mamba
Legend
because you have more magic on the character side
D&D (2024) Its till just me or is the 2024 MM heavily infused by more 4e influences?
- Thread starter Henadic Theologian
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EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
It's not a matter of unused material. It's a matter of what results are (IMO extremely) likely to pop out by accident when you design without any consideration for what the experience of facing off against something will feel like. A conflict or two where the experience is sacrificed in the name of naturalism is fine. A campaign built out of them is not. I would much, much, much rather have something that specifically sets out to produce a string of "good" (well-crafted) experiences, even if it must make minor (I stress, minor) sacrifices to naturalism in the crafting of those experiences, than something which ensures that every single experience is as maximally natural as possible even if that harms the experiences in the doing.
I understand that, for you, naturalism is an extremely high priority in order to have an experience you can "enjoy" (noting that that "enjoyment" can include frustration or grief or whatever other emotions, it doesn't have to be 100% happy happy joy joy all the time). Believe it or not, despite my arguments here and elsewhere, I really do also need a fair amount of naturalism, setting cohesion, and consistent logic in order to enjoy the experiences that make up a game. (That "consistent logic" thing is actually one part of why I am so antagonistic to fudging!) My problem is, and has always been, I have seen what an obsessive dedication to naturalism-above-all does to games, to whole game systems. I have seen how it pretzels the player experience in the process of going where it goes. The experience-of-play becomes mired in constant checking and re-checking of situational modifiers, poring over page after page of complicated simulation-engine details, spending half an hour just determining whether the wording of a particular rules-element actually applies or not, etc.
I'm here to play a game. I need that game to actually be fun to play in and of itself. Once I have a game that is fun to play in and of itself, I can then work with and around the rules of that game to craft an exciting, engaging, self-consistent, and yes, naturalistic experience. I find that it is actually quite easy to do this in most cases, and even when it is hard, it is usually only an issue of being overly literal with terms (like "prone", the bugaboo of many an edition-war argument) or demanding that everything be as concrete as possible when abstraction is the much more appropriate approach. I get that this means you and I don't necessarily get the same value out of a given set of rules, but in my experience, having played the games I have and having designed a fair amount of reasonably-good homebrew stuff over the years, I will continue to insist: A game that has been successfully designed to be a great and exciting experience, even if naturalism was not a primary concern during the design, will almost always be superior to a game that made ferdamsher that it was as naturalistic as possible and only then began to concern itself with whether it's actually fun to play it.
dave2008
Legend
No, you can play 5e without any magic on the character side. I have done, it is quite fun to play that way actually.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Alrighty. I think the issue then is, more or less, that you're going to need to have a HUGE menu of abilities to choose from if you want to both (a) have those abilities actually be interesting to face off against, and (b) get even a reasonable accuracy of knowing what X monster is with bare-minimum description + seeing some abilities. That's not necessarily a problem per se, but it does induce combinatoric explosion in the testing of these abilities, because now you need (to invent a number) 100 genuinely different monster abilities (counting say 2 "blank" abilities so that not all monsters have 4 distinct abilities), and 100 choose 4 = 3921225. Even if you only need to actually test a tenth of one percent of that...you'd be testing almost as many monsters as were printed during all of 4th edition. Just to get things off the ground.
Oh, a zillion reasons.
The party has gone from an arid/desert area to a forested/woodland area (perhaps a cork forest, since cork oak tends to like dry climates), so you want to adapt a creature to that environment but still have it be identifiable as that specific type of creature.
You want to craft a red dragon that was infected with vampirism (something that actually cropped up in a game I was in, though not a D&D game.)
You want to distinguish Red Wizards of Thay from Candlekeep Bibliomancers from Rashemi "Witches" from...etc., even though all three might favor evocation magic.
A magically-created volcano has been growing in an area, corrupting the creatures around with elemental fire and earth. You want them to still be clearly recognizable as whatever they were before that corruption, but also identifiable as a corrupted creature of the appropriate type.
You want to represent subtle but meaningful cultural/behavioral differences between different populations, e.g. two different tribes of ogres who practice both warfare and magic differently.
I'm sure I could come up with more, but I think you get the point. Having a monster's statblock be totally inviolate, unalterable under any circumstances whatsoever lest it become not-immediately-identifiable, is a pretty serious limitation on creativity. But maybe we're talking past each other? It sounds like you see it as "ah, this monster is perfect in its identifiability with what it has, why would I want to change it?" But what I'm saying is that the identifiability isn't perfect, it's fragile. To change even one ability would make it unidentifiable.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Okay, here's a good example of what I mean:
One of my favorite 4e combats ever--which was in a science-fantasy homebrew setting--was us fighting a handful of baddies who had turrets that could pop up, shoot us, and then retract to pop out somewhere else.
