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Thing I thought 4e did better: Monsters
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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7006810" data-attributes="member: 996"><p>Correct. The jargon is not tightly coupled to the fiction. The DM has a lot of latitude with the latter (even the players could have quite a bit - more on that latter).</p><p>Never saw Scanners, I take it? <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /> Seriously, though, bloodied did not mean blood spraying everywhere. For one thing, there are monsters with no blood. It was exception-based design, remember? So, if a monster had a triggered-on-bloodied no-action power that sprayed acid blood all over, then, yes, when it was bloodied, acid blood sprayed all over. OTOH, if it has a triggered-on-bloodied immediate reaction to breath acid, it didn't mean that. Because each power was an 'exception' in that 'design.'</p><p></p><p>(Full disclosure: I've never been entirely OK with 'exception based design.' )</p><p></p><p></p><p>No it isn't, the game still uses hps, hps still decline, and hps have always passed the half-way point in that process. Adding a jargon label for that was not a fundamental change. It's darn near a trivial change, especially since, IMX, a lot of DMs back in the day might acknowledge when a monster was 'about half down' or the like, if you asked. And, no, it doesn't force anything on your world, at all. In fact, a subtle but perhaps 'fundamental' change to the game that started with 3e, the increasing acceptance of customizing fluff & cosmetic details without having to change underlying mechanics (yes. 3e. katana-is-a-masterwork-bastard-sword), made it easier than ever to layer just the world you wanted over the D&D mechanics.</p><p></p><p>Not all that unlikely, now, thanks to BA. </p><p></p><p>Corroded needn't mean broken or even irreparably marred. Though that's an ability a very few creatures, like rust monsters, obviously have, and most others, like dragons, generally don't. It's not hard, in any edition, to add such an ability, though.</p><p></p><p>It's not, it could conceivably use it's reaction for something else. Bloodied Breath didn't make the dragon angry. The 'why' of it is color left up to the DM. That might be making the dragon angry, or it might not. Depends on the dragon & the story. It might, instead, be that the dragon was 'toying' with the party, and, when bloodied, finally realized it was in a real fight. (That's a rationale I like with solos, that they start battles wildly overconfident. But, again, it's only one possible rationale.)</p><p></p><p>Your presumption is mistake. Immediate actions, OAs, and even free actions are voluntary. (Well, generally, because exception based design. See disclaimer above.) Now, a no-action power might represent something that just happens automatically.</p><p></p><p></p><p>And, once again, no, i not a fundamental change in how the game works. If anything, it's a return to the way the game worked prior to 3e, with monsters being statted out quite differently from PCs. And, while 4e's tight math & consistent scaling did lead to bounded accuracy, it was in a more evolutionary rather than in the reactionary way you might be thinking. BA is also tight math & consistent scaling, just with smaller numbers - little more than a cosmetic change in some ways (in the ways that it's much more than a cosmetic change, the main manifestation is in how heavily being outnumbered tells in a 5e combat).</p><p></p><p>Is a straw man. While you can always just change a monster's stats for no reason just to challenge your party, there's nothing in 4e (or any other edition) that obliges you to do so without providing a rationale. </p><p></p><p>Now, you /could/ legitimately re-stat a monster to work better at different levels, even the exact same individual, but, doing so didn't mean that it would...</p><p>Not that you need stats for a creature to rampage through a village - or be killed by a few well-prepared villagers with boarspears. But, hypothetically, the standard-issue bear that you re-statted from a level 5 standard to a level 13 minion to work better in a paragon game, would still be the same level 5 standard in a heroic battle. If you wanted to play through it attacking a village with nothing more than nominally 1st-level defenders you might even stat it as 1st level elite. It'd be the same bear, worth the same 200 exp, in every case. </p><p></p><p>I know that is probably hard to grok, keep reading, it comes up again...</p><p></p><p>That's a trivially easy requirement to meet, it's just a matter of approach. What do you start with? Rules or fiction? If the former, you pick the rules elements you'll use and imagine a fictional rationale, if the latter, you imagine what you want in the fiction, and find the rules element that best models it.</p><p></p><p>Nothing new there. </p><p></p><p>In the above example of scaling a monster's level and secondary role in tandem, you really do alter the mechanics, not the monster. It can be the exact same monster, the same /individual/, even. The game can just model it differently depending on the role it's playing in the fiction. The same individual ('normally' a 10th level standard, worth 500exp) might be statted as a Solo when facing a 1st level party and a Minion when facing a 18th level one, for instance. </p><p></p><p>Correct! It's just more an art in some editions (1e) and more a science in others (3e). 