Confused about NPC/Monster generation

[pemerton]

Back to my example in of the pit fiend: a group of 26th level PCs stumble upon three pit fiends in three separate encounters: one just getting out of the shower (no armor), one on guard duty (typical equipment) and one preparing to launch a massive devil invasion (+2 full plate). Logic dictates that the first pit fiend (unarmored) has a lower AC than the breastplate pit-fiend which is lower than the +2 full plate pit fiend. But by how much? Is it implied that you take the "normal" PHB value of a breastplate (+6 in 3.5) subtract that from the AC (for the unarmored) and then add the value of +2 full plate (for the other?) or should the variance be smaller (since -6/+4 to AC might lower/raise its challenge level/xp value too much) and thus they still all have the same AC?

The logical conclusion wrt your example, plus what we know about the "charts" (or whatever exactly the rules are encoded in), is that the unarmoured Pit Fiend is a lower level monster (ie is worth fewer XP, because an easier fight).

Conversely, the better armoured one is a higher level monster.

Now, it seems that different levels will have a degree of tolerance for variation in AC, hp etc, so if the differences between unarmoured/heavily armoured fit within those variations level may not change.

A lot of people seem to be treating monster level as the new hit dice (ie a constant property of the monster from which everything is derived). But the logic of the new design, as far as I can tell, is that level is simply a function of role + stats, and a piece of information that tells you XP plus degree of challenge. Changing the stats is changing the degree of challenge, and therefore (presumably) changing the level and the XP.

The only major rules change that would be necessitated by the design I describe would be to get rid of spells that target monster level (because monster level is no longer an ingame property to which magic might respond).

Another example: 4 5th-level soldiers (AC 19-23, ie) attack the party. One is wearing chain, one is wearing plate, one is wearing leather, and one is wearing nothing but a loincloth. Yet they still all fall into a 19-23 AC range?

Again, it sounds to me like they're not all 5th level, given that they don't all pose the same degree of challenge.

EDIT: Cross posted with Mearls. Maybe they're not going as metagamey as some of us had come to believe. I wonder why not.

 

[Xyl]

(snip: mearls post)
*APPLAUSE*

 

[Lizard]

For monsters, things might be a little trickier if you want to account for all the numbers. You might give your level 18 demon a suit of plate and find that his AC is a little lower or higher than you want. In that case, you can either accept some wiggle room and change the number or find some reasonable explanation (the guy wears plate, but his AC is a little higher than expected because he has thick skin; you give him a shield or a couple of feats) or tinker with his attributes.

In any case, you can still simply create NPCs. The abstracted "NPC skill bonus" is designed to allow them to use normal equipment and end up with reasonable numbers. We want to avoid a game where the PCs cart around huge piles of +1 and +2 armor and weapons looted from their foes. It messes up the standard rate of treasure and can lead to some absurd game world questions.

For instance, an ogre might do more damage and have lower accuracy than you expect based on his level, Strength score, and weapon. This reflects the ogre's wild but powerful swings. We essentially built Power Attack into his stats.

The really, really important thing with the system math is that it is all a guide. As a DM, it's up to you to decide how and why you want to tinker with stuff. The key lies in paying attention to the expected numbers, looking at your creature in light of those, and thinking of tweaks you can make to create a balanced package. Maybe you design an ogre gatecrasher who does a bit more damage than normal for his level, but you drop his AC or attack bonus a couple points to compensate.

Ideally, DMs will see the guidelines that they can use, abuse, and bend all they want to create the effects they are after. The thing that makes me happy about this system is that it "telescopes" to fit the DM's needs. You can spend as much or as little time building these guys as you want. If you need something quick, you can pull out the baseline numbers and use those. If you want to spend a while sculpting an NPC or monster to do something weird and interesting, you can dive into the system and do that.

I hope that the system provides a nice middle ground between a rigid mechanism and hand waving. There are rigid mechanisms in place, in that we crunched the math, created baselines, and built rules to get you to those baselines. However, those mechanisms are built to serve the end result. If you know that a level 8 monster should do 12 damage per hit on average, the game doesn't care whether you get that 12 via an arbitrary 2d8+3, or if you decide to give the guy a greatsword and a 20 Strength to make his damage 2d6+5. If you choose to make the guy's damage above average for his level, you know ahead of time that the guy hits harder than expected and can either design around that or just tell the players to suck it up.

The game basically says, "You're the DM. You decide, based on your campaign and your personal tastes, how you want to achieve these ends. It isn't our place to dictate that sort of thing to you."

