DMG Excerpt: Customizing Monsters

[hong]

How long it takes a vampire to make spawn can impact combat. If it's a minor action and he has minions to spare...or, as others have noted, if the vampire is alert to invaders. If it takes a minute, he can turn his domestic staff into spawn while the heroes are distracted with a single fight. If it takes an hour, he might have time to get one new ally before they get to his sanctum. If it takes a week...he's SOL.

Assume for the moment that the existence of the category of "combat actions" implies the existence of its complement, "noncombat actions", ie those that can only be taken outside of combat. A reasonable conclusion is that vampires creating spawn is not something that can be done in a matter of seconds, else it would appear in the combat statblock.

As for the other possibilities: you're the DM. Which do you prefer?

I don't want to turn this entire thread into a debate on vampires. It's just another example of the consequences of assuming the combat round is the building block of the world and scaling everything accordingly.

The combat round is the building block of combat. Nothing needs to be scaled accordingly, because combat is not the building block of the world.

 

[eleran]

I think Lizard has a good point. You can always make things up, but it's nice to get a baseline, particularly for fluff like the monster's ecology and society.

The 4e philosophy seems to be, monsters are designed to live for a short time anyway, so each entry has to be short and self-contained. This is a huge advance over 3e, where monsters had enormous stat blocks and were often almost as complicated as the PCs.

But "short and self-contained" can be taken too far. Maybe we'll need a lot more "The Ecology Of..." articles to fill the gap.

Or something even more radical, the actual MM he is complaining about without having seen it.

 

[eleran]

How long it takes a vampire to make spawn can impact combat. If it's a minor action and he has minions to spare...or, as others have noted, if the vampire is alert to invaders. If it takes a minute, he can turn his domestic staff into spawn while the heroes are distracted with a single fight. If it takes an hour, he might have time to get one new ally before they get to his sanctum. If it takes a week...he's SOL.

I don't want to turn this entire thread into a debate on vampires. It's just another example of the consequences of assuming the combat round is the building block of the world and scaling everything accordingly.

We're having an earthquake. Again. In Southern Indiana.

Yeah, it's been predicted for a while that the New Madrid fault that runs from MO thru the midwest is due for a big rumble in the years to come.

 

[Saitou]

How long it takes a vampire to make spawn can impact combat. If it's a minor action and he has minions to spare...or, as others have noted, if the vampire is alert to invaders. If it takes a minute, he can turn his domestic staff into spawn while the heroes are distracted with a single fight. If it takes an hour, he might have time to get one new ally before they get to his sanctum. If it takes a week...he's SOL.

So if it said that Spawning took a week, a month, five minutes, any answer at all would appease you?
Seems you just want an answer for th heck of it.

Any requirements WotC would have made for creating Spawns would invariably resonate negatively with parts of the gaming community. Some people wouldn't like it, and change it, and then have PCs moan because he implemented Rule 0.

THIS time around, Rule 0 seems to be Rule 1, by effectively leaving most of the fluff up to you. Cause that is what fluff IS, the flavour you choose to instill into your campaign.


Now, I don't want to jump to conclusions, but you seem to depend pretty heavily on ready-made fluff instead of making up your own. Is it really that hard to choose how a Vamp Lord creates spawn for yourself?

 

[Derren]

The conceit in play is that any monster has a built-in bonus to its attacks and damage consistent with what a monster of its level should get from magical gear, but it doesn't actually have the gear.

I know the mechanical reason for this, but from a simulationist point of view it does not make sense that items stop working when they are in the hand of powerful individuals.

There may (or may not) be a Death Knight template.

Some time ago there was a pretty big article about the Death Knight template (without crunch) so it is very likely that there will be a Death Knight in 4E. And considering how bland the Lich template is I really wonder If there will be a big difference between those two, considering that the lich template works also rather well for fighters.

 

[el-remmen]

Yeesh.

Where is the simplification they are always talking about here?

All that armor stuff seems to be complicating armor class as compared to 3E instead of leaving it or simplifying which 4E has been doing with everything else.

One of my favorite things about 3E was how natural armor and worn armor stack.

If they want simple they should go with simple: Armor grants +x bonus. Add this to the creature's AC and remember to remove Dex/Int bonus if it is heavy armor - and simply remind DMs to be careful consider the effect of giving monsters such gear.


