Exception-based monster abilities?

[Plane Sailing]

I was completely put off it by 4th edition D&D, where it seemed like an excuse for lazy design. When four different monsters had four different ways of handling the same thing (pin with a spear iirc) it just drove me up the wall.

I don't have any problem with some creatures having unique abilities, but I do look for consistency in approach.

 

[Celebrim]

I think it is fine to customize monsters however you see fit. I don't really have much desire these days to return to the 3E way of doing things (where it felt like too much of the system operated on the same mechanical rules, and for me that started taking some of the imaginative spark out of things). I am a fan of 3E....but just in term of this one aspect, I like the GMs (and the designer's),imagination and judgment to be a little more freed up.

I don't really understand this comment, and I'm going to have to speculate on where that perception comes from.

From my perspective, 3E was massively exception based. It had some rules for helping DMs to create balanced monsters according to certain expectations, but it's hard to find a monster entry that didn't validate designer creativity by providing exceptions to those rules.

One of the most common and often applied exception was the 'racial' provision. If you thought that the monster in question needed more skill points (or fewer) or more feats or higher attack bonus or really anything else, you could just append to the monster 'X gains Y as a racial bonus'. But indeed, pretty much every rule in the game for making a monster was broken at some point. Need an intelligent ooze, animal, or plant? Sure, make one, just note that despite being a whatever, it's intelligent. Want an undead plant? Just tack on a comment that it's both undead AND a plant. And so on and so forth. All those extraordinary and supernatural abilities that appear below the stat block are exceptions.

Where I think some DMs went wrong with this is that they felt all these tools meant that they were required to make any monster they created fit for publication, tracking each skill points and bonus down to the least jot and tittle. That of course is a huge burden. It's such a huge burden that even the 40 hour a week pro's often screwed it up and needed errata. This was of course true even before 3e, as the 1e Monster Manual II - which was nothing but exception based - still managed to misprint and misstate various things (no, Jann Nobles weren't actually supposed to have 83 HD, cool though that concept is).

But it is not at all a burden that a DM keeping track of things for his own use needs to over worry about. If it was actually challenged, you could justify pretty much any stat block by making the exceptions from the norm simply racial and extraordinary bonuses of this creature.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't really understand this comment, and I'm going to have to speculate on where that perception comes from.

For the record, I don't think exception based design has ever been a particularly useful term. I am not terribly invested in whether 3E was or was not exception based. Whatever we call it, 3E had a specific approach to monsters that I think set it apart from other editions (and I don't think it is necessarily bad, just not what I am after at the moment).

It has mainly to do with the fact that monsters and PCs fundamentally followed the same rules (particularly if you wanted to do something like use a template). At first I loved it, but over time it felt constraining. Particularly when it came things surrounding consistency of mechanics. There were certain things in 3E that worked the same whether it was from a spell, monster, PC, etc (and a lot of it had to do with how things were tagged). Like I said, I liked 3E. When I ran d20 wuxia recently I did it with 3E because of its high level of customizability. I just found in the mid-2000s (when I was running and playing it a lot), the consistency of the system throughout, was actually a bit much for my tastes. Yes, you can always ignore tools and adjust mechanics. I am just talking about how most people tended to run it in my experience.

If your experience with it was different, that is cool. I'm really not much interested in edition warring (particularly over an edition I liked). But these days, I prefer monsters be done a different way (where each one is uniquely created as needed with worrying about keying its abilities into some other aspect of the system).

 

[Celebrim]

For the record, I don't think exception based design has ever been a particularly useful term. I am not terribly invested in whether 3E was or was not exception based.

I think that is the core of what we agree on. The problem with the term 'exception based design' is that there is almost no monster book out there for any system that isn't exception based, and certainly not for D&D. I suppose HERO could be said not to be exception based, because everything in it is presumably based on mechanics that are shared across all creatures whether PC or NPC or monster, but even that perception may be as much as anything based on my lack of familiarity with HERO.

Quantifying just how exception based something is would be difficult.

It has mainly to do with the fact that monsters and PCs fundamentally followed the same rules (particularly if you wanted to do something like use a template).

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with that. On the one hand, it's quite obvious monsters and PC's fundamentally didn't follow the same rules, as just by way of one example the difficulty of using PC's as monsters often shows. Indeed, each of the types of monsters followed its own rules, and then each specific monster usually made exceptions to the generic 'ooze' or 'giant' or 'dragon' or 'vermin' template in various ways. Granted, at the system level monsters and PC's used the same base concepts - hit points, saving throws, skills, attacks, damage, etc. - but that's true of most systems. It's a rare system that has hit points for PCs and a wound track for monsters, as that sort of inconsistency tends to mean that the system is more complex rather than less.

