Confused about NPC/Monster generation

[vagabundo]

I'm really excited about this new system. It looks like we'll be able to eyeball monsters very easily. I've been toying around with that in 3e, with some limited success. I have to say that I am not a GM who assumes that all tough monsters will magic weapons and armor. It's cool when they do. If I can work it into the story, I will. But I don't see it as a necessity.

I've started eyeballin' a lot more this year as I have become unsatisfied with the way 3.5e monsters worked.

Last night I ran an owlbear as a random wilderness encounter in the Dagger hills. I gave it double the hitpoints as it's AC is fairly low and the PC's are 11th level. And I gave and extra set of furious claw attacks. It charged in an was dispatched fairly quickly 2-3 rounds of combat and managed to do a little damage to the PCs. I uped the CR by 2 and gave out a little XP. Everyone was happy.

No real reason why this Owlbear had more hit points and extra attacks other than I wanted it too and maybe he was a tough guy.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Cross-post from another thread:

I can see that some people might have a problem with a lack of transparency in the rules governing NPCs vs. PCs. You don't want to kit out NPCs with the same equipment you'd expect of a PC of that level, so it doesn't all get stolen and sold. You equally don't want them to suck against the PCs, so you add bonuses to compensate. The trick is either tying equipment to that NPC, or the bonuses themselves, in such a way that a PC can't exploit the same rules.

One obvious way is the 'I made these items, they only work for me' trick. It tires quickly, but for powerful mages, actually suits. Secondly, PCs typically face foes on unfamiliar ground, and you can tie the mysterious equalising bonuses to that ground - to altars, sacred ground or somesuch. Finally the idea of non-standard rituals can be used for those bonuses at home or away, since the PCs may never get hold of such a ritual. Give the NPC in question the equalising bonuses due to some complex ritual involving monetary or other sacrifice and you solve both the 'where's his cash' and too-many-items problem, without weakening the challenge.

I have to agree with an earlier post though, I'd like there to be a mechanistic set of traits you can apply to a monster, like 'wild attacker' - although maybe this is somewhat dealt with by the monster role anyway?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I've started eyeballin' a lot more this year as I have become unsatisfied with the way 3.5e monsters worked.

Last night I ran an owlbear as a random wilderness encounter in the Dagger hills. I gave it double the hitpoints as it's AC is fairly low and the PC's are 11th level. And I gave and extra set of furious claw attacks. It charged in an was dispatched fairly quickly 2-3 rounds of combat and managed to do a little damage to the PCs. I uped the CR by 2 and gave out a little XP. Everyone was happy.

No real reason why this Owlbear had more hit points and extra attacks other than I wanted it too and maybe he was a tough guy.

I haven't been daft enough to just eyeball this stuff, but I devised templates to create my 3.5 (or ratehr: Iron Heroes, that's what I run these days) versions of Minions, Elites and Solo monsters. I think on the scale of Minion and Elite, doubling/halving hit points or doubling/halving damage does the trick most of the time - provided the monsters are already of a CR equal to the level of the PCs, or at least in the ballpark +/- 1d2. It's more difficult to make Solo monster, though, since it's hard to come up with extra-action like abilities for existing monsters - and you can easily overdo it if you try it with a monster with a lot of attacks (my example was the Gibbering Mouther, and the fight was a bit to tedious for me and my players taste).
A great help for me were also the Iron Heroes Villain Classes. I think they might be pretty close (maybe still abit to specific) how the 4E monster guidelines might look like.

 

[Lizard]

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.

Based on the Pit Fiend stat block, though, this isn't explicitly 'called out', meaning a slowdown while the DM checks on armor values. Also, again WRT the pit fiend, my instinct would be that a devil-forged, rune-encrusted breastplate is, in fact, magical (at least the flavor text implies it), and so should grant a higher AC bonus than a breastplate made by Fred the Smith, but without a clear division in the AC score, that's not easy to determine. (Armor Class==Reflex Defense+Armor Bonus, I am guessing from SWSE, but is that armor bonus, in the case of the Pit fiend, 100% equipment? Naked, he is no tougher than a human of the same level? Or should I just assume monsters (or any sort) don't have magic armor unless I decide to give it to them, and use default values?)

Or maybe there's no way to remove/nullify/weaken armor in 4e, making it moot in play.

