Excerpt: Swarms

[Thornir Alekeg]

Not bad. I will echo the feeling that it doesn't seem all that different from 3e.

Personally what I would like to see are a couple of things from swarms:

Tiny creatures such as insects can ignore armor as they crawl into the spaces and get inside the armor itself - maybe even then use a portion of the targets armor bonus for itself. Imagine your paladin stripping off his armor in a fight shrieking "get them off me!"

When Bloodied either the swarm's AC versus melee attacks increases, or damage from melee attacks is reduced from 1/2 to 1/4, reflecting the fact that they individual creatures that make up the swarm are more dispersed than they were. Along with that of course the swarms attack damage should also drop by 1/2.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm with you on the "not that different from 3E" angle, except for one thing: the aura means a single square of swarm attacks 9 squares of targets.

Where as the default 3e swarm occupied 4 squares. This isn't that big of a difference. The biggest difference is 4 vs. 9 squares, but the fact that the 3rd edition swarm more 'swarmily' could occupy any 4 continious squares. The big difference is on display when a swarm from either edition enters a 5' wide corridor.

Also, 3E swarms had to enter your space to do anything to you, meaning that you could typically just step 5-feet out and swing at them in melee.

Assuming that you were 'nauseated', yes. Third edition swarms effectively 'grab' you to prevent you from doing this. Further note that typically, stepping out and swinging them in melee was meaningless. You wouldn't take less damage because the swarm would just follow you the next turn. And 3e swarms were typically immune to melee. You can't kill 10,000 centipeeds in a timely fashion by swinging a sword.

Heck, even against foes with reach, the 4E swarm can enter your square, which means you need a full move (provoking) to get out of the aura.

In both cases, I think you need to consider that the expectation is that the swarm is made up of several individual swarms. So for example, a 10' corridor might be filled with 4-5 continuous swarms. The biggest change is that swarms provoke attacks at all. I have mixed feelings about that. In some cases, it's 'swarmier'. In other cases, it isn't.

Also unlike 3E, you can end up in multiple damage auras. 3Es "have to be in the same space" thing made that - well, I'd have to look up if it was technically possible for multiple swarms to share a space with each other, but the aura means that they can overlap a whole lot more area.

Yes, but 3e swarms did thier damage automatically. Multiple attacks versus automatic damage from one attack is probably a wash.

Hmmm... I guess after thinking about it some more I'm not so much with you on the "not that different from 3E" angle anymore... sorry.

It's still not that different. The 4e rules are simplier and treat the swarm as less of a special case monster (which has good and bad points), but ultimately there is nothing revolutionary about the 4e swarm rules. I don't really care too much one way or the other.

Positives:

a) Does away with the nausea saving throw, which I found somewhat problimatic. Though, it doesn't really replace it with anything other than the ability to make AoOs, which is also problimatic.

Negatives:

a) Swarms are explicitly defined as being made up of 'tiny' creatures. Unless 'tiny' has been redifined, I'm guessing that this means that they aren't going to try to model swarms of say honeybees using these same rules.
b) Swarm no longer occupies an amorpheous area. A swarm in a 5' corridor (or 2.5' wide corridor!) occupies the same space as swarm in an open room.

 

[med stud]

I think the swarms of regular insects would be better as environmental hazards or traps (as someone above said). I think it would be ridicolous with people fighting 100000 bees with torches, I would like it more like a skill challenge.

The PCs enter a sealed crypt, hearing a weird sound. All of a sudden a wave of scarabs pours out from a doorway. Here the skill challenge begins. Getting away is important, therefore every round every PC has to roll Athletics to avoid damage. AoE-spells can be used, using the attack bonus of the PC instead of a skill. Each use of flaming oil or the like counts as an autosuccess. There might be other skills that I don't think about right now, but that's the gist of the challenge. The consequence of failing the skill challenge is either to get backed up in a dead end or to be chased out into unfamiliar territory. By winning the skill challenge the scarabs are dead.

It's an unorthodox skill challenge but I think it would play out nice.

 

[Lizard]

Isn't the point of a lot of these articles how things are changing? Obviously the majority of readers will have played 3.5 and therefore, they lay a frame of reference. Then they say, "Gee golly, isn't that cool," and people take it as slander towards the older edition.

