Essentials Displacer Beast Up

[renau1g]

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Displacer Beast)

Not sure how I feel about the displacement ability. It might be more annoying than anything, especially when you roll that 19... I wonder how that would interact with the improved crit range of say a Daggermaster...

Anyways, cool monster.

 

[Scribble]

I think it's neat from a saves me an extra die roll type of thing, but yeah it used to be doesn't work on a crit, now it's only doesn't work on a normal crit basically.

 

[Davachido]

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Displacer Beast)

Not sure how I feel about the displacement ability. It might be more annoying than anything, especially when you roll that 19... I wonder how that would interact with the improved crit range of say a Daggermaster...

Anyways, cool monster.

Natural 20 is the only way of getting an automatic hit.

"Precision: Some powers and other abilities allow a creature to score a critical hit on a roll other than a 20, but only a natural 20 is an automatic hit"

This means that if the daggermaster rolls a 19 he misses, due to the displacer beast's trait. (If it is up that is.)

 

[Scribble]

Natural 20 is the only way of getting an automatic hit.

"Precision: Some powers and other abilities allow a creature to score a critical hit on a roll other than a 20, but only a natural 20 is an automatic hit"

This means that if the daggermaster rolls a 19 he misses, due to the displacer beast's trait. (If it is up that is.)

Yeah, but the old wording simply said Critical Hits ignore this effect, so ALL crits ignored it.

So if you had the ability to crit on a 19 and that was good enough to hit the DB it would be a crit.

Now it's a miss, even if it would otherwise have been a hit/crit... DB's power got slightly more powerful.

 

[Mengu]

I'm not too fond of the new displacement mechanic. Now I have to constantly ask, what did you roll? And they will likely tell me their total. And I'll have to repeat myself, no, I mean on the die... Waste of time. I'd much rather be rolling a die behind the screen, and will probably continue to do that for speed, if I should use a displacer beast. I also like Beast's Fury better than Cunning Blitz. Maybe I'd keep Beast's Fury as an encounter power.

When these new monsters get incorporated into the compendium, I hope the old ones don't suddenly disappear. There are a lot of nice mechanics there I don't mind referencing.

 

[LightPhoenix]

Add me to the group that's not a fan. It's not that much more work to roll a d10 (or even a d6) to determine if they hit or not. Plus, it puts the power in the hands of the DM, and not random chance. If an encounter is going on too long, I want the purview to fudge that roll and say they hit anyway.

 

[BobTheNob]

I'm not too fond of the new displacement mechanic. Now I have to constantly ask, what did you roll? And they will likely tell me their total. And I'll have to repeat myself, no, I mean on the die... Waste of time. I'd much rather be rolling a die behind the screen, and will probably continue to do that for speed, if I should use a displacer beast. I also like Beast's Fury better than Cunning Blitz. Maybe I'd keep Beast's Fury as an encounter power.

When these new monsters get incorporated into the compendium, I hope the old ones don't suddenly disappear. There are a lot of nice mechanics there I don't mind referencing.

You could even just flip a coin (the "two" sided dice ) and achieve the same thing. I just love the thought of "I got a crit!" with the dm replying "...yea, against thin air" (follow by evil laughter)

 

[I'm A Banana]

I like it.

Less rolls = less grind = more time to kick butts.

 

[Stormonu]

I'm not too fond of the new displacement mechanic. Now I have to constantly ask, what did you roll? And they will likely tell me their total. And I'll have to repeat myself, no, I mean on the die... Waste of time. I'd much rather be rolling a die behind the screen, and will probably continue to do that for speed, if I should use a displacer beast. I also like Beast's Fury better than Cunning Blitz. Maybe I'd keep Beast's Fury as an encounter power.

When these new monsters get incorporated into the compendium, I hope the old ones don't suddenly disappear. There are a lot of nice mechanics there I don't mind referencing.

You don't even have to ask that, just "did you roll odd or even?"

Of course, you could even just take their grand total and determine if it's a hit by whether it's an odd or even number - it's still in a range of twenty numbers, half of which are odd, half of which are even. I'm sure they'll pipe up and let you know when they roll a nat 20.

BTW, even-odds is exactly how I handled 50% miss chance in 3E; I used the player's die roll on the d20 to determine if it missed or not (evens were hits so nat 20s always hit). Disliked rolling the extra dice after the attack had already been made.

 

[fuzzlewump]

I love that the displacement goes away when you hit it, for a turn. It's a cool mechanic and it's an interesting narrative component: I imagine an arrow sticking into 'thin air' with blood dripping out sort of revealing the displacer beasts 'true' position, until its turn where it rips it out, or 'resets' the ability so that the arrow gets displaced with the rest of its body, or something.