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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9286433" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Considering I don't actually believe 4e did the thing you describe, yes, I certainly do believe there are ways to do that. You'll have to be much more specific about what you mean in order for me to meaningfully answer the question, since I doubt this answer is all that productive.I don't see the "actively tries to negate their impact" thing. At all. So I can't really respond to this.The "One D&D" playtest demonstrates that it does not--and Crawford, very early on in that playtest process, explicitly said how the rules don't do that. For example, the fact that players simply do not take short rests nearly as often as the game's design expects them to, which shafts any characters dependent on short rests or numerous combats (e.g. Warlocks/Battle Masters or Champions, respectively) and supercharges the classes that depend on long rests and were already somewhat above the curve (mostly full casters and especially Wizard).Given I do not share your opinion, and in fact have highlighted various ways in which the text both actually does fail to tell people what they're supposed to do, or does tell them but somehow gets ignored, I just don't agree with your absolute hardline "there cannot be mechanical changes, sorry" position.Bolded: No, it won't necessarily have that impact. That's exactly the assertion I refute. Doing so poorly has such effects, specifically as a result of being a poor implementation. This is not a trade-off; we can in fact have both things.Exactly. It is a story of growth, of exceeding one's limits (or, indeed, transcending mortal limits entirely), which is a pretty friggin' big part of fantasy narratives in general. There's a reason fiction of all kinds, not just novels but games and film and TV shows etc. almost always feature epiphany and training, where opponents who used to be a terrible danger (sometimes even to the point of "nope, can't fight those, just run away") become absolute chump change over time. Avatar: the Last Airbender, for example, presents ordinary firebenders as a pretty serious threat during the first season. By the middle of the third, even without the Day of Black Sun, Team Avatar can easily defeat ordinary firebenders and really only fear folks like Combustion Man, Azula, or Ozai.I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean by "the fiction of paragon tier in mechanically heroic tier terms." Do you mean that, in a sense, the fiction sweet-spot gets expanded to cover a different level range? Or do you mean something else? If that is what you mean, I personally would say that it's really a difference of setting the "scaling factor" of a game. Heroic is small-time, Paragon is big leagues, and Epic is world-shaking, but choice of campaign setting and focus can change what those things mean. Neverwinter, being an FR game, is heavily trafficking in otherworldly stuff (much as Planescape does), and thus its scale has only a very brief period in early heroic for totally mundane challenges, and tops out in high epic with the theoretical potential to not just slay gods but fundamentally rewrite the rules of existence--effectively shifting everything up by around half a tier. DS, meanwhile, shifts everything in the other direction by half a tier or a bit more--early on it really is the case that fighting random (relatively) mundane desert creatures is a risky move, like how random sewer rats in an RPG can be a terrifying early threat, and you top out fighting beings who are attempting to ascend to the level of something like a demigod and maybe, maybe finding a way to heal the wounds of the world...or at least make the region you live in suck less.Again, not seeing that, so I can't answer the question.They aren't changed arbitrarily. They are changed for very specific reasons. There isn't a static benchmark because the benchmark is the player experience, which is dynamic. Mechanical representation is not the master, driving player experience before it and callously indifferent to how those mechanics will be experienced through play. If you choose to do this (and you do not have to! You can quite easily use monsters even within a +/- 8 level range if you feel like it, the rules even say so!), the mechanical representation changes specifically because mechanics are there to encode and represent the player experience, not to be some imperious objective reality and hope that that reality actually produces the experience so intended.For someone who so thoroughly espouses the "the rules are not the master, I am" philosophy as far as I can tell, your desire for this static benchmark to be your master, to which you must adhere no matter what, is genuinely baffling.Designing a 4e monster is thus a matter of genuinely thinking about what the creature is, and what the experience of fighting it should be. At level 1, a frost giant isn't even a solo--it's a force of nature, something the party has no hope whatsoever of defeating in battle, and must either flee from it, entrap it, or outsmart it, aka, a skill challenge.But you shouldn't be designing a fight, or a combat, or whatever else, from the starting point of "I need to have a level X fight because my players are level X." You should come up with the concept of what the fight actually is, the fiction, and then develop mechanics which suit that fiction. Sometimes, that will mean that the best mechanical representation of a creature is a minion, even though the players have fought a creature like that before and it wasn't a minion. That's fine--because the objective fiction reality is still there, you're just adjusting how that manifests in mechanics in order to accurately portray whatever that thing is now, in this context.This is not "undermining" anything. It is simply recognizing that mechanics are always an abstraction, and that we can (and, I argue, should) adapt that abstraction so that it invites the desired experience of play, rather than hoping to luck into (or brute-force) an experience of play by throwing utterly unchanged abstractions