Of course they're going to point out where they think they've made improvements. Oy vey.

Compare these two:
"Did you love Big Macs? Well, then you'll really love the Big Mac Deluxe! Everything you liked, and more! Here's what we've added..."

vs.

"We decided to try some Big Macs, and we'd rather be eating ground glass mixed with maggot puree! My god, how did we ever inflict that vile crap on you, our beloved customers? We're sorry! We're so sorry! To show you how sorry we are, we're introducting the Big Mac Deluxe. Our new motto:'The Big Mac Deluxe -- It Won't Make You Puke Your Guts Up, Like The Old One Did'."

Which advertising campaign is more likely to win over fans of your current product?

Which is more likely to make potential new buyers think, "Well, if the old one sucked so bad, can we really trust them to make a new one which doesn't?"

Or, to put it another way, which is more appealing -- a political ad which focuses on your candidate's strengths, or one which focuses on the opposing candidate's weakness?

You can sell "New and improved" without taking every chance you can get to kick the old one. Honestly, it's looking less and less like a marketing campaign and more like developer spleen-venting. What, did Monte, Skip, and John strangle Mike Mearls' puppy or something? It's hard to focus on objectively evaluating the mechanics when the previews are wrapped in this kind of bile-spewing.

I mean, they don't even say WHY the old swarm rules were boring, they just assert it, as if it was self-evident. Well, it's not. Why not do the following:

"The old swarm rules set out to do a, b, c. They did a, but in actual play, you hardly saw b because of x, and c never worked as intended -- remember (famous gamer inside joke ala pun-pun here). So we took the core goals of the swarm rules, applied the 4e design ethos to them, and fixed the problems we perceived as follows..."

A lot better than "We'd rather be EATEN ALIVE BY ANTS than play 3e!"

The new swarm rules look cool and playable, and I have some great swarm ideas. However, they're not THAT different from the 3e rules, and actually are a step backward in "making you feel like you're fighting a swarm" -- you can flank the swarm, you can sneak attack it, you can knock it prone (I'm guessing, in the absence of anything which says you CAN'T). So the self-congratulatory crowing on how much the old rules sucked is really out of place. It's an incremental advance, at best, and its achieved at the cost of reducing, not increasing, the "swarm feel" in the name of simplicity.

 

[Tuft]

Skipping over the usual "3e was t3h suxx0r!" introduction, we get swarms that....

I'm reminded of a local advertising campaign that Microsoft ran a few years back. To entice people to upgrade their Microsoft Office, they ran a series of ads that basically called anybody that had ever used their previous version for unimaginative morons....

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

One question that springs to mind. Why aren't Minions swarms? That would cut down on the paperwork a bit. Instead of keeping count of 10 guys with 1 or 5 hit points (or whatever), they are counted as one creature for combat purposes. As exception based design seems to be in, it would be easy to give each 'minion swarm' rules relating to their make-up. Goblin swarms, zombie swarms, etc.

Not saying it's better or worse - just that this could have been an alternative route taken to simulate larger groups of weak monsters. I wonder if it was considered at all.

Minions are there to give you the "feedback" of cutting through hordes of mooks, killing people left and right.
Swarms give you the feedback of fighting, well, a swarm, a thing you seemingly can't defeat. You strike them, but they keep coming, and they are in your face and eating and biting and chewing and aaaargh...

They are different from the 3.5 swarms how, exactly?

- Large whole composed of smaller creatures? Check.
- Deals damage to all creatures within their area? Check.
- Difficult to kill with regular weapons? Check.
- Special effects based on the creature? Check.

The only new things are:
- Immunity to forced movement (makes sense since forced movement is a big part of 4e combat).
- Size reduced from "shapeable Large" to "Medium".

It'd make more sense if the text said: "We took the 3.5 rules for swarms and added a couple of special effects for the new types of swarms we created".

I agree that the difference is technically not that much. But you left out one of the most important new features: The aura. If you want to fight them (in melee), you have to expose yourself to them. In 3E, you could attack them from safety with a single 5 ft step and keep hacking them. In 4E, if you want to attack them, you're automatically exposed to their attacks.

I think it should be easy to "mod" the 3E swarms to have the same effect.