However, it seems extremely likely that disarm/sunder will still be in the game, so I wonder why natural weapons for things like the Pit Fiend, with its huge claws, are not listed. This situation is very common in actual play. Do all monsters of a given level/size/role do 'fixed' unarmed damage? ("Pit fiend is a 26th level Large Leader, so he does 1d6+Strength")

I personally feel the desire to simplify stat blocks by not calling out how numbers are generated will lead to less simplicity in play as underlying causes of those numbers (dexterity, armor, etc) change due to player actions and the DM must make on-the-fly adjustments and quickly reverse-engineer the numbers in his head. The incidence of "monsters" or throwaway opponents entering longer-term play is high in many games, and the smoother the transition from "combat stats" to "real stats", the easier it is for a DM to deal with the expectedly unexpected. While experienced DMs can do the breakouts mentally, I worry that new DMs will respond to innovative player actions with "You can't do that, there's no rules for it".

Likewise, if I want to add classes/equipment to a monster, starting with the "naked" monster, I need to go back and reverse-engineer the stats for an unarmored, unweaponed, version, then add in the equipment bonuses. Ths might be a trivial time addition in comparison to the time saved by simplification in other areas, of course, getting back to the whole "We haven't seen the whole system" problem.

 

[Lizard]

Who is to say that the Goblins sword deals the same for a Goblin as for a Human. Or even better, an Ogre wielding a club vs. the Human using it. Some weapons and Armor might not be transferrable between species at all, and sometimes not even between different wearers.
If an opponent switches to a different weapon, you could make a general rule of "this reduces its damage by half".

3e does this with weapon sizes already.

I am running a Large creature in my current game. If a DM was to tell me "Well, the large longsword you took from the troll is totally different from the large longsword you carry", my head would go all 'splodey unless there was some in-game reason (it was magic, etc). This doesn't work well for all weapons in the world. The idea that there are "orc swords" and "gnoll swords" and "bugbear swords" is just plain weird...

As another example from real play: We were facing some trolls, who were attacking us unarmed. When they realized the fight was getting serious, they drew greataxes. This dramatically changed their attack patterns and damage -- from claw/claw/bite to 2-handed greataxe/bite. It felt "real", mechanically. It was easy to do, from the DMs perspective, because all the underlying numbers for the trolls were there.

 

[Pinotage]

It looks like I might be trading monster design time in 3e for monster explanation time in 4e.

Seems like it - I'll agree on that for sure. It's fairly straighforward to turn 3.5e into this kind of 4e hand-waiving system. It's even fairly easy to come up with 3.5e tables for guidelines. I don't really see where the new system is any better than 3.5e's system, apart from the fact that it provides a baseline (which could've been fairly easy to construct in 3.5e).

I'm guessing as well that there are rules for all the hand-waiving being tied to XP? Either way, it looks like 1e meet 3e in some bizarre way.

Pinotage

 

[Lizard]

I've been pondering why I have so many issues with this. Mr. Mearls' explanations make perfect sense from a design perspective, and I understand the reasoning behind it, but I simply can't wrap my mind around it. Looking at my gaming history, for the past 20 years, the systems I've run games in (not counting a 1-shot of Kobolds Ate My Baby) were Star Wars (D6), BESM 2e, GURPS, Hero, and 3e or 3e-derived games like D20 Modern. These games differ a lot in crunch level and focus, but all have in common that everything is designed with the same rules -- there aren't "monster/NPC" rules and "PC" rules. (I don't consider things like 'PCs have action points' or 'generic NPCs are built on fewer points' to be special rules in this regard). The last 'special case' games I played were AD&D 1e and "Black Box" Traveller. Yes. I'm THAT OLD. (I own/collect/read many dozens of games, but actual play is limited to a few favorites.)

Did I have fun playing 1e and Traveller? Sure.

Could I have that same kind of fun with 4e?

I dunno. I will have to play it and find out, I suppose. If there is a complex system under there to use if you want to ignore the quick&easy way, it ought to work for me. I might even like it better when I actually get my hands on it, but right now, it's a very alien way of thinking for me and I am having a visceral reaction to it. I do not like it when emotions overcome reason.

(Addendum: Actually, I ran a Hackmaster game for a few weeks, and then it exploded in an orgy of PC-on-PC violence which would do the Knights Of The Dinner Table proud...)

 

[Dragonblade]

(snip: mearls post)
*APPLAUSE*

Indeed! I love the new 4e system. I HATE building monsters and NPCs. I just want to know what stats he should have at a given level and BAM! encounter done.

If the PCs catch him out of armor, I'll just give him a slight AC penalty. Thats easy. What I hate about the 3.x way is that I have to painstakingly build the guy from level 1 and account for every little bonus. Bah! Give me the 4e system any day!

 

[I'm A Banana]

I want to make one thing clear: there aren't hard coded rules for a PC who wants to gain a monster's power, but there is enough info in the DMG on the system as a whole that the DM can adapt one (with a little work, mainly eyeballing things to make sure that you don't cause any unexpected, long-term consequences).

