Complete Disagreement With Mike on Monsters (see post #205)

[Klaus]

It might also finally be true that you can build an expert npc with +15 to a skill or whatever, without them being 75 HP tough guys that can take out a whole party of low level characters.

Like, I dunno this?

Bob The Smith: Male Human Expert 4. S 13 D 10 Co 11 I 12 W 9 Ch 8
BAB +3, AC 12 (+2 leather), Atk +4 hammer (1d6+1), hp 11 (4d6)
Skills: Craft (armorsmithing, weaponsmithing, blacksmithing) +11 each (+13 with masterwork tools), Profession +7.
Feats: Skill Focus (Craft [armorsmithing, weaponsmithing, blacksmithing].

Took me 5 minutes.

 

[Thurbane]

I also hope monsters are first and foremost organic - not ambulatory stat blocks.

Like the much vaunted example of the Ogre Mage - "Oh no, it has Sleep as an SLA, and Sleep is useless on characters of an appropriate CR level!".

Well maybe, just maybe, the Ogre Mage evolved without an inbuilt "CR appropraite ability" gene determining it's development. Perhaps they evolved the ability to drop Goblins, Kobolds and other little critters for lunch!

People swear black and blue that saying more recent editions of D&D have a "videogame" feel is a totally false analogy, but I can't help but feel monsters whose powers are totally designed to be appropriate for "level X characters" have a distinct Diablo feel to them...

 

[BryonD]

Like, I dunno this?

Bob The Smith: Male Human Expert 4. S 13 D 10 Co 11 I 12 W 9 Ch 8
BAB +3, AC 12 (+2 leather), Atk +4 hammer (1d6+1), hp 11 (4d6)
Skills: Craft (armorsmithing, weaponsmithing, blacksmithing) +11 each (+13 with masterwork tools), Profession +7.
Feats: Skill Focus (Craft [armorsmithing, weaponsmithing, blacksmithing].

Took me 5 minutes.

Well, first, I was shooting off a quick thought and on further reflection should have selected a higher skill total. And even with that you came up with a character that has the BAB of a L3 fighter and low fudged HP and still came up 4 points short of my target (I'm not going to count the MW tools).

IMO the rules should readily support the idea of a master of a great library with knowledge scores equal to the highest of anyone in the know lands (say +30 or more), and yet not have any combat skills (+0 BAB) and roughly commoner 1 or 2 level HP without fudging or forcing an aburdly low.

This has never been an OMG D&D has a great zit on it issue. I'm still a big 3X fan. At this moment it is the best game ever published. But I'd like to see the rules support a more broad scope of builds. And having skill and BAB and HP all tied to the same mechanic (HD) holds that back.

 

[Klaus]

Well, first, I was shooting off a quick thought and on further reflection should have selected a higher skill total. And even with that you came up with a character that has the BAB of a L3 fighter and low fudged HP and still came up 4 points short of my target (I'm not going to count the MW tools).

IMO the rules should readily support the idea of a master of a great library with knowledge scores equal to the highest of anyone in the know lands (say +30 or more), and yet not have any combat skills (+0 BAB) and roughly commoner 1 or 2 level HP without fudging or forcing an aburdly low.

This has never been an OMG D&D has a great zit on it issue. I'm still a big 3X fan. At this moment it is the best game ever published. But I'd like to see the rules support a more broad scope of builds. And having skill and BAB and HP all tied to the same mechanic (HD) holds that back.

I messed up and forgot the -4 nonproficiency penalty for the hammer, my bad! His attack should've been +0. And the library headmaster? How simple is that to give him something like: "Maester Lwuinn has a +10 circumstance bonus on all Knowledge checks, from a lifetime of reading", bumping his modifiers from +11 to +21?

Mind you, I'm not being adversatorial, just showing that I don't see this as an issue. Once again, .

