D&D General What does the mundane high level fighter look like? [+]

[Vaalingrade]

But the criticism is completely true. If we have pretty normal situation that commoners and/or town guard are trying to fend off monsters that are serious threat to them but minions to the PCs that arrive to help them, then those commoners/guard can still oneshot the monsters. To get around that you need to ignore the rules. No other edition of D&D has issues with such a simple basic scenario. You can just plug the stats from the MM and roll the dice, no issue.

In their native edition, there's no bounded accuracy or CR. Monsters are leveled and minions have an AC commiserate with their level and do average leveled damage. Scrubs cannot hit them to do the 1HP unless they crit, and the minion can still crush them flat.

Because the minion is actually a logical and elegant mechanic for the narrativist style is was created for.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, you need to follow the rules.

This is from the 4e D&D DMG, p 40:

D&D is a game about adventuring parties fighting groups of monsters, not the clash of armies. A warlord’s power might, read strictly, be able to give a hundred “allies” a free basic attack, but that doesn’t mean that warlord characters should assemble armies to march before them into the dungeon. In general, a power’s effect should be limited to a squad-sized group - the size of your player character group plus perhaps one or two friendly NPCs - not hired soldiers or lantern-bearers.​

If the paragon tier PCs are leading commoners in defence of their town against Ogres, that sounds like a skill challenge, at least initially. When it turns into a fight, the commoners are perhaps some sort of buff to the PCs; or they are imagined to do their stuff "off to the side" while we resolve the real action, which is the PCs vs the Ogres.

To me this all seems obvious stuff that follows from the basic design and presentation of the game.

So you admit that the combat rules are not suited for handling such an incredibly common scenario? Personally I'd consider that a rather serious flaw in the system.

I judge the game by my experience of it, not the experiences of those who seem not to be familiar with its basic rules principles and who worry about their Ogre NPCs slipping on banana peels. But I fully agree that 4e will not easily support Clouseau-esque fiction.

That really isn't the gist of the criticism and you know it. And both Oofta an I are familiar with the system and have used it. I admit that criticism of 4e tended to get a tad hyperbolic back in the day, but having experience with the system, I'd say most of the criticism was essentially correct, if perhaps somewhat exaggerated.

 

[Baron Opal II]

I find it bizarre that someone can suggest that's something approaching the thing I said when it's right there in the quote above it.

I guess you don't hear "you might be right" that often?

 

[Tony Vargas]

This is obviously not how 4e D&D stat blocks are meant to be used.

TBF, there's a strong argument against using monster/enemy-NPC stat blocks against eachother (beyond, perhaps, the odd bit of mind-controlling - magic breaks all the rules, afterall). There's not really a lot of point to the DM running through a combat the players don't participate in. (I suppose it's not, like, a reprehensible thing to do, but it is, at best, a solitary bit of fun for the DM who enjoys that sort of thing.)

If the paragon tier PCs are leading commoners in defence of their town against Ogres, that sounds like a skill challenge, at least initially. When it turns into a fight, the commoners are perhaps some sort of buff to the PCs; or they are imagined to do their stuff "off to the side" while we resolve the real action, which is the PCs vs the Ogres.

OT1H, paragon PCs defending a town is a little below their paygrade, that's Heroic Tier stuff. OTOH, 4e did have an issue when it came to having troops on the PC's side. There were Companion characters that weren't quite monster stats and were tuned to work with a PC party, but that was it. You could create a Companion character with the swarm trait, and there's a unit of much lower-level people fighting along-side the heroes.
I have done that, and, predictably, it slowed down combats having units of allies fighting units of enemies not direcly related to the PCs' part of the battle. It wasn't quite the excrutiating experience it was for the players when I integrated their party into a Battlesytem unit in AD&D, but it did make for a very slow - huge, epic, but slow - "encounter"
While I'd readily use swarms of medium humanoids as units for high-level PCs to fight, again, I don't find a lot of benefit to doing it on the player's side of any battle - such allies can just be described doing their thing across the battlefield, while play focuses on the, y'know, players.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I fully agree with @hawkeyefan.

I mean, "boss" and "goon" are themselves relative. When Grolantor or Erythnul shows up, with their troop of "Ogre bosses", it would make perfect sense to stat those bosses as minions. (Eg upthread I posited my 15th level elite Ogre Warhulk, who could easily be statted as a 27th level minion.)

But the "behaviour" here is abstract mechanical matters such as attacks, damage, action economy etc. These are all purely conventional. Which I think is a key part of @Manbearcat's point.

