Word of Mearls: Official Player races will not get Oversized Weapons. Forked Thread
- Thread starter frankthedm
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This is rather depressing, because it points to (again) a very limited palette of possibilities due to the dread fear of anyone anywhere being better than anyone else at anything -- apparently this is the End Of Gaming As We Know It, even though grossly unbalanced games have been around for 30+ years and people still manage to have fun with them.
And why is it NOT unbalanced for Halflings to be stuck with undersized weapons?
One of the best things about 3x was that, pretty much, ANY creature could be a PC race or an NPC -- you didn't need to wait around for an "official PC version" that may or may not look anything like the default for the race.
This seems to imply that there will NEVER be playable large-size creatures in 4e, unless they have to wield undersized weapons, or else have some typically ham-fisted rule which says "Well, the weapons they wield LOOK like they're large size, but, in fact, they do damage as if they were normal." (Maybe they do +1 or something, or, once per encounter, function as if they were ACTUALLY large size.)
I understand a lot of the mechanical reasoning -- when you start getting things like [6W] attacks and each [W] is 2d6 or more, especially with criticals, brutals, etc, it quickly scales ludicrously. I consider this a problem with 4e design, and its very mainstream focus. Instead of saying, "How can we make a system to handle anything anyone might want to do?" (Which was the 3e approach, even if often badly implemented), the 4e designers seemed to say "How can we make a system to handle what we will define as the 'standard' for play?"
And why is it NOT unbalanced for Halflings to be stuck with undersized weapons?
One of the best things about 3x was that, pretty much, ANY creature could be a PC race or an NPC -- you didn't need to wait around for an "official PC version" that may or may not look anything like the default for the race.
This seems to imply that there will NEVER be playable large-size creatures in 4e, unless they have to wield undersized weapons, or else have some typically ham-fisted rule which says "Well, the weapons they wield LOOK like they're large size, but, in fact, they do damage as if they were normal." (Maybe they do +1 or something, or, once per encounter, function as if they were ACTUALLY large size.)
I understand a lot of the mechanical reasoning -- when you start getting things like [6W] attacks and each [W] is 2d6 or more, especially with criticals, brutals, etc, it quickly scales ludicrously. I consider this a problem with 4e design, and its very mainstream focus. Instead of saying, "How can we make a system to handle anything anyone might want to do?" (Which was the 3e approach, even if often badly implemented), the 4e designers seemed to say "How can we make a system to handle what we will define as the 'standard' for play?"
I can't be the only one who grew sick of core races 2+ years ago and has played nothing but exotic LA races/monster PCs (savage species style) almost exclusively ever since...
Nope. We're just wrapping up an all-SS campaign which took us from 1st to 16th level with the strangest menagerie imaginable...
OK, so you understand why giving oversized weapons is bad. You make that clear.
Then you indicate that 3.5 often poorly handled the exceptions it was so happy to give out so that it could have the anything goes attitude.
And you consider a system designed to handle the races who are made to conform to a certain standard as a problem?
Making races "standard" and interchangeable does not mean that one can't be better than another, at certain things. Oversized weapon and str/con makes them better at every other race possible, in too many ways.
If you don't like the design philosophy of 4, keep playing 3.5 really. Play the powerbroken savage species characters who are all far better than anything in any core book before them. This is the effect they are trying to avoid in 4, where every time we release a race we all but invalidate the previous ones.
If everyone in the campaign was playing a savage species race that's fine, the power level balances out more or less, but if everyone is playing them and one lone guy is playing a dwarf or halfling they are going to be so outclassed in most ways. 4E makes it so that every race remains a viable choice, and you pick based on what you want to play to have fun, not what you should play to be effective.
What i don't understand is that people need 'official rulings' from a wotc guy before accepting these things. People in my campaign got to choose any race in the players handbook, because they were designed an balanced for it. If they wanted anything else, homebrew or any other source, they had to check with me.
Not because i want to be in control of the choices they make, but because of the before mentioned balance concerns. When i read the oversized weapon rules, i came to the immediate conclusion it was to strong. When i looked on the forums, it was like people treated all the MM races as legitimate options, as if they were in the PH. Did none of you read this section before the MM races?
Several of the monsters in the Monster Manual have racial
traits and powers, not unlike the races presented in the
Player’s Handbook. In general, these traits and powers are provided
to help Dungeon Masters create nonplayer characters
(NPCs). This information can also be used as guidelines for
creating player character (PC) versions of these creatures,
within reason. Note that these traits and powers are more in
line with monster powers than with player character powers.
A player should only use one of the following races to
create a character with the permission of the Dungeon
Master. The DM should carefully consider which monster
races, if any, to allow as PCs in his or her campaign.
And even if your Dm let you play those characters, why does it change now all of a sudden? Mike mearls isn't going to show up to your game and slap you around if you still play a Bugbear. D&d is not set in stone, if you dont like a 'nerf' you dont have to use it.
And in the spirit of being constructive, why dont you replace the oversized race feature with a free superior weapon feat? This still allows your character to wield a big weapon, like a bastard sword or fullblade, but perfectly balanced with the rules. Very easy fix, and i use it in my campaign.
