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

[Nebulous]

I like this approach. Humanoid monsters will be able to have a 1-30 racial level write up. We'll see less of the Half-celestial Awakened Gelatinous Cube paladins.

Really, is such madness that common or is that just an exaggeration? I've never seen anyone come close to making silly combinations like that.

3.X is fantastic for player options but it is a nightmare to prepare as a GM. I used to love the complete control over opponents for my PCs. Every foe was unique. Class levels, Feat choices and templates meant never running the same monster twice. Oh my lord the variation.
But now every foe was like rolling up a PC. The paperwork the wrangling of skills and feats for PrCs. Template abuse. In seeking a cooler monster I sucked out all the flavor and replaced it with mechanics. I welcome monsters as monsters, not DM PCs.

I welcome the changes they're coming up with. As much as i like the effort they took in 3rd edition to balance the playing field, when i look at a page long stat block for a monster, it seems sort of pointless for a creature that in all likelihood isn't going to live very long.

 

[Samnell]

Place me squarely in the "Monsters using PC rules" or "modability" camp - I too am in complete disagreement with Mr. Mearls. This was one of the features that enticed me back to D&D. The monster stat blocks of 1e and 2e drove me nuts because they often seemed totally arbitrary.

Me too. I'll go one step further: the wild incoherent subsystems of 1e and 2e were arbitrary. There was no actual system behind them all. Roll high this, roll low that, so on this one negative numbers are good, this one they're bad, this one adds ability mods, this one does not, the ability mods are all different, etc. They made the game worse. Worse to play and worse to DM. I can't blame Gary for not foreseeing this in the 70s when no one had designed a game like this before, but today's designers have no excuse.

The same rules, and rules principles, for everything was one of the core elements of the d20 design philosophy. I think Monte once summed it up to the effect of the 3e team doing everything in its power to erase rules distinctions between PCs and NPCs. I'm not completely cynical about 4e, but the news that such a fundamental element of the 3e design philosophy was being discarded strikes me as a gigantic step backwards. Long before I was sold on 3e's easy multiclassing, feats, and hit dice that kept going up past 10th level, I was sold on rules that applied to everything the same way. I'll go far as to say that system coherence was the selling point of 3e to me. These years of mostly DMing it have never led me to think otherwise.

If it turns out that the new monster building process started with a target CR and worked back from it to generate the same stats or same sorts of stats as we have now, I would not only be content but indeed herald it as a positive improvement. But the talk of streamlining monster stats argues the opposite.

 

[GreatLemur]

I'm pretty torn about this whole thing. I've got a really serious, gut-level dislike of anything that goes against the internal consistency of a game system and thereby decreases its modularity. Modularity is incredibly important to me, because I don't really feel like playing any game the way it's supposed to be played. I don't believe that anyone on earth is looking to play half-celestial awakened gelatinous cube paladins, but orc, bugbear, gnoll, and lizardfolk PCs sound like a great idea. So does customizing less PC-appropriate monsters with class levels to take them outside of their usual schticks. Why shouldn't there be fire giant wizards or goblin monks?

But, at the same time, I realize that Mearls' "build it for what it'll be used for" approach is the "right" thing to do in that it'll lead to the most improvement for the most people. Build the world's most popular RPG for the average gamer, and let us gearheads customize it ourselves, because you know we'll be houseruling the hell out of it, anyway.

Furthermore, I'm sure there will be ways to play as orcs, bugbears, gnolls, and lizardfolk. And even if the fact that the PC versions of those critters are different from the monster versions offends my sense of logic, I know that it ain't really gonna mean much at the table. And, hell, however they end up working that bit, it's gotta be better than ECL.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I'm all for simple monsters so long as there's a built in way to class them (and determine their new Monster Level without too much hassle).

 

[Storm Raven]

But no, seriously, in terms of spellcasting, Elric would be a conjurer no? And a fighter with a dang powerful sword.

In 3e terms, I'd say Elric was a sorcerer/fighter, and a fair amount of his summoning prowess was probably derived from his ring.

 

[Gryffyn]

I'm all for simpler monster writeups. Anything that makes the game easier to GM means that more people will run games. The more people who run games, the more D&D games there will be. The more D&D games there are, the more fun we'll all have.

 

[Syltorian]

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.

I hope your optimism is more warranted than my pessimism. I get the latter from the claims that you cannot play them as PCs. Is that only because they are getting rid of ECL and LA; that is, you can add class levels, and advance them as though they were PCs, except that you don't know what the basic abilities are worth, balance-wise?

Sure, in most Cases the Monster lives 2-5 rounds and will not use any Skills.
But sometimes PCs will try to talk to a Monster or vice versa.
Maybe the PCs want to Bluff their way pas a Monster.
Or the Monster becomes a follower/henchman/companion of the party (for example in Monte Cooks Campaign the party had a Half Dragon Umber Hulk as NPC).

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.

Exactly. They should at least be possible. I am looking for instance at Eberron here. One of the most intriguing characters in Sharn is a sphynx (forget exactly which type), what about Oalian, the awakened greatpine? Will they now be unable to use skill-points just because WotC has decided that sphynxes are supposed to be killed in 3 rounds? Or will they become so unique creatures that DMs cannot create creatures similar in their own campaigns?

Monsters are not simply for the killing. If I want to kill monsters, I'll dig up my old Diablo II CDs. It's much more satisfying to hit things in that game. But I've disliked it because it's boring storywise. Yes, they mentioned that the Ettin was having conversations with itself in combat. I like that kind of flavour; but everything else we heard seems to be reducing D&D to a combat game. Which I agree it is to a large point, but there is much, much more to it.

I'm not a big fan of unlikely templates either, nor do I like monstrous NPCs myself (being mostly tied up in Eberron, that means non-humanoids, with humanoids as in common usage, not the monster-type; ogres and hobgoblins I'm fine with). But even so, it should be possible. Maybe someone's campaign does require an odd combination, or a displacer-beast necromancer, or what have you.

So I only hope that I am completely misreading their intentions here.

 

[Baby Samurai]

In 3e terms, I'd say Elric was a sorcerer/fighter, and a fair amount of his summoning prowess was probably derived from his ring.

His official d20 stats put him at fighter 8/wizard 20, and stormbringer is a +11 greatsword that deals d100 Con damage in addition to normal damage.

 

[Nebulous]

There is no need to enforce a tight link between HD, skills, and other abilities for monsters--their role is only to survive five rounds of combat with the PCs.

Exactly what i said. And at this point, this seems to be the direction the game is taking. I can't wait to see what Monte Cook has to say about all of this.

 

[Umbran]

And while I can understand the argument of increased complexity, I don't totally buy it. In my 20+ years of GMing experience, different rules applied to different situations/character types etc. made things harder , not easier.

Given that it is as yet sight unseen, I'm not sure how much it will be, "different rules applied to different types," as opposed to, "the two types are generated differently, and from that point on, the rules are the same."