You seem to be advocating some sort of "reification" of AC, hp, action economy etc. But as Gygax explained in his PHB and DMG, that way lies madness - for instance, it implies that Conan is physically tougher than a warhorse; that a sword fight consists of a metronomic exchange of unparried blows; etc.

It's all abstract; and once the abstraction is recognised, conventionality follows.

I have no general antipathy to GM judgement; and I never found it weird. The player whose PC was in command of the squad of handcrossbowmen found it pretty cool, I think.

"Abstract" does not mean "infinitely maliable to you and your table's narrative needs".

 

[Micah Sweet]

No, you need to follow the rules.

This is from the 4e D&D DMG, p 40:

D&D is a game about adventuring parties fighting groups of monsters, not the clash of armies. A warlord’s power might, read strictly, be able to give a hundred “allies” a free basic attack, but that doesn’t mean that warlord characters should assemble armies to march before them into the dungeon. In general, a power’s effect should be limited to a squad-sized group - the size of your player character group plus perhaps one or two friendly NPCs - not hired soldiers or lantern-bearers.​

If the paragon tier PCs are leading commoners in defence of their town against Ogres, that sounds like a skill challenge, at least initially. When it turns into a fight, the commoners are perhaps some sort of buff to the PCs; or they are imagined to do their stuff "off to the side" while we resolve the real action, which is the PCs vs the Ogres.

To me this all seems obvious stuff that follows from the basic design and presentation of the game.

I judge the game by my experience of it, not the experiences of those who seem not to be familiar with its basic rules principles and who worry about their Ogre NPCs slipping on banana peels. But I fully agree that 4e will not easily support Clouseau-esque fiction.

Again, we understand how 4e works, and its intentions for gameplay. It is NOT what we want. Please stop assuming we just don't get it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So you admit that the combat rules are not suited for handling such an incredibly common scenario? Personally I'd consider that a rather serious flaw in the system.


That really isn't the gist of the criticism and you know it. And both Oofta an I are familiar with the system and have used it. I admit that criticism of 4e tended to get a tad hyperbolic back in the day, but having experience with the system, I'd say most of the criticism was essentially correct, if perhaps somewhat exaggerated.

I ran and played 4e for nearly two years. We get it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

TBF, there's a strong argument against using monster/enemy-NPC stat blocks against eachother (beyond, perhaps, the odd bit of mind-controlling - magic breaks all the rules, afterall). There's not really a lot of point to the DM running through a combat the players don't participate in. (I suppose it's not, like, a reprehensible thing to do, but it is, at best, a solitary bit of fun for the DM who enjoys that sort of thing.)


OT1H, paragon PCs defending a town is a little below their paygrade, that's Heroic Tier stuff. OTOH, 4e did have an issue when it came to having troops on the PC's side. There were Companion characters that weren't quite monster stats and were tuned to work with a PC party, but that was it. You could create a Companion character with the swarm trait, and there's a unit of much lower-level people fighting along-side the heroes.
I have done that, and, predictably, it slowed down combats having units of allies fighting units of enemies not direcly related to the PCs' part of the battle. It wasn't quite the excrutiating experience it was for the players when I integrated their party into a Battlesytem unit in AD&D, but it did make for a very slow - huge, epic, but slow - "encounter"
While I'd readily use swarms of medium humanoids as units for high-level PCs to fight, again, I don't find a lot of benefit to doing it on the player's side of any battle - such allies can just be described doing their thing across the battlefield, while play focuses on the, y'know, players.

There are certainly better ways to run mass combat in a D&D-like game than 4e or Battlesystem, this is true.

 

[Sacrosanct]

This claim is very controversial to me.

For instance, in the last session of Torchbearer that I GMed, the PCs piled scrap metal onto a magically-conjured floating disc. Presumably this falls under the metaphor of the players "interacting with" the scrap metal. But the scrap metal had no statistical description.

The PCs also drank water (no statistical description required), lit a fire (no statistical description required), and journeyed from a ruined tower to a forgotten temple complex (no statistical description required). Their journey was hindered by blustery winds, whose relevant statistical characterisation was +1 toll. The PC with a cloak was able to reduce the toll for the journey, based not on anything statistical but on common sense reasoning about the fiction.

In general, the way we assign physical properties to things in the fiction is by describing them. And those descriptions then provide the context for the players to declare actions for their PCs. Only in some contexts of action resolution do we need game mechanical statistics, and those statistics are generally relative to a particular game play context (like penalty to the toll from a journey).