I guess I don't understand how you can both feel constrained and also feel that you had a high level of customizability. When I opened the 3e MM, the first thing that struck me was just how much of the customizations I had felt compelled to employ to provide challenge for higher level PC's (doubling or tripling the HD of a monster, for example) was explicitly validated by and encouraged by the system.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

One of the most common and often applied exception was the 'racial' provision. If you thought that the monster in question needed more skill points (or fewer) or more feats or higher attack bonus or really anything else, you could just append to the monster 'X gains Y as a racial bonus'. But indeed, pretty much every rule in the game for making a monster was broken at some point. Need an intelligent ooze, animal, or plant? Sure, make one, just note that despite being a whatever, it's intelligent. Want an undead plant? Just tack on a comment that it's both undead AND a plant.

One of the things about 3.X was that everything had inherent meaning. A racial bonus meant that there was something about the creature's physiology which made the creature better at the relevant task. Natural ability was covered by ability scores. Skills only represented practiced skills. You could have a creature with +20 to Spot because it had four ranks and Wisdom 13 and a +15 racial bonus, and it would be distinctly different from another creature that just had 20 skill ranks, or 15 ranks and +5 from Wisdom. There were a lot of rules, but most of them were far-reaching and applied equally to everyone.

Most of what a creature could do was just the sum of its parts, and could be inferred just by looking at it, once you were fluent in the system language - you could look at a troll, and guess by its size that it would have Strength and AC within a certain range, and even if you didn't know immediately that it could regenerate (in the same way that it's not obvious that a dragon can breathe fire), you would know that any regeneration in this world followed certain rules about how fast it happened and what sorts of conditions were required to stop it (just like you'd know that armor doesn't help you against a breath weapon or spell, because that's always a saving throw rather than an attack roll).

Also, for the record, there was a strict hierarchy of types. If you tried to turn a plant into an undead (or apply a half-demon template to a dragon, or whatever), then there were strict rules for how types interacted and which abilities the final creature would have. This was important so you could know if the final creature needed to breathe, was immune to paralysis, or was proficient in martial weapons. You could just make stuff up without worrying about that, but then you risk the players feeling helpless since the world doesn't work how they believe it should work.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with that. On the one hand, it's quite obvious monsters and PC's fundamentally didn't follow the same rules, as just by way of one example the difficulty of using PC's as monsters often shows. Indeed, each of the types of monsters followed its own rules, and then each specific monster usually made exceptions to the generic 'ooze' or 'giant' or 'dragon' or 'vermin' template in various ways. Granted, at the system level monsters and PC's used the same base concepts - hit points, saving throws, skills, attacks, damage, etc. - but that's true of most systems. It's a rare system that has hit points for PCs and a wound track for monsters, as that sort of inconsistency tends to mean that the system is more complex rather than less.

I guess I don't understand how you can both feel constrained and also feel that you had a high level of customizability. When I opened the 3e MM, the first thing that struck me was just how much of the customizations I had felt compelled to employ to provide challenge for higher level PC's (doubling or tripling the HD of a monster, for example) was explicitly validated by and encouraged by the system.

I guess part of it is that while it is highly customizable, this is all done through a highly developed and deep system. The monsters reflect this. Fire Damage works a particular way in 3E. Damage Reduction works a particular way. Vulnerabilities and special abilities all have tags that matter. The whole CR system is pretty important as well. At first I really liked that. But over time, I felt like I was always going to the system and didn't feel as free to just make stuff up whole cloth. When you have a system that is consistent and deep like that, it sometimes, for me, loses a bit of its spark as it gets applied to everything. Granted, nothing to stop you from making a monsters entirely the way you want, but if you had a monster with a fire attack, there is an assumption in the game that it follows those rules. If you had a monster with a particular tag (undead or celestial) there were rules for what that entailed (and the monsters in the MM reflect this). It is a great system, one I like and enjoyed a lot. But right now, that isn't what I am as interested in doing when I am a GM.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

One thing that's worth noting here is that there was only one Achilles, one sword in the stone, and one Mjolnir. And, in each case, there's a whole lot of in-setting lore about that unique instance that ideally would precede its appearance in the game.

In the 5E game I am currently running, there was a legendary Orc warlord who had appeared after being vanquished a thousand years prior, and who claimed to be invincible. After some investigation, the players uncovered further legends of a single weapon that could slay him, and they went on a quest to find it, which they eventually recovered and subsequently used to slay him.

The sword was a frostbrand, dealing +1d6 cold damage per attack. The only thing that could stop his regeneration was cold damage. The party could have succeeded as easily by casting Ray of Frost against him, if they'd had someone who could cast it. The legends were perfectly accurate - this was the only weapon that could slay him, because it was the only weapon in the known world that dealt cold damage - but his regeneration followed all of the normal rules that were established for the setting.

 

[dave2008]

I hate to be this person, but... I see two issues with the wording of the Sphinx's riddler ability:

1) The sphinx tracks someone who flees - if it does so, isn't it leaving its guard duties? This doesn't seem to fit thematically

2) As written the PCs only need to answer the riddle to negative the sphinx's protection, not answer the riddle correctly / solve it. I know the RAI, but judging by these boards there sure are a lot of people who are strict about RAW.

Back on topic, exception based design is fine and good. You just have to be careful with what the exceptions are.