 

[Cadfan]

My usual random thoughts:

1. The Needlefang Drake Swarm looks... really freaking dangerous for a level 2 monster. I mean, seriously. It does a LOT of damage per round, especially if the PCs are near to each other, it has a LOT of hit points, and its highly resistant to the most common attacks available to level 2 PCs. I like the monster, but it doesn't seem like a regular level 2 monster. I mean, seriously. Swarm moves adjacent to a PC (move action), knocks the PC over (minor action), attacks for 2d10+4 damage (standard action), then lets the PC have a turn and attacks again for 2d10+4 damage. Seriously? I know that not every attack will likely be successful, but, seriously?

2. This could change depending on party composition or the availability of purchasable gear. Supposing that flaming oil is an area attack, I could see a party of PCs tearing through a swarm in a single round. Same with a party with several dragonborn PCs. But using only the pregens, this swarm would be a really rough fight, perhaps more appropriate for an Elite monster.

3. I hope there's advice in the DMG for how to describe fights with swarms. In a normal fight, you beat up the monster and it dies. With a swarm, you beat up the swarm until enough of its constituent members have died and it retreats or no longer meaningfully threatens you.

4. These swarms have really high Reflex defenses. Which... is probably the defense you attack if you use an area attack.

5. Swarms don't need default immunity to mind effecting attacks, because not all swarms make sense as immune to mind effecting attacks. Why shouldn't all the little hungry lizards fall asleep to a sleep spell?

6. Interesting that, with swarms, location is abstract. The swarm occupies a single space, in the sense that you have to attack that space to hurt it. But the swarms constituent members occupy a 3x3 space, and bite you if you enter that larger area. So basically you have to wade into the swarm if you want to hurt it. I like this. This is one place that the "get it off! get it off!" feel is really accentuated. They should have pointed this out more clearly. Having to wade into a swarm to hurt it rather than standing next to it and swinging at it is a big improvement, to me, over 3e.

7. If you want a bigger swarm, use multiple swarms. Simple, elegant, effectively models the "as you beat them up they get smaller" aspect of a swarm. In such a case I'd possibly rule that the auras don't stack. I don't know, depends on balance issues.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'm reminded of a local advertising campaign that Microsoft ran a few years back. To entice people to upgrade their Microsoft Office, they ran a series of ads that basically called anybody that had ever used their previous version for unimaginative morons....

Actually, it reminds me more of the Apple advertising campaign. Even if it wasn't critisizing its own products, the way it hit on the PC/Microsoft was similar to what Lizard is describing. (And yes, this made the poor Microsoft "persona" actually come off as a likeable guy, and the Apple "persona" a prick. Even if a lot of what they said was true.)

 

[Mort_Q]

Tiny creatures such as insects can ignore armor as they crawl into the spaces and get inside the armor itself - maybe even then use a portion of the targets armor bonus for itself. Imagine your paladin stripping off his armor in a fight shrieking "get them off me!"

When Bloodied either the swarm's AC versus melee attacks increases, or damage from melee attacks is reduced from 1/2 to 1/4, reflecting the fact that they individual creatures that make up the swarm are more dispersed than they were. Along with that of course the swarms attack damage should also drop by 1/2.

Best thing is... you can write those up as powers for a particular swarm.

Infest Armour (free, on a hit; encounter)

When the swarm occupies the same square as an armoured target and scores a hit, it can infest the targets armour.

While infesting the armour the swarm gains Immunity melee and ranged and is no longer Vulnerable to Area and Close attacks. In addition, the swarm moves with the target if it chooses, and always has combat advantage against its target.

 

[OchreJelly]

I can see the encounter setup now.

"You reach a clearing in the jungle -- ahead of you the underbrush is thick. From out of this undergrowth a tiny lizard the size of a cat scampers out into the center of the clearing."

PC1: "Aw, he's a cute 'lil guy isn't he?"

"The tiny lizard chirps and purrs. It dances about on it's two hind legs precociously"

PC1: "Lets get him. I want this guy as my pet!"
PC2: "yeah that might not be such a..."

Suddenly all the foliage begins to stir as 100's of the tiny lizards scurry out at alarming speed.

-- Combat ensures --

PC1: "The needles! I have never been is such PAIN!!"
PC3: "Gah!! They are all over me! BAD TOUCH!! AHHHWWWHA!!
PC2: "I told you..."