D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[el-remmen]

The mythical Lego RPG that can be used to build any genre, any complexity and any power level is just that, mythical. Or GURPs. But I don't want my character sheets prepared by H R Block.

I didn't say any of that. I didn't use the word "any" or mention different genres. No need to come in snarky, my dude.

 

[mamba]

WOTC is not above copying popular solutions to popular mechanical complaints.

maybe, but they won’t get that from some person telling them how they fixed it in their home game

But folk who downplay complaints, decry solutions, and don't offer replacement or advice can't expect to be catered to.

and people who expect to be catered to personally because they do give feedback are in for a surprise…

 

[occam]

A very surprising post by Keith Ammann of TMKWTD. I'm passingly familiar with the blog, I check it out every now and again and I've always been interested to see how Keith breaks down monsters and suggests how they'd work in a fight. This is surprising to me, at least, because in the 5e-sphere this blog and book series etc. are fairly well known, and this guy really is not jiving with 5e24.

The relevant part of the post starts after he's talked about the Colossus.

I apologize for the long quote, I considered picking it apart and just quoting the particular stuff but I think it's almost all important to the discussion.

He goes on to talk about how he's looked at 5e alternatives, other game systems, but isn't sure where to go next (I was tempted to leave a comment about A5E), but it seems like 5e24 is definitely not getting his attention going forward.

So he likes the monster power of MM25, but doesn't like how they executed it, giving guard captains 18 strength and the like. Actually, I've had this problem as well, in that in order to present a proper, believable challenge to PCs I've had to use unbelievable methods: upping NPCs and other creatures stats to levels that seem crazy in the context of the world, but they end up working satisfactorily on a mechanical level. This is largely how the MM25 operates.

Overall I have to say that his points all hit home for me, and I'm curious what y'all think... and, as per the questions he poses later on in the post, what direction you think he should take?

I get some of what he says, but he expends a lot of words in the longest paragraph of your quote complaining about NPCs with ability scores of 18-20. PC ability scores have gone to 20 for three whole editions now (heck, four editions if you count Dark Sun); that's over 25 (or 34) years now, isn't it past time to get used to that? Why should NPCs not get the same treatment? And what about the gladiator (Str 18) and the archmage (Int 20) in the Monster Manual published in 2014? Did he have the same problem back then?

 

[occam]

Honestly, I would have expected more complaints about how to explain mortal, flesh and blood creatures as elementals and fiends. I don't think anyone expects a lizardman sovereign to be suddenly an immortal spirit, but rather just a mortal that's inexplicitly immune to Hold Person and the like.

You may have missed some threads. Consider yourself lucky.

 

[Chaltab]

A CR 10 NPC is meant to be very significant.

True, but we're talking about a CR 4 NPC whose stats resemble those of a level 10 PC martial (having 10 hit dice, two attacks, and 18 STR).

Obviously, NPC and PC stats don't translate 1 to 1 but unless a creature has spell slots (which isn't really a thing in 5E since MPMM) then hit dice are the only way to approximate its class levels.

(Incidentally, by this measure the Bandit Crime Lord that the blog post laments being so dexterous is a level 26 character... presumably 11 Fighter, 15 Rogue)

 

[mamba]

It seems like the best way to make NPCs and monsters make more sense in the context of the world, including their ability to challenge PCs, is to divorce them even further from the mechanics that the PCs use. Kind of ironic.

Just giving them flat numbers, "has a +10 to hit, does 3d6+6 damage, +3 to physical +6 to mental saves" rather than using proficiency bonuses and stats to achieve and/or rationalize those numbers. Now it's looking more like an OSR statblock :'D

that doesn’t really have them make more sense, that just removes the context that allows to compare them to PCs

 

[Charlaquin]

Breaking the quote down to respond to point by point.

On top of that, I have certain … feelings … about D&D 5E24. One of the things I love—and I speak in the present tense—about 5E14 is, even as it substantially streamlined D&D’s rules and options, it still both maintained the feeling of playing classic D&D and permitted play in a wide range of styles, from gritty, grimy low fantasy to wild high fantasy and everything in between.

I’m sorry, but this claim is extremely dubious to me. 5.14 has always been extremely high fantasy. If you insist on using the system to run a “gritty, grimy low fantasy” game, you can make it work, but you’ll be shoving a square peg into a round hole. 5.14 has four classes out of twelve that don’t cast spells by default. Two of those four have subclasses with spellcasting progression and the other two really only have a single subclass each that isn’t overtly supernatural, they just don’t typically cast spells, and even they each have subclasses with some minor spellcasting. 5.24 really doesn’t change this at all.

