Rules, Rules, Rules (Legends & Lore)

S'mon said:

I would be really unhappy playing in a game I knew worked that way. I wonder how many players are fine with this approach?

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I think a key word there is "knew". I have at least one player who prefers a more "numerocentric" approach, but he actually has gone out of his way to compliment my DMing, possibly because he doesn't know the numbers are relative when I run the game.

Pentius said:

I think a key word there is "knew". I have at least one player who prefers a more "numerocentric" approach, but he actually has gone out of his way to compliment my DMing, possibly because he doesn't know the numbers are relative when I run the game.

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Proof that Illusionism works, if the DM is good at it!

I take a very 'numerocentric' or objective approach as DM, I like the sense of progression it brings. If anything I think it is an easier approach in 4e, because PCs power up more slowly than in prior editions, and it's easy to create workable demographics from the start where eg 'normal people' exist throughout the Heroic Tier range.

One thing I did in my Wilderlands campaign was to set a 'baseline mook' value at 5th level minion. This was done with an eye to keeping such useable throughout the Heroic Tier, allows for eg 'experienced mooks' who are 9th level minions (so twice the XPV) without straining disbelief, and fits well with the monster demographics in the 4e Monster Manual and Monster Vault. I think it helped a lot that I started the campaign at 3rd level.

Some sample demographics IMC:

Typical peasant farmer or townsman - minion-2 Human Rabble
Orc commoner - minion-4 Drudge
Typical Altanian barbarian nomad 'bravo' - minion-5 Skirmisher
Human Lackey - minion-7 (eg cultist)
Typical Altanian barbarian 'warrior' (Lodge member) - minion-8 soldier
Orc warrior - minion-9

"Standard monsters" are typically 5 levels lower, but fit in the same sort of scale, eg:

Human common Bandit: skirmisher-2 = min-7
Orc Raider: skirmisher-3 = minion-8
Orc Berserker: brute-4 = minion-9
Altanian Reaver: skirmisher-5 = min-10
Altanian Sword Knight: soldier-8 = min-13

I'll typically mix up 4th level brute orc berserkers with 9th level minion orc warriors rather than treat them as being the same monster, but that will depend on circumstances - eg in my previous campaign when I ran a mass battle with dozens & dozens of combatants I made the human knights min-8 (instead of soldier-2) and the gnolls min-10 (instead of skirmisher-5) for convenience & playability.

S'mon said:

Proof that Illusionism works, if the DM is good at it!

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I don't think I'm really doing an illusionism act here. I'm not hiding the way I DM. He just hasn't asked. I'm usually not open to any real discussion of meta-game concepts mid-session, and he and I don't spend nearly as much time together as I'd like outside the game. Even so, he knows at the least, that I prefer a relativity-high, narrativism driven approach to the game.

pemerton said:

In 4e, I can't see any other way of doing it. Compare, for example, the MM stats of a human guard to those of a drow warrior.

The drow warrior (+14 vs AC) hits the human guard's AC of 18 on a 4 or better. On the two rounds that the guard is subject to Darkfire, the combat advantage means the drow hits on a 2. Each hit deals 8.5 points of damage, +7 with combat advantage, and has a 9/10 chance of inlicting drow poison, giving the guard -2 to hit. Two rounds of combat advantage will deliver about 29 hp damage, leaving the guard with 18 hp. Two or three more rounds without combat advantage will whittle those away.

In that time, the guard will deliver, on average, about 3 hp per round (2 hp per round while suffering -2 to hit), meaning that the drow loses somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10 or so of its 83 hp. Confronted by two guards, the drow could expect to beat both of them and take around 30 hp or so of damage. To have a good chance of beating the drow would, I think, require 4 or more guards able to attack at once. For a single guard to beat the drow it would have to survive more than 20 rounds in combat. This would require the drow to miss it (a 3/20 likelihood) at least 10 times, or at least every second round. I think the odds of that are (20 C 10) times 3 to the 10 divided by 20 to the 10. I make that to be odds of around one in 1000 - extremely unlikely!

And I just don't see generic drow as being that good...

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Neither do I - did you know there are drow minion stats (11th level AIR?) in the Monster Vault? I would use those, or similar, for typical soldiers in a drow city. No way every drow soldier is a 12th level standard monster. In a drow-centric campaign starting at low level I'd probably stat those typical drow soldiers as maybe 5th or 6th level standard monsters; they're Paragon tier minions in MV because it's assumed the PCs will encounter them in low Paragon tier.

I'd treat the 12th level drow stats in MM as suitable for a member of a long range drow raiding group of 5-8, similar to a human adventuring party. And for using against lower level PCs I'd take off 5 levels and make him an Elite.

Likewise if there were 12th level (drow?) PCs attacking a human town, I'd stat the typical human town guards as minions, maybe somewhere between 8th and 11th level (8th for the +5, 11th preserves XPV).