After the fight, the DM told us that he had reskinned those turrets from some kind of hopping-frog minion.
By the standard you had set here, it sounded like such a combat not only wouldn't have been possible, but should have been awful, because we should have instantly realized that these weren't, and could not be, turrets. We should have immediately known that he had reskinned something, which would almost surely have pulled all of us out of the experience and made it blatantly obvious how artificial it all was.
If that isn't what you meant from what you said, perhaps I have simply been barking up the wrong tree. But it really does seem like the example above, taking a monster as-is but repurposing it for a different aesthetic and context, should be unworkable and bad in the design paradigm you've proposed.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
This is completely fair. 4e definitely did not give very good advice for how to handle various status effects and such--there was some logic written into the actual monsters themselves and what levels they appeared, but it did not make these ideas actually available to the DM.
Personally...I think this was an issue of the devs caving to player demands. Specifically, things like Expertise.
It always seemed quite obvious to me that the idea was to make the difficulty naturally rise over the course of the three tiers, thus mechanically encouraging teamwork and synergy to compensate. Instead, people lost their bloody minds over the fact that characters ended up being "3 points behind" by the time they reached late Epic, compared to the "monster level ~= monster stat" design. So WotC caved and gave players what they wanted! And then players realized that this actually made Epic tier noticeably too easy for a fully teamwork-optimized party.
None of which is to say that it isn't an issue. It is. I just think it was an issue self-inflicted on the community, by the community.
As a current FFXIV player, I've been dealing with exactly the same thing. The FFXIV community is finally waking up to the realization, so this sort of thing is hardly unique to 4e. For FFXIV, the TL;DR is that the community kept demanding XYZ things, like every tank getting a gap closer, or "healers that heal, not DPS", or every DPS class being able to do their BIG AWESOME BOP attacks during the brief window every couple minutes where all the team buffs are up. Now they've got all of the things they've been asking for for years, they hate how homogenized the classes are, how overly-simplified many of them have become, and how boring it is to heal anything except bleeding-edge content or regular content where everything is going wrong. These wounds are 100% self-inflicted; players demanded all of the things that led to this and the developers obliged. Many of the changes were not inherently bad in isolation, nor were they just bad ideas regardless of implementation (indeed, many of the ideas were great or were fixing real problems!), but their collective effect has been bad. Fortunately, the playerbase has mostly accepted that they're just as responsible for all this as the devs are, so most of them are actually showing some patience to see fixes for these issues unfold over time.
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EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I can actually speak to this for once!
It was pretty annoying, as the only real spellcaster in the party (Fighter, Barbarian, Monk, and my Celestial Warlock). I'd taken the (5.0) Book of Secrets so I could learn rituals. But because of the incentives in that campaign making it nearly impossible to ever actually go to a major city rather than our little hamlet, we essentially could not ever actually go to town to DO anything with our riches and such. I wanted to do magic stuff! I really did! But it just didn't make sense to go do that, and I wasn't about to be a petulant jerk and demand it, especially since that could put our friends/allies/objectives at risk.
So....yeah. In some ways, 5e is higher magic than editions that came before. Directly-accessible and reliable spellcasting being the main thing. But in other ways, even in settings that are pretty high magic like FR, 5e really isn't that high-magic at all.
Hussar
Legend
Minor nitpick - PHandalin does have a spellcasting cleric in it. But, your point does stand.
Agreed. Just finished doing the entire Phandalin module with only a warlock as a caster (more on that below) and it worked fine.
Heh. In the interests of transparency, I was the DM for this game. And the decision to make this a very low magic campaign was set at the outset of the campaign. Even the warlock was allowed under protest.
So, yeah, at the very upfront of this, it should have been very clear that no caster was going to get any support in the entire campaign. That was straight up deliberate. You were never going to get magic stuff in that campaign @EzekielRaiden. But, the campaign worked perfectly fine without it. There was only a single point (a feeblemind effect) where we needed to do any sort of jiggery pokery to keep the module going.
MonsterEnvy
Legend
Who, Sister Garaele is the only person I can think of in town who could be, but she is explicitly a commoner.
Hussar
Legend
Sister Garaele in Shattered Obelisk, is an Acoloyte which is a 1st level caster.
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