3.5 breakdown at high levels?

[MrGrenadine]

Hi! OP here.

I really wanted to hear about reasons why folks thought 3.5 fun suffered at high levels, so thanks to everyone who posted about that. I'm not so interested in hearing why 4e is supposedly better than 3.5, but hey, life in these times, I guess.

Anyway, a couple questions:

1. For those who feel that creating complicated monsters was a pain--why do it? Doesn't anyone just have their players run up against a group of monsters right out of the MM? Do monsters need to have class levels to be challenging? Or is it a boredom thing, as in "<yawn> another group of Storm Giants. Ho hum." I can't imagine a stock monster couldn't be made into an interesting, long-lasting villain by just adding a strong personality and some clear goals.

2. For those who feel that 3.5 combat was bogged down by too many choices--on the player side, this is something thats really going to depend on the player, obviously. As someone mentioned, players who aren't interested in reading and remembering rules and spell effects and whatnot just aren't going to do it, which leads to either a lot of page flipping, or missed opportunities from not knowing all of the available options. Has anyone fixed this problem? (By making simple stat blocks for spells or powers, clearly laid out, to avoid flipping through books, or something?)

And on the monster side, would it be boring or helpful to limit monster feats and spells to a few optimal choices, along with some good strategy based on the location, height, allies, etc?

3. I'm really surprised to read that anyone was loathe to fudge stats, etc, because they felt that the rules should be followed verbatim. In 22 years, I've never played a campaign without the DM picking and choosing of which Core rules to include, which 3pp to include, and/or adding houserules on top. I honestly thought RAW was for RPGA events and thought experiments. For everyone else, there was "take what you want and leave the rest." Has anyone out there played in or DM'd a strictly RAW long-term campaign?

 

[MrGrenadine]

Double post. Can't wait for that new server!

 

[Spatula]

1. For those who feel that creating complicated monsters was a pain--why do it?

Because stock options aren't available for what you need, probably. Classed NPCs would fit in there - the stock NPCs in the DMG aren't that helpful. Or you want something different, say a bigger badder version of the grunts that the PCs have been fighting.

2. For those who feel that 3.5 combat was bogged down by too many choices--on the player side, this is something thats really going to depend on the player, obviously. As someone mentioned, players who aren't interested in reading and remembering rules and spell effects and whatnot just aren't going to do it, which leads to either a lot of page flipping, or missed opportunities from not knowing all of the available options. Has anyone fixed this problem? (By making simple stat blocks for spells or powers, clearly laid out, to avoid flipping through books, or something?)

I'm sure there are spell cards out there. Having them doesn't reduce the sheer number of options that high level spellcasters have, it would just make lookup times slightly shorter. If people aren't interested in memorizing the spells in the books, why are they interested in memorizing the spells when you put them on cards?

And on the monster side, would it be boring or helpful to limit monster feats and spells to a few optimal choices, along with some good strategy based on the location, height, allies, etc?

That's the main thrust of 4e's approach to monsters. I would pay money to see someone "fix" 3e monster design along similar lines as 4e, although that would break existing monster stats.

First thing out the door: spell-like abilities and spellcasting as class X. If the monster can buff itself with magic, include those buffs into its stats. Important attack spells become special abilities that are written out in the stat block so you don't have to go looking up spells just to see what the creature can do. The rest is unimportant except as flavor ("Outside of combat, this creature can also cast any 1st-3rd level wizard spells that you feel are appropriate, 3/day").

 

[Benimoto]

1. For those who feel that creating complicated monsters was a pain--why do it? Doesn't anyone just have their players run up against a group of monsters right out of the MM? Do monsters need to have class levels to be challenging? Or is it a boredom thing, as in "<yawn> another group of Storm Giants. Ho hum."

Just because you'll run out of monsters. Take a look at the Monster Manual, and you'll notice that 5/6ths of the monsters are for levels 1-11, and only 1/6th of the monsters cover levels 12-20. Again, to be specific, look at CR 17. There's only 5 monsters there. Then, if a few don't fit your campaign at the time, you've got maybe 3 monsters to cover 12ish encounters.

So maybe it was a boredom thing, but I found that I had to supply at least 75% of the monsters myself after a certain level, either by advancing HD, class levels or occasionally making monsters up entirely.

 

[Hussar]

I'm not sure if it's really fair to say that people are loathe to fudge the stats. I'm certainly not. The point that's being made, as far as I'm concerned, is that the rules give you absolutely no guidelines as to how to fudge the stats.

Only include what's needed? How can I know that? If I leave off a feat, or two, or choose very poor feats, does that affect CR? How many skill points can I leave off without worrying about it?

In other words, the system, while certainly allowing you to fudge, gives you very little help as to how much you can do it.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I'm not sure if it's really fair to say that people are loathe to fudge the stats. I'm certainly not. The point that's being made, as far as I'm concerned, is that the rules give you absolutely no guidelines as to how to fudge the stats.

That's correct.

3e: Experience gives you guidelines.

4e: Rules give you guidelines out of the gate.

The appeal to 4e (in this particular respect) seems to be entirely dependent on your experience and your comfort level with the 3e rules. If you're not comfortable fudging 3e (for whatever reason) then 4e is a huge step forward.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

3e: Experience gives you guidelines.

4e: Rules give you guidelines out of the gate.

The appeal to 4e (in this particular respect) seems to be entirely dependent on your experience and your comfort level with the 3e rules. If you're not comfortable fudging 3e (for whatever reason) then 4e is a huge step forward.

