Tony Vargas
Legend
Teemu said:
I have to wonder about the 'However' here. In both cases you have a non-magical daily (unnamed in his case, hypothetical in yours) that's better than a regular charge.
Do we also ask why we didn't ask that before 2008?
D&D 4E I love 5E, but lately I miss 4E's monsters
cbwjm
Seb-wejem
Yes, If I was a fighter before 4e with a skill/power called brute strike (an actual 4e fighter power this time) and I was only allowed to use it once per day, I would very much ask why. However, in the context of just playing the game, I might just accept it as I accepted the new system for 4e and accept the limited dice for battlemasters. In each edition, this is just the way it is unless you want to houserule something.
Tony Vargas
Legend
That's strangely hypothetical. How 'bout a 3e fighter who took Stunning Fist as a Fighter Bonus Feat, and had a daily limit on that. Don't recall a lot of controversy over that detail, then. Times/day was a D&Dism little-questioned even when applied outside the Vancian spellcasting system.
It was, of course, a rhetorical rather than hypothetical question. 3e offered no answer to that question in the case of stunning fist or defensive roll - IDK about that PrC special ability Teemu mentioned, above. 4e did offer brief explanations for dailies for each power source. 5e at least kept that for the Fighter and his few short-rest resources, though, again, controversy has been minimal. FWIW.
Last edited:
Manbearcat
Legend
Then I definitely don't understand (when we're talking about monster design), why you would be using the only non-updated 4e dragon as the template for 4e dragon distinctiveness.
If that is the case, then its, quite simply, uninspired GMing. Let us say the GM hasn't created an interesting, dynamic, interactive battlefield in any way...whatsoever (D&D 4e GMing 101). At the utterly bare minimum, combat with a Blue Dragon should entail trying to deal with a ranged flyer that is constantly assailing you with Lightning. And if you do manage to pin it down, it has the ability (and impetus) to escape melee (Push + Prone) and immediately get back on the wing. Combat with a Red Dragon will entail getting up close and personal with a fiery wyrm that dominates the melee. Fiery bite and claw attacks. When you try to gang up on it or flank it, you're getting a massive tail slap for your efforts, sending you flying away, and you'll have to test it again. Every now and then you'll get an infernal blast.
And neither of those touch Frightful Presence. Or the actual updated monsters.
I'm fairly (99.75%) certain this has been clarified as an improper reading of the text. Shove is a discrete Action. Multiattack is a discrete Action. You could sub Shove for the entire suite of Multiattack attacks. However, you can't sub Shove for one attack of a Multiattack flurry. I think this was also cleared up on a Sage Advice column (or a Tweet). Now, of course, you can do whatever you'd like in your home game, but its not orthodox 5e.
Well, I'm not really "starting to admit", because it was never something I was arguing (that a single ability makes for a lack of distinctive punchiness). I mean sure, if you strip down a McClaren, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, and a Porsche (remove the location/type of engines, remove suspension/transmission systems, remove electrical/brakes), then yeah...you've just got a mildly different aerodynamic chassis with mildly different weight distribution.
I don't see how that makes for a compelling argument about the distinctiveness of the actual cars.
And again, this is 4e, where robust synergies creating tactical overhead and a dynamic series of interesting, thematic decision-points is the fundamental purpose of the engine.
A huge part of the design effort of 5e was grounding the creature/phenomenon's story in the setting first, then building mechanics to that (rather than the inverse). Dragons evolving unique hunting and confrontation archetypes (as a result of their distinct behavioral and biological paradigms) seems to precisely fit that directive. I would hope that Blue Dragon's finesse hunt on the wing while Red Dragon's shock and awe their prey with rage and fury.
We seem to be moving toward a discussion of complexity rather than distinction (one that I didn't enter into...I just wanted to correct the "lack of distinctiveness" narrative that was developing). Ok, I'll jump into that real quick.
One thing I will say right off the bat is that (illegally) subbing various maneuvers (and their own distinct resolution procedure) for components of a Multiattack Action in order to achieve the same thing from a singular action (which doesn't require extra resolution...Gore = damage + auto Push and Prone rider) strikes me as ramping up the cognitive workload of the GM!
Beyond that, let us say you just gave each of the two dragons one extra Legendary Action that cost 2 Actions. This would be distinct from each other. Obviously it would need to be remapped to 5e, but here goes:
BLUE
RED
Would this singular addition:
1) Increase distinctiveness (behavioral, biological, tactical overhead in combat for both players and GM).
2) Increase the GM's cognitive workload beyond whatever preferred threshold you have.
Manbearcat
Legend
This didn't get nearly enough play, but this is a brilliant observation.
The ONLY reason why Minions become a problem is because their juxtaposition with the rest of the setting's inhabitants makes the absurdities of HPs stand out like a sore-thumb even more (if D&D combat mechanics are viewed through an utterly untenable process-sim/"realism" prism...rather than the abstract, narrative machinery that they are)!
