Apologies for the long post. But to me this thread really highlights that 4E is cementing certain aspects of the metagame-ingame relationship that have always been part of D&D, but have not always ben explicit. I think the current designers have really got a good handle on that relationship, and are designing the new rules keeping it clearly in mind.
MoogleEmpMog said:
At my table, and the tables of everyone I've personally played with, the 3.5 Monster Manual has been a book of races as well as antagonists.
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Other roleplaying games, D&D's own past, books, movies, non-RPG games - the d20 system has powerful if occasionally somewhat clunky setting emulation.
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there no reason the two design principles shouldn't be compatible, when they so often are in other games?
Kamikaze Midget said:
I'm mostly with Mog on the first page: the designers shouldn't be telling me what I use the game element for. If I want to use monsters as an encounter, a bit of scenery, the local blacksmith, or a PC race, I should be able to do that. 3e lets me do that quite admirably.
Except that the game is a set of rules on how to deploy game elements, so it can't help but tell the players and GM what to use those elements for.
Thus, for example, D&D (in its current edition) has no rules for gods as PCs.
The real question, therefore, is this: are monsters, NPCs and PCs identical game elements (as some posters on this thread regard them) or not? That is, are they the sorts of things that players can use as their vehicle for gameworld exploration and activity? I can see why the designers have answered "no" to this question. D&D, in its current incarnation, thrives on permitting PCs to be extremely responsive, in details of mechanical build, to player desires. For monsters to meet this goal is for them to become, in practice, unusable for GMs.
In other games it might be possible to treat NPCs and PCs alike. But these games probably do not demonstrate the degree of player-responiveness that D&D does. That is, those games have a different metagame priority.
Kamikaze Midget said:
I want a *system* for determining what a creature is capable of.
"Make Junk Up" blows like a wandering prostitute (table) as a system.
Kamikaze Midget said:
I want a system. Making stuff up sucks as a system.
Why do I want a system? Am I a foolish dreamer? No. I rather like a deep and rich setting. I can't evoke a world that still ticks and tocks outside of the PC's if I don't have rules for determining how it does that. So that if, for some reason, the centaur has to tie a knot, I know how well it does that, without simply making stuff up.
What a creature is capable of is determined by its attributes, skill bonuses, special abilities etc - just the same as for a PC. As I think was fairly obvious, and as Mearls has made clear, the changes in monster design aren't to the way in which monster capabilities are described, but the way in which monsters are built.
If what you want is a system to tell you how good a 4HD monstrous humanoid should be at tying rope, the answer is "As good as they should be, given their talents as a race of rope-tiers". That is, pick the gameworld-appropriate number and give it to them. If you don't know what the gameworld-appropriate number is, then make it up! Or forget about it and move on.
Azgulor said:
Place me squarely in the "Monsters using PC rules" or "modability" camp - I too am in complete disagreement with Mr. Mearls.
Again, the issue is not about whether monster capabilities are expressed in the same language as that of PCs - of course they will be - it is about whether they are built using the same set of rules. They won't be. Which makes sense, given their different roles in the game.
JoeGKushner said:
The game system uniformity helps expalin how the world works.
It is becoming very clear that, in 4E, the rules for building PCs and monsters do not model any gameworld process. (I would argue that this has always been true in D&D - for example, the earning of XP by garnering gold in 1E, or by overcoming adventuring challenges in 3E, does not model any in-game causation - but 4E's design will make this more explicit.)
Thus, the monster build rules do not simulate a monster species' evolution, or an individual monster's birth and growth and learning. They play a purely metagame function of building GM-usable game elements.
Tharen the Damned said:
Sure, in most Cases the Monster lives 2-5 rounds and will not use any Skills.
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It is not often that you use these Skill Points, but they give the Monster the possibility to be more than 5 rounds of Gore and EP.
I think another thing that has to be acknowledged - and it is a natural consequence of the fact that build rules are purely metagame - is that monster write-ups may not be complete, in the sense that (within the context of the gameworld) it is possible that the monster has an ability not in the stat-block (perhaps the Ogre knows how to speak Elvish) just as PCs may have some properties not in the stat-block (eg perhaps the PC has a twin sister).
Thurbane said:
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.
This is another example where the monster may have an ability not mentioned in its stat block, because for the typical use of that stat block (namely, by a GM running a level-appropriate encounter) the information is irrelevant. It does no harm at all to the game for the GM to decide that the Ogre Mage, when off-screen and not cone-of-colding PCs, is Sleeping Kobolds.
glass said:
On the one hand, symmetry is obviously a good thing in principal (and not just aesthetically- system mastery is important). OTOH, if it gets in the way of monsters actually being good monsters that is obviously bad.
I think that is not necessarily important that monsters are built on exactly the same rules as PCs, but they should be expressed in the same language. By that I mean monsters should still have hit points and ability scores and what have you, and they should mean the same, even if those things were not determined in the same way as for PCs.
This is exactly what 4E will have. "Symmetry" will obtain in the description of NPCs, monsters and PCs, but not in the rules for building them. Because those rules do not simulate any in-game reality. They are purely metagame, and different metagame rules serve different metagame functions.
Syltorian said:
I don't care about monster PCs, but I do care about them as NPCs. And that includes being able to give them classes, modifying their feats, skills, and so forth. I want to have a dryad druid, a satyr enchanter, an ogre scout, heck: even a dragon archivist for the players to meet.
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That seems to be either impossible or difficult now, from what (little) we know so far.
Just assign the number and move on.
If the real question is "How challenging is such a modified monster" and "How many XP is it worth to beat it" then it would be good for the rules to answer that question. At the moment, they pretend to, but everyone knows that the rules for calculating the CR of monsters with NPC levels don't really work (as Dave Noonan admitted in his article some time ago about building Drow NPCs).
Mouseferatu said:
While, again, I have no inside knowledge and thus cannot make any promises, I see no reason why it shouldn't still be possible to add class levels to monsters. It should still be possible to add X (levels) to Y (monsters), no matter how Y was created.
It may not be entirely smooth, in terms of figuring out how much XP the monster is worth or what level of difficulty it is--but then, neither was total CR in 3E, really.
Like he said.
And in conclusion: It seems to me that those who are objecting to the new design want the metagame-ingame relationship to be different from what it will be in 4E. In particular, they want the monster build mechanics to
model some process that is actually part of the gameworld. But as a poster on another thread said, D&D (for better or worse) is really abandoning such simulationist-style mechanics. Such mechanics being abandoned, there is no reason to build PCs and NPCs/monsters according to the same set of rules.
