D&D 5E D&D Next Q&A: 03/28/2014

[Plaguescarred]

D&D Next Q&A
03/28/2014
By Rodney Thompson

You've got questions—we've got answers! Here's how it works—each week, our Community Manager will be scouring all available sources to find whatever questions you're asking. We'll pick three of them for R&D to answer.

What do you think?

 

[Plaguescarred]

I was expecting a typical equipment section and piecemeal equipment shopping to still be possible so this comes to no surprise but i can see how this confirmation can reassure some people.

Glad to hear exotic armors was removed from the base armor table as i prefer material such as dragon or mythril to be reward rather than market commodity.

I like monster varieties, especially for humanoids, and glad to hear we will still get variety to some degrees.

 

[Li Shenron]

1) I am surprised that someone really needed to even ask this...

2) Probably a good idea. I liked those "fancy" armor, but they do carry such strong flavor, that it's probably for the best not to have them in the standard list, otherwise it would feel like campaign settings should have dragonhide and similar thing as a well-known commodity. They can be great additions, and why not sometimes some of that stuff can even be widespread in a specific fantasy setting, but not a default.

3) Clearly the MM has some space limitations, thus we can't have variations of every monster and quasi-classed versions of every humanoid. Variations are useful and interesting, so the more the better, but we can only hope they make the most sensible choices for which ones to provide for which creatures.

 

[Ruzak]

3). On the monster variations note it is nice for both the players & characters to know what they are facing when they encounter "goblins." Maybe you occasionally want to have the surprise of a powerful goblin wizard, but that likely needs to be a custom monster anyway.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

With 1 it was stated they could back in the article it was mentioned in, but apparently many lack reading comprehension.

 

[Thaumaturge]

3) I think it is pretty clear they can't give us a monster book that has: "all of the iconic monsters", a number of varieties of most monsters, and is reasonably sized or priced.

If this is a "choose two of three" situation, I'm glad they cut the fifteen shades of goblins.

Thaumaturge.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

3). On the monster variations note it is nice for both the players & characters to know what they are facing when they encounter "goblins." Maybe you occasionally want to have the surprise of a powerful goblin wizard, but that likely needs to be a custom monster anyway.

I agree with this. I like to have some idea of what monsters are capable of. "Goblins are weak creatures with some basic attacks that are fairly easy to defeat" makes them easy to categorize and understand.

Over the past few editions, they've suddenly become very complicated. In 3e, there was no way to tell if a goblin was CR1 or CR50 by looking at it. It could have a mix of any classes/templates/feats/spells in the game. It could function like almost any other monster in the game. The same thing was true about 4e to a lesser extent. This goblin could be one of 5 or 10 goblin subtypes with a vast array of abilities and could be lower or higher level if your DM scaled them. You didn't know what to expect when facing a goblin.

I prefer combats to be about informed tactics most of the time. You understand how goblins work and how they fight. Now, come up with a strategy to defeat them most effectively. I never really liked the fact that there was a "getting to know you" period at the beginning of most fights in both 3e and 4e where PCs would hold back their good attacks because they'd want to measure the skill of their enemies, get an idea of their capabilities and their tactics and then finally defeat them. Most of the time it only ended up making the battle take longer.

I agree that sometimes it's good to step out of the comfort zone and deal with something out of the ordinary. However, I'd prefer that to be the exception rather than the rule.

 

[Klaus]

You didn't know what to expect when facing a goblin.

You do. In 4e, all creatures of a race had at least one defining trait. For goblins, it was Goblin Tactics, which meant that regardless of class or weaponry, any goblin is capable of weaving beneath missed attacks to retreat out of harm's way. Kobolds, on the other hand, hardly ever stayed put, and were always repositioning themselves to maximize their effectiveness (they all had the Shifty trait).

I like the compromise #3 gives: goblins are not known for their warriors, so a baseline goblin will probably cover your needs, while drow have more variation.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

You do. In 4e, all creatures of a race had at least one defining trait. For goblins, it was Goblin Tactics, which meant that regardless of class or weaponry, any goblin is capable of weaving beneath missed attacks to retreat out of harm's way. Kobolds, on the other hand, hardly ever stayed put, and were always repositioning themselves to maximize their effectiveness (they all had the Shifty trait).

You know one thing to expect. You don't know most of it. They each had a defining trait that almost always played nearly no part in the encounter.

In 2e, if you came across a goblin, you knew they were likely using whatever weapon was listed in the Monster Manual, they all had the same hitpoints and bonuses to hit.

In 4e, the goblin in front of you might be attacking and doing more damage while flanking or casting AoE damaging spells. They could have any bonus to hit and any number of hitpoints depending on whether they were an elite, solo, and what level your DM decided to scale them to. In the end, the shifty trait was such a small part of their kit that it told you nearly nothing about the monster.

 

[DEFCON 1]

In 4e, the goblin in front of you might be attacking and doing more damage while flanking or casting AoE damaging spells. They could have any bonus to hit and any number of hitpoints depending on whether they were an elite, solo, and what level your DM decided to scale them to. In the end, the shifty trait was such a small part of their kit that it told you nearly nothing about the monster.

This. While I've loved many parts of 4E, and for a long time the monster scaling was a part of that (because it meant that I could use certain monsters regardless of the party's level at the time)... over time it did come to a point with me where it made levels almost superfluous. When I could easily have a Level 1 Minion kobold and a Level 15 Solo kobold... the game lost any semblance of levels having meaning. It made distinguishing tiers more difficult because the same monsters you might have fought in Heroic tier you would still often fight in Paragon and Epic tiers (and vice versa), and as Majoru said, I lost any sense of monster power. Higher levels meant players and monsters had more... stuff... but it didn't mean anything much in terms of the world around us.

So I'm looking forward to going back to monsters having a much narrower set of levels where they would be active as actual threats. And that once you outleveled them, they stopped being that threatening on their own unless you came upon them en masse. Which would be its own type of cool fight and for which needing to use Minions to accomplish it would be negated.