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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4225273" data-attributes="member: 710">What makes a Goblin unique from a Kobold in 3E, mechanically? The Goblin has different stat modifiers. That's it. Once you begin to add class levels, a lot of this will be lost.Unique aspects are more or less flavour - Kobolds tend to have sorcerers and tend to use traps, for example. Goblins might come in larger hordes. But mechanically, they look very similar.If you add class levels, you can provide unique experience, but this is entirely based on the class. The players will note if they fight Kobold Rogues and Sorcerers or Goblin Rangers and Clerics, but they don't link the differences to the race. If you'd give the Kobold rangers and Clerics and the Goblins Rogues and Sorcerers, they'd use the same tactics.There are ways you can change this. 3E has clearly monsters that are a lot more unique. Fighting a Beholder or fighting a Giant are two very different experiences. They have unique innate abilities, and players will have to account for them differently, entirely based on the monster, not on class levels. The reasons some monsters are unique and some are not have a lot to do with the exceptions they have built in. A Hydra can make multiple attacks even if moving, and its head regrows. A Beholder fires multiple eye rays and has a magical cone. You can multiclass as much as you want, you will not get this abilities. Monsters like these are examples of "exception based design". Normally, no one has access to antimagic cone. Beholders do. No one can just regrow his heads, and get even more then he used to. Hydras do.Dealing with a Hydra requires to find a way to deal with Regeneration (and utilize the option to cut down heads). Dealing with a Beholder requires to deal with antimagic-cones, and multiple magical attacks. You need different, unique tactics to deal with these threats.In 4E, normally, no one can shift as a minor action. Kobolds do. It might be a very tiny thing, but it is breaking the normal way things work, and thus it changes the possible tactics and creates need for new counter-tactics.</blockquote>

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