Mustrum_Ridcully said:
I guess the goal is this:
A fight against dozens of mooks, that still have a reasonable chance of hurting and possibly overpowering the PCs (at least one of them), but still favouring the PCs if they fight smart enough. (a typical EL = PL to PL +2 encounter in 3rd Edition).
In my opinion, before a mook is even a reasonable challenge, it has to hit in a straight up fight more often than 1:20 times. It doesn't have to be much more than that, because we can leverage a good set of rules to give additional advantages for overwhelming numbers, but it does need to be more than that. So that gives us a minimum standard for mookishness.
On the other hand, much better than that and we have to consider whether the mook is really a mook. By mook, people generally really mean something that they could have concievably fought at 1st level. Hill Giants might become the mooks of a high level game in any edition, but they don't really feel like mooks because at one point in the character's career they felt really uber. This is a very tight constraint, and it prevents us from using as a mook anything tougher than an ogre.
Effectively this means that if the game scales up much beyond 10th level, we are going to reach the point where mooks - even mooks as tough as ogres - present no real challenge. This is going to be even more true if at 1st level hordes of these mooks (rather than merely a few) are to be considered a challenge. It's impossible to make the mooks both absolutely weaker and absolutely stronger at the same time. Yes, you could scale the mooks abilities to the level of the PC's, but you can do this in any edition (you always fight 1st level orc warriors at level 1, and then mysteriously always fight elite 4th or 6th level orc warriors latter on).
That's pretty difficult to pull off in 3rd Edition. It might also not be really that what happened in 1st Edition (I don't know, I began with 3rd edition).
It's pretty difficult to pull off in any edition. The way 1st edition accomplished it in the ideal was to make significantly improving AC beyond what you had at 2nd level 'hard'. An armored character that could afford plate mail and shield, would see only small incremental improvements in his AC. AC's much better than -4 were difficult to achieve, so a character after 2nd level might reasonably expect only 6 or so improvements in his AC over the entire course of his career. Unfortunately, even an AC 2 was enough to protect him adequately from mooks, and upon obtaining anything better than AC 0 he was pretty much gold. You could cap out at -10 AC in a game that had gotten a little monte hall, but since Thac0 for monsters capped out at around 7, this still meant that some of the toughest monsters in the game would miss you on 80% of thier attacks. Few monsters by comparison had AC's higher than 2, and 5-6 was more typical, so high level fighters generally only missed on any of thier attacks on a 1. As a result, the expected damage taken in a fight was very low. Players did not have the expectation that any single fight with just about anything would seriously challenge them and the real terrors of the game were special effects - poison, level loss, etc. - that strongly encouraged you not to even risk the 1 in 20 chance of getting hit if you could manage it.
As you can see, 4e seems to be moving in the opposite direction. It remains to be seen if this is a real improvement. In any event, I'm quite confident that the math can't be 'fixed', because it is inherently tied to the systems chosen randomization device - the D20.
In 3rd edition, it will probably fail because to get to the desired encounter level with a dozen "mooks", you would need mooks with a CR 5 points below the party.
One thing that always bothered me was the tendency of 3rd edition players to treat CR/EL as a hard and fast rule rather than guidelines with known and even stated limitations. A DM that said, "According to the rules this was a EL 5 encounter, so I don't understand why it was too hard/too easy." doesn't get alot of sympathy from me. I think that 4e is going to make it much more explicit that ultimately, balance is up to the DM and not to the numbers of some system. IME, very low level mooks in large numbers yielded a EL according to the numbers much much higher than the actual challenge the encounter represented. I did not feel at all obligated to think that 32 orcs was necessarily a EL 9 encounter, when the reality was that for 9th level PC's it was closer to EL 5.
Unless they are all equipped with Wands of Magical Missiles, they are probably incapable of hurting the PCs except when rolling natural 20s
Level independent attacks are really interesting, and monsters which have level independent attacks (by that I mean that they represent some threat regardless of the level of the PCs), are one of the most valuable tools in a DM's arsenal precisely because they can reoccur as villains again and again over the course of the player's career.
I suspect that the attack and AC difference in 1st edition between 1st level to 6th level monster wasn't as high as in 3rd edition...
I'm not sure I can answer that in a simple way. AC didn't climb in 1st edition much, but AC doesn't necessarily climb in 3rd edition (especially 3.0) either. Attack bonus climbs really fast between 1/2 HD (kobolds) and 3+1 HD (bugbears) in first edition, but then levels off quickly compared to 3rd mainly because of the fact that most monsters had no strength scores. First edition also had facing, which made being surrounded more brutal than being flanked which was some limited help. More importantly, 1st edition had weapon vs. AC modifiers - but I was one of the few DMs that advocated thier use (in no small part because they could keep mooks dangerous). IME, first edition's rate of advancement was much slower, which meant more of your career was spent fighting orcs and such compared to 3rd edition, but other people with different experiences regarding the availability of treasure found 1st edition to be just as fast as 3rd.
I think the one sentence summary though is as much as has changed in the game, the problem has stayed the same. And, I don't see 4e changing that in any way. You can't give a 1st level mook attack bonus/hit points/damage that threatens the AC of a 7th or 10th level character and allows it to survive area of effect attacks from that level, and not have it be overwhelming to 1st level characters. You can't - especially if you are determined to let 1st level characters face hordes of mooks.
