D&D 4E Thing I thought 4e did better: Monsters

[Sacrosanct]

Gotta role play the bad guys too. They have just as much desire to live as anyone else. Or unlive if they're undead.


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An image I had commissioned for an adventure I did several years ago*. It's all about perspective Monsters have motivation and stories too




It was a two part adventure where players play monster humanoids, defending their land from invading "heroes"

 

[Jester David]

Eh, 4th and 5th both have blurbs in the encounter design sections that say a fight becomes "harder" of you give favorable conditions to the monsters. A medium fight becomes hard, a hard fight becomes deadly ...

Right, but you're not awarded more experience.

4E also had Levels for traps and level guidance on how much damage environmental conditions should deal so they were worth the action to push someone into them. It would be super easy to do the same thing in 5th.

Traps were treated like monsters IIRC. But traps in 4e were... different. By the book anyway, requiring multiple checks to disarm and not really matching the standard "gotcha!" traps of past editions. There needed to be a minion variant of traps really.

But environmental effects, terrain, and hazards in the battlefield generally didn't award experience. Traps that could be "triggered" were basically terrain based Encounter powers rather than true traps, and didn't award experience. Things like a vat of boiling oil or a falling portcullis.

 

[Xeviat]

But environmental effects, terrain, and hazards in the battlefield generally didn't award experience. Traps that could be "triggered" were basically terrain based Encounter powers rather than true traps, and didn't award experience. Things like a vat of boiling oil or a falling portcullis.

Exactly. If the monster's level was accounted for, and the trap/environment effect was the same level, and it took action on the part of the enemy, it was accounted for.


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[pemerton]

The myth of Tucker's kobolds is such BS. They werent kobolds, they were killer DM traps with kobold based flavor text.

They also seem like a good target for Cloudkill - and make one wonder why the MU, at least, wasn't under Protection from Normal Missiles.

 

[pemerton]

It never fails to amaze me that for the majority of D&D's existence, it's official motto was "Products of Your Imagination", and yet so many players refuse to use their imagination and instead think monsters/PCs are limited to what's in an official statblock as to what they can do and nothing else is allowed.

You don't think this is just a bit condescending?

 

[pemerton]

Well, when you have players who don't assume every encounter should be automatically won, then it isn't a problem. They tend to be more cautious in their approach.

Several times over the past week or so I've seen this idea of "encounters thst should be automatically won". I'm not sure where it comes from - but here is a comment from Gygax, on p 179 of his DMG:

Number of creatures encountered should be appropriate to the strength of the encountering party.​

In other words, the idea that "encounter building" involves some constraint of fairness or reasonableness is hardly new.

The main difference I see between then and now is that Gygax assumed that, with the exception of random encounters (which is the context in which the above advice is given), the players will be choosing what challenges their PCs confront (by scouting out the dungeon, and choosing which targets to hit); whereas most contemporary D&D play seems to assume that the GM will choose what challenges the PCs confront. The old idea of a large dungeon complex with mostly static encounters (monsters in rooms) - and idea that one can see at work in the Tucker's kobolds editorial - is mostly gone.

And another thing: is the game better when the players (and their PCs) adopt a cautious approach? Personally, I don't think so. Conan, mostly, is reckless, not cautious. Aragorn went boldly into the Paths of the Dead - he didn't push in front with a 10' pole. My own view is that cautious, 10' pole play tends to be boring, and that more forthright play tends to be more exciting at the time and more memorable after the event.

I don't think that makes me some sort of bad roleplayer!

 

[pemerton]

traps in 4e were... different. By the book anyway, requiring multiple checks to disarm and not really matching the standard "gotcha!" traps of past editions. There needed to be a minion variant of traps really.

There was - it is discussed and examples given in DMG2.

 

[Grazzt]

They also seem like a good target for Cloudkill - and make one wonder why the MU, at least, wasn't under Protection from Normal Missiles.

Cloudkill might've worked to take out some of them,depending how how spread out or not they were. But the M-U would have to be careful with that spell. Depending on his positioning, if he caught any party members in the cloud, they'd have to make a saving throw or die (since it says the party was 6th-12th level and IIRC 1e cloudkill affected creatures up to and including 6 HD/levels).

Protection from normal missiles wouldve worked to protect whomever the m-u cast it on. But unless he memorized multiple protection spells in lieu of other stuff, not many in the party would benefit.

 

[cbwjm]

There is also no guarantee that they had those spells available in the first place.

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[pemerton]

The fact is, 5e, like 4e, requires the DM to make the monsters come alive.

This is pretty much my stance on a lot of these 'ermagerd, X is broken!' Threads.
Bottom line: if your monsters are boring slabs of HP, it's on you. Not the monsters.

Gotta role play the bad guys too. They have just as much desire to live as anyone else.

How seriously do you mean this?

I mean, does the same thing go for PCs to: that we don't need those dozens and dozens of pages of spell descriptions; the table of weapon details; etc, because it's all about the players bringing their PCs to life through evocative roleplaying?

It seems to me that, no matter how evocative the GM is, if a dragon is going to be different from (say) a giant rat in an encounter, than that needs some mechanical expression: at a minimum, it has to be harder for the PCs to defeat the dragon than the rat (in D&D this is more AC, more hp, better saves - these mechanics have been pretty stable over the years) and the dragon has to have some sort of dangerous multi-target attack that refelects its ability, in the fiction, to breathe fire (in D&D this is the AoE "breath weapon", the mechanics of which have varied over the years).

Once you get into the minutiae of action economy and the like - which have tended to get more complex, in D&D, as the years go on - then if the dragon is meant to be an exciting solo threat some way is needed to handle this too. No amount of GM hamming it up is going to compensate for a lack of off-turn actions in 3E, 4e or 5e. So the GM can either fiat those things, or have them written down in a stat block. Writing them down doesn't make them more interesting, but it doesn't make them less interesting either.