I'm being flexible in deciding whether to stat monsters as minion, standard or elite, but I'm not levelling up the monsters as the PCs level up - eg if drow PCs raid a human town then the typical townsfolk will stay min-2 whether the PCs are 3rd level or 12th. I wouldn't raise them to 12th level minion to match the PCs.
But I would normally focus on the battle with the town's defenders who could actually threaten the PCs, which might mean 11th level minion guards backed up by high-heroic or low-paragon NPC standard & elite leaders. If for some reason the town was attacked by 20th level drow PCs, the leaders would be high-paragon minions, the guards would stay min-11; unless for some reason there was some significant risk of failure I would handwave it though - "You win" - maybe some skill checks & attack rolls to see how many of the defenders escaped alive etc.

pemerton said:

More bluntly: we don't have any precise mechanical measure of how much tougher a drow warrior is then a human guard

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XPV - if the drow warrior is 11th level standard then he's worth 4 times the XPV of the 3rd level guard, so the drow should be a match for 4 guards (as you note he actually is, per your number crunching) - so you can equally use 4 11th level minions for the town guards, have roughly the same threat level, & preserve the XPV.

Likewise, if drow cities have mostly min-11 soldiers per MV, those could be turned into 3rd level standard monsters in a drow-city-centric campaign starting at low level. The absolute threat level is roughly preserved & the XPV is the same.

pemerton said:

Although sliding down a staircase has a scaling DC, although it is the same task, if the game is following the default storyline in some rough fashion then the 1st level staircase is likely to be in an inn, and the 21st level staircase is likely to be in an ancient tower on the Feywild or in the Elemental Chaos. Although these different settings are in some sense merely colour, I think that colour goes a long way to making the scaling, and the general looseness of fit between mechanics and fiction, seem acceptable rather than misleading.

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My approach, which is not RAW, would be to treat sliding down both staircases as (probably) a 'hard task for an Heroic PC, easy for Paragon' and set a DC 20 in both cases. IMO high level PCs *should* be succeeding more often, and should be able to succeed at things they're not specifically trained in - which the default approach tends to work against.

Pentius said:

I think a key word there is "knew".

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My players know it in a formal sense at least, in that I'm pretty liberal in disclosing DCs, and they can tell from my narration that the 10th level human minions aren't radically different in kind from the 1st level ones, and when the campaign started I circulated a document that included the following:

S'mon said:

My approach, which is not RAW, would be to treat sliding down both staircases as (probably) a 'hard task for an Heroic PC, easy for Paragon' and set a DC 20 in both cases. IMO high level PCs *should* be succeeding more often, and should be able to succeed at things they're not specifically trained in - which the default approach tends to work against.

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Whereas my way of achieving the "succeed more often" vibe is by playing on the colour, and on the fictional stakes, as I posted earlier.

S'mon said:

Neither do I - did you know there are drow minion stats (11th level AIR?) in the Monster Vault?

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Not off the top of my head, but handy to be reminded of, as my game might be drifting in an underdark direction soon!

S'mon said:

I'm being flexible in deciding whether to stat monsters as minion, standard or elite, but I'm not levelling up the monsters as the PCs level up

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Whereas I am flexible in both those respects - minion/standard/elite, and level.

To try and say more about my approach: there are no gnoll minions in any of the monster books I've got, and late heroic was a bit of a gnoll-fest in my game (The Well of Demons, plus some other encounters adapted from The Night Below). So that means in all their fights against gnolls, the PCs had to really work hard to take them down. Whereas in a more recent encounter with wererats I statted up some wererat minions (because I wanted to keep the numbers the same as in the original Night Below setup). So the wererats were dropping like flies. But I don't particularly narrate this as the gnolls being tough and the wererats being weak. I just narrate the outcomes - "the gnoll parries your blow but you can see the strain on his face" vs "your blow cuts through the wererat's defences and it drops, dead". The balance of skill vs luck, whether we should think of the wererat battle as perhaps involving more time passing while the gnoll battle has been resolved in more gritty detail, is all left unstated and up for grabs. (I know that technically all rounds are 6 seconds, but that rule almost never comes into play in my experience. And because the actual playing out of a round takes much more than 6 seconds, I don't have any trouble imagining killing a minion as being something like compressing the battle in time, while fighting a standard foe involves more detailed attention.)

S'mon said:

XPV - if the drow warrior is 11th level standard then he's worth 4 times the XPV of the 3rd level guard, so the drow should be a match for 4 guards (as you note he actually is, per your number crunching) - so you can equally use 4 11th level minions for the town guards, have roughly the same threat level, & preserve the XPV.

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I use this maths for encounter building, but leave it open how much it correlates to ingame toughness. As with the wererat minions, I leave it unstated whether someone was unskilled, or unlucky, or untough, or some combination of all three.