Not because i want to be in control of the choices they make, but because of the before mentioned balance concerns. When i read the oversized weapon rules, i came to the immediate conclusion it was to strong. When i looked on the forums, it was like people treated all the MM races as legitimate options, as if they were in the PH. Did none of you read this section before the MM races?
Several of the monsters in the Monster Manual have racial
traits and powers, not unlike the races presented in the
Player’s Handbook. In general, these traits and powers are provided
to help Dungeon Masters create nonplayer characters
(NPCs). This information can also be used as guidelines for
creating player character (PC) versions of these creatures,
within reason. Note that these traits and powers are more in
line with monster powers than with player character powers.
A player should only use one of the following races to
create a character with the permission of the Dungeon
Master. The DM should carefully consider which monster
races, if any, to allow as PCs in his or her campaign.
And even if your Dm let you play those characters, why does it change now all of a sudden? Mike mearls isn't going to show up to your game and slap you around if you still play a Bugbear. D&d is not set in stone, if you dont like a 'nerf' you dont have to use it.
And in the spirit of being constructive, why dont you replace the oversized race feature with a free superior weapon feat? This still allows your character to wield a big weapon, like a bastard sword or fullblade, but perfectly balanced with the rules. Very easy fix, and i use it in my campaign.
When the option was to learn from the mistakes in 3e and provide BETTER rules for non-standard races? Yes.
You've obviously never played an SS campaign. The monster races are horribly UNDERpowered for their ECL. Our Ogre Mage didn't get iteratives until he was about 12th level, and he was our main healing sponge because his hit dice sucked. My raven humanoid Blood Magus had more hit points than him!
Pretty much everyone I know plays "what's fun". I honestly feel the folks who haunt the char op boards don't actually PLAY, they just make builds. Most of the stuff I see there is based on ignoring "What would make this character fun/interesting/unique?" and instead embraces "How can I squeeze one more +1 out of this?", resulting in characters who make absolutely no sense. But that's another thread.
ECL may have been a clumsy solution, and worked better for non-caster classes, but at least provided a means by which non-standard races could introduced into the campaign and "feel" proper. The only way I can see it working in 4e is if you had "multiclass races" -- you would spend a feat (your only one, at first level) to gain a "racial class", and then you could buy additional "racial powers" with more feats.
By basically capping races at Medium, I think a lot of possibilities are cut off. I'm pretty sure the 4e system is not so delicate and fragile that some solution could not be found. As it is, I get the impression from 4e fans that 4e is a precious flower of spun glass, and you musn't push it at all, lest the perfect and sensitive 'balance' be shattered for all time.
If a system can't take a couple of good hard kicks, what good is it?
I have been wondering about this too. There are several ways they could do it.
1. Bring back racial penalties. -2 to attack will more-or-less balance oversized weapons, and the extra surface area of large creatures is a sort of hidden defense penalty (since more creatures can attack you and it's harder to have cover).
4e has a "races don't carry penalties" dictum that seems fine as a general guideline, but if they stick to it like gospel it will lead to much stoopid, especially when designing wacky racial concepts. 4e threw out a lot of sacred cows so I hope the designers aren't instituting new ones.
2. Partial abilities. Maybe the oversized weapon counts as a normal-sized weapon for Encounter and Daily powers? That way your At-Wills are still a bit better than the other guy's, but your 4[W] Encounter attack isn't disgusting. Or maybe oversize is just a flat +1 or +2 damage -- not as good as monster weapons but not terrible (there are feats that do that and no one considers them underpowered).
This is the sort of hand-waving you mention above, but any sort of playable monster rules will require a certain amount of hand-waving. One of the main reasons Savage Species sucked so bad is that they refused to impose any hand-waving at all, and tried to balance the monsters exactly as written, which doesn't work very well. I think it's a lot more important for the monster races' rules to capture the flavor of their MM counterparts than to match up exactly.
3. Feats/Multiclassing. Maybe the PC ogre starts out as Medium sized (he's a young ogre) and needs to take a feat to become large and another to wield oversized weapons. Or worse, you need to power-swap your Utility powers to do it. More elaborate races could power-swap their attack powers (for example, a mind flayer wouldn't start with mind blast but could trade an Encounter power to get it). This is sort of like 3.x's monster classes or racial classes translated into 4e terms.
I'm convinced that we will see a 4e Savage Species eventually and that it will be a lot better than the 3.x one. Even if Wizards announces that "no, it would be too imbalanced, we're going to stick with medium humanoids and just trickle them out through DDI," then you know a third-party publisher would snatch up that gauntlet real quick.
-- 77IM
Please, I advise you to at least have some idea about what you are ranting about before you go shooting your mouth off. With a few exceptions, most monster races are fairly underpowered for their ECLs because wotc assigned too high LAs to them (likely because they over-estimated how useful their abilities would be, or because they were compared against unoptimized PCs as yardsticks).
I agree - a crappy solution was better than no solution at all. It didn't make sense how a baby ogre could quickly progress to a fully-grown ogre after a few weeks of adventuring, but if you were willing to close one eye to this, you could at least still be able to play a monster race from 1st lv onwards.
However I look at it, it is still more favourable than the alternative - having to wait until lv6 before I could play an ogre. At least the option was there if I felt so inclined.
I look forward to the day when 4e will let me play a dragon PC as per the monster in the MM, not some watered down variant which retains none of its features save its name.
James McMurray
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