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<blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 5440341" data-attributes="member: 3400">Bad design? I don't think so nor do I think that's any objectively provable fact. Expectations have changed some over time for a lot of players and that means Save or Die may not be as good a fit for those expectations as it did for expectations in the earlier days of D&amp;D. That doesn't, however, make it bad design for expectations that fit it better, such as expectations that the game intends to model very dangerous creatures that have powers capable of killing you without battering you like a regular fight.I would not call that a well designed monster because it's doing damage to an abstract pool that varies from character to character based on the size of the pool and not based on the nature of the attack. It's a sloppy mechanic because it doesn't fit that mechanic's reason for existence - to provide a way to ablate down a character's resistance. Think of it this way: in a game with SSSOD being the normative design, suppose I came up with a creature that short-circuited 2 of those saves and went right to SOD. Would that be a well-designed monster? No. Because it's abusing a particular mechanic that is designed to work in a different way and under different assumptions. It would be even worse if every character got a different number of saves before hitting the SOD and my creature short circuited all of them no matter how many there were.... like doing character's current hit points+11.Now, if that monster were designed to do an average of 21 points of damage on a hit because of the nature of its attack and its strength and characters with 10 hit points on average encountered it and didn't run like hell, then the monster would be appropriately designed even if it did cause a TPK.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="billd91, post: 5440341, member: 3400"] Bad design? I don't think so nor do I think that's any objectively provable fact. Expectations have changed some over time for a lot of players and that means Save or Die may not be as good a fit for those expectations as it did for expectations in the earlier days of D&D. That doesn't, however, make it bad design for expectations that fit it better, such as expectations that the game intends to model very dangerous creatures that have powers capable of killing you without battering you like a regular fight. I would not call that a well designed monster because it's doing damage to an abstract pool that varies from character to character based on the size of the pool and not based on the nature of the attack. It's a sloppy mechanic because it doesn't fit that mechanic's reason for existence - to provide a way to ablate down a character's resistance. Think of it this way: in a game with SSSOD being the normative design, suppose I came up with a creature that short-circuited 2 of those saves and went right to SOD. Would that be a well-designed monster? No. Because it's abusing a particular mechanic that is designed to work in a different way and under different assumptions. It would be even worse if every character got a different number of saves before hitting the SOD and my creature short circuited all of them no matter how many there were.... like doing character's current hit points+11. Now, if that monster were designed to do an average of 21 points of damage on a hit because of the nature of its attack and its strength and characters with 10 hit points on average encountered it and didn't run like hell, then the monster would be appropriately designed even if it did cause a TPK. [/QUOTE]

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