fighting is the smallest part of the xp equation, the looting and living the lifestyle is the biggest). In eliminating predictable stats and abilities for monsters which are not naturally occurring, (in other words, anything in the monster manual which doesn’t exist on Earth in 2009), the players now have to wonder if they should fight or run—with running being the likely first option, and fighting only as a last resort. If you can scoop up some treasure as you are running out the door, all the better. This is how encounters with monstrous creatures often turn out in the S&S books I enjoy. The experience point system we have in place rewards that behavior. Thus more closely bridging the game between the game rules and the game style.
As long as the players have fair warning, they shouldn’t complain. Besides, remember the early editions of the game? Where it was strongly advised that the players do not read the monster manual or the DM Guide? There was a reason for that. This approach of unpredictable monsters just brings us back to a more old school feel to the game, both in game terms and S&S terms.
I’ll end with a passage from a Conan story I just finished reading. From “The Pool of the Black One” by R.E. Howard
Conan caught the girl’s hand, and fled. Slope after slope rose and fell before them, and behind sounded the rushing of a river. A glance over his straining shoulder showed a broad green ribbon rising and falling as it swept over the slopes. The torrent had not spread out and dissipated; like a giant serpent it flowed over the depressions and the rounded crests. It held a consistent course – it was following them.
The realization roused Conan to a greater pitch of endurance. Sancha stumbled and went to her knees with a moaning cry of despair and exhaustion. Catching her up, Conan tossed her over his giant shoulder and ran on. His breast heaved, his knees trembled; his breath tore in great gasps through his teeth. He reeled in his gait. Ahead of him he saw the sailors toiling, spurred on by the terror that gripped him.
The ocean burst suddenly on his view, and in his swimming gaze floated the Wastrel, unharmed. Men tumbled into the boats helter-skelter. Sancha fell into the bottom and lay there in a crumpled heap. Conan, though the blood thundered in his ears and the world swam red to his gaze, took an oar with the panting sailors.
With hearts ready to burst from exhaustion, they pulled for the ship. The green river burst through the fringe of trees. Those trees fell as if their stems had been cut away, and as they sank into the jade-colored flood, they vanished. The tide flowed out over the beach, lapped at the ocean, and the waves turned a deeper, more sinister green.
Unreasoning, instinctive fear held the buccaneers, making them urge their agonized bodies and reeling brains to greater effort; what they feared they knew not, but they did know that in that abominable smooth green ribbon was a menace to body and to soul. Conan knew, and as he saw the broad line slip into the waves and stream through the water toward them, without altering its shape or course, he called up his last ounce of reserve strength so fiercely that the oar snapped in his hands.
But their prows bumped against the timbers of the Wastrel, and the sailors staggered up the chains, leaving the boats to drift as they would. Sancha went up on Conan’s broad shoulder, hanging limp as a corpse, to be dumped unceremoniously on to the deck as the Barachan took the wheel, gasping orders to his skeleton of a crew. Throughout the affair, he had taken the leadwithout question, and they had instinctively followed him. They reeled about like drunken men, fumbling mechanically at ropes and braces. The anchor chain, unshackled, splashed into the water, the sails unfurled and bellied in a rising wind. The Wastrel quivered and shook herself, and swung majestically seaward. Conan glared shoreward; like a tongue of emerald flame, a ribbon licked out on the water futilely, an oar’s length from the Wastrel ’s keel. It advanced no further. From that end of the tongue, his gaze followed an unbroken stream of ambent green across the white beach, and over the slopes, until it faded in the blue distance.
The Barachan, regaining his wind, grinned at the panting crew. Sancha was standing near him, hysterical tears coursing down her cheeks. Conan’s breeks hung in blood-stained tatters; his girdle and sheath were gone, his sword, driven upright into the deck beside him, was notched and crusted with red. Blood thickly clotted his black mane, and one ear had been half torn fromhis head. His arms, legs, breast and shoulders were bitten and clawed as if by panthers. But he grinned as he braced his powerful legs, and swung on the wheel in sheer exuberance of muscular might.