But it was clear from the moment the 5E24 Player’s Handbook dropped that D&D was going all in on wild high fantasy, to the exclusion of other styles, and also that it had chosen to fully indulge a decade’s worth of munchkin demands for MOAR POWER!

5.24 PCs have a higher power floor than 5.14 PCs, but the ceiling is pretty much the same, and some of the holes in the ceiling have been patched up. I understand and empathize with people who preferred the floor to be lower, but the problem is that some classes’ floors were always this high. Those classes would have needed to be heavily nerfed to get the balance more consistent, and that would have gone over even worse than these changes. Moreover, changes on the encounters building and monster side have taken into account the higher PC power baseline.

Knowing that 5E24 was coming, I had fully planned to seize the opportunity to update Live to Tell the Tale: Combat Tactics for Player Characters and in the process improve it as a teaching tool. I was excited to do so, in fact. But when I held the PH24 in my hands and paged through it, the realization came over me that PCs don’t need the help anymore. They’ve been failure-proofed. There’s almost no error a player can make, at this point, that will end their character’s adventuring career prematurely—not unless their DM goes full adversarial, which I don’t condone. And DMs had a hard time posing appropriate challenges to higher-level PCs already! It’s only going to get harder from here. (The restructured combat encounter difficulty guidelines in chapter 4 of the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide will help with that somewhat, at least.)

This is a very silly complaint. As he observes himself, 5e has always been accused of being “easy mode.” As he also observes, the encounter building guidelines and monster stats have been adjusted to account for the stronger PCs, so the net effect is that 5.24 is not noticeably more or less “easy mode” than 5.14 is. Moreover, combat being too easy is a self-imposed problem. You don’t have to be “going full adversarial” to simply go above the by-the-book recommendations in the interest of presenting a challenge that is appropriate for your party. Part of the job of DMing is recognizing that your players aren’t spherical cows in a vacuum; they’re going to deviate from the by-the-book assumptions, and you’re going to need to make adjustments to account for that if you want to provide an appropriate challenge. That hasn’t changed from 5.14 to 5.24.

But it’s not just the shift in the balance of power between DMs and PCs that bothers me about 5E24. There’s a palpable change in design approach between 5E14 and 5E24. In 5E14, it seems to me, the designers began with a narrative in mind, then thought about how best to implement that narrative mechanically. The sense I get from 5E24, on the other hand, is that the designers began with mechanics they wanted to implement, then came up with narratives to rationalize the mechanics.

Ok, I disagree with what he’s literally saying here, but I understand where the sentiment is coming from, and I actually agree with what I think he’s trying to express. There was a thread a little while back about how 5.14 “reified” is mechanics and 5.24 doesn’t really do that in the same way. It’s things like dragons having a single abstract “Rend” attack they make three times instead of the more specific “one Bite attack and two Claw attacks,” or the way 5.14 hobgoblins used to have a feature explaining that their weapon attacks did extra damage but 5.24 hobgoblins just incorporate the extra damage into their attack entries and don’t bother explaining where the extra damage comes from. Things like this are mostly invisible to the players, but they are nods to the DM that sort of gesture at “simulationism.” And I can understand why this change would bother Keith in particular, because his work is entirely based on taking those nods at “simulation” seriously, teasing out their implications, and advising people on how to run monsters in a way that is consistent with those implications. The 5.24 monster manual basically treats what he has been doing as completely unimportant, in favor of achieving more consistent mathematical balance, on the logic that the players won’t notice the difference anyway. That’s pretty antithetical to his work, and as someone who appreciated the kind of work he did and took it as an inspiration in my own homebrewing, I get it. I’m with him on this.

Which is how you end up with warlocks signing lifetime contracts with supernatural entities whose identities they don’t even learn until they’re level 3,

This is such an incredibly asinine complaint. If you want your warlock to know who their patron is from first level, there is absolutely no reason you can’t still do that.

and Beast Master rangers who form bonds with immortal spirits instead of, you know, wild animals. (The ludicrous overuse of the adjective “spectral” to describe how PCs’ abilities manifest,

I’m ambivalent about this one. On one hand, I too find it silly how so many things in 5.24 are just holograms - spectral companions, spectral steeds, spectral dragon wings, spectral summoned creatures, etc, etc. I prefer when these things are described as solid and visceral and real. On the other hand, it’s just description. If you want your animal companion or your steed or your wings or your summons or whatever to have physical substance, it’s ok to just describe them that way. I think they’re mostly described as spectral so they don’t have to worry about things like “does wearing armor prevent dragonborn from sprouting their temporary wings?” that the simulation purists get themselves into a frenzy about.

combined with the fact that you can undo so many decisions you regret having made with just a good night’s sleep, calls to mind a line from the song “Type” by Living Colour: “Everything is possible, and nothing is real.”)