4e and 5e are between those two extremes, with 4e closer to science and 5e closer to art. Well, maybe technical exercise more than science. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /></p><p></p><p>'Need' gets defined pretty charitably. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /> Consider the old-school stats on, well, just about anything. /LOTS/ was left very much up to the DM. I think as early as 2e, we started seeing all 6 stats for monsters, for instance. Some editions are more consistent in what they include vs leave out, is about all you could say on the matter.</p><p></p><p>That's a bar D&D has never cleared without incident. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /> IMX, introducing people to the game from 1st through 5th ed, 4e actually presented the game in a way that was easiest for entirely new players to just pick up and play. For precisely the reasons it seemed so not-D&D to long-time fans. </p><p></p><p>Nod. Again, something that's present to varying degrees in all editions. 4e was the only ed that didn't reference spells in some stat blocks, for instance, and presented each & every attack, 'utility' & trait the monster had - yet you migth still have to cross-reference all the jargon used to present that so tidily. </p><p></p><p>Something you're not accustomed to when looking at D&D. Yep. The learning curve was harder on old fans than potential new ones.</p><p></p><p>You did, yes, or rather, you read too much into it. They're monsters, they're statted as opponents in combat. The out-of-combat systems - rituals, skills & skill challenges, though more distinct from combat and more extensive than in other editions, didn't actually require a lot of detail on the 'opposition' side, as that was mostly handled by the DM setting DCs. (You might pull out a skill bonus or opposed skill check, out of combat, for instance, but the monster blocks did have those. FWIW.) </p><p></p><p>And, really, RPGs, particularly D&D, get that a lot. The rules /are/ heavily oriented on combat in general. It's a fact that underlies the erroneous conclusion that they're "violent games," as well, for another instance of people getting it wrong. Maybe it stood out for you more in the case of 4e because it didn't have the familiar presentation and structure of the classic game, the way 5e does, again?</p><p></p><p>Yes. That was an overblown selling point of the MM books, that every monster had an illo.</p><p></p><p>It only takes one sentence to say that. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /> Clearly, it's not all you're saying. Either you're trying to convince everyone reading that they should dislike it, too, or you're trying to justify your dislike, when there's no need to justify a subjective feeling like that in the first place. In the process, you're making a lot of false and misleading statements and reaching a lot of erroneous conclusions. Prettymuch a typical edition war exchange, just without the implacable h4ter malice. (And thanks for that.)</p><p></p><p>Yes. The treatment of monsters was moving away from the mechanically-different-from-PCs, primarily-antagonist approach of the early game to a more detailed & mechanically unified approach that, ultimately, in 3e, gave virtually all the same options available to PCs to monsters and NPCs. 4e got back to the old approach, though with a very new & different presentation and mathematically robust mechanical underpinnings. 5e hasn't really pulled back from that, just reverted to somewhat more familiar presentation (it really didn't take much).</p><p></p><p>Maybe you don't intend to. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /></p><p></p><p>"In terms of stats?" Perhaps, of course, you can run a monster in such a way that, through rulings, those stats don't matter all that much. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /> </p><p></p><p>Who'd stop you? Who'd even notice, really?</p><p></p><p>That's prettymuch the reason for D&D's success, right there. ;P Seriously, though, it's our beloved game, and the brilliance of 5e is in capturing the sense of D&D, as a whole across editions, well enough that we can all feel like we know how to play it.</p><p></p><p></p><p>"partially?" Sounds like it doesn't always work better with rules.</p><p></p><p>Seriously, it depends on how you want to pace your game and what aspects of it you enjoy. One long-running campaign certain of my friends play in, for instance, is centered around the development of a town the party has more or less founded. It's like D&D Civilization. Two of the players are really deeply into it, and handle it away from the table, for the most part, though what they do has a big impact on what sort of challenges end up confronting the party. The rest of the group are just playing D&D more conventionally. The rules driving that off-screen stuff, though, aren't from any D&D source.</p><p></p><p>I do like the idea of downtime rules, and would love to see 5e's fleshed out a bit more. They do impact pacing, though, so DMs need to keep in mind that they could always customize them, particularly simply changing the underlying unit of time to better fit campaign pacing, a useful tool that's also easily missed when it comes to the lengths of rests and the 6-8 encounter day controversies....