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

[plecostomus]

The blog's Shadow is from 2014, which had no such table. The 2024 monsters are still in the works and will end up in his new book

Oh yeah, I just meant this specific blog post about how mechanics are prioritized over narrative in 2024. The tables could be useful for deciding a particular Shadow's tactics, if he's looking for ways to base monster strategies on flavor.

One thing I use my VTT for is on some monsters, I assign a random adjective in front of their name. So I had some ghouls like Nervous Ghoul and Resigned Ghoul in my ghoul encounter. The Nervous Ghoul I had run for the door right away when the players showed up armed and angry. It worked out perfectly because a PC was there, and the Nervous Ghoul attacked them. I got to add another dimension to one of my Ghouls with a single word.

I love really quick solutions to flavor combats like that.

 

[Nightfly]

The Cleric was at -6 to his Strength ability score.

Did you miss the part where the cleric would be dead because of that? The statblock for the shadow did say that specifically. Just wondering.

EDIT: Sorry, I thought you literally meant negative six, not six less.

 

[plecostomus]

Did you miss the part where the cleric would be dead because of that? The statblock for the shadow did say that specifically.

Just wondering.

To his ability score, not his modifier. He has a total of 15 Strength. That's why I mentioned him being the first one to run into the room is helpful against Shadows specifically.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

that is easy, because we already have that conversation in the green dragon stat block thread…

The 2014 dragon is a creature with claws, a bite, and actions that match a creature.

The 2024 could be sandstorm genie with a weird cough It has Rend as a generic ‘it attacked you somehow, don’t care how, but here is the default damage that does’ and a Miasma that has no explanation for how he does it, and no one on the design team cared about how he does it either. To me their design process looked like ‘Thematically it fits, so add it, as to how, let’s call it magic, hopefully enough people then stop asking.’


that is in the green dragon thread, and contains more of what I do not like about the new one, if you are interested..

As I said, it obviously is not every creature, but it is a trend, and one I am not liking… and as you said, an example probably won’t help though

If I may ask a possibly insensitive question:

What, if anything, would change if you learned that that wasn't the design process, and in fact they tried to make that connection, and just produced something that didn't look like they'd done that process?

Because this gets at some of my criticism earlier. You have a reaction to the statblock: it feels generic. It feels like it is exclusively a pile of mechanics, which happened to get some label slapped on it. From that reaction, however, you (seem to) have concluded that that is what it is; that it is nothing whatever but a pile of disconnected, unrelated mechanics that happened to meet some undefined quota or eyeballed estimate of how many mechanics should be present in that pile.

That step is taking your felt response to the design ("this feels generic, bland, flavorless, untethered, etc.") and then draws a conclusion about what the designers thought, felt, or did, or rather what they didn't do, which I think would be accurately summarized as "The designers completely neglected to consider anything as a creature within a world, and exclusively thought of it as a bundle of mechanics that needed to meet certain requirements."

I want to understand more what it is that draws you to jump from the felt response, which no one can deny and which you are perfectly entitled to, to the articulated criticism of the design (and more importantly those who designed it, and their priorities), which is necessarily something we can argue about. Because it isn't just a matter of taste once it becomes a criticism. "I don't like X", and even "I won't ever play Y because it contains X", are both taste and thus not subject to argument (barring certain conditions that I as an Internet rando, rather than a personal friend, can never fulfill). "Y is flawed because it does X" or similar things (e.g. "the designers embraced Y which harmed X"), on the other hand, is a criticism and thus subject to dispute.

 

[Distracted DM]

Yeah, but how often does that work in reverse? You make things easier for players? Add new options without taking something away? Make abilities and spells more powerful? In 2e, I think the only setting that added more than it removed was Faerun and people used to call it a munchkin's paradise.

Artificers were added for Eberron. Settings typically have new spells, equipment, kits (subclasses), ancestries, feats, etc. to enhance things. I allow splatbooks and third party products as long as they seem reasonable, both mechanically and thematically.

As far as "why don't you create settings by adding new super-powerful options," well... because if there are new super-powerful options, no one's gonna take the standard stuff. I'm going to have to create an entirely new game's worth of super-powerful classes, ancestries, spells, monsters, etc. I'm creating a new system at that point.

 

[mamba]

What, if anything, would change if you learned that that wasn't the design process, and in fact they tried to make that connection, and just produced something that didn't look like they'd done that process?

nothing whatsoever, well maybe my idea of how good they are at their job

I want to understand more what it is that draws you to jump from the felt response, which no one can deny and which you are perfectly entitled to, to the articulated criticism of the design (and more importantly those who designed it, and their priorities), which is necessarily something we can argue about. Because it isn't just a matter of taste once it becomes a criticism.

Mostly that I expect them to be qualified enough to achieve what they set out to do, ie the result is intentional and therefore allows me to infer their original goals and intentions.

Apart from that, this is a matter of taste, I believe most criticisms ultimately are. What one (dis)likes in a TTRPG certainly is entirely subjective.

I do not want to imply that no one can reasonably consider this an improvement over 2014, it just isn’t one for me. As I wrote

I can see the benefits too, a generic Rend lets you describe the fiction however you want, so is more flexible there, but at the price of a loss of detail.

Another poster summarized it nicely

2014 prioritized simulationist looks.
2024 prioritized gamist benchmarks.

I agree with that, and which one you consider better is subjective

 

[tetrasodium]

Neither are challenging specialists.

That was a big part of mmy original point before you started talking about a "tradition" that spans all of a single edition as reason not to support GMs as I described earlier. Are you posting with chatgpt? Maybe feed it a little more back and forth history then a single post if so?

 

[Clint_L]

I'm not saying to make a gary/mary-stu, just one that's less grounded. In fact, why is just straight up canonizing that the PCs are special in some form of lore way is bad? Other settings have the implicit view of 'This is how things are going until you, the players who have some meta but not setting importance, are going to screw it up' why not just make that explicit?

Because some of HATE that premise. In my game world the PCs are not that big a deal.

 

[Clint_L]

Oh yeah, I just meant this specific blog post about how mechanics are prioritized over narrative in 2024. The tables could be useful for deciding a particular Shadow's tactics, if he's looking for ways to base monster strategies on flavor.

One thing I use my VTT for is on some monsters, I assign a random adjective in front of their name. So I had some ghouls like Nervous Ghoul and Resigned Ghoul in my ghoul encounter. The Nervous Ghoul I had run for the door right away when the players showed up armed and angry. It worked out perfectly because a PC was there, and the Nervous Ghoul attacked them. I got to add another dimension to one of my Ghouls with a single word.

I love really quick solutions to flavor combats like that.

Stealing this idea. Simple but brilliant!

 

[Minigiant]

That was a big part of mmy original point before you started talking about a "tradition" that spans all of a single edition as reason not to support GMs as I described earlier. Are you posting with chatgpt? Maybe feed it a little more back and forth history then a single post if so?

My point is it tradition to either make monsters based on looks, benchmarks, or both.

Making fun tactical monsters only existed in 3PP or the sacred cow grilling edition.