Challenge Rating Replaced With...What?

[Henry]

I wonder how many First Edition fans 4th edition will win over? I wonder this because everytime I read a snippet these days (after the initial "it's the d20 we know and love" stuff initially announced) it seems like they're revisiting some of the paradigms of 1st Edition:

1. They're making 30 levels core in the game. 1st edition had preogressions up into the high 20's.
2. The "points of light in the darkness" sounds VERY much like the D&D settings that Arneson and Gygax were originally working with.
3. Monsters may have a fixed XP. Monsters in 1E had a fixed XP amount (plus an extra amount per hit point).
4. Classes are going to have more clearly defined rolls, even though allowing for customizability. In 1E, character classes were VERY heavily defined as to roll in the adventure. You were NOT going to have a thief that couldn't pick a lock, for instance.
5. Monsters are going to have simplified stat blocks for easier use for the DM. 1st Edition had possibly the simplest stat blocks in all of Dungeons and Dragons.

It won't be 1E, for sure, but it's almost like the designers are looking back at some of the paradigms Gygax and the first generation gamers first visited, and taking some nuggets of wisdom from them that seem to get lost in the shuffle. Now, for the loss of Challenge Rating, I don't necessarily like a flat XP versus an "encounter rating" of some sort, but I can understand the appeal. It'll be curious to see how close the end product is, paradigm-wise, to 1st edition.

 

[helium3]

Or are you thinking of a notionally CRx creature against a CRx party? It would mean more (and more complex) calculations, and it takes CR as its starting point which might not work out well.

Something more along the lines of this, though I would generate the class stats for the party first (to hit modifiers, damage, AC and hit points) and then figure out what monster stats I needed to get the appropriate amount of hit point attrition.

 

[helium3]

Off the top of my head, I'd say it was to fix the problem with fixed XP where a horde of inferior foes could give vastly more XP than was proper for any challenge they posed the party, and also put the cap on the possibility of a lucky party killing something quite beyond them and getting enough XP to gain several levels at once.

That's what I think the reason is as well. I suppose you can deal with this by putting in a rule related to encounter building that says something like "Don't use creatures that are more than three levels below the level of the party."

 

[MerricB]

I wonder how many First Edition fans 4th edition will win over? I wonder this because everytime I read a snippet these days (after the initial "it's the d20 we know and love" stuff initially announced) it seems like they're revisiting some of the paradigms of 1st Edition:

1. They're making 30 levels core in the game. 1st edition had preogressions up into the high 20's.
2. The "points of light in the darkness" sounds VERY much like the D&D settings that Arneson and Gygax were originally working with.
3. Monsters may have a fixed XP. Monsters in 1E had a fixed XP amount (plus an extra amount per hit point).
4. Classes are going to have more clearly defined rolls, even though allowing for customizability. In 1E, character classes were VERY heavily defined as to roll in the adventure. You were NOT going to have a thief that couldn't pick a lock, for instance.
5. Monsters are going to have simplified stat blocks for easier use for the DM. 1st Edition had possibly the simplest stat blocks in all of Dungeons and Dragons.

It won't be 1E, for sure, but it's almost like the designers are looking back at some of the paradigms Gygax and the first generation gamers first visited, and taking some nuggets of wisdom from them that seem to get lost in the shuffle. Now, for the loss of Challenge Rating, I don't necessarily like a flat XP versus an "encounter rating" of some sort, but I can understand the appeal. It'll be curious to see how close the end product is, paradigm-wise, to 1st edition.

Hmm... if I can disagree with you there a moment, Henry...

#1 - They're making 30 levels core in the game. 1st edition had preogressions up into the high 20's. - actually, AD&D didn't really work beyond 12th level, and was written with the assumption that PCs would retire then. You can also see this with demihuman level limits.

#2 - The "points of light in the darkness" sounds VERY much like the D&D settings that Arneson and Gygax were originally working with. - Arneson wasn't involved in AD&D (and his contribution to AD&D campaign lore is marginal at best). Greyhawk was originally "big city with dungeon" and little else; although later Greyhawk moved towards some elements of PoL.

#3 - Monsters may have a fixed XP. Monsters in 1E had a fixed XP amount (plus an extra amount per hit point). - in AD&D, monsters didn't have a fixed XP total! It was meant to be adjusted by the DM based on the difficulty of the encounter! 3e's CR vs Level table actually is closer to the intent of AD&D than how AD&D was usually played...

#4 - Classes are going to have more clearly defined rolls, even though allowing for customizability. In 1E, character classes were VERY heavily defined as to roll in the adventure. You were NOT going to have a thief that couldn't pick a lock, for instance. - The word is role, Henry.

