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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DM_Blake" data-source="post: 4342918" data-attributes="member: 57267">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?</blockquote>

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