“What now?” faltered the girl.
“The plunder of the seas!” he laughed.
“A paltry crew, and that chewed and clawed to pieces, but they can work the ship, and crews can always be found. Come here, girl, and give me a kiss.”
“A kiss?” she cried hysterically. “You think of kisses at a time like this?”
His laughter boomed above the snap and thunder of the sails, as he caught her up off her feet in the crook of one mighty arm, and smacked her red lips with resounding relish.
“I think of Life!” he roared. “The dead are dead, and what has passed is done! I have a ship and a fighting crew and a girl with lips like wine, and that’s all I ever asked. Lick your wounds, bullies, and break out a cask of ale. You’re going to work ship as she never was worked before. Dance and sing while you buckle to it, damn you! To the devil with empty seas! We’re bound for waters where the seaports are fat, and the merchant ships are crammed with plunder!”
__________________ ~Joe
If you like what I said, throw me some XP. I was a goblin sharpshooter for far too long.
I have been altering the monster statblocks for years. It is pretty easy to do.
__________________ "From the beginning, no one has ever stood in Heaven. Not you, nor me, nor God Himself. But soon, that unbearable vacancy on the throne in the sky will be filled. From now on... I will stand in Heaven!"-Sousuke Aizen-Bleach
It's a 3e thread. This is the sort of thing people consider threadcrapping: edition-relevant drive-bys that don't contribute to the thread. A discussion here about the 4e monster design might have been a lot more useful. ~ PCat
The emphasis on doing things like this is one of the better features of the DM advice in 4e. It's definitely not a mechanical benefit, unless you are a publisher.
All it takes to do this in 3e is to take a deep breath, and hope the players aren't the type to demand the rules are followed to the letter.
I think you're on the right track here. The way that the older versions emphasized "grab the treasure and run" was the fact that monsters were worth very little XP; treasure was where the real XPs were at.
Basically, PCs will do whatever gets them the XPs. If they get XPs for killing monsters, they'll act like the Terminator. If they get XP's for basket weaving, you'll never get them in the dungeon. Giving lots of XPs for treasure and very little for monsters incentivizes loot acquisition and monster avoidance.
I also agree that you should mod the monsters freely. Especially if you change the XP that they give... there's little other reason to worry about their "level equivalent".
Going off of AD&D here (which had the best selection of monsters, bar none), a "skeleton" encounter ought to be scary if the DM is known to have a mean streak. There are a lot of monsters that look like skeletons... maybe these two are Skeleton Warriors instead! Or some other horror. You also have the purely unique stuff like some of Len Lakofka's undead from Bone Hill.
__________________ "I despise all weavers of the black arts. Speaking of which, can you pass the gravy?"
So, what's the complaint? Sometimes they're the bog-standard skeletons that cause peasants and ignorant barbarians to quake in fear (you, of course, have a cleric handy who can tell you about them in detail, and a wizard who can make some if he so chose).
Sometimes they're skeletons that the necromancer has enhanced (with the existing rules to do so), and they can chill your blood with a touch, outrun your steeds and never tire, and explode in a cloud of necrotic energy (and revitalize their companions) as they die.
And there are rules for all of that. In 3.5E, there are the Corpsecrafter line of feats, the half-troll template for your giant-troll hybrid...hell, there are even rules for estimating new special abilities.
But throw enough random abilities out there, and the decision to run or fight stops being meaningful. If you literally can't tell if running or fighting is more likely to be a better option ("can this monster hunt me down and murder me in my sleep? Shoot me in the back as I flee? What about my slower companions?"), you eliminate meaningful tactical choice.
The ideal, of course, is to have a system in which many different knowable parts can be put together, but the sum outcome can be something both comprehensible and initially unexpected. (I have a personal fondness for turning giants of various types into were-dinosaurs.)