Minion mechanics are MORE realistic (a singular connected strike by a deadly weapon and you're out)!
Tony Vargas
Legend
I've toyed with the vague concept a retro-nostalgic system idea that uses 'hits' in combat. At the mundane level, a hit kills a normal person, some attacks can inflict more than one hit at a time, and some persons (thanks to armor for instance) might be able to negate one or more hits - not a lot more in either case. Beyond the mundane levels you get into attacks doing large, variable amounts of hits, and characters and creatures having the ability to negate lots of hits - and it becomes like hps. I feel like grounding a hp-like mechanic in a more lethal mechanic might help. :shrug:
Manbearcat
Legend
I just think its fascinating is all. The weird intellectual mind-eff that D&D players often internalize whereby Minion mechanics (one hit from a deadly implement and you're dead...uuuuuuh yeah!) becomes this source of cognitive dissonance rather than HP (and everything else) themselves!
Let us call it The Rabbit Hole Inversion Syndrome!
Tony Vargas
Legend
D&D is kinda an echo chamber that way, I guess. The hobby, really. We're just a very small community, and group-think develops easily.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
I didn't select my dragons to demonstrate 4e distinctiveness, I selected them to try and note 4e "typicalness" - what a given player may have actually encountered in play at some point. For that, MM dragons in the middle of the level range is an okay choice: the chances of a player seeing one of those in play is much greater than the chances of a player having seen a post-MM3 elder, for sure, and debatably greater than having seen a post-MM3 Young (though the higher ratio of low-level parties might offset the longer tenure of the original dragon, it's not automatically clear that this is the case, and I wanted to get a dragon old enough that it had some room to grow and be what 4e envisioned its dragons being - comparing wyrmlings isn't exactly a great point of comparison for that reason).
5e is exactly as amenable to "inspired GMing" as 4e was. If the monsters required "dynamic, interactive battlefields" to be distinctive, then that once more exhibits that the thing in-and-of-itself wasn't the distinctive element, it was all the aids and crutches and build strategies that gave it that property. All those "inspired GMing" strategies remain viable in 5e. So if inspired GMing was what made the difference, having the same list of actions as another color of dragon shouldn't be an impediment to distinctiveness - just use that same inspired GMing to encourage the kind of fight you want to have.
Of course, I think you're minimizing the most distinctive qualities of these two dragons which is that one spits electricity and one spits fire. If that's the only difference your players note between the fights, that's, to put it bluntly, quite enough for a lot of players and a lot of groups. Making one do their thing more in melee and one do their thing more at range doesn't really rise to the level of "significant" for a broad swath of the D&D playing populace (this is especially true if it takes a handful of powers, the right battlefield, and inspired GMing to even get at that significance - that might as well be Proust for how much your average player can derive the significance from it).
Mearls doesn't seem to like it, at least in the Grapple case, ("A question: PCs with multiple attacks can replace an attack with grapple. Can monsters with Multiattack do the same? i'd say no – might have some unintended effects. OK on a case-by-case basis, but be wary about it."), but if what you want is damage + a shove, that's clearly what you want to do in that case.
Here's a thing that I'm not sure you're appreciating: if it requires extensive knowledge, detailed analysis, and careful building to understand why the thing is distinct, it's going to be lost on a huge swath of your audience. In my terminology, it's not significant in-and-of-itself. It requires greater understanding and nuance to appreciate.
Like, sure, to someone who knows a lot about fancy vroom-vroom machines, those brands all have distinct identities. But to, I dunno, my mom, they're all just fancy cars. Their distinguishing trait is "fancy." The differences between them are irrelevant if they're even coherent.
Most people, when they approach D&D, are like my mom with fancy cars. Subtle distinctions that those masters of the system may appreciate are entirely meaningless. What matters is big things: X breathes fire. Y breathes lightning. DONE!
I imagine older groups that have been gaming for longer have more nuanced needs (I'm cool with opt-in complexity), but that's not a ding against an original design that leaves the monsters striaghtforward enough to let the thing that most people will see as distinctive shine without unnecessary cruft.
(Hell, even with the relative simplicity of 5e dragons, I still see DMs with decades of experience forget to use legendary and lair actions!)
I don't think it wouldn't increase distinctiveness as much as it would increase the GM's cognitive workload. +5 Distinctiveness, +20 Cognitive Workload.Manbearcat said:
Which is why I'm cool with something like that being opt-in. Someone who is willing to pay the price in cognitive workload to achieve the real but minor gain in distinctiveness is great! It's just not great for the "original" version of the monster - it's quite complex and distinct enough for a big swath of D&D's potential audience (arguably too complex, but that's D&D for ya).
Bacon Bits
Hero
The issue is that with a list of spells, or a list of feats, you've got one list of abilities that's fairly universal across the entire game. And everybody's basically pulling from the same list. You play the game for a year, and you're going to have about 80% of the feats and spells more or less memorized.
