Aggro

[firesnakearies]

The absolute beauty of paper gaming is that there IS a DM, who can make every single event in game customized and appropriate to what's happening. This is why pen-and-paper RPGs will always offer a richer, deeper gameplay experience than computer games. The CRPG industry has come a long way, and has made a really impressive effort at providing a static, coded system which can simulate many of the functions of a DM. But until we develop true artificial intelligence, no programmed engine will ever be able to run a game the way a living DM can.

Many of the features that people are used to in MMORPGS are only there BECAUSE there is no DM, so the game devs do the best they can to provide a fair system of action resolution. But in D&D, the DM doesn't need a whole lot of the extra artificial mechanics which are essential in a computer game.

Each monster or NPC that you run can have an actual personality, actual motives, actual varying levels of intelligence, perception, and knowledge. You get to decide that. Fighting a pack of zombies should not be the same, for your players, as fighting a band of savvy human mercenaries.

A mindless beast might just lash out randomly at anything near it, or it might charge headlong through the ranks, ignoring all sorts of peril and pain that this subjects it to, to crush some guy in the back who enraged it. But a vampire lord or a mind flayer is going to do the absolutely most intelligent, tactical thing it can think of, which does NOT mean playing into whatever the PCs are trying to maneuver it into doing.

I like to ask myself what this particular monster would know about fighting adventurers. Your elite drow assassins have definitely fought other trained, intelligent people of all classes before, so they should react accordingly. They'll understand what fighters can do, know the implications of being marked, but they'll also understand exactly how dangerous the spellcasters are, how they can't allow healers to do their thing unmolested, and so on. On the other hand, a tribe of lizardfolk, while possessing humanlike intelligence, might not be so savvy, might not realize just what will happen if they ignore the fighter's mark, or leave the squishies in the back alone for awhile. But they'll learn, and adapt.

The fact that you can make every encounter dynamic, and have the enemies respond appropriate to their nature, is what makes D&D combat so cool. It also makes intelligent monsters much scarier to the players, because they know that a beholder or a marilith isn't going to just stupidly let the PCs do whatever they want, but will be constantly trying to outmaneuver the defenders, shut down the healers, and harry the ranged strikers.

An aggro mechanic would ruin one of the very best things about D&D. Nothing beats a DM making each monster's decision individually, according to its mental faculties, and what is happening at that moment. In a well-run D&D game, very few fights are ever tank-and-spank.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

The above advice is sound.

IMO, intelligent NPCs should focus on wounded (but still conscious) PCs, as an unconscious PC can't hit (or blast) back. I suppose I'm rather vicious this way. Fortunately, melee opponents can rarely actually pull this off, but I've severely injured a few PCs with minions using "focus fire" on, say, a wounded paladin.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Something that I have found using the ubiquitous kobolds against a 1st level party is that although I (the DM) have a good idea about who the kobolds would like to attack, certain classes have abilities which force the kobolds hand.

If the fighter has managed to get himself into a choke point, the little guys can't just run past him and have to deal with him first. If the paladin has challenged someone, they find this a strong incentive to either fight him or run away for a bit until the challenge has gone.

So I'm seeing that defender classes are actually quite well equipped to defend their allies and do the equivalent of 'drawing aggro' assuming that the fight doesn't take place on the flat featureless plain (of course...)

 

[DM_Blake]

Do you think this is still true?

For most foes (apart from minions) the strikers are now the biggest threats and I would have thought that they would be the first choice for attacking by sentient creatures.

Sure in previous editions it made tons of sense to get the mage first, because they were so much more powerful than everyone else. Now most of the potential targets have the same kind of power to hurt you!

Cheers

Yes, this is still true, but not as overwhelmingly true as previous editions.

Previous editions, mages did the most damage and were the most fragile, so for the smallest investment, the monsters could take out the largest threat.

Now in 4th edition, mages don't really do more damage than anyone else (well, that's sort of true). They are no longer automatically the largest threat.

But they still are the most fragile.

So now in 4e, for the smallest investment, the monsters can take out one of the threats.

Not quite as imperative, but still sound reasoning.

There's always exceptions. That heavily armored tank up front with all the HP might be very susceptible to attacks against its REF or WILL defense, and the monster in question might have very good attacks against those defenses, so these types of monsters might prefer chewing up the armored front-line types beacause, for them, these are the targets that require the smallest investment. And this will happen more in 4e than it ever did in previous editions.

 

[DM_Blake]

I would like to point out that "aggro" in a computer game was the best system the programmers could devise to substitute for intelligence.

It would be a very difficult task to teach each and every monster in the game how to apply its special abilities in an intelligent fashion.

Worse, it would an impossible task to teach the AI how to evaluate every possible comination of PC groups it might face.

Trying to build all that into a computer AI would be insane. The game would never be finished. Somoene would finally say "OK, that's enough AI, it's good enough, let's release this game" and immediately the player base would start finding holes in the AI, stuff that programmers either didn't think of, or thought of but didn't have time to include in the AI.

Rather than take on such an insane task, they built a simple system where the monsters track how much damage they are taking. They track how much healing the healers are providing to the PCs. Some special abilities add a fixed amount, or a percentage, to these numbers, and some other special abilities reduce these numbers by a fixed amount or a percentage, or drop them to zero. Each PC is tracked separately. The PC with the highest number is the one who has the "aggro", meaning the monster will target that PC.

Theoretically, that PC is having the most impact on the fight. Either he's doing the most damage, so the monster has to kill him first to stay alive, or he's doing the most healing, so the monster has to kill him first to have any chance to kill anyone. But the PCs with special abiilites skew this result. The fighters have ways to make sure they have the highest number, since they have the armor and HP to take the beating. Some sneaky classes can drop their numbers, effectively hiding from the monster's attention even though they might be doing the most damage.

And so on.

All of this is very necessary in a computer game.

But none of it is necessary when the monsters are driven by a real intelligence. In case you're wondering, that real intelligence is you, the DM.

You can decide how this monster plans its attacks. Does it hate magic? Does it have good abilities to eliminate heavily-armored high-HP fighter types? Does it have good ranged attacks and prefer to take cover and pick off enemies with ranged attacks first? Do multiple monsters gang up on one target or do they work separately? Does the monster even have enough intelligence to figure this stuff out (zombies, oozes, etc., probably just attack the nearest warm body regardless of "aggro" - but in computer games they use the same aggro rules as intelligent monsters).

So I advise the DMs out there to use their own intelligence to make combat interesting and dynamic. Make each battle unique. Don't fall into a trap of using artificial "aggro" rules because if you do, you're giving your players an experience that isn't really any better than they can get from a computer game, but without the lovely graphics. You don't want your players deciding to stay home and play WoW instead of joining your PnP version of WoW, do you?