</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>There's a lotta spells, for those of us with decades of familiarity, it's trivial. Though, when running 5e, I tend to run an NPC spell more or less like I remember it rather than look it up, so heavily colored by the glory days of 1e. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7006810, member: 996"] Correct. The jargon is not tightly coupled to the fiction. The DM has a lot of latitude with the latter (even the players could have quite a bit - more on that latter). Never saw Scanners, I take it? ;) Seriously, though, bloodied did not mean blood spraying everywhere. For one thing, there are monsters with no blood. It was exception-based design, remember? So, if a monster had a triggered-on-bloodied no-action power that sprayed acid blood all over, then, yes, when it was bloodied, acid blood sprayed all over. OTOH, if it has a triggered-on-bloodied immediate reaction to breath acid, it didn't mean that. Because each power was an 'exception' in that 'design.' (Full disclosure: I've never been entirely OK with 'exception based design.' ) No it isn't, the game still uses hps, hps still decline, and hps have always passed the half-way point in that process. Adding a jargon label for that was not a fundamental change. It's darn near a trivial change, especially since, IMX, a lot of DMs back in the day might acknowledge when a monster was 'about half down' or the like, if you asked. And, no, it doesn't force anything on your world, at all. In fact, a subtle but perhaps 'fundamental' change to the game that started with 3e, the increasing acceptance of customizing fluff & cosmetic details without having to change underlying mechanics (yes. 3e. katana-is-a-masterwork-bastard-sword), made it easier than ever to layer just the world you wanted over the D&D mechanics. Not all that unlikely, now, thanks to BA. Corroded needn't mean broken or even irreparably marred. Though that's an ability a very few creatures, like rust monsters, obviously have, and most others, like dragons, generally don't. It's not hard, in any edition, to add such an ability, though. It's not, it could conceivably use it's reaction for something else. Bloodied Breath didn't make the dragon angry. The 'why' of it is color left up to the DM. That might be making the dragon angry, or it might not. Depends on the dragon & the story. It might, instead, be that the dragon was 'toying' with the party, and, when bloodied, finally realized it was in a real fight. (That's a rationale I like with solos, that they start battles wildly overconfident. But, again, it's only one possible rationale.) Your presumption is mistake. Immediate actions, OAs, and even free actions are voluntary. (Well, generally, because exception based design. See disclaimer above.) Now, a no-action power might represent something that just happens automatically. And, once again, no, i not a fundamental change in how the game works. If anything, it's a return to the way the game worked prior to 3e, with monsters being statted out quite differently from PCs. And, while 4e's tight math & consistent scaling did lead to bounded accuracy, it was in a more evolutionary rather than in the reactionary way you might be thinking. BA is also tight math & consistent scaling, just with smaller numbers - little more than a cosmetic change in some ways (in the ways that it's much more than a cosmetic change, the main manifestation is in how heavily being outnumbered tells in a 5e combat). Is a straw man. While you can always just change a monster's stats for no reason just to challenge your party, there's nothing in 4e (or any other edition) that obliges you to do so without providing a rationale. Now, you /could/ legitimately re-stat a monster to work better at different levels, even the exact same individual, but, doing so didn't mean that it would... Not that you need stats for a creature to rampage through a village - or be killed by a few well-prepared villagers with boarspears. But, hypothetically, the standard-issue bear that you re-statted from a level 5 standard to a level 13 minion to work better in a paragon game, would still be the same level 5 standard in a heroic battle. If you wanted to play through it attacking a village with nothing more than nominally 1st-level defenders you might even stat it as 1st level elite. It'd be the same bear, worth the same 200 exp, in every case. I know that is probably hard to grok, keep reading, it comes up again... That's a trivially easy requirement to meet, it's just a matter of approach. What do you start with? Rules or fiction? If the former, you pick the rules elements you'll use and imagine a fictional rationale, if the latter, you imagine what you want in the fiction, and find the rules element that best models it. Nothing new there. In the above example of scaling a monster's level and secondary role in tandem, you really do alter the mechanics, not the monster. It can be the exact same monster, the same /individual/, even. The game can just model it differently depending on the role it's playing in the fiction. The same individual ('normally' a 10th level standard, worth 500exp) might be statted as a Solo when facing a 1st level party and a Minion when facing a 18th level one, for instance. Correct! It's just more an art in some editions (1e) and more a science in others (3e). 