I'd like to think I am comfortable with 3e rules, but fudging monster stats on the fly was not something I was comfortable with. I like following rules precisely and I like to keep the game fair. If I make a monster with the exact rules in the book, it's as fair as the game was designed for. If the encounter is unfair or unbalanced, then it is a problem with the rules.

On the other hand, if I increase a creature by 5 CRs on the fly by adding levels of something or just trying to increase the hitdice then I'm sure to miss something. I might not add any feats because I figure its no big deal. I might not choose new spells out of time constraints or choose really bad ones. Then I have an either overpowered or underpowered encounter.

Plus, my players can spot fudging a mile away and I've been yelled at for it the couple of times I've tried it. Once I came up with an AC on the fly for an NPC I fudged and when one of the players couldn't hit it with a high number he kept wondering very loudly about how the NPC could have an AC that high. The rest of the players agreed. Until, in order to make them get back to the game, I decided to recite out the math I had worked out in my head. Turns out I was 1 or 2 points too high. Not a HUGE deal, but it would have caused 2 attacks that missed to hit instead. But they insisted on rolling damage and adding it to the NPC immediately since I was cheating.

I believe once I didn't have time to make up an NPC at all so I just decided that he was a level 12 fighter and that between strength bumps, BAB, magic weapon, feats, magic stat enhancers he'd have +18 to hit. There were members of the party with ACs of 36. They were doing all the blocking to prevent enemies from getting close to everyone else. The NPC might as well not have been in the battle as he didn't hit all combat. If I had spent time and a lot of effort, I'm sure I could have used PrC, feats from outside of the PHB, templates, different races, calculating bonuses in more detail(I'm sure if I had remembered Weapon Focus and figured out his actual cash then I could have put better items on him and gotten his bonus up to +23), and so on to actually make a challenging opponent.

But that's exactly the point. At high levels the numbers break down. The attack bonus of the enemies is WAY too small to hit the PCs sometimes and WAY too high to miss other times. A player who knows how to min-max effectively has a 36 AC at level 12. One who doesn't has an AC of 24. One monster has +15 to hit at CR 12. One has +30.

That's what I found as the number one issue affecting high level. The second being that nearly every round one of the bonuses would need to be recalculated or would be forgotten by someone:
"Did you include Heroes Feast? What about the Greater Magic Weapon I put on you? Haste? Prayer? Righteous Wrath of the Faithful? Keep in mind the Bard Song. Wait...Bard Song and Heroes Feast are both Morale Bonuses? I've been adding too much to hit all combat! What's that? Prayer and Righteous Wrath are both Luck Bonuses? Well, I wouldn't have cast Prayer if I knew that. Let me go back to my last turn and cast something else. You are including the minuses to your attack for firing into melee, right? Keep in mind, the Righteous Wrath ran out last round, but the Prayer didn't. Oh, crap, I forgot it ran out. I wouldn't have hit last round. Remove that damage. And I forgot I still got the Prayer so I would have hit!"

 

[Jhaelen]

Just because you'll run out of monsters. Take a look at the Monster Manual, and you'll notice that 5/6ths of the monsters are for levels 1-11, and only 1/6th of the monsters cover levels 12-20. Again, to be specific, look at CR 17. There's only 5 monsters there. Then, if a few don't fit your campaign at the time, you've got maybe 3 monsters to cover 12ish encounters.

This!

Things get worse if you like your adventures to have a theme and the monster composition to make some sense. As it happens, I have some numbers for you:

I've recently prepared a level 12 adventure for 3E based on Ari's 'Last Breaths of Ashenport'. I used four monsters straight from the MM and created 10 new statblocks which took me about 15 hours:

My starting point were the Aboleth and Skum from MM1, Kuo-Toa from MM5, and two types of npcs created from scratch (well, for one of them I actually reused an npc created for an older adventure, increasing the class levels and upgrading the equipment).

Then I advanced some of them by adding HD, added the Half-Farspawn Template from 'Lords of Madness' and added some class levels to arrive at the required encounter levels.

As always the spellcasters took the longest. Selecting feats, spells and equipment is always slow for me, since I don't want every npc to have the same spells - that gets old real fast, imho. The second reason they take so long is that I like to include all of the mechanical effects of the spells in the stat blocks - I hate having to look up spells during fights!

 

[Spatula]

Plus, my players can spot fudging a mile away and I've been yelled at for it the couple of times I've tried it. Once I came up with an AC on the fly for an NPC I fudged and when one of the players couldn't hit it with a high number he kept wondering very loudly about how the NPC could have an AC that high. The rest of the players agreed. Until, in order to make them get back to the game, I decided to recite out the math I had worked out in my head. Turns out I was 1 or 2 points too high. Not a HUGE deal, but it would have caused 2 attacks that missed to hit instead. But they insisted on rolling damage and adding it to the NPC immediately since I was cheating.

...wow.

 

[Scribble]

That's correct.

3e: Experience gives you guidelines.

4e: Rules give you guidelines out of the gate.

The appeal to 4e (in this particular respect) seems to be entirely dependent on your experience and your comfort level with the 3e rules. If you're not comfortable fudging 3e (for whatever reason) then 4e is a huge step forward.

This is part of it. At least in my case. In my case it was:

Experience gives you guidelines, but a lot of it was guess work. And then you had to be able to use said experience to deal with the guess being wrong. Ooops, that feat ended up making him way to powerful! or oops changing that made him way too weak!

So you ended up with somewhat of a cascade of fudges... Not a huge problem for an experienced DM, but still.

I like the fact that I can achieve what I was going for with just a few math tricks, and not have to worry about dealing with the results being "oopsed."

This was true in ditions prior to 3 I'd say as well... Just I think with the 3e balanced math idea it got a lot more prevelant.