A worry about "special case monster abilities"

[Geron Raveneye]

Let's take a different ability: Regeneration 5 (Acid & Fire). Okay for a feat?
Greater Teleport At Will (50 lbs of gear tops). Okay for a feat?
Damage Reduction 10 / magic & bludgeoning. Okay for a feat?
Antimagic Cone. Okay for a feat?

A immensive host of abilities of monster abilities are too powerful to be described simply as a feat. You can jump through hoops and add prerequisites that make it next to impossible to take them before a very high level (at which point you will always be able to point to a Wizard or Cleric that can use the ability a few times per day). But monsters have access to them a lot earlier.

Feats are not meant to easily reproduce spell-like or supernatural abilities. But by the time the characters meet creatures with those abilities, they will be high enough level to either have access to a magical item that confers the same ability, or a spell that does the same.

Try to find a magical item that grants you something like Dodge or Combat Expertise.

 

[Zogmo]

There is one thing that I'm worried about though, and I hope it doesn't happen - and that is a proliferation of "special case monster abilities".

An example from 3e that always jarred with me was the Bebeliths ability to 'rend armour'. It seemed strange that it had such a unique ability (surely anything huge+ with claws should be able to do that?). It stood out like a proud nail when compared to the pretty standard way most other monster abilities were handled.

I haven't read all the posts to date so I apologize if this has been stated before.

Not trying to be snarky or give attitude here.

With that line of thinking we would then expect all snakes to be constrictors and venomous.

All eels must bite, be poisonous and be electric too.

All creatures with wings must fly.

All squids would behave just like octopi.

Even in our mudane world creatures that seem exactly the same as others show very different characteristics from each other.

So I would expect the same from fantasy creatures too.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I haven't read all the posts to date so I apologize if this has been stated before.

Not trying to be snarky or give attitude here.

With that line of thinking we would then expect all snakes to be constrictors and venomous.

All eels must bite, be poisonous and be electric too.

All creatures with wings must fly.

All squids would behave just like octopi.

Even in our mudane world creatures that seem exactly the same as others show very different characteristics from each other.

So I would expect the same from fantasy creatures too.

Sorry, I don't think I explained my concern well enough here.

I'll try again (borrowing some great examples someone else used up-thread).

Ettins having a special ability to take an additional standard action but still only one move action (two independent heads, only one pair of legs) makes perfect sense to me.

Mindflayers having the ability to extract someones brain with their head-tentacles makes perfect sense to me.

Frosty Creature x having the magic ability to make a place slippery while others don't makes perfect sense to me.

What doesn't make sense is when creatures like the Bebelith 'rend armour' or to a slightly lesser extent Nightwalker 'crush item' abilities get apparently tacked onto a monster, and don't seem to be well connected either thematically or magically with the creature.

Thus I'm not saying that all creatures that look alike should have the same powers (far from it!) I'm just concerned about the possibility of strange one-off powers creeping in which don't seem to have any connection with the creature as such.

After all, to take your example, because one snake has poison you wouldn't want to say that no other snake had poison, would you? There are sound reasons for carrying powers over to other creatures where it is thematically appropriate without requiring a blanket coverage to all creatures.

Cheers

 

[jaer]

If you can, why has WotC *explicitly* (given Mearls' comments) opted not to? Either it is much harder in 3e (where stating it up as a feat is easy), or it is easy and they are being lazy. Neither option reflects well on WotC.

They opted to not put it in yet. Why? Because none of the classes focuses on unarmed combat. Classes are much more rigidly defined in what they do now (whether you like that or not is a different matter). Who would be using this Meat Shield feat if they put it in? Fighters, rogues, and rangers all of whom probably would prefer to avoid a grapple? Fighters need to move around and be able to swing at opponets to defend their team; rogues will want to be sneak attacking, and rangers for the most part are archers or potentially dual-weapon swingers. If being grappled is a detrement to these classes, if the best thing they can do when grappled is to get out of the grapple, why give them a power that keeps them in one?

