Shemeska said:
Which will be good, given the unfortunate precidence of archfiends of CR 20ish range the BoVD gave us, pandering to the 'kill em and take their stuff' crowd, combined with the really awful dichotomy between archfiends and true deities that D&DG gave us.
We really got hamstrung in 3e with that early precident given to us by giving us not just stats to projections or avatars, but to the archfiends themselves, and really anemic stats at that. I'm holding out hope that Erik and company will do something to rectify the situation a bit.
Of course, I prefer my archfiends like I prefer my deities: without statblocks for the full being on their home plane.
Statblocks for demon lords is hardly a 3E innovation, but I see your point. The problem with handling the demon lords and other archfiends is the fact that everyone's game is different. Some folk want to run a campaign where the final encounter is a throw-down fight with Demogorgon, but since they don't use the Epic rules, a CR 50 Demogorgon is useless to them. Others don't want/need stats for the demon lords since they aren't combat targets in their campaigns.
My philosophy is this: it's best to design stat blocks for demon lords in the mid 20s, since the majority of D&D games don't progress past level 20. That way, the stats are there for DMs to use as the main villains for the end of a standard D&D campaign. If you need more powerful demon lords, it's simple enough to go to page 294 of the
Monster Manual and advance the demon lord's Hit Dice to whatever level you need it to be at; the increases in base attack, saves, skills, feats, and other things should cover you. Of course, some aspects (damage from special attacks, spell resistance, DR, etc.) aren't accounted for in these rules, but they're easy enoguh to adjust as well. And if your campaign doesn't use demon lords as combat encounters, no amount of stats are going to matter.
Personally, I don't agree with all of the design choices that were made as regards the archfiends in 3rd Edition, but I'm happy with most of them, and Erik and I are doing the best we can to do right by the book while not causing too many ripples by messing with established continuity. Will it make everyone happy? Of course not. In fact, I'm really nervous about how the book'll be recieved, since with the possible exception of
Lords of Madness, it's the book I'm the most proud of to have been a part of. At the same point, it's probably been the
hardest WotC book I've worked on, since there's so much history to preserve and honor. Of course, I can't say what will and won't make the final edit, but a good way to get a preview of the book's tone is to check out the Demonomicon articles in
Dragon or Erik's awesome
Armies of the Abyss book published by Green Ronin. In any case, it's gonna be a gutwrenching wait till the book's out!