Also, flip side of the question: if you get XP for loot, do you need to worry about incentivizing hanging around in town and commiting burglaries rather than going to hunt monsters? I mean, Conan and Co. did quite a lot of that, as well, but that's because authors can declare "No, you don't murder Plot McHook, loot his house, and frame a passerby." much more easily than GMs can. Also, there's the problem with players consistently choosing to spend a month slowly besieging and clearing dungeons rather than blitzing through them.
You could give full XP for encountering then evading or escaping monsters, though.
But throw enough random abilities out there, and the decision to run or fight stops being meaningful. If you literally can't tell if running or fighting is more likely to be a better option ("can this monster hunt me down and murder me in my sleep? Shoot me in the back as I flee? What about my slower companions?"), you eliminate meaningful tactical choice.
The ideal, of course, is to have a system in which many different knowable parts can be put together, but the sum outcome can be something both comprehensible and initially unexpected. (I have a personal fondness for turning giants of various types into were-dinosaurs.)
Also, flip side of the question: if you get XP for loot, do you need to worry about incentivizing hanging around in town and commiting burglaries rather than going to hunt monsters? I mean, Conan and Co. did quite a lot of that, as well, but that's because authors can declare "No, you don't murder Plot McHook, loot his house, and frame a passerby." much more easily than GMs can. Also, there's the problem with players consistently choosing to spend a month slowly besieging and clearing dungeons rather than blitzing through them.
You could give full XP for encountering then evading or escaping monsters, though.
Why bother looking for a line of feats somewhere in some random supplement to justify some ability I want to give a monster when I can simply give it that ability? Rules for that sort of thing are not needed, nor desired.
The cleric will never be able to tell the characters all about them, regardless of knowledge checks. He will be able to tell the basic gist of them, and turn them, but never know more than the basics, unless he made that specific skeleton. Same for the wizard. Since the monsters are non-standardized, not cookie-cutter, so must be the spells to make them. Therefore, they are unpredictable.
I don't mind if they spend all their time in town robbing and looting. Though I doubt they will do it. It's a sandbox campaign centered in a town, with three bards who are the equivalent of being in a band. It's a RP heavy campaign. They don't want to creep around dungeons. Circumstances will, of course, lead them into trouble at every turn. Their stated goal as characters is to never have to fight at all, though the players want some fights. They are not optimizing their guys for fighting in any way. Running is ALWAYS the best option for them.
But when they have to fight, I want the fight to be scary and unpredictable. Once they're in the fight, tactics become a factor. Once the first skeleton struck discharges that glowing ball of energy in its chest cavity as an electrical shock running up the metal blade, the players may wish they had equipped their characters with alternate wooden weapons like clubs. I want tactics to be gut guesses based on past experience and the encounter as I describe it, rather than predictable behaviors based on knowledge of rules and stats.
And yes, they will get come XP for avoiding a encounter, if it is done with cleverness, and especially if they managed to get some of the treasure from the beastie they avoided.
__________________ ~Joe
If you like what I said, throw me some XP. I was a goblin sharpshooter for far too long.
We did this throughout the ten years we played 3e, and we did it in 2e and 1e before that: regularly change monsters to be different from the MM, making them mysterious and minimizing metagaming all in one go. This sort of thing really promotes a sense of wonder. I think it's a great idea!
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Currently editing the 4e War of the Burning Sky adventure path. Support EN Publishing, get excellent modules!
We did this throughout the ten years we played 3e, and we did it in 2e and 1e before that: regularly change monsters to be different from the MM, making them mysterious and minimizing metagaming all in one go. This sort of thing really promotes a sense of wonder. I think it's a great idea!
No doubt. In a recent campaign it gave rise to a "land kraken" which defied much of the meta-game logic the players had grown to use as a crutch when dealing with more familiar creatures. In another campaign, "gas giants" (hill giants who subsisted primarily on wild cabbages and developed a decidedly trog-quality to them) was both humorous at the table and dangerous in-game. In either case it took only adjusting the norms a little bit to create mysterious and challenging new territory for the players.
* 3e Monster Manual: section on advancing monsters.
* 3e Monster Manual: section on creating monsters.
* 3e Monster Manual (or any number of other d20 books): any template(s) you like.