#5 - Monsters are going to have simplified stat blocks for easier use for the DM. 1st Edition had possibly the simplest stat blocks in all of Dungeons and Dragons.. By that you seem to have ignored oD&D and Basic D&D. 4e statblocks are going to look extremely complicated even in comparison to 1e, I'd wager.

Cheers!

 

[Samnell]

That's what I think the reason is as well. I suppose you can deal with this by putting in a rule related to encounter building that says something like "Don't use creatures that are more than three levels below the level of the party."

Or a simple declaration that monsters of X level below the party don't drop any XP at all. Which would probably lead to a few less explosive flamewars about how the designers are "telling us what monsters we're allowed to use". Just a few though, internet being what it is.

 

[The_Universe]

They've admitted that they're doing this with magic item pricing.

Where did you hear that?

 

[Samnell]

Where did you hear that?

"We tried to fool ourselves into the fact that there was a hard pricing, but we started recognizing that with MIC, that we should look at them more wholistically. There will not be magic item creation rules for DM’s as we realize that as professional game designers we don’t even get it right every time. We’re going to give you lots and lots of examples and suggest that you build it, test it, etc. "

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=204434

SKR summed up my feelings on the matter over on Monte's boards:

People are going to build magic items whether or not you give them guidelines for it. If those guidelines give them 90% accuracy on pricing simple items and 50% accuracy on complex items, that's still 905 and 50% better than not giving them any guidelines at all.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Hmm... if I can disagree with you there a moment, Henry...

#1 - They're making 30 levels core in the game. 1st edition had preogressions up into the high 20's. - actually, AD&D didn't really work beyond 12th level, and was written with the assumption that PCs would retire then. You can also see this with demihuman level limits.

<SNIP>

#3 - Monsters may have a fixed XP. Monsters in 1E had a fixed XP amount (plus an extra amount per hit point). - in AD&D, monsters didn't have a fixed XP total! It was meant to be adjusted by the DM based on the difficulty of the encounter! 3e's CR vs Level table actually is closer to the intent of AD&D than how AD&D was usually played...

Merric - First I will disagree:
#1 - while most progressions were written to 12th level, every spell caster had spell lists to at least 26th level and each had instructions for continued advancement (with the exception of monk and druid which capped) Demihuman capping was a way to artificially keep elves and dwarves from outnumbering humans, it worked too, until 2e did away with the restrictions. And while a 21st level wizard was rare, they were neither unheard of nor unplayable.

...and then give a total agreement.
#3 - I'm looking at my 1e AD&D Monster Manual right now (3rd edition printing). There are no XP values listed for monsters in the MM. It was the Fiend Folio and the MMII that began to 'legalize' that practice. Before these books, it was based on a 'suggested' scale via the DMG and fit with the situation. Originally, 200 orcs could be thousands of XP at 1st level and tens of XP at 15th, very similar to the CR/scale of 3e.

However, I preferred the fixed system of 1.1e and 2e.

 

[Baron Opal]

#3 - [/i]Monsters may have a fixed XP. Monsters in 1E had a fixed XP amount (plus an extra amount per hit point). - in AD&D, monsters didn't have a fixed XP total! It was meant to be adjusted by the DM based on the difficulty of the encounter! 3e's CR vs Level table actually is closer to the intent of AD&D than how AD&D was usually played...

Sure they did. It was in the back of the DMG. There may have been guidelines to adjust this number, but orcs were worth 40 xp +1 per hp, each.

 

[Henry]

Thanks, Thunderfoot and Baron Opal.

On point #2 - note I didn't say "AD&D" there, but D&D - and both Blackmoor and Oerth as developed were very much a model of "Points of Light," Greyhawk city being one of them, and a much smaller city than one thinks of today. Note that even for Basic D&D that Keep on the Borderlands sort of follows this model, so the cosmopolitan look that later iterations of D&D took on was not present in earlier models; that's the point I was getting at.

Point #4 - D'OH!

Point #5 - if they are still complicated, then they aren't going to deliver on that one stated design goal. More to the point, I'm not suggesting they're going back to 1E's size of stat block (as I said, mechanically, it'll still be far from it), but that paradigm of simpler stat blocks for the DM really works. DMs need fewer details than players do, because they have more to pore over during a session, and it's something that Gygax and others did note and put into practice.

In all, I see a lot of changes that look a heck of a lot like things that 2E and 3E abandoned, and which are now being looked at again, and someone is realizing the wisdom of them.