The common theme of 4e: if a feat, power, or ability (and potentially race) does not fit with any of the design concepts of the presented classes, save if to release when we release a class it goes with.

This cuts back on junk feats people won't take (or, one could see this is WotC attempt to keep things simple for beginning players: don't give them feats that don't go with a class because they might take them without realizing it isn't good). and keeps them in the book with the class that will take them, thus cutting back on cross-referencing.

This isn't a flaw of 4e nor laziness on WotC's part but a decision made to reduce useless clutter in books and confusion about class roles. Save the cool grapple/unarmed combat feats and abilities for a book that features classes who will use them consistently and effectively.

 

[HP Dreadnought]

Yeah, it does assume that, but it's not the same as a unique special ability. Under 4e, Bugbear Stranglers can take people and use them as sheilds. No one else can, really. There's no rules for it. You could make rules up, using the guidelines given, but I'm not really happy if I pay designers to tell me to make stuff up myself.

This kind of thinking is how we wound up with ridiculously overbuilt grappling rules in 3.5.

Under 3e, giants often throw rocks (as presented in their stats), and people can throw rocks, too (improvised throwing weapons). That's a continuum -- giants do it better, people can still do it.

Like the rules above, would be a continuum -- anyone can use a human shield, Bugbear Stranglers are just especially nasty about it.

But the rules as we've seen them are binary -- no one can use a human shield, except Bugbear Stranglers, because they have that ability and nothing else really does. You could give it to others, but it might break your game. Have fun.

There is absolutely nothing preventing the DM from allowing a PC to use the human shield technique. . . but since they are not specialized at it like bugbears they wouldn't be nearly as good at it and would take substantial negative modifiers. -- Just the same way large and powerful humans are not adept at throwing rocks.

One of the big advantages of D&D over a computer game is your ability to do just about anything. However, to accomodate that the DM needs to be able to interpret and apply the rules in a way that works.

Having documented rules for everything you can do and no ability to go outside those rules is what is so limiting in computer games.

I think people need to get past this idea of "a rule for ever occasion" and accept the fact that the DM needs to do some work in adjudicating the game. Overbuilding of the rules is the major problem with 3.5. It may eventually get that way with 4E, but let's not get started on the wrong foot!

 

[HP Dreadnought]

The Bugbear's ability, on the other hand, has no logic behind it - it's not something Bugbears are iconically known for, it's a purely arbitrary restriction on something simple and mundane that everyone can imagine their characters doing, so naturally it sets off alarm bells.

Bugbears have been masters of stealth for some time. In 4E this maneuver *IS* something bugbears are iconically known for - as evidenced by the fact that they have a special ability to do it.

This is the 4E bugbear. . . the rules concerning the previous versions no longer apply and people shouldn't be trying to apply 3.x and prior thinking to 4E monsters any more than we should say "Demi-humans have level limits (1st edtion), why don't 4E demi-humans have level limits? Its something they are iconically known for!"

 

[Dausuul]

Feats are not meant to easily reproduce spell-like or supernatural abilities. But by the time the characters meet creatures with those abilities, they will be high enough level to either have access to a magical item that confers the same ability, or a spell that does the same.

Try to find a magical item that grants you something like Dodge or Combat Expertise.

Name me the magic item that gives you greater teleport at will, or a beholder-style antimagic cone (again, usable at will), or DR 10/magic and bludgeoning, or regeneration 5/acid or fire. The best you can get for any of these are wussified versions that don't come close to the power of the real thing.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm thinking that this might not be a worry - one of the playtest reports (don't ask me which one!) mentioned a PC who wanted to slide under a table and kick someones legs out from under them (or something equally crazy) and 4e made it easy for the DM to say 'sure'.

Yeah, I saw that, and it gives me a glimmer of hope. I'm just afraid that they made it into some weak-ass improvised attack doing 1d6 damage to two targets or something. Hopefully I'm dead wrong.