* any number of other monster books: any monster variant, or entirely different thing you like.
* my ol' house rules: liberal usage of the Minion and Elite templates (created before 4e was even a whisper of a promise. . .
Or something like that. But really, the MM has so many handy (and ahem, oft overlooked) bits and pieces in it, for just this kind of purpose (among many others).
edit --- oops, didn't read the full OP. guess you won't be using the above methods anytime soon. eh, ne'er mind.
Last edited by Aus_Snow; 2nd May 2009 at 10:59 PM..
What works for me is to create the monsters I want as far as look and feel without looking up any monsters. Then I'll flip through the MM to find some stats that can be workable as that creature.
In one memorable campaign, my players battled small porcelain dolls that came to life. Their jaws distended and they tried to swarm over the PCs, sucking their blood and draining their con.
Really freaked the players out, and were hardly recognizable as the Stirges I used for their stats.
If I want skeletons, then they're skeletons. But their actual powers/stats could be anything. Use the MM as a suite of linked stats/abilities, with no regard to the fluff, and it works beautifully.
__________________ signed Jere, Lord of Pendragon
"Raven dark but beautiful, in a malevolent sort of way;
With eyes that speak of wonders on the other side of Day.
She dances in the shadows where others fear to tread;
But though her touch may kill you, it's her love that you should dread."
This is why there are sooo many different monsters for D&D. All DMs want to surprise players every now and then.
I have no problem with you altering monsters in an adhoc way for 3.5. If you are an experienced DM then you don't need the EL crutch anyway. Since you have greatly reduced xp for slaying then the accurately adjusting the CR given your changes is also not as important.
One way to keep players on their feet is to change the descriptions of monsters.
I've also been thinking of adding some weaknesses and features to the elementals to spice them up a bit (but each elemental would be slightly different).
One trope in fantasy is that the Hero(es) defeat the monster by finding its weakness. This sounds like it would fit in with what you are trying to capture flavorwise. You may wan't to allow reasearch and knowledge checks to find the weakness, or Spot checks and something else while actually fighting the creature. If you want mechanics for doing this the 4e skill challenge may fit the bill.
Sounds like you want to play a horror style game more than a standard one. I never ran more than one starter adventure in Ravenloft, but I seem to remember that setting having built in rules for fear and terror, that acted upon on characters whether they thought their characters would actually be afraid or not. Maybe something like that would be good here.
I think mixing and changing up monsters is always a useful tool, but if you were to use it in *every* combat, every monster, it seems to me it would take some of the tactical element out of the game. Though 3rd edition would work better than 4th in this.
If the central goal of the game is more survival/horror or finding ways to avoid and escape combat, and the heroes are not so much champions as underpowered commoners hoping to dodge their way through the dangers of the world, and the party is happy with such an arrangement, then why not?
Last edited by Switchback; 3rd May 2009 at 07:41 AM..
If the central goal of the game is more survival/horror or finding ways to avoid and escape combat, and the heroes are not so much champions as underpowered commoners hoping to dodge their way through the dangers of the world, and the party is happy with such an arrangement, then why not?
That's not true at all. Look at classic Sword & Sorcery rogues (in the generic sense) like Conan. He often doesn't want to fight... fighting gets you killed. He wants to get the gold, the girl and maybe the glory; he wants his skin to be intact.
Why would an adventurer want to fight? Even most soldiers don't want to fight. Fighting gets you killed. An adventurer is distinguished by his willingness to face danger in order to score a great reward, not by having a death wish.
I wouldn't call a judicious adventurer like Conan an "underpowered commoner"... I'd call him "smart". He's not Rambo (a guy who relies on script immunity to intentionally wade through hundreds of mooks just because) and I don't think of D&D adventurers like Rambos either. Sure, they want to be good at fighting... in a world like that, being bad at fighting can be hazardous to your health! But just because an adventurer cultivates a masterful skill at fighting doesn't mean he therefore tries to fight everything that moves! We're not grinding Thundertusk Boars here.