Even better, they're all in the PHB. That means it's not just on you as the DM to get every ability right. Your players can correct you, and help you out by reading the spell description. Nobody's casting a fireball that targets Fort, or has a 50' radius, or uses d10s for damage, or is not a sphere, or has one of two dozen rider effects.
If every book you read is detective novels, they're going to get pretty dull. If the only customers you meet in your job are doctors or teachers or police officers, again, they're going to start to have a bit of a sameness to them. It will get difficult to tell them apart.
It's like if your only entertainment was a TV that played nothing but 90s sitcoms all day every day. Friends, Seinfeld, Roseanne, Frasier, Home Improvement, Everybody Loves Raymond, Wings, Martin, Sabrina, Fresh Prince, Boy Meets World, etc. Maybe they're very good sitcoms. Maybe you like them. Maybe they're episodes you've never seen before. But you know they're all structured exactly the same. The plot will vary, but the pacing, themes, general narrative structure, and often the humor is all identical. That's going to get very tiresome.
You're right that those factors you list can make a combat memorable, but when every combat has the players do those three things then combat will still stop being memorable. Your combats essentially become a Michael Bay movie. Very exciting things happen all the time. Wow, more explosions and slow motion CGI. Just like the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. You watch the first Transformers movie, and it's very exciting. You watch the next three, and they all blend together. You can do this pretty easily with any movie marathon. Sit down and watch Iron Man 3, Captain America 2 and 3, and Avengers 1 and 2. By the end, the plots and storylines all blend together. If, instead, you break things up and watch other movies or take a break between them of a few months, you allow the memorably elements to be memorable. I feel like you can't do that with 4e because of the way monsters are built.
Now, yes, you may find 4e's monsters to be distinctive enough, but I certainly did not. I found that they all followed the same template, and that got very dull after awhile. And from the discussions I've had, the sentiment was shared in my playgroup. By the end, I felt like there were only really 5 monsters in the game: Brute, Artillery, Soldier, Controller, and Skirmisher/Lurker (which often played the same, IMX). Everything else was just whatever damage type they dealt and whatever 1 round or save ends rider effects their abilities had. The stats were otherwise basically locked to the CR of the creature. Toward the end of my group's play in 4e, the only distinction the players sought was: "What role is this monster?" That was the only really useful "hidden" information. Once you knew that, the tactical choices were pretty obvious and, therefore, not particularly difficult.
You don't have to agree with me. I'm not proving things deductively here. I'm stating my opinion, and relating my experience.
I really don't feel like it's out of line to expect that, unless I'm citing references from the books or quoting others to reinforce my argument that I need to explicitly and repeatedly state that I'm relating my personal opinion. There is some burden for that determination placed on the reader. Yes, it can be more clear when someone uses the phrase, "In my opinion," but that's not a rhetorical requirement for an opinion. Frankly, it should have been obvious that I was speaking my opinion. Firstly because this is an inherently opinion-based topic just going by the subject alone, and secondly from my first sentence: "See, I find this really interesting because I completely agree with you, but your reasoning is why I dislike 4e's monsters and prefer 5e's." I've literally described what I'm talking about as my likes and preferences. I don't think it's reasonable to complain that I'm stating my opinions as facts. That's either quoting out of context, not reading my post, or ignoring the topic.
I did not find 4e's powers easy to parse. I found that you had to read very carefully to make sure you got all the effects of each ability, and you had to do it on each creature. It was particularly frustrating because all the ability descriptions look identical, but the effects are a small line of text. I distinctly recall encounters where the Artillery, Brute, and Solider of the same creature had very different rider effects for abilities that otherwise do the same thing. You may not find that confusing or complicated, but it was to me and to my play group. I remember one of our first encounters where every creature was mistakenly given the rider effect from the Artillery because that's what the DM read first and he assumed they would all be the same. I remember several times throughout play where a player would stop and say something like, "Wait, is this the one with the DOT, or the one with the push?"
And yes, when I have the spells in the PHB roughly memorized and that's one of the reason why I find that 5e is much easier. That's exactly the point I was making. I know the effects of the spells in the PHB (in both 3.x and 5e), so a spell listing is actually a useful shorthand for a large list of abilities to me. Additionally, as I said above in my response to pemerton, the DM isn't the only person at the table who knows the ability. The rest of the table can help out, since there's always a few copies of the PHB at hand and more than one player at my table (6-8 players) will probably know the spell's effects. And, again, if I want to tweak a spell list it's very easy to do since the PHB has a bunch of powers that are roughly equivalent in effect power. Furthermore, you don't have this situation where the powers of the PCs are completely distinct from those of the NPCs. I never liked the fact that what NPCs had access to was so stripped down compared to the PCs, while simultaneously several NPCs of player races had access to abilities that had no peer among the powers PCs had access to. I understand why that was -- it was impossible to do otherwise in 4e given the amount of crunch PCs had -- but it challenged my suspension of disbelief.
Again, I'm not trying to prove something deductively here. I'm stating my opinion and relating my experience and explaining the problems that we had. And I shouldn't have to say that at all.
Similar Threads
