D&D 5E Wandering Monsters: The Little Guys

DMZ2112 said:

At which point the question becomes not "why don't we just use the stats?" but "why are we buying these books, again?"

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I don't know. Why are you?

This is what kills me. So many people post things like "The description of Monster X was SO GREAT in the 2nd edition Monster Manual! Why doesn't WotC just use that?" Well... one, your opinion on that monster doesn't match everybody else's, so the 2E description is just as useless as any other editions... and two, if you are using the 2E description then it doesn't matter what is in the 5E description! So to make the 5E book actually worth buying... let's see some new ideas (or further adaptation of established ideas) so that it's actually worth buying the book.

Why would anyone buy a book that was a cut 'n paste job from every other book? Cause all the pages someone wanted were all bound together all nice and pretty? Same exact information they already own... but now all put in one place. Great. That's money well spent. Couldn't be bothered to just photocopy the various descriptions from all the different books themselves... everyone needs WotC to do it for them.

Taking a simplified example from the terrible Pathfinder characterization of goblins: my goblins, by contrast, are actually pretty smart. When I run in Pathfinder I have to use a completely custom stat block for goblins because their goblins are the poster children for severe brain damage. This is frustrating. It could potentially be /so much worse/ in D&D5 if they follow the D&D4 monster design strategy while caricaturing all of their monsters.

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Basically what you're saying here is that YOUR IDEA of a goblin should trump everyone else's. It should be written in the book exactly how YOU want it... and to heck with everyone else. And why? Because you don't want to have to create custom stat blocks.

Despite the fact that even if Pathfinder *didn't* make their goblins "brain-damaged"... you probably would STILL create a custom statblock for them because whatever they put down would STILL not be exactly how you see the goblins in your head. Thereby rendering the entirety of their efforts for naught.

Well, it's really obvious that Pathfinder's intellectual property is more influential now than WoTC's intellectual property. The Pathfinder goblin is on the verge of becoming iconic within D&D.

Personally, I like the Pathfinder goblin. There is a lot of The Hobbit going on in the Pathfinder goblin, and the goblins of The Hobbit are iconic. And there is a lot of where the conception has been going in urban fantasy going on there as well. But it's also taking the race too far I think in one direction toward a sterotype. I consider the things that make the Pathfinder goblin so effective of a conception to be only part of what makes the race work as a race. I've taken the D&D goblin if not in a completely different direction, then at least into different territory.

One of the things that intrigued me early on about Goblins is that hobgoblins, bugbears, and goblins were all apparently ethnic or racial groups of the larger goblin-kind. They had shared heritage, culture, and deities. Ok, so how did they get so divergent? My answer to this was, "Selective breeding." Right off the bat this made goblins very unique. They had deliberately created physical castes. So what were they breeding stock goblins, the worker caste, to be like? The answer was - cunning, devious, crafty, and stealthy. They weren't cowardly - the race was lawful evil. They were disciplined. They just preferred feints, diversions, hit and run tactics and the like because that was what they had been bred to excel in. They were perfectly capable of fighting with fanatic zeal if they had their back to a wall and no where to go. This was the caste of miners, artisans, assassins, and spies. Goblins of the ordinary sort made up the archers, raiders, sappers, grenadiers and skirmishers of the goblin-clans armies. Light of build, they made excellent cavalry of the horse-archer mode. They didn't ride wolves - they rode freaking pony sized wargs or horse sized dire wolves! They were the most dangerous light cavalry in the known world. Goblins frequently employed poisons on their arrows. The little buggers were feared. They had the same sort of humor as the Joker. That they were laughing didn't make them less scary. They weren't small because they were weak. Being small made them more dangerous doing what they did. And if they needed something big to come pound you down and bully you by brute force, well they had Bugbears and Ogres for that.

Hobgoblins were their elite heavy infantry - the legionaries and hoplites at the center. The overseer caste of Bugbears were shock troops, and also responsible for seeing that there were no desertions from the ranks. No other race has so versatile of an armed forces. In fact, only collectively can the other free peoples even match them - it's goblins versus the world and its not at all clear that the world will win.

