Design & Dev: Monsters (DRAGONS!)

[Kabol]

"Finally, the cleric is up. Calling on the power of her god, she swings her halberd at the dragon—a critical hit! The damage isn’t bad, but even better, the wizard gets a nice surge of healing power."

- That just made me, OH so happy. Sounds like Cleric has a little crusader in him in 4E. I think im gonna go cry a little.

 

[Arashi Ravenblade]

hmmmm....

 

[A'koss]

Guys, there's a 2 page thread on this already...

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=204972

 

[Greg K]

All this article did is convince me that I am not buying 4e and that I am completely done with WOTC with the exception of Dragon Magazine up until the 4e switch occurs.

 

[Glyfair]

I had thought of that too (as they're pulling a lot of stuff over from SWS) but still... 500+ HP? Slay an ancient dragon in 2 hits? Not a chance IMO - that's far too much. Even half that seems excessive.

Consider this possibility, just from things that have come up in 4E discussions

Solid hit, means critical. Double or triple damage there.

Fighters will have "per day" and "per encounter" abilities, so one or two of them were used on the attack.

Modification for whatever counteracts the loss of interative attacks.

All this for 500 damage.

 

[satori01]

I like the "interactive" aspects of the monster design, such as the immediate Glob of Fire Trick....yes for the naysayers it smacks of W.O.W design, but that is not a bad thing (tm).

I do not want to see dragons completely stripped of some spell casting. I think it is a good idea to concentrate primarily on Dragons physical prowess, however as we saw in 2e, lack of spell casting relegated them to by Archmages' Mounts. No one in 3.x simply called dragons stupid beasts suitable for merely riding.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Let me assure everyone that, if the fighter in the example actually did do 500 hit points of damage in one attack, development will ambush him on his way out of design and soundly beat his damage back to a real D&D level.

(The example combat cannot possibly start on round 1. It's more likely round 4 or 5. Dragons take a LOT more than 2 hits to go down, and no PC will come close to doing 500 hit points of damage to a single target with one attack.)

Thank you so much for chiming in on this. My brain was on the way to filling in the blanks and they were not pretty.

 

[A'koss]

Consider this possibility, just from things that have come up in 4E discussions

Solid hit, means critical. Double or triple damage there.

Fighters will have "per day" and "per encounter" abilities, so one or two of them were used on the attack.

Modification for whatever counteracts the loss of interative attacks.

All this for 500 damage.

In case you missed it, check out Mike Mearls' reply a few posts above yours.

I don't doubt that there will be ways to combine "maneuvers" magic and solid crits to dole out some serious damage. But 500 HP is insane amounts of damage for just one roll...

 

[Banshee16]

Not me.

I'm looking forward to 4e but that whole encounter just makes me go, "Hmmm... the continual disatisfaction that the design staff has with dragons, ranging form adding age categories in earlier editions via Forgotten Realms to making them powerful spellcasters with unique abilities in higher editions, has just taken a huge shot of crack cocaine to the new levels of silly."

Were dragons really that weak? I don't think my PCs survived a fight against one in 3E. They only encountered one or two, but they were sent packing.

And now they're going to be tougher? I thought the 3E dragons seemed to be the best of the 3 editions.

I picked up on the fighter causing 500 points of damage in a round. That seems rather....excessive. Of course, that's based on the assumptions inherent to 3E.

Banshee

 

[Glyfair]

Were dragons really that weak? I don't think my PCs survived a fight against one in 3E. They only encountered one or two, but they were sent packing.

While the first encounter in RttToEE was a notorious player killer, I don't remember too many TPKs reported. Lots of deaths, but most eventually overcame it (in my game 2 PCs were down, but none died).