__________________ "I despise all weavers of the black arts. Speaking of which, can you pass the gravy?"
I think I understand what you're getting at, lets hope. My DMing philosophy is that Rules are for the players, for the DM they're just... "guidelines". I tend to use Mutants & Masterminds to devise "low PL" (usually monster's HD or HD -2) powers to add to otherwise normal D&D monsters. Keeps my players on thier toes. Additionally, routinely subjecting the PCs to high CR (4-7 above thier average level) might have a chance of teaching them to run away when they have to and to use tactics to bring the beast down.
__________________
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Ernest Gary Gygax | David Lance Arneson
07/27/1938 – 03/04/2008 | 10/01/1947 – 04/07/2009
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Why would an adventurer want to fight? Even most soldiers don't want to fight. Fighting gets you killed. An adventurer is distinguished by his willingness to face danger in order to score a great reward, not by having a death wish.
Because the rules so happen to favour combat over everything else?
What is the point of having so many options that are meant to enhance your fighting experience, only to be expected to run away from an encounter or find another means of working around it, rather than charge in guns-blazing? I want to see the result of hours of extensive character building/design, damnit!
An Adventurer might want to fight to prove that they are the best and strongest in the land.
__________________ "From the beginning, no one has ever stood in Heaven. Not you, nor me, nor God Himself. But soon, that unbearable vacancy on the throne in the sky will be filled. From now on... I will stand in Heaven!"-Sousuke Aizen-Bleach
One problem with D&D and trying to recapture that feel of S&S books in the game... is that the monsters are all well known. After 25 years of playing the game, you know that if you’re a 3rd level character, and you enter a room with 2 skeletons, you’ll likely mop the floor with them. No challenge.
Think about that for a second. In Sword and Sorcery novel terms, some evil wielder of foul arcane power, a master of the necromantic arts, goes through an evil ritual to raise the dead in a horrific form, and make them his servants. He lost part of his soul to do so...
How to bridge that disconnect? Make every monster an unknown factor. In other words, ignore the monster manual statblocks. D&D gives very specific rules on game mechanics for everything...
I agree with you. However, isn't there a chapter in the 3.5 MM or DMG which addresses this very issue? There are very specific rules for adjusting or modifying monsters. The necromancer in question can make 1 HD skeletons or 4 HD skeletons. They can have a cloak of shadows that grants them some concealment or not.
I don't have a problem with making creatures by fiat. And, I very rarely made an opponent by the book in 3.X; it was too much work for me.
__________________ "People need vision.
Sometimes you just have to add spices without a recipie."
- My wonderful wife.
I tend to be of the belief that you should reward people who put ranks into knowledge skills. Make players spend actions in combat to try to figure out what these things are. Remind players not to optimize their tactics when facing a new foe. (I had to burn a crap spell in the first round of a fight with a mind flayer last time. It killed me to not cast one of the two spells that I knew had a chance of working. He got away as a result.) Tell your role-players to play it as if they've never seen these things before and to get in their best zombie plague reactions. It's great if they feel it, but it's still role playing not real reactions.
__________________ All role playing advice is given without knowledge of you and your group. Only you and your group knows what is fun for you. What you are doing is not badwrongfun. My advice is offered based on what I think might be fun for you to try.
"Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary." - Amedee Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art
"I already have a place where I can get little recognition for my accomplishments, advance at a very slow pace, and have to work hard to eke out minimum rewards for my efforts. It's called work." - toberane.
That being said, Why can’t an owl bear have fire resistance? Why can’t a skeleton emit an electrical shock or life-stealing cold damage when hit? Why can’t trolls breed with giants, giving a subbreed of giants some regenerative ability? Why can’t there be 10 HD skeletons that just explode when reduced to 0 hp?
I wasn't aware they couldn't.
Give any monsters the ability you want them to have. If you think it's significantly more powerful than the standard monster, raise its CR 1 or 2 points. All those mathy things are just guidelines. Behind the screen nobody willl know if you did your homework, made it up or picket it up from a 3pp supplement
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