Fudging the Numbers in 3ed - Forked from: Why do you keep playing 4e?

[Wulf Ratbane]

Anybody play Monte Cook's module Queen of Lies?

Spoiler alert.

[sblock]The BBEG at the end is a drow chick with an embedded twin. Yes, she has a little Quatto twin, just a face with one tiny little fetus arm (just enough for somatic components), and she keeps it cleverly hidden under her cloak.

The "host" drow chick is a high level cleric. And her embedded twin is a sorcerer. So this BBEG casts a cleric spell every round, and also a sorcerer spell every round.

But she only has one hit point total, one set of abilities, one statblock, etc. She just "arbitrarily" gets to cast two spells per round because she has an embedded twin.[/sblock]

Needless to say, my players freaked out.

So there's Monte Cook. Tell him how bad he cheated.

 

[Jhaelen]

I found this post very interesting because the first thing that struck me what stops you from doing this in 3ed?

Where is it written that you can't fudge "the math" in 3ed? Is the concept of fudging the math some kind of new revelation in 4ed?

These questions have been asked time and again. But I think they're missing the point.

It doesn't matter if you can fudge "the math" in 3E or not. What does matter is that there are rules that can be used to create monsters without fudging. Why should I fudge anything if there are rules that tell me how to do things without fudging?

In 2E I felt comfortable creating lots of stuff. I felt I had a firm grasp of all the rules and their implications for balance.

In 3E I had been DMing for a full year before I dared to start creating very minor things. I still don't feel comfortable creating a new monster from scratch. It's also important to note that using the same rules for monsters and pcs was one of the features that sold me on 3E.

The cool thing about 3E is this:
When I tell a fellow DM about one of the fun encounters in my game and he asks me: 'Hey, sounds cool, but how did x do y?' then I can explain every little detail and he can recreate the encounter using only things from official supplements. I can tell him about the spells, feats, class features, monsters, items, etc. I used to create a certain intriguing synergetic effect.

In 2E or now in 4E the only thing I can say is 'I made it up' or 'Well, that's a thing that only a monster can do'.

This is all fine until you realize how much effort it takes to create interesting situations without fudging anything. And that's the 'revelation' of 4E.

I basically had to relearn what I'd always been doing in 2E.

One important advantage 4E has over 3E is the transparency of the math and the abundance of guidelines that create a feeling that fudging is _easy_ and you don't have to worry about things getting unbalanced.

As a final note: I'm still playing 3E but after reading 4E I feel more comfortable fudging things in 3E. When I notice that doing things by the book wouldn't have any noticable advantage over fudging, I take the shortcut. But there are still lots of things where the system mastery I acquired allows me to min-max hell out of a concept, so there's still a lot of situations where I don't fudge, because I feel it's worthwhile to stay within the rules.

Ultimately it is more satisfying for me if I can pull a tricky thing off and surprise my players without fudging - don't ask me why

 

[el-remmen]

I think we need more precise terminology, because typically, "fudging" in D&D refers to changing die roll and/or results, which is different from building monsters and NPCs via short-cuts and rule exceptions.

I really don't see why "changing stuff" in 3.xE would be so discomforting. From the beginning I never saw any difference in my approach to 3E as to 2E or 1E - for the game to be what I want I need to make changes as I go along. If I played 4E I would have the same attitude - the problem w/ 4E to me is that I would have to change a helluva whole lot more to get the game I want out of it.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Anybody play Monte Cook's module Queen of Lies?

Spoiler alert.

[sblock]The BBEG at the end is a drow chick with an embedded twin. Yes, she has a little Quatto twin, just a face with one tiny little fetus arm (just enough for somatic components), and she keeps it cleverly hidden under her cloak.

The "host" drow chick is a high level cleric. And her embedded twin is a sorcerer. So this BBEG casts a cleric spell every round, and also a sorcerer spell every round.

But she only has one hit point total, one set of abilities, one statblock, etc. She just "arbitrarily" gets to cast two spells per round because she has an embedded twin.[/sblock]

Needless to say, my players freaked out.

So there's Monte Cook. Tell him how bad he cheated.

Monte, hear me? You are a terrible cheater DM! Why did you help create all this rules if you go on to totally ignore them later?

---

I don't have this module. Maybe I would have learned from that to do what I like earlier. But maybe I would have just seen as a terrible cheat. (There was a time where I had no clues who the D&D designers were or anything.)

 

[Greg K]

Thats a good analogy. Whats being forgotten is that the exacting nature of 3E rules meant that after the game your creature, critter, or whatever was subject to player audit.!!!

No, they were not (unless you are a publisher and the players could buy your product). Otherwise, how the creature was built was none of the player's business. Now, you may have chosen to allow players to audit the monster at your table, but that was your choice to do so,

 

[DandD]

This will help players to justify playing characters with embeded quadrupleds and more in their body, who are all controlled by the player, and cast several spells from all magician classes, while the main body has trained into fighter/barbarian/warblade/whatever.

He can full-attack or use a maneuver, and simultaneously cast 3+ spells.

Thank you, Monte, for showing me how to cheat more in D&D.