(I deleted some things to avoid over-quoting; I left just the parts I wanted to address...)

OK. I've run into the 'loot the bodies' problem in my own games (gods, have I!), but abstracting out equipment to a vague 'NPC bonus' just slams right into my willing suspension of disbelief. It also leaves me with issues regarding equipment-affecting spells, abilities, and tactics -- if I just describe an ogre as "Wearing a battered breastplate", and someone removes that somehow, his AC ought to go down, and if the MM entry for "Ogre" likewise includes "assumed equipment", I don't know how much is breastplate and how much is ogre hide. "Wing it!" says the peanut gallery. Yeah, I can, but today I decide it's +3 and tomorrow I forget and it's +4, and that kind of inconsistency IS noted by players and further handwaving about "Uh, these are the rare ironhide ogres of the northern passes, yeah..." just muddies the waters more. 3x's wall-o-numbers that broke down every factor in AC, to-hit, damage, etc might have been overwhelming, but they were damn useful in real play.

I much prefer "Featower Attack" to "building power attack into his stats", at least if that's not somehow made explicit. I understand you don't want to give monsters feats in 4e, but mechanistic systems like "Trait:Wild Attacker. +2 damage/-2 to hit", as something I can bolt on to any monster (and which is explicitly noted as pre-bolted to the Ogre) works better for me.

I suppose my confusion is about whether, in game terms, equipment is "flavor text" or "real". That is, if I say "Monster X does Y damage", it doesn't matter if I describe him as having a greatsword, a maul, or a rabid weasel on pole; it does Y damage. But for the PCs, in turn, the weapons DO matter (i'm guessing...). If a PC is "expected" to do 10 points of damage/round at his level but decides he wants to use a rusty dagger, he will, I'm guessing, do less damage than anticipated.

I dunno. I love Hero System, which is much the same thing -- I can build a 4d6 AP HKA and call it a wooden toothpick, but it seems very odd in D&D, which was always more simulationist. (Remember weapon type vs. AC? Good times, good times...)

 

[Kraydak]

That's about what I was expecting, and it saddens me.

It removes/complicates a lot of possible actions. It makes the DM's work harder if the players manage to steal/sabotage their opponent's gear before hand. It explicitly removes Dispel Magic vs. gear as a tactic (extremely potent in 3e). It dramatically nerfs disarm/sunder (assuming those are kept).

It also causes severe issues if NPCs are treated as anything other than 1 encounter foes. NPCs starting as foes and getting coopted (magic/diplomacy/whatever) is reasonably common. This means that players can gear up NPCs, potentially to terrifying levels (barbarian in rags->barbarian in full plate).

Lastly it can cause issues such as the Pit Fiend being described in the fluff as wearing a breast-plate, but not having that in his equipment section (a write-up error, I hope), not to mention the Pit Fiend's weapon of choice being moronic. While you might not want PCs to be overloaded with weak NPC loot, you still have to explain why rich NPCs AREN'T loaded with loot.

Much of this can be swept under the rug because players will only interact with an NPC's stats once, and thus the precise provenance of the stats is somewhat open to question (players may well whine if their human foes have superb ACs without bothering with good armor. it would destroy my personal suspension of disbelief, destroying my enjoyment). As soon as players start interacting with NPC's stats more than once though, the system becomes highly gameable. You don't want players fighting some barbaric (read poorly equipped) foes (thereby setting their stats in stone), making peace with them, hiring them (paid for by improving their gear) and letting absolute monsters loose on the world. This pushes the game into finding the scariest defeatable poorly equipped humanoids around and coopting them, because, once coopted, they outclass the PCs cheaply. Henchmen dominating a game is rarely good.

 

[Incenjucar]

AC is mostly an issue when you have to deal with player races or level-boosted monsters without non-transferable stat modification methods as part of the setting (I'm lucky in that my setting has entire classes devoted to such improvements, along the lines of incarnium users).

Dealing with that is probably an inescapable issue without heavy flavor changes or the tacked-on feeling.

This is pretty much true regardless of rules set.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

<snip>

Interesting. But the system seems neither cool nor fun - at least you're not saying that it is! So, I take it Rouse memo was read and taken to the heart?