4e and 5e are between those two extremes, with 4e closer to science and 5e closer to art. Well, maybe technical exercise more than science. ;) 'Need' gets defined pretty charitably. ;) Consider the old-school stats on, well, just about anything. /LOTS/ was left very much up to the DM. I think as early as 2e, we started seeing all 6 stats for monsters, for instance. Some editions are more consistent in what they include vs leave out, is about all you could say on the matter. That's a bar D&D has never cleared without incident. ;) IMX, introducing people to the game from 1st through 5th ed, 4e actually presented the game in a way that was easiest for entirely new players to just pick up and play. For precisely the reasons it seemed so not-D&D to long-time fans. Nod. Again, something that's present to varying degrees in all editions. 4e was the only ed that didn't reference spells in some stat blocks, for instance, and presented each & every attack, 'utility' & trait the monster had - yet you migth still have to cross-reference all the jargon used to present that so tidily. Something you're not accustomed to when looking at D&D. Yep. The learning curve was harder on old fans than potential new ones. You did, yes, or rather, you read too much into it. They're monsters, they're statted as opponents in combat. The out-of-combat systems - rituals, skills & skill challenges, though more distinct from combat and more extensive than in other editions, didn't actually require a lot of detail on the 'opposition' side, as that was mostly handled by the DM setting DCs. (You might pull out a skill bonus or opposed skill check, out of combat, for instance, but the monster blocks did have those. FWIW.) And, really, RPGs, particularly D&D, get that a lot. The rules /are/ heavily oriented on combat in general. It's a fact that underlies the erroneous conclusion that they're "violent games," as well, for another instance of people getting it wrong. Maybe it stood out for you more in the case of 4e because it didn't have the familiar presentation and structure of the classic game, the way 5e does, again? Yes. That was an overblown selling point of the MM books, that every monster had an illo. It only takes one sentence to say that. :) Clearly, it's not all you're saying. Either you're trying to convince everyone reading that they should dislike it, too, or you're trying to justify your dislike, when there's no need to justify a subjective feeling like that in the first place. In the process, you're making a lot of false and misleading statements and reaching a lot of erroneous conclusions. Prettymuch a typical edition war exchange, just without the implacable h4ter malice. (And thanks for that.) Yes. The treatment of monsters was moving away from the mechanically-different-from-PCs, primarily-antagonist approach of the early game to a more detailed & mechanically unified approach that, ultimately, in 3e, gave virtually all the same options available to PCs to monsters and NPCs. 4e got back to the old approach, though with a very new & different presentation and mathematically robust mechanical underpinnings. 5e hasn't really pulled back from that, just reverted to somewhat more familiar presentation (it really didn't take much). Maybe you don't intend to. ;) "In terms of stats?" Perhaps, of course, you can run a monster in such a way that, through rulings, those stats don't matter all that much. ;) Who'd stop you? Who'd even notice, really? That's prettymuch the reason for D&D's success, right there. ;P Seriously, though, it's our beloved game, and the brilliance of 5e is in capturing the sense of D&D, as a whole across editions, well enough that we can all feel like we know how to play it. "partially?" Sounds like it doesn't always work better with rules. Seriously, it depends on how you want to pace your game and what aspects of it you enjoy. One long-running campaign certain of my friends play in, for instance, is centered around the development of a town the party has more or less founded. It's like D&D Civilization. Two of the players are really deeply into it, and handle it away from the table, for the most part, though what they do has a big impact on what sort of challenges end up confronting the party. The rest of the group are just playing D&D more conventionally. The rules driving that off-screen stuff, though, aren't from any D&D source. I do like the idea of downtime rules, and would love to see 5e's fleshed out a bit more. They do impact pacing, though, so DMs need to keep in mind that they could always customize them, particularly simply changing the underlying unit of time to better fit campaign pacing, a useful tool that's also easily missed when it comes to the lengths of rests and the 6-8 encounter day controversies.... There's a lotta spells, for those of us with decades of familiarity, it's trivial. Though, when running 5e, I tend to run an NPC spell more or less like I remember it rather than look it up, so heavily colored by the glory days of 1e. ;) [/QUOTE]
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