Does it? Have you done the maths for every instance of minionisation?

In 4e D&D, a 1st level standard NPC has AC around 15, hp around 30, around +5 to hit for around 9 damage. A 9th level minion NPC has AC around 23, and around +13 to hit for around 9 damage. Whether that minion is easier or harder to defeat is not obvious at all. For a 9th level ranger with +13 to hit (+5 stat, +4 level, +2 enhancement,+2 proficiency) and AC 24 (Hide +2, +4 DEX, +4 level, +1 sundry), it will take two attacks on average to hit (and kill) the minion. The minion may get in one attack, with an expected damage of 4 to 5.

Assuming the ranger does d10+2 on a hit (weapon +2 enhancement), it will take around three hits to kill the 1st level standard NPC: 16.5 (weapon dice) +6 (3 hits) +7 (two lots of Hunter's Quarry). In that time, the NPC will get in (say) two attacks, with an expected damage of about 1 per attack, or 2 overall.

Of course other examples will come out a bit differently, as the possible variety is pretty significant, and the level of the PC relative to the NPCs will affect the maths quite a bit. But I think this illustrates that the general effect of minionisation is not to make an enemy easier to defeat, but to make the maths of the game more workable. (Ie the exact opposite of your "kludge" claim.)


Actually, in 4e D&D how tough a creature is and how hard they are to kill is represented, statistically, by the combination of AC (or other defence) and hp. And these are adjusted relative to the power of the PCs, in order to make the maths work smoothly. If all you know of a 4e stat block is the number of hp, but not the level of the creature (and hence its AC and attack bonus), you don't know how hard that thing is to kill, how tough it is.

This is a very obvious feature of 4e D&D.

I'm not sure if you ever played 4e D&D, but it sounds like maybe you missed the rules for level scaling of to hit, AC, damage etc. You seem to be assuming that "minionisation" leaves the stat block unchanged but for the creature hit points. But that's not the case (as my example just above illustrates).

Mechanics do matter. Changing the stats of the creature/NPC, to reflect the relative power of it and the PC, so as to make the maths of the game work smoothly, does affect the feel. In my experience, that is a good effect. Just as one instance, it tends to reduce spike damage from weaker foes - the scaling of minion attack bonuses together with the flattening of their damage numbers makes them more "even" in their contribution to the combat. (Whereas using a lower level standard means they mostly whiff, but very occasionally hit or crit for less "flat" damage.)

This helps support the Conan-vs-pack-of-were-hyenas feel.

It's not confused. Nor confusing, at least in my experience. It is one solution to the problem of using a relatively uniform mechanical resolution framework, and a reasonably linearly scaling PC build framework, to handle both a hardy young squire fighting off a bandit or two and a demi-god fighting off a flight of Vrock demons. I don't know of any other version of D&D that handles these things particularly well.


Assuming the players understand the rules of the game, they know that the Ogre's stats reflect its power relative to their PCs. Being immersed in the fiction (presumably, if we're successfully playing a RPG) they will appreciate that the Ogre would kill commoner's willy-nilly.

The same reasoning applies to the Ogre who steps on the cat's tail.

Sorry if this has been already mentioned, but there’s another reason other than immersion. Which I think you’re discounting because most players associate mechanics to support their assumptions. They don’t just go “oh, a 1 hp ogre will kill a commoner anyway” because HP have been defined for them. It’s a measure of toughness. You’re assuming players will apply a narrative reason to override a stated mechanical reason and I don’t think that’s how most people work. We tend to rely on rules and definitions before assuming they don’t mean anything. That’s why they are there in the first place.

But anyway, the second reason is arguably more important, and is directly contradicting the point of this thread. If you make an ogre have 1hp, then that applies to everyone. The wizard, or heck, wizards familiar can take one out in one hit. So that makes the problem of fighters being overshadowed even worse.

It’s much better to shift that power to the fighter itself. That way it’s an ability that can’t be used by literally everything and everyone.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Consistency regarding the fictional world!


It is an extra step that doesn't exist in the objective model.

But you’d add more steps on the other side in order to maintain some sense of mechanical consistency.

You literally are ignoring the rules. The cat has attack rules, the ogre minion has rules that say it has one HP.

Who’s running the house cat? Who calls for an attack roll? Why wouldn’t the GM just say “the cat doesn’t get an attack”?

It’s a stupid example that won’t come up.

