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

[ptolemy18]

They're designing it for combat and combat alone -- a shallow design goal that does not speak to how monsters are truly used in at least MY campaign.

I agree completely.

 

[pemerton]

Overly focusing monster generation on metagame purposes breaks down when, as happens *extremely* often, monsters get used for other purposes. Enhanced diplomacy rules or a well placed charm spell can take nigh any creature and put it in a position where you need to know what skills it has, how it interacts with equipement or buff spells and everything else that you decided to ignore because it was *only* a combat brute that would live for 5 rounds, max. Only a very, very limited subset of monsters (oozes?) will never be forced to interact with the PC rule set. Certainly anything even vaguely humanoid will.

I don't entirely agree, for the reasons I gave in my replies to Kamikaze Midget: When the nature of the challenge changes (eg the PCs try to sweet-talk the Brute) then the GM has to make a call (perhpas off the cuff, or perhaps there will be default rules in the DMG or the MM) about the parameters of the Brute as a social challenge. In that sense, metagame purposes can be flexible.

But I do think you're right that it becomes trickier if the PCs charm a Brute and want to use it for some non-combat purpose. What non-combat stats should it be given? If I was thinking about how to implement mechanics to resolve this sort of situation without any prior constraints, I would look at some sort of system to facilitate player-GM negotiation: whether through Fate Points, or other concessions, the player who charmed the Brute is able to work with the GM to stipulate its other abilities.

Given that we're talking D&D, it's unlikely those sorts of mechanics will be adopted. So I don't know how it will work, and I agree with you therefore that it might be a problem.

<snip monster stat block>

Does it compare directly to the players? Nope. It likely has WAY more hit points and some of its abiltiies will be extremely powerful for a 10th level character. Nor does it give you enough information to make a character out of the monster, but you still have all the same stats as a character.

There is one thing that might complicate the situation. You are assuming that your sample stat block is complete, in that it is a total picture of the monster. If that is what the designers intend, then I agree with those who say we have a design for overly limited purposes (eg designing purely for combat).

For this sort of design approach to work, I think that it must be understood that the stats of a Brute are not the totality of its stats, but the stats it needs to play in the role the GM has assigned it. If the situation suddenly changes, and the Brute becomes the focus of a social challenge, then I am assuming the GM has to, at that point, generate a new statblock (off the cuff, or by application of some sort of default rule). In that sense, I am assuming that under the new system monster stats will be deliberately incomplete. Only PC stats will be complete, because only a PC has the metagame purpose of engaging in any challenge at any time.

Thus, when the PCs charm the Brute and want to use it as part of a social ploy, it can't be assumed that the Brute's combat stats exhaust its abilities.

Extremely often? I don't know about that. I played in weekly campaign for almost every week since about 1993(2 weekly campaigns for a number of those years), and I've been a Triad member for Living Greyhawk for 2 years and played in LG for 6 years. I can fairly certainly say that the number of times that I've need to know those things has been maybe...2 or 3 times.

If that's correct its reassuring, given the potential problem that I think Kraydak has raised.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

If the monster is a "Brute", he is just like most meelee combat monster (Troll, Ogre, Giant) outside of combat: He sucks at it.

It might also be important to keep in mind these two things:
1) The designers brag about how all the parts of the system works together and each subsystem is informed by the others. This indicates to me that the designers are very well aware that their combat brutes must be usable in a social challenge, too, if they are designing social challenge rules! But usable can just be: Has the default modifier for bluff, diplomacy, intimidate, sense motive and gather information for a 10th level monster. But that's not different from what we have now.

2) None of the character or combat roles discussed about tell anything about social encounters. Striker, Defender, Leader, Controller (and what where the monster roles again?), nothing says anything about how this affect social challenges. The "roles" in social challenges have not been discussed yet. Maybe there are some (and maybe there are social equivalents of striker, defender, leader and controller), maybe there are not. (Seems like a possible weakness to me.) We'll see.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

But I do think you're right that it becomes trickier if the PCs charm a Brute and want to use it for some non-combat purpose. What non-combat stats should it be given? If I was thinking about how to implement mechanics to resolve this sort of situation without any prior constraints, I would look at some sort of system to facilitate player-GM negotiation: whether through Fate Points, or other concessions, the player who charmed the Brute is able to work with the GM to stipulate its other abilities.

Right now, the stat block of a creature tells you how it works in both combat AND non-combat situations, in that the stat blocks list their non-combat skills. The designers have already said that the stat blocks of creatures in 4e will be complete as well.