DEFCON 1 said:

You basically want Paizo to give you exactly what you want so that you can be lazy.

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I LOVE IT WHEN A CONVERSATION GETS ALL PERSONAL AND ACCUSATORY!

Oh, wait, no, that's hate. I hate it when that happens. It makes me all （　ﾟ Дﾟ)ノ!!!!! So it's not something that is going to happen again, right?

Salamandyr said:

Defcon 1...yes, I don't have to use them as written in the books, and I won't...because, ugh! but this direction will also dictate how those monsters are used in creative material put out by the company. So you'll be seeing those monsters being used as joke material in published modules, so it's important to me to influence the official "tone" as much as I can.

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Oh please. Give the adventure authors a little freaking credit. Like every monster that appears in every module is an exact carbon-copy personality-wise as every other one.

Do goblins and kobolds appear in adventures occasionally as "comic relief"? Sure. But EVERY time? Not even close. I don't seem to recall Irontooth being all that "funny". Not when he was kicking the ass of three-fourths of all adventuring parties that went up against him in KotS.

Kamikaze Midget said:

I LOVE IT WHEN A CONVERSATION GETS ALL PERSONAL AND ACCUSATORY!

Oh, wait, no, that's hate. I hate it when that happens. It makes me all （　ﾟ Дﾟ)ノ!!!!! So it's not something that is going to happen again, right?

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Acknowledged and agreed. Removed the inflammatory terminology from the post.

DEFCON 1 said:

Basically what you're saying here is that YOUR IDEA of a goblin should trump everyone else's.

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I want a D&D game where everyone's own idea of what a goblin should be trumps everyone else's at their own table.

So Pathfinder fans can have fun with funny little sadists. And [MENTION=78752]DMZ2112[/MENTION] can use his own goblins.

In fact, if they follow 4e monster design principles in that there is a math gospel (something I'm pretty in favor of), it should be pretty easy to do that: altering statblocks should be no problem.

DEFCON 1 said:

Oh please. Give the adventure authors a little freaking credit. Like every monster that appears in every module is an exact carbon-copy personality-wise as every other one.

Do goblins and kobolds appear in adventures occasionally as "comic relief"? Sure. But EVERY time? Not even close. I don't seem to recall Irontooth being all that "funny". Not when he was kicking the ass of three-fourths of all adventuring parties that went up against him in KotS.

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Can you dial it back a little? Thanks.

You're right. I really love Irontooth (and the kobolds) in Keep on the Shadowfell. I'm on record as hating The Sunless Citadel. You can look it up. But look at the 4e treatment of kobolds and goblins. They ain't funny. Both modules (from two different eras of the game) depicted kobolds and goblins pretty much exactly as they were officially presented in the monster manual.

I like the 4e treatment of goblins and kobolds. I want to basically keep that. But what it sounds like is they want something a little more Sunless Citadel and a lot less Keep on the Shadowfell. And they're asking my opinion. So yay! I get to give mine. We all get to chime in on what the "official" monster is going to be.

I told everybody what I want. Are you gonna use this? Do you like it? Or are you just pitching seeds at people for having opinions?

Kamikaze Midget said:

I want a D&D game where everyone's own idea of what a goblin should be trumps everyone else's at their own table.

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Then you don't want ANY monster description then? Statblock only? Because ANY description someone writes is going to be counter to someone's idea of what a goblin is.

DMZ2112 said:

Taking a simplified example from the terrible Pathfinder characterization of goblins: my goblins, by contrast, are actually pretty smart. When I run in Pathfinder I have to use a completely custom stat block for goblins because their goblins are the poster children for severe brain damage. This is frustrating. It could potentially be /so much worse/ in D&D5 if they follow the D&D4 monster design strategy while caricaturing all of their monsters.

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Different strokes for different folks. I happen to find Pathfinder treatment of goblins to be the best thing to happen to them since they first appeared.

Worst monster column yet. Neither of these is comic, imo.