against a party with slightly different numerical values.NO. THEY. ARE. NOT.This is a pernicious falsehood. The books explicitly reject doing this. Repeatedly. I have dug up the quotes before, I can do it again.Enemies are NOT "always level appropriate." I'm certain you've read the 4e DMG, so you should know better. And if you haven't, why are you staking such strident claims on the basis of nothing better than hearsay?That is not the culture of play. That is WotC. WotC is making revisions, yes. And if you hadn't noticed, those revisions are not exactly the most popular thing! We have a poll right now asking whether people will adopt 5.5e, and it's currently 54% yes, 46% no. I wouldn't call that a ringing endorsement of new stuff!But what I was actually talking about was 3PP and genuinely new mechanics, not just additional options for classes or feats or the like. I stand by what I said with regard to that. The culture of play for 5e--what the actual people running it tend to do--is the most hidebound I've ever seen D&D be. Far moreso than any edition first published during my lifetime (which would be 2e and up.)Not at all. It is representing the fact that these things do still pose some challenge, but the kind of challenge they pose is different now. It is the same creature. The fictional reality has not changed. The mechanics have. Because mechanics are not fictional reality, and cannot be--the map is not the territory.You are asking for every globe to have precise-to-the-meter topographical maps and street-view data. That is not productive nor useful for any globe, even a dynamically flexible one like Google Earth. The types and manners of information presented to the viewer should change as the scale and perspective change. The physical reality--the Earth itself--is not changing in any way. But the data furnished to you from a scale of 500 miles to the inch (or 300 km per cm, or whatever you prefer) should be different from the data furnished to you from a scale of 100 feet to the inch, even if in both cases you are centered on the same latitude and longitude. Some details that are essential at the 500 mile scale are utterly meaningless at the 100' scale and vice-versa.The text of 4e's DMG explicitly says you should not do this, and in fact it adds (again, explicitly) that it is sometimes wise to have players truly face the exact same monster--no mechanical changes at all--so they can see how much their characters have grown.Those would in fact be different creatures. Not the same creatures. If you're fighting an actually-more-powerful creature in an area you've been to before, it's because something there has changed and more powerful creatures have shown up.Correction: A minion ogre is the same creature, but its mechanics have changed, because mechanics are contextual. In the context of "we have had one adventure together rescuing the miller's daughter," a single ogre is a dangerous and risky opponent which should not be underestimated. In the context of seasoned adventurers who have visited other planes and dealt with the servants of fey ladies and kings of shadow, an ogre is a nuisance, albeit still a danger. In the context of demigods who regularly show the deities themselves that they're not to be trifled with, a single ogre doesn't even rise to the level of nuisance anymore.That shift from "terrifying" to "nuisance" to "non-entity (in isolation)" is represented with mechanics. Because mechanics are an abstraction, and that abstraction should serve us, not command us.I mean, potentially it could be the same ogre. That could even be good fun; you fight literally the same ogre (say) six times from level 1-ish to level 18ish, initially as a skill challenge, then progressively a solo, an elite, a standard, a minion, and finally as a single soldier amongst a squad. A direct and palpable representation of how far the characters have come--literally a threat they couldn't threaten at the start of the campaign is now a puny nothing before them.As stated: the 4e DMG explicitly, repeatedly, instructs the DM to not do things like this. It could not possibly be more clear that this is a thing you shouldn't do, without writing in large, friendly letters "DO NOT DO THIS THING."4e's encounter design sections (there's a few of them, looking at encounter design from different perspectives) consistently state that you should use a variety, not just in flavor terms but in mechanical terms as well. What one might call "typical" fights are usually in the level +/- 2 range, but it explicitly suggests including at minimum some fights +/- 4, potentially up to +/- 8 on occasion as spice, with the +8 side giving the players a real nasty problem, and the -8 side giving them a cakewalk that highlights their strengths. The use of these things is, as stated, always focused on what kind of player-experience they're designed to produce.And they aren't "not in the world anymore" in 4e either. "Weak" creatures would become one of the following, depending on context:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Minions (creatures that can still do damage and are still non-trivial to hit, but which die as soon as they take any amount of damage; some homebrew ideas added the idea of "mooks," which are effectively two-hit minions, they must take damage from two different sources to fall)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Swarms (a collection of creatures that are not dangerous alone, but are dangerous collectively, e.g. a swarm of insects or vampire bats or the like)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A skill challenge (fighting them isn't productive. you want to get rid of the problem for good; e.g. if you have an ant problem, squishing a thousand ants isn't going to make the problem go away, even though the ants might be genuinely incapable of harming you)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A "trap"/obstacle/feature/etc. rather than a creature proper (because, again, for particularly weak creatures, killing them isn't productive, you must eliminate the underlying problem)</li> </ul></blockquote>

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