My take on it all. (A Rant of sorts, feel free to ignore)

[MadMaligor]

...While I understand what you are saying, it defies any sort of logic. If the Drow (or any other "mid-ranged monster", has an army of, well hell- lets face it "Super-soldiers" why would they bother with an army of minions at all? Hell if the average drow is worth 11 of the enemie, they could conqurer the world in a couple of days...A hand ful of scrappy hero's that gets in the way (assumeing they are level appropriate) would be mowed down as well...It doesn't make sense...Oh well, maybe thats why I always eventually abandon D&D (again). The whole "Level" thing just doesn't work for me....

On the contrary, the whole army thing doesnt work unless you remove drow nature, their history, their culture, their belief and value system (the same could be said in varying ways for other powerful humanoid like examples). Inevitably, you run into that age old caveat "Power corrupts". The Kuoa Toa are the Drow of the sea with a whole different set of problems associated with a very different culture.

A Drow sized army on an even playing field would, and should, whipe the floor with the same sized human army. I dont see the problem there.

 

[BEAN THE CAT]

...I kid you not, the Monster Manual is the best book of the 3. It might be my favorite D&D book of all time.

With incredibly simplicity, you can think "I would like my PCs to fight X", go look up X, put together an encounter, and be relatively confident that it will be a fight of the difficulty you expect.

The whole process takes between 30 seconds and 2 minutes (depending on whether or not you have to scale monsters). It is the single greatest accomplishment of 4E.

-Cross

Oh, I agree. I think the basic lay out is great. Again it's just my own feeling, that a "Basic Stat Block in addition to Applied Templates" would have gone miles toward making my game (if I were to run one) even easier...

 

[BEAN THE CAT]

On the contrary, the whole army thing doesnt work unless you remove drow nature, their history, their culture, their belief and value system (the same could be said in varying ways for other powerful humanoid like examples). Inevitably, you run into that age old caveat "Power corrupts". The Kuoa Toa are the Drow of the sea with a whole different set of problems associated with a very different culture.

A Drow sized army on an even playing field would, and should, whipe the floor with the same sized human army. I dont see the problem there.

Well with the drow you have to remember that all their lore paints them as fearsome warriors that are the badasses of the underdark. That are constantly fighting themselves to the point where they rarely launch any large scale attacks. They kind of thin out themselves and make enemies with everyone. Sure the average drow warrior is lvl 11, but when everyone hates you it gets hard to conquer things.

Well, the problem here is both of you are using some "official" mythos...I am guessing probably FR. And thats fine, if you are using that.

But what if I don't want to use that setting . What if in my world "Drow" are emasculated fascist wussies with a chip on their shoulder, what if their whole Warrior par excellence mystique is just propaganda ?

In previous editions of D&D, the game was generic enough to let the GM decide.

As I recall "Drow" as they were stated in 1st-3rd are on par with other "humanoids" (i.e. A 1+ HD monster in AD&D), and there were exceptions made for more advanced members of a given race (3rd took it to extremes). Now we are told "why they are all exceptional, its a society of veritable ubermensch."

Again it seems to be an "Ain't it cool" factor, that permeates the book...which lends to an rather artificial tone to the game. I suppose though that is to be expected from a game that depends so heavily on parity to work.....Okay so now your all 13th level...guess we will get out the Drow then.

 

[Particle_Man]

I don't have the MM, and this is slightly off topic, but:

Isn't applying the minion template nothing more than:

a) Change monster's hit points to 1.

Or is there something else to being a minion?

 

[NewfieDave]

Minions also do fixed damage.

 

[Benimoto]

Again it seems to be an "Ain't it cool" factor, that permeates the book...which lends to an rather artificial tone to the game. I suppose though that is to be expected from a game that depends so heavily on parity to work.....Okay so now your all 13th level...guess we will get out the Drow then.

I see it less of an "aren't drow cool" things, and more a nod towards having monsters available at every level. There are 30 levels, and for the Monster Manual to be useful for casual pick-up games as well as long-running campaigns, there have to be monsters ready to run at almost every level.

Just as 4th edition came out, I was finishing my only level 1-20 campaign in 3.5, and I have to say, for the last few levels, there was a lot of preparation to do. If you look at basically every 3.5 monster manual, like 50% of the monsters only cover levels 1-5. This is because they took the approach that the monster entries only represent the "base" class and that you have to add levels to the monsters to make them work for higher-level parties. This made it so that when my campaign hit around level 15, I had to create 80-90% of the monsters the party fought myself. It was a lot of work, and I'm sure I wouldn't do it if I wasn't already invested in the campaign.