I think you are reading too much into "social challenges". From everything I've read so far, I believe that the "social challenge" system will be a lot like dealing with a combat is now or dealing with an encounter trap from Dungeonscape, but with social skills.

So, for instance, you might have a "social encounter" where you have to convince a guard to let you past. You will need to adjust the guard up to 20 "social points" to succeed. If you succeed on a 15 bluff check, you add 2 "social points", if you succeed at a 25, you add 3, if you succeed at a 15 diplomacy check it adds 5, etc. The social points go down by 5 every round. I can see this sort of system as being easy to remember, engage the whole party, and integrates into the current system without much effort.

It also had the benefit of not needing any more information in any monster's stat block to use them as combat or social encounters. You just need to know their bluff, sense motive, diplomacy, and other social skill modifiers.

There is one thing that might complicate the situation. You are assuming that your sample stat block is complete, in that it is a total picture of the monster. If that is what the designers intend, then I agree with those who say we have a design for overly limited purposes (eg designing purely for combat).

I'm missing something. Why would the stat blocks be anything but complete in the same way the current ones are. The designers have just said they've managed to make them a lot smaller but that monsters will still have skills, feats, and all the other things they had before. This is already what we have now, it just takes up less space on paper in the new version and you don't have to limit creatures based on their type, race, hit dice or any other arbitrary number. If you want a goblin with +400 to hit, but 5 hit points, a 2 strength, and +40 to diplomacy, you can.

For this sort of design approach to work, I think that it must be understood that the stats of a Brute are not the totality of its stats, but the stats it needs to play in the role the GM has assigned it. If the situation suddenly changes, and the Brute becomes the focus of a social challenge, then I am assuming the GM has to, at that point, generate a new statblock (off the cuff, or by application of some sort of default rule). In that sense, I am assuming that under the new system monster stats will be deliberately incomplete. Only PC stats will be complete, because only a PC has the metagame purpose of engaging in any challenge at any time.

I seem to be missing something. Why would you believe you'd have to generate a new stat block? At the most, I could see that if the Brute became a target of a social encounter, you MIGHT have to invent a number for how "easily convinced" they were. But other than that, their social skills would all be listed and nothing would need to be changed.

As far as I know all the comments about a "social stat block" just mean that for purely social situations, you should be able to compress the stat block even more, since you wouldn't have to list combat stats at all.

 

[Kraydak]

Extremely often? I don't know about that. I played in weekly campaign for almost every week since about 1993(2 weekly campaigns for a number of those years), and I've been a Triad member for Living Greyhawk for 2 years and played in LG for 6 years. I can fairly certainly say that the number of times that I've need to know those things has been maybe...2 or 3 times. We did all play monsters during one campaign, but the only reason we did so is because Savage Species came out and we wanted to try it out.

So your DnD experience rarely involves Charm, Diplomacy, Disarm, Sunder, Dispell Magic in combat, Calm Emotions or any other such action? All of those require moving to a more complicated rule set.

Besides, none of that really matters, they've said that creatures have ALL of that information.

The difference between player characters and monsters(from everything I've read) is that a player race will say:
+2 strength, -2 con. At 5th level they get Super Luck, and 10th level they can choose to be able to jump really high or turn into a frog.

monsters will say:
Goblin Clubfighter
Level 10 Monster
xp: 570
Str 26, Dex 14, Con 16, Int 15, Wis 12
Attacks: +14 (Club) 1d6+8
HP: 258
Saves: 20 Ref, 15 Fort, 17 Will
Skills: +14 Diplomacy, +12 Tumble, +3 Craft, +10 Concentration
Special Abilities:
Hit Hard With Club (Ex): Once per combat, he can spend a swift action to do an extra 2d6 damage with his club.
Low Light Vision (Ex)

Does that mean that Goblins have +15 strength? Nope, just that this one has that strength. Does that mean that all goblins can Hit Hard With Club? Nope, this one can though. You can run this monster through virtually any situation you want. Although, you can't figure out HOW it got 258 hitpoints or how it got +14 to hit. It just does, since it is a level 10 monster designed to be a brute, and it needs about +14 to hit so that it can hit level 10 PCs on average 60% of the time. It has 258 hit points so that it can survive about 5 rounds of attacks since the average striker at 10th level does 50 damage.

Does it compare directly to the players? Nope. It likely has WAY more hit points and some of its abiltiies will be extremely powerful for a 10th level character. Nor does it give you enough information to make a character out of the monster, but you still have all the same stats as a character.

So, what happens if the goblin gets disarmed? Dispelled? If his AC doesn't include a bonus breakdown, what happens if he gets surprised? What happens if he gets surprised *after* a rust monster attack (or a Rusting grasp spell)? Are any of his combat stats Morale based?