 

[MerricB]

From what I recall, the MM will have in it for "class advancement monsters" the stuff necessary to advance them with classes. So, orcs, goblins, that sort of thing. Remember, we're not just talking about 3e races here: it's not +2 Str, +2 Con and a LA any more. No, instead we've got level-dependent abilities! So, an 5th level Orc Fighter might be able to to a Strong Strike with a battleaxe, or a 5th level Kobold Rogue may be able to do a Reactive Tumble away from a fireball...

I'm making the talents up, but the point is the same: Race matter more in 4e.

Obviously, they're not going to do this for every monster. Lots of them will be simpler.

However, I expect monsters and PCs will still be built on the same base. Why do monsters need feats? They don't. However, if you had a Ogre Fighter 6, you could give it feats purely from the fighter levels & HD.

The 3.5e revision for monsters (which gave them all feats equal to PCs) was really, really great because you didn't have to remember two (or five!) separate progressions. With this theoretical 4e "no feats for monsters", you don't have to remember anything either - the monster part doesn't have feats, but once you give it PC levels, it gains feats.

Skills, Ability scores? Yeah, the monster will still have that. And I'd guess that they'd work like Saga edition skills. Easy skill bonus to work out, and possible racial adjustments.

Certainly with Saga edition, you can get a +10 to a 1st level skill very easily indeed (just be trained, for +5, and then skill focus, for another +5). Reducing the variance in skill gain between levels (so 1st to 20th is +0 to +10), and you have something that allows 1st level commoners to be good at their core tasks.

Cheers!

 

[BryonD]

I messed up and forgot the -4 nonproficiency penalty for the hammer, my bad! His attack should've been +0. And the library headmaster? How simple is that to give him something like: "Maester Lwuinn has a +10 circumstance bonus on all Knowledge checks, from a lifetime of reading", bumping his modifiers from +11 to +21?

Mind you, I'm not being adversatorial, just showing that I don't see this as an issue. Once again, .

And I can and will hand wave with the best of them when it makes the game more fun.
But my point is simply that if the game itself implicitely supports a wider range of builds than that is a Good Thing(tm)

 

[ShadowX]

While I definitely want to wait for actual information before bemoaning or heralding their monster design, I do want to weigh in on the purpose of monsters.

I see a lot of people that want a high congruency between the rules for monsters and characters so they or their players can play monsters. While this is definitely a cool option, I think core D&D needs to be created to serve the vast majority of its player base who don't expand their racial options past your basic fantasy archetypes. D&D has never been, nor should it be, a fantasy RPG toolbox and as such monsters need to serve as monsters first and foremost.

Also, Third Edition races were a rather transparent lot, a different set of stat bonuses and relatively few unique abilities. This made creating monsters as PCs rather easily. Fourth Edition is ramping up the impact of race and as such I think you might enjoy the basic races again, but also it will be harder to make monsters into PCs. If the previews are to be believed, your minotaur as a PC race needs special abilities linked to every class.

While on an intellectual level, translucency between the rules for monsters and PCs is a neat idea, when you actually sit down to play it completely degrades in importance. Your players likely don't care and will never know if your 3 HD monster can have skills or BAB that high or not. If you have ever ran a published adventure you have almost assuredly, unless you are John Cooper, used a monster with a slightly askew statblock. Did your game stumble to a halt? Likely it didn't make any difference. This is not to say that guidelines for creating monsters are not important or desirable, but hard rules based on the HD of a monster make little sense since CR is not rigorously tied to HD and is instead based on numerous other factors.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Why do you say this was ironic?

Because monsters were often a hodge podge of strange abilities that didn't always seem to go together and there were... easy ways to minimize the xp from the old table.

 

[MerricB]

While I definitely want to wait for actual information before bemoaning or heralding their monster design, I do want to weigh in on the purpose of monsters.

Nicely stated.

Cheers!

 

[Samnell]

I see a lot of people that want a high congruency between the rules for monsters and characters so they or their players can play monsters..

I don't know about others, but that's not why I'm concerned at all. If making a monster PC curdled all the milk in the county it wouldn't bother me much. I've allowed players to play monster PCs before, and I've done it a few times myself, but it's never been a core or important part of my D&D experience.

EDIT: Sorry, misidentified the quote.