They've shifted the burden around, yes. If you want to make drow wussies that fight level 3 PCs, you have to do the work of actually statting them out, yes. But if you're running an established campaign setting, or you want to use the pre-made D&D mythology, then it's a lot less work. Instead of having to level up a whole drow hunting party to make an appropriate challenge for your 15th level party, there's already one in the Monster Manual ready for you.

 

[mattdm]

As I recall "Drow" as they were stated in 1st-3rd are on par with other "humanoids" (i.e. A 1+ HD monster in AD&D), and there were exceptions made for more advanced members of a given race (3rd took it to extremes). Now we are told "why they are all exceptional, its a society of veritable ubermensch."

Drow are iconic enough that I bet we'll see different instances of them in future books.

For now, though, turn to the back of the book and find exactly what you want under "Racial Traits". There's your first level drow, and then follow Customizing Monsters in the DMG up to level 5. For levels 5-10, start with the drow warrior and scale down, with scaled-down drow arachnomancers as leaders.

 

[ferratus]

I think the question is whether you want there to be a bunch of low-level races that look pretty much the same, and that you have to add powers and abilities to them through class levels (as was the case in 3e).

The way 4e approaches it, they have instead spead the humanoids out through the levels to reflect what they are supposed to do in the D&D mythos. Since Drow are supposed to be able to boss around Giants, they get to be level 11+.

I would advise anyone who wanted to downgrade the drow that they are probably in the minority, and as you are in the minority you should have to do the houseruling yourself rather than making the rest of us beef them up. I would also say that an easy way to have low-level drow is to simply take hobgoblins and swap out one of their encounter powers for "darkfire" and "globe of darkness" found in the back of the MM. Instant low-level drow.

That said, I wish 4e MM1 had put some more low level monsters in the book rather than spreading monsters throughout all the levels. I've already used kobolds in the preview adventure, and the goblin stronghold is level 2, so I'm struggling to fill up 10 encounters without these two creatures.

 

[BEAN THE CAT]

I see it less of an "aren't drow cool" things, and more a nod towards having monsters available at every level. There are 30 levels, and for the Monster Manual to be useful for casual pick-up games as well as long-running campaigns, there have to be monsters ready to run at almost every level.

Yes, this is obvious,. they want people to be able to look in and see that at Level X, mosters A,B and C appropriate challenges. I just wish few more examples of each type, rather then segregating everything by levels in such an obvious manner/.

I think the question is whether you want there to be a bunch of low-level races that look pretty much the same, and that you have to add powers and abilities to them through class levels (as was the case in 3e).

I don't think that is it at all. If by adding powers is the only way the game can differentiate between races then D&D is doing something wrong....Fluff can, has in the past, and should be used now to differentiate races-

which makes more sense : "The Zulu are different from the Hottentots, because their cultural, religious and economic norms differ from those of the Hottentotst "

-or-

"The Zulu are different then the Hottentots because the Zulu have leet Ninja powerz, have twice as many hit points ,and shoot lightening outta their butts......"


So then there is the question -Why should a Low level (fill in race) , not be just as menacing to a low level PC, as a High level (same race) be to a high level PC?

If all D&D has are "power level" to seperate stuff, then, uhhhgggg.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

While I understand what you are saying, it defies any sort of logic. If the Drow (or any other "mid-ranged monster", has an army of, well hell- lets face it "Super-soldiers" why would they bother with an army of minions at all? Hell if the average drow is worth 11 of the enemie, they could conqurer the world in a couple of days...A hand ful of scrappy hero's that gets in the way (assumeing they are level appropriate) would be mowed down as well...It doesn't make sense...Oh well, maybe thats why I always eventually abandon D&D (again). The whole "Level" thing just doesn't work for me....

It seems largely Artificial...and yet so retro where D&D is concerned

Repeat after me: "D&D is not a simulationist game", "D&D is not a simulationist game", "D&D is not a simulationist game"...

The purpose of the creatures on the Monster Manual is not to show you the "average" drow, kuo-toa or bugbear. Not everyone in a Drow city is a 11th level Lurker.

The creatures in the Monster Manual are "threats for PCs" only, which in the case of Drow it means proved warriors of a certain level...

But if, for some reason, you want to stat an angry drow baker with a rolling pin, you can certainly do so... I would suggest using a "Human Rabble" as base, and add darkvision.