I think there is nothing there that challenges my assumptions on the system, so I have nothing useful to contronbute yet. Though, as a side note: I created Elite and Solo templates for D&D/Iron Heroes monsters (in reaction to the 4E previews on monsters), and used the "double hit points or double damage" approach also to toughen some monsters up. (But in my case, i didn't reduce other statistics, since I wasn't aiming for keeping the level/CR of the monster but increasing it in the CR +1 to CR +4 range)

 

[mearls]

I suppose my confusion is about whether, in game terms, equipment is "flavor text" or "real". That is, if I say "Monster X does Y damage", it doesn't matter if I describe him as having a greatsword, a maul, or a rabid weasel on pole; it does Y damage. But for the PCs, in turn, the weapons DO matter (i'm guessing...). If a PC is "expected" to do 10 points of damage/round at his level but decides he wants to use a rusty dagger, he will, I'm guessing, do less damage than anticipated..

Weapons and armor do matter for NPCs and monsters that use gear, IIRC. I think we did a pass on the MM to make sure that the critters were using armor and gear from the PH. Thus, if a monster is described as wearing chain and it somehow loses that armor, you know how much to reduce his AC.

The same goes for weapons - I believe that we standardized damage expressions to match the weapon that the creature carried. If you swap the ogre's club for a sword, his damage foes change. Now, YMMV whether that's enough of a change, but the change would be there.

The key is that, with the baselines, you know where that puts the monster with respect to the average critter.

 

[ruleslawyer]

SNIP

Frickin' brilliant! (Or should I say "wicked awesome" in line with the new Rouse guidelines?)

Incidentally, Lizard: Having followed a similar system to what Mike is espoused for a while (basically using massively expanded tables for "villain classes" that cover everything from Shadow Thieves to beholder-mutants), I can say that you're best off applying situational penalties rather than deriving every single NPC bonus beforehand. Thus, if the PCs somehow destroy the ogre's breastplate, just apply a -4 to the vanilla AC and have done. It's easier to take away piecemeal than have to add everything together to derive all monsters from scratch, IMO.

 

[rkanodia]

Whoops, mearls beat me to it, and obviously he was right

 

[I'm A Banana]

Others will want to account for all the numbers. For NPCs, we've included a "skill" rating of sorts, an abstraction of feats and magic items that allows you to give NPCs vanilla gear without messing up the numbers or giving the PCs tons of magical weapons and armor in addition to their normal treasure.

So my question would be why don't high-level villains have equipment like you'd expect high-level heroes to have? Presumably, they're raiding the same dungeons for it.

We want to avoid a game where the PCs cart around huge piles of +1 and +2 armor and weapons looted from their foes. It messes up the standard rate of treasure and can lead to some absurd game world questions.

Admirable, and I'm sympathetic to the goal. So how do they get these high stats without magical buffing? Are all NPC villains genetic mutants who have exclusive special powers?

If you create a 12th level monster and give him a club, his base 1d6 damage isn't much for a 12th level guy, and if you boost his Strength you might end up with an absurd number.

This slightly concerns me because clubs, from what I've read, will be 'different' from other weapons in more than just damage. If the club has a particularly evocative secondary effect that I want that monster to have, is the suggestion just to 'bolt it onto the monster itself'? And then somehow explain how this gnoll is another one of those genetic mutants?

Ideally, DMs will see the guidelines that they can use, abuse, and bend all they want to create the effects they are after. The thing that makes me happy about this system is that it "telescopes" to fit the DM's needs. You can spend as much or as little time building these guys as you want. If you need something quick, you can pull out the baseline numbers and use those. If you want to spend a while sculpting an NPC or monster to do something weird and interesting, you can dive into the system and do that.

I like this, but my ideal would be a fast system that is explained well, that makes sense in the context of the world. For instance, that paper tiger you created, how did it get to be what it was? What changed it, and what happens if the PC's seek that same change? Say I'm playing some sort of zealot who gladly sacrifices his body for the power to take out his enemies, and he captures that binary paper tiger and demands, through Diplomacy or threats or bribes, to be taught the creature's ways.

Do I just have to say "No," as a DM? Or does the system allow me to say "Yes" and figure out the consequences of that yes?

The game basically says, "You're the DM. You decide, based on your campaign and your personal tastes, how you want to achieve these ends. It isn't our place to dictate that sort of thing to you."

My mantra for this is usually this:

"Make Stuff Up" sucks as a rule.

If the system isn't robust enough to handle what I consider to be basic verisimilitude (and I don't believe my requirements, or my players' are really that high...3e definitely went too far in many areas) without throwing up it's arms and saying "You do the work!", I may be in the market for a completely different monster/NPC design scheme very, very early on in this edition's life.