A black box approach to monster stats limits players (and other monsters...) heavily in terms of tactics allowed. Named bonuses can be targetted directly, unnamed bonuses cannot be. This wouldn't be that significant for an animal say, but a humanoid probably has a disarmable/sunderable weapon and some armor. Which might be magical. A fey warrior probably has stats that come from magical buffs, which should be dispellable.

The end result, if monsters are *only* used for combat, of simplifying the system is to remove tactical options. Including such extremely basic ones as disarm and dispell. If people are using charm or the new and improved diplomacy rules (and they often do, remember Meepo...), the time saved in monster generation is lost in trying to reverse engineer something that was never designed to be reverse engineered. Maybe more time is saved by going black box, but the time gained is prep time. Reverse engineering time can be game time.

I can't see it as worth it. Adding in the complexity of a "special abilities" system (which WILL NOT be as simple as reading the combat stats off a table) and you end up with the black box system not netting you much prep time at all in the end as opposed to a PCesque design system.

 

[D.Shaffer]

So, what happens if the goblin gets disarmed? Dispelled? If his AC doesn't include a bonus breakdown, what happens if he gets surprised? What happens if he gets surprised *after* a rust monster attack (or a Rusting grasp spell)? Are any of his combat stats Morale based?

Considering that we dont know what the actual monster stat block will look like, isnt it a bit premature to be complaining about what information will be missing from it?

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Considering that we dont know what the actual monster stat block will look like, isnt it a bit premature to be complaining about what information will be missing from it?

I agree. This entire thread sounds like a room full of 19th-century philosophers arguing about why horseless carriages should have six legs, rather than four.

 

[Kraydak]

Considering that we dont know what the actual monster stat block will look like, isnt it a bit premature to be complaining about what information will be missing from it?

True, except for the simple fact that simplicity comes at the cost of complexity (and I sure hope that doesn't sound profound). *Any* simplification will come at a cost. That cost may be grinding the game to a halt after a charm spell. It may come at the cost of removing Disarm and Sunder and Dispell Magic as useful tactical options. The descriptions that have come out of WotC have NOT detailed the complicated things (Ex, SLA, SU and spell abilities in 3ed parlance) but only the frankly trivial ones (BaB, HP, AC, Saves). Of course the stat block can have all the important information, but if you have *that*, you have gone and done all the work that you were going to save. So why not do the work right, allowing you to interface with the PC system fully?

I'm worried that by doing the easy stuff first, in the way that they seem to have been, will lock them into in a system that makes lots of people unhappy (the roll-playing is badwrongfun croud, the swashbuckling croud and the tactical croud all have cause to worry). I see a great opportunity to take 3e's Type system and make it *work* that is being wasted for something that makes life easier 9 times out of 10 and grinds the game to a halt that 1 time in 10. Or says "you can't do that". It seems so out of character with everything else coming out about 4e.

 

[Forrester]

I'm in agreement. I loved the idea when 3rd Edition first came out, but in actual practice it possibly ended up being a horrendous pain in the butt in preparing for and running a game.

Yep yep and yep.

 

[pemerton]

Right now, the stat block of a creature tells you how it works in both combat AND non-combat situations, in that the stat blocks list their non-combat skills. The designers have already said that the stat blocks of creatures in 4e will be complete as well.

<snip>

Why would the stat blocks be anything but complete in the same way the current ones are. The designers have just said they've managed to make them a lot smaller but that monsters will still have skills, feats, and all the other things they had before.

<snip>

Why would you believe you'd have to generate a new stat block? At the most, I could see that if the Brute became a target of a social encounter, you MIGHT have to invent a number for how "easily convinced" they were. But other than that, their social skills would all be listed and nothing would need to be changed.

The reason I had been suggesting stat blocks might be incomplete was because a role-oriented stat block would only give information necessary for that role. Otherwise it would not be role-oriented. I had missed the designers' remarks about complete statblocks. If this is the case, then my thoughts about role-oriented stat blocks must be wrong.

(Though the suggestion that a GM might have to invent a number for how "easily convinced" a brute is some sort of concession of less-than-complete stat blocks, because that's a bit like saying the stat block is complete but for hit points - just a minor detail!).

The alternative interpretation of the designers' remarks on roles, if stat blocks are to be taken as complete not just for that role, but in totality, is that it is not stat-blocks that are role-oriented but creatures themselves. I would see that as a less attractive way to go, because it is less flexible. Rather than simplifying the presentation of creatures via stat blocks, it would be simplifying the creatures themselves.