Natch, of course not...

In fact, this one-person-casting-two-different-spells existed for the purpose of an adventure in The Dark Eye, where through some magic ritual, the minds of the player characters are teleported into the past and into a magical body to examine some demise.

That character was controlled by the consens of all. Fighting with the stats of the best fighter, casting spells from all schools, you could cast flamebolts, heal yourself and blind your opponents all at the same time (provided three of four players did choose magic-capable classes).

Funny experiments back then.

 

[Stoat]

For me it's probably psychological. I have a somewhat lawful streak, so when playing 3e, I will want to stat out the monsters down to the last feat and skill point, even if it never makes any difference in the game and the players never find out.

It's kind of like how I will wait at a pedestrian crossing until it signals me to walk, even if I'm on a deserted street late at night and no cars are around.

Would it be more convenient for me to just cross? Certainly.
Am I going to put myself or other road users in any danger? Most likely not.
So why don't I just cross? Because the habit of obeying the rules is too deeply ingrained in me.

So a ruleset that pretty much gives me permission to fudge is quite liberating for me. But that's just me.

To some extent, I'm in the same boat. When presented with a set of rules, my first instinct is usually to follow the rules.

More to the point, I never got a good feel for where the numbers should work out in 3.X, and I DM'd it from the beginning. What's a good AC for a CR 5 melee type monster? What about the Will save of a CR 10 mastermind type? How many hit points will keep a CR 15 monster on its feet long enough to be challenging but not so long that the fight drags on? I dunno. I dunno. I dunno.

The 4E DMG has a nice table that spells all that out. So far, following that table has yielded good results for me.

That said, I always enjoyed statting out 3.X monster to the last skill point. I kinda found it relaxing.

Also: I've always figured "Do you stop at a red light in the middle of the night when there's nobody else around for miles?" to be a pretty good way of gauging a person's orientation on the law/chaos axis.

 

[Timeboxer]

I found this post very interesting because the first thing that struck me what stops you from doing this in 3ed?

I basically feel like I don't understand the math enough to fudge in 3E.

One interesting thing that I read is that, if I remember correctly, the CR system in 3E was actually built through testing -- in other words, throwing an N-level party against a monster and determining how easy or hard it was for them, and then assigning the CR afterwards. This is a bit of an evolutionary algorithm, so it seems tough (or at least time-consuming) to attempt to backwards engineer an easy way to fudge the math in a way that's not merely "Take a creature kind of like what you want, and then try to on-the-fly modify it, and hope that your modifications don't make it too hard or too easy." (Though I would certainly pay for something that could provide an analysis of the math of 3E that lets me fudge encounters easily!)

By contrast, 4E's openness means that it's always clear what makes for a correctly balanced challenge for the party; I can basically run a fudged encounter using Page 42.

 

[nightwyrm]

To some extent, I'm in the same boat. When presented with a set of rules, my first instinct is usually to follow the rules.

More to the point, I never got a good feel for where the numbers should work out in 3.X, and I DM'd it from the beginning. What's a good AC for a CR 5 melee type monster? What about the Will save of a CR 10 mastermind type? How many hit points will keep a CR 15 monster on its feet long enough to be challenging but not so long that the fight drags on? I dunno. I dunno. I dunno.

The 4E DMG has a nice table that spells all that out. So far, following that table has yielded good results for me.

I find this to be my problem with monster modification/creation in 3.5 (let's not use the word fudging, it carries a connotation of emergency DM fiat at the gaming table). I don't have a good idea what stats or powers a CR X monster should have. The monster building process as given in the MM in 3.5 proceeds with monster type/class -> HD/level -> feats -> skills -> spells/special abilities -> items etc. CR is only assigned at the end by comparing your creation with other monsters in the MM, and if the resulting CR is not what you want, then you have to go back and make more modifications. This seems really backwards to me.

Sure, you can ignore those rules and just give your monster whatever numbers or abilities you want. Give your 1 HD orc 42 hps and have him be able to throw 2d6 fireballs. But wasn't one of the attraction of 3.5 the ability to build PCs and NPCs using the same rules. It wasn't suppose to be a bug, it was suppose to be a feature.

What I like about 4e is that it explicitly gives a table of the expected stats for a monster of a given level. How the monster gets to have those stats and powers are not really important. What's important is that they do what they're suppose to do when facing against the PCs.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

But wasn't one of the attraction of 3.5 the ability to build PCs and NPCs using the same rules. It wasn't suppose to be a bug, it was suppose to be a feature.

You're right, it is a feature.

But assuming that the ability to build monsters the same as PCs is a requirement-- that's the bug.

It's like this: If I tell you that I can find you a quicker route to work every day, that would be helpful.

If you found that particular route started to clog up with traffic, and yet you refused to take any alternative route, because of an erroneous assumption that all other routes were closed to you-- that's your own fault.

What I like about 4e is that it explicitly gives a table of the expected stats for a monster of a given level. How the monster gets to have those stats and powers are not really important. What's important is that they do what they're suppose to do when facing against the PCs.

This is trivial to do in 3e as well-- but definitely, a similar table in 3e would have helped.