NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6001562" data-attributes="member: 42582">This seems to be confusing ingame and metagame. Ingame, the monster is tougher than the PCs. The mechanical technique whereby this is achieved is by piling on hit points and damage.Huh? What is levelling up a goblin, other than piling on hit points and damage, presumably to represent the toughness of that goblin compared to the ordinary goblin and the level 1 PCs?But in a game based on an action economy in combat, like D&D, there are also issues about giving the "boss monster" a suitable suite of actions. So one way to "pile on damage" is to give multiple attacks at lower damage (a bit like the mechanical strategy that AD&D used for fighters, paladins and rangers). In an abstract combat system like D&D there need be no ingame difference between one attack roll for big damage and two attack rolls for moderate damage. We can choose between mechanical interpretations in the interests of gameplay convenience and pleasure.There is still the issue of the action economy. Everything else being equal, I think multiple (or perhaps AoE) attacks make for more interesting play than big-damage single-target attacks, when there is only one enemy on the field.Agreed, although I think fantasy RPG design has come relatively late to this point. There is an interesting discussion of the issue in the Burning Wheel Adventure Burner, for example (that book is a bit like a DMG for BW): they discuss various strategies (mechanical, encounter design, etc) a GM can use to help "bosses" survive the one-vs-many action economy. (And I don't think it's a coincidence that the same BW book that discusses this issue lists 4e D&D in its bibliography, as one of the influences on it!)For most of D&D's history, a monster stat block has been neither of those things. It has been a representation of certain capacities of the monster in a suitable mechanical form for usign that monster in game play.I don't want to play D&D as a "storytelling" system with massive GM force. I want to play it in a reasonably lighthearted but Forge-y style with an emphasis on thematically and mechanically strong scene framing supporting player protagonism. And I want monster building rules that support that.I think WotC are going to have to think about more than just your preferences, or my preferences, in desigining a "unification" edition of D&D.</blockquote>

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