Ok. so you think the ogre minions are dietetically representing weaker ogres. But then you said earlier as response to why the commoners don't kill the minion ogre:

So now it is no longer a weaker ogre whose on HP diegetically represents it's status as a weakling? What gives?

You’re mistaking hit points for the things they represent.

Hit points are not diegetic. The characters are aware of diegetic things. They are not aware of hit points. They may be aware of what hit points represent, but they’re not aware of hit points themselves.

So if we accept that hit points are representative… then what’s the issue? In the case of minions, the one hit point represents the fact that accomplished heroes are able to dispatch them with one hit.

In this case, the ogre is weak compared to the heroes, but not weak compared to the commoners. Crazy.

This makes no sense. The rules are chosen to represent the fictional world in the first place, thus their outcome will represents that world.

And minion rules reflect the world I’d like to see… where fighters can largely take on foes that were once significant in droves.

Nothing in your quote immediately above doesn’t apply to the minion rules.

You literally do. Town guard has rules, the characters have rules, the minion monsters have rules. This would result the townguard killing these monsters with ease, but you just choose to ignore this.
Seriously, these sort of relational statblocks are just a huge mess; it is not good design.

It depends on what you want the rules to accomplish. If you want fighters to be able to mow through mooks, then it’s great design. It’s simple to handle at the table, requires no effort on players’ parts, and requires no additional prep.

If you want a fighter that struggles to quickly put down low level threats even at higher levels, then 5e’s hit point bloat and damage scale are what you want.

That seems like a very boring choice. Scruffy killing the ogre is the sort of stuff that will be remembered for years. Granted, it is far less remarkable if it was foregone conclusion due a design flaw in the system rather than a highly unlikely freak occurrence.

No, it sounds terrible to me. I expect my group would talk about it for years, but not in a good way.

Do lots of house cats make it into battle in your games?

But they actually do both.

They don’t. You only think they do because you’re ignoring what folks are telling you.

I clicked "love" rather than "like" because of these two points.

The first complements my reply to @Micah Sweet not far upthread: the notion that the PCs can't tell how powerful a foe is, by observation, is highly contentious. You provide a perfect example of how they can do so.

I mean, it seems insane to me not to indicate these kinds of things through descriptive narration.

The second complements some of my replies to @Crimson Longinus over several pages of this thread: the assertion that it is easier to use complex damage multiplication etc rules, than to use minion rules, is not obvious to me at all, and actually seems somewhat implausible:

For instance:
The notion of "narrative intent" of the monster is in my view a red herring: I mean, by placing an Ogre (with 59 hp) rather than a Goblin (with 7 hp), is the 5e DM manifesting a "narrative intent" for the foe (to not be one-shottable, killable by fireballs, etc?). This notion that 4e D&D encounter building involves some distinctive element of "narrative intent" seems like nonsense to me.

But turning to the suggested mechanic, how is this easier to use than minions? Instead of putting the work up front, during the GM's encounter design, it makes it matter during play, requiring the GM to share hp totals and requiring the player to make a choice. It also causes weirdness in the play: either the fighter is getting an additional action (their "finishing move") outside the normal action economy; or the fighter player is getting to retcon their attack into a finishing move ("dissociated mechanics"!).

I don't see how jumping through all these hoops in order to preserve invariance of monster statblocks relative to the PC statblocks makes for a better game.

It seems to only be about maintaining mechanical consistency. Which makes no sense to me as a goal in this way. It just seems to satisfy some personal aesthetic rather than anything useful.

It represents them having gotten a little better at avoiding harm, perhaps perfecting a technique or spell they've been practicing during their downtime. I would also prefer training to be a thing in a game I run for experienced players.

So it’s representative of potentially multiple things?

The one thing it isn't is a narrative conceit designed to push the "story" in a particular direction, or to validate some "class fantasy".

That’s exactly what levels do, though. Zero to hero and all that.

I think you should read the whole context in which things are said. @hawkeyefan gave an example of dietetically different ogres (ogre boss and ogre goons.) Discussion was whether minionisation reflects such diegetic difference. It does not, and you agreed.

No, my point was that it does reflect such a difference.

Still not sure what Hawkeyefan thinks as to me it seemed in different post they seemed to argue it different way.

No, i think you misunderstood. Perhaps my point was not clear… I’m not sure at what point a misinterpretation may have happened.

Minions are representative of the fiction just as most other monster stats are.

"Abstract" does not mean "infinitely maliable to you and your table's narrative needs".

Who’s called for infinite malleability? We’re just talking about minion rules. Gee whiz.