The magic threshold BS is another example of not simplifying - but just making something more annoying than helpful.

 

[Lacyon]

I know the mechanical reason for this, but from a simulationist point of view it does not make sense that items stop working when they are in the hand of powerful individuals.

One of us is misreading that chart, and I don't think its me.

Magic items don't work as well when they're in the hands of less powerful individuals, which is something I think you can work with in a simulationist manner.

Yeesh.

Where is the simplification they are always talking about here?

All that armor stuff seems to be complicating armor class as compared to 3E instead of eaving it or simplifying which 4E has been doing with everything else.

Yeah, that paragraph is definitely awkward. I think it actually is doing it roughly the same way as 3E, except that natural armor and armor don't stack.

 

[small pumpkin man]

BTW. Is this the only pic that exists, or is there an actual comic book for it?

There is. It's a story called Desert Sun by Jon Rogers (who's currently doing Blue Beetle) which can be found in the "Ninja Tales" anthology from Boom Studios. I don't know if you could still find it in stores, I haven't seen any new copies, well, ever, but second hand compies can be found on Amazon, Ebay and probaby other places.

 

[Lizard]

So if it said that Spawning took a week, a month, five minutes, any answer at all would appease you?
Seems you just want an answer for th heck of it.

"If the monster has Strength 18, ,20, 22, any answer would appease you? Seems you just want an answer for the heck of it."

Yeah. I want statistics in my monster book. Silly me. I consider things like spawn creation for undead as important as their armor class. Then again, I see the game as more than a sequence of combat set pieces.

Any requirements WotC would have made for creating Spawns would invariably resonate negatively with parts of the gaming community. Some people wouldn't like it, and change it, and then have PCs moan because he implemented Rule 0.

Sure. And I can make ogres stronger, or orcs weaker, or say that all hobgoblins can cast Magic Missile once per day. It's my world. The point is, there needs to be a baseline to vary from, or what are we buying again, exactly? A book of pretty monster pictures?

Now, I don't want to jump to conclusions, but you seem to depend pretty heavily on ready-made fluff instead of making up your own. Is it really that hard to choose how a Vamp Lord creates spawn for yourself?

And the point is missed by a few light years...

I want to build a world that makes sense. Knowing things like vampire spawn rates gives me a way of determining 'reasonable' vampire populations. Now, if I'm doing a vampire-centric world, then I'd just make up whatever I wanted to fit the overarching game theme. But if I'm doing a broader game, I just want to have a general idea of how common vampires are, and for that, I depend on the rules to give me useful crunch -- just like they tell me that orcs are more likely to be warriors than spellcasters (while giving me the freedom to add orc wizards if I so choose), or that dragons fly.

I find one of the most enjoyable parts of worldbuilding is working from the dry facts of the MM to the cultural/social/historical implications. That's why I prefer good solid crunch to flavor text. I consider undead creation rates to be crunch, not fluff. The fluff is derived from that crunch.

I also consider a 'shared consensus world' to be valuable, especially in a semi-open gaming environment. The more baseline material is left out in favor just presenting stripped down combat stats, the more different assumptions third party publishers will make, and the less useful any product will be without extensive work.

A vampire-specific sourcebook might contain a whole bunch of rules, options, and guidelines for designing vampires in your game, with essays on the implications of each decision. I'd buy it. The core game, though, should contain a default. "Vampires make spawn" is not enough, any more than "Orcs fight a lot" -- without providing actual combat stats -- is.

 

[Stormtalon]

Hmmm, not seeing added complication here, really. Armor is now armor -- natural, manufactured, whatever -- and it doesn't stack. Quite frankly, I got annoyed in 3.x with how many things did stack, both as a player and a DM and it's nice to see that list being trimmed significantly. A monster's base innate armor is AC - 10 - dex/int mod; armor added to that only affects it if it's higher. Where's the complication?

As for the magic item threshold it's only annoying if you plan on equipping every bloody humanoid monster with +x weaponry & armor that the PCs can loot and use/hock, which is something I thought most everybody was wanting to move away from (though I could be wrong, but with so many complaints about the Christmas tree effect and magic item shops, can't see how). It's more aimed at those times where you want a monster to have something which someone specific in the party will want to use but you don't want the item to overly unbalance the encounter.