Probably good enough for me.

To answer an earlier question, the swingy monster came out when I was messing around with looking at monsters' stats as an expression of an effect over an entire encounter, rather than on a round-to-round basis. Hence, half hit points but double damage.

Hmm....yeah, all-or-nothing, binary, paper-tiger effects like that remind me a lot of things like the 3e mindflayer or the 3e warforged or save-or-die mechanism, where the results are extreme outliers. Cool.

more in the next reply

 

[I'm A Banana]

While it's useful to wonder about the monster's part in the world, and how it got so far in life without the treasure it has, I think almost any system will break down eventually when examined in this fashion. After all, assuming you run a fairly standard campaign, why do the PCs face so few fights against equal odds? An even stricter sense of verisimilitude would dictate that the PCs regularly face opponents of equal skill, in equal or greater number, with roughly equal amounts of equipment. In such a system, the PCs' wealth resources would double with every encounter, yet they would fairly regularly find themselves overwhelmed or dead.

Isn't that what 3e had a lot of? But yes, it's the nature of verisimilitude to break down at a certain point, though where that point is varies beteween groups, largely depending on how inquisitive your players are. I tend to have and encourage inquisitive players, because a large amount of the fun of D&D for me is creating a world with my friends, and if they don't ask questions, and I don't have answers, we don't get a whole lot of world created.

I'm genuinely curious as to what difficult questions you're anticipating. And as a separate question, what tools does the 3rd edition system give you for backstory and place in the world?

The thing that leaps first to my mind is the 'useless' skills and feats from 3e. If I know how well a Centaur can do macreme (to use an absurd example), that means I can make macreme an important part of centaur life and personality, and that if the players don't want to kill them wholesale, they can perhaps challenge them to a macreme competition. Similarly, if the horrid abomination from beyond the stars has 5 ranks in Religion, I know this creature is a scholar of the metaphysical and so wouldn't be as out of place as it might seem answering the cleric's request for a planar ally.

The questions I'm anticipating are along the lines of "How can this ogre do so much damage when the last one we faught couldn't!" or "Wow, why don't powerful fiends of temptation have any gold?" or "Hmm...this gnome seems very knowledgable. I approach him offering a position at the local wizard's college!"

As a DM, I want tools to be able, on the fly, to allow these interesting questions, and to validate them with satisfying answers that aren't just hand-waved excuses to get the game back 'on track.' I want the players to be able to change the track. If the ogre does more damage, I want to be able to instantly create a whole tribe of drug-using ogres that use plants that enhance their strength, but make them reckless that the players can investigate (and even use the drug themselves!). If the devil doesn't have much treasure, I want the PC's to be able to follow the records to the devil's supported leaders in the local government, agents they thought they could trust. If the professor of Esoteric Studies wants to make the gnome his new Junior Chancellor of Illusion and Mischief at the local Wizardly University, I want to be able to allow that to spin into new plots.

Removing some of this 'useless' detail means that I have less random hooks to hang bits of information from. I can understand and sympathize with the need to streamline, but I need to be able to put complexity back in on the fly, without preparing for it beforehand. I might need to tinker with 4e's way of doing monsters and NPC's quite a bit to achieve the results I'm looking for.

I see. I guess I was not so worried about the last part - the skills as presented were enough 'out of combat' stuff for monsters to be doing for me, and 'monsters as PCs' doesn't come up much in my game world - though it would be nice if it could! I am still actually somewhat skeptical on that front - after all, this board has had endless discussions about powers that are 'OK for a monster, but game-breaking for a player'.

A lot of this boils down to stuff that's very powerful for one encounter, but isn't a problem if it's only present in one encounter. Though the 4e team went in a simpler direction, I don't believe finding a happy middle ground is entirely impossible. 3e was too heavily into the identical mechanics, but 4e might be too heavily into 'whatever works, however you make it work.' Then again, maybe the guidelines will be robust enough to handle it.

tell your players to stop being so picky
But once you know the system I would hope you can easily do 'on the fly' explanations of the the 'fudge factor/wiggle room' used. Especially if monsters have access to things that PCs don't and never will under standard rules. But yes you will have to accept a lot more ''his AC is this because his AC is this" if you want quick generation.

Hey, I like my picky players.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the results. Probably satisfied enough to be able to tweak the rules enough to meet my needs, but I do think they could find a better middle ground. Still, maybe some 3rd party will do it, or maybe I'll just publish some rules about it. And maybe I *will* be totally satisfied when I see everything in context, because it definately seems that the team is at least aware of players and DMs like myself, even if they are catering more to a more direct crowd.

one more post, to break it up a bit...