Eh, in my experience, players almost never actually do this. If they do it’s because the idea they had proved not to be as fun as they thought it would, and I’d rather they just be allowed to make the change than feel like they’re stuck with a character they’re unhappy with.

Now, I happen to think that the MM25 is probably the best of the three revised core books of D&D. All three are flawed, but the MM25 is the one whose strengths most outweigh its flaws. I’m running an Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden game in which I’m using 5E14 rules and character creation but 5E24 monster stat blocks whenever they’re available, and I’m liking the feel of that particular combination.

Huh. That’s surprising, I feel exactly the opposite. The 5.24 PHB and DMG are great despite some flaws, and the 5.24 MM is by far the weakest of the three; a mess of a book that I only tolerate using because the power bump to 5.24 PCs demands more powerful monsters.

But at the same time, since the freaking dawn of creation, the normal distribution of human ability scores in D&D has been from 3 to 18. That’s foundational. It’s bedrock. Anything outside that range is either subhuman or superhuman. I’m OK with the fact that 5E has always allowed PCs of high enough level to raise their ability scores above 18, because at that point, we’re talking about heroes of legend—but other humans, in my opinion, should still fall within the 3-to-18 range. Yet the MM25 gives us guard captains who are as strong as Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, the record-breaking strongman who played Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane on Game of Thrones; bandit crime lords who are more dexterous than Miyamoto Musashi, Lionel Messi, or any present or past member of Cirque du Soleil or the Flying Karamazov Brothers; and cultist hierophants, pirate admirals, performer maestros and noble prodigies—noble prodigies!—who are morecharismatic than Martin Luther King Jr. or Beyoncé. (The most bonkers example is the warrior commander, “skilled in both combat and leadership,” who has the Constitution of Rasputin, greater Dexterity than any acrobat, athlete, dancer or swordfighter who’s ever lived, and Strength that surpasses Björnsson’s … together with Charisma that’s merely on par with, say, Justin Trudeau’s.) What are we even doing here? These are clearly instances in which “line go up” took precedence over maintaining internal logical consistency. And I’ve made a career out of creating, and helping others create, imaginary worlds that come alive because they’re internally consistent.

This is very odd to me. Despise calling it a bedrock of D&D design, I don’t think ability scores have corresponded to the range of human capability since AD&D. There’s the general idea that lower numbers are worse and higher numbers are better, and that most human(oid)s have somewhere around 8-12 as a baseline, with higher or lower scores than that representing exceptional (or exceptionally poor) abilities. But 3e moved away from having the scale be as specific and rigidly defined as he’s suggesting here, and D&D has never looked back from that.

 

[mamba]

I don’t think that’s really true. What specifically does 5.14 support that 5.24 doesn’t?

That is what Keith’s post read like to me, that 2024 leaned into epic fantasy moreso than 2014 and to the detriment of everything else, and I do agree with that trend, 2014 was slightly more grounded than 2024, even if not by much

 

[Bae'zel]

I get some of what he says, but he expends a lot of words in the longest paragraph of your quote complaining about NPCs with ability scores of 18-20. PC ability scores have gone to 20 for three whole editions now (heck, four editions if you count Dark Sun); that's over 25 (or 34) years now, isn't it past time to get used to that? Why should NPCs not get the same treatment? And what about the gladiator (Str 18) and the archmage (Int 20) in the Monster Manual published in 2014? Did he have the same problem back then?

Yeah of all the complaints this one confused me the most.

I have the first "the monsters know what they're doing" book and I find that most of the advice is still relevant.

Maybe the author has a deal coming up with Pathfinder or another new RPG.

 

[mamba]

I mean, if a flesh and blood creature is type elemental, than that means the game mechanic “elemental” doesn’t mean immortal spirit, right?

yes, but it also makes it hard to have a coherent definition for ‘elemental’ - and if you find one it certainly is not one that was used in 2014