You can disagree with any aspect of this you like, but it's not really a paradox.

Sorry to be unclear, you're not at all addressing the paradox I was talking about. The paradox is between saying that they don't like "rules bloat" and thus have cut/limited abilities, even ones that there's some call/logic for, yet that they're going to bring in all these abilities, or ones very much like them, in later books. It's like "We're stopping rules bloat by delaying it!". Delaying isn't stopping, and in some cases they're merely offloading rules bloat to house rules.

 

[med stud]

Yeah, I saw that, and it gives me a glimmer of hope. I'm just afraid that they made it into some weak-ass improvised attack doing 1d6 damage to two targets or something. Hopefully I'm dead wrong.



Sorry to be unclear, you're not at all addressing the paradox I was talking about. The paradox is between saying that they don't like "rules bloat" and thus have cut/limited abilities, even ones that there's some call/logic for, yet that they're going to bring in all these abilities, or ones very much like them, in later books. It's like "We're stopping rules bloat by delaying it!". Delaying isn't stopping, and in some cases they're merely offloading rules bloat to house rules.

Rule 1 for RPGs is that there will always be rules bloat; rule expansions are what keep the food on the table for the employees of the RPG company. If you don't like it (I don't) you can avoid by not buying supplements. I intend to buy the core books, maybe adventures, but that's it. No complete martial and stuff like that.

Looking at Iron Heroes I think there are reasons to be hopeful about improvised attacks. Mearls has shown that he can do rules for those things. That improvised attack about sliding under the table would most likely be a skill check, which if you made it would either give you attack bonus or AC bonus (for having the table as protection).

EDIT: Maybe I should contribute something to the topic as well . Personally I tend to view the whole picture before I start to use common sense and look for consistency.

The meat shield ability of the bugbear seems to be what everyone is talking about so here is how I think about it:
*Let's say that it's an ability that could be learned by anyone with the strength of a bugbear. It's not a wild claim by any means.

*By applying consistency in that case you would say that a PC could learn the ability.

*Why I wouldn't allow that anyway is that that ability is cool if used once or by a subclass of enemies. You know that those stranglers are creepy sons of bitches and you know that they can do it. It would not be cool if a PC would start any fight against humanoids by grabbing someone and using that person as a shield.

 

[jaer]

Sorry to be unclear, you're not at all addressing the paradox I was talking about. The paradox is between saying that they don't like "rules bloat" and thus have cut/limited abilities, even ones that there's some call/logic for, yet that they're going to bring in all these abilities, or ones very much like them, in later books. It's like "We're stopping rules bloat by delaying it!". Delaying isn't stopping, and in some cases they're merely offloading rules bloat to house rules.

If I may, I don't see this as a paradox because I am infering this to mean:

1) We are reducing the "rule bloating" by cutting down on the number of potential options in a general grapple. (They made the rules everyone needs to know simpler.)

2) Later on, we will be introducing rules that only specific players with certain abilities can do in a grapple. (They will inflate the rules one player needs to know or the DM needs to know to run one particular creature.)

Perhaps we will disagree on "reducing rule bloating" refering to streamlining only the basic rules, not class-specific ones, but that is what I thought Mearl was saying.

For instance, WotC said they were streamlining AoO, making them more straight forward and consistant acroos the board. However, Fighters have been described as the masters of the Opportunitist Attacks...they sound like they will be able to make a lot of them under circumstances that no other class can make them. AoO made simpler (in general), and yet there will be more rules covering them and the different situations in which they can be used (specifically for the Fighter).

I see this as the same "paradox" Mearl described with grappling.

The general rules will be very clean and simple (or, rather, that is the goal!). Class abilities might add complexity and additional options to the general rules, but only that player need to know those rules (and if no one plays that class, those rules never apply...they are, in effect, completely optional). I don't see that as being a rule bloat or a paradox.