I have had a couple of fights recently with elite wizards, and they put a bit more pressure on the narration. They have many hit points, which means they take a long time to drop. But unlike (for example) a behemoth or owlbear, they don't have a lot of meat that has to be hacked through. And they are unarmoured, and using staves, so I can't use the same narration as I did recently for an elite hobgoblin leader, pitching them as tough and skilled melee combatants in their own right. The melee PCs obviously are highly competent combatants, so I can't just talk about those PCs missing a lot or otherwise being ineffective in their attacks. The solution I have adopted is to describe the wizards as being preternaturally skillful in their parrying with their staves, and their erection of magical shields of defence etc. As their hit points drop, I describe this magical enhanced deftness and protection being worn down.

My general goal is to keep the narrative plausible (within the genre parameters) and engaging. But I don't feel any need to adopt some consistent correlation of numbers to fictional elements or capacities. Numbers are just a mechanical device for achieving a fictional outcome.

Re round duration - I also tend to treat it as an indeterminate amount of time, eg the more combatants, the longer the rounds. The 6-second default is about right for 5 PC vs 5 standard monster battles.

pemerton said:

Whereas I am flexible in both those respects - minion/standard/elite, and level.

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Is there a reason why you don't fluff the 1st level minion as (eg) untrained rabble and the 9th level minion as (eg) a tough thug or trained soldier? That seems to be the 4e standard approach - MM human rabble vs human lackey, MM orc drudge vs orc warrior, MM hobgoblin grunt vs hobgoblin warrior.

Whereas in 1e-3e the difference between a 1 hd and 9 hd monster is huge, in 4e the in-world difference between level 1 and level 9 is much smaller, just x4 the XPV & nominal threat level: eg 'rabble' to 'thug', not 1e-3e's 'rabble' to 'warlord'.

Likewise for standard monsters, 1st level & 9th level human soldiery can IMO easily both exist in the same narrative space - 1st level is a green, though trained, warrior, 9th level is a tough veteran, duke's guardsman, or somesuch (Edit: eg the MM2 'human pirate').
And if the PCs are 9th level you can just make the green recruits minion-9s.

Is the issue that you want the PCs to fight 'human thugs' at 1st level, not 'human untrained rabble', and to be doing the same at 9th? To me the narrative difference there is pretty small, but if I wanted to keep the exact same foe (eg a particular bandit gang or thieves' guild) through 10 levels of play I can see I might be tempted by your approach.

S'mon said:

Is there a reason why you don't fluff the 1st level minion as (eg) untrained rabble and the 9th level minion as (eg) a tough thug or trained soldier? That seems to be the 4e standard approach - MM human rabble vs human lackey, MM orc drudge vs orc warrior, MM hobgoblin grunt vs hobgoblin warrior.

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Is the issue that you want the PCs to fight 'human thugs' at 1st level, not 'human untrained rabble', and to be doing the same at 9th? To me the narrative difference there is pretty small, but if I wanted to keep the exact same foe (eg a particular bandit gang or thieves' guild) through 10 levels of play I can see I might be tempted by your approach.

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What you say is more or less right. At 1st level, the first encounter - adapted from Night's Dark Terror (and I think upthread I have said The Night Below when I mean Night's Dark Terror - getting my "Nights" confused!) - involved the PCs on a boat being stopped by a chain across the river and then swarmed by cultists. I statted the cultists as 1st level minions (delevelled rabble). Just recently, at 12th level, the PCs were attacked in the streets outside the apartments of a wizard they had fought and killed, and some of the assailants were thugs from the docks. I statted these as (I think) 10th level minions, levelled up from the minions in the Monster Vault. (Which I think are human thugs.)

The question of whether dock thugs are tougher than cultists has never come up. No one asked about it. From my point of view, it's about using the encounter building mechanics to get a balance of numbers, threats etc that I think will play well as an encounter. All the narrative/fictional interpretation can be overlayed later, in the course of play as needed!

Now once the PCs are demigods I'm probably not going to be using any thugs anymore, whether cultists or longshoremen! But I see this as being driven by colour and by fictional positioning, not by mechanics.

A further thought: your comparison of the limited scope of 4e levelling compared to 3E is interesting. I've not played much 3E. But compared to Rolemaster the levelling in 4e is still mechanically very noticeable. In Rolemaster, the difference in attack bonus between a 1st level fighter and a 20th level fighter is about double: from +70 or so to +150 or so, on a table where bonus plus d100 needs to reach somewhere around 100 to do noticeable damage. That double bonus is very signficant - because it is also used as defence, and so in a one-on-one duel the 20th level fighter can put 70 of his/her bonus into defence, leave the 1st level fighter needing an open-ended roll (ie 96+) to do anything meaningful, and still attack with +80. But RM makes defending against multiple foes very difficult, which means that even low level opponents can still be quite significant in numbers, whereas in D&D this is not really the case. And an ambush by low-level opponents, bypassing defences, is utterly huge in Rolemaster, whereas in D&D it is no more than +2 to hit from combat advantage.

So compared to what I was used to GMing, I find the level differences in 4e quite marked. Which might in part explain my approach to them.