D&D (2024) Its till just me or is the 2024 MM heavily infused by more 4e influences?

[Charlaquin]

Alrighty. I think the issue then is, more or less, that you're going to need to have a HUGE menu of abilities to choose from if you want to both (a) have those abilities actually be interesting to face off against, and (b) get even a reasonable accuracy of knowing what X monster is with bare-minimum description + seeing some abilities. That's not necessarily a problem per se, but it does induce combinatoric explosion in the testing of these abilities, because now you need (to invent a number) 100 genuinely different monster abilities (counting say 2 "blank" abilities so that not all monsters have 4 distinct abilities), and 100 choose 4 = 3921225. Even if you only need to actually test a tenth of one percent of that...you'd be testing almost as many monsters as were printed during all of 4th edition. Just to get things off the ground.

I think this would be a significant problem if we insisted on every creature having completely unique abilities, but as mentioned, that’s not really what I’m suggesting.

Oh, a zillion reasons.

The party has gone from an arid/desert area to a forested/woodland area (perhaps a cork forest, since cork oak tends to like dry climates), so you want to adapt a creature to that environment but still have it be identifiable as that specific type of creature.

You want to craft a red dragon that was infected with vampirism (something that actually cropped up in a game I was in, though not a D&D game.)

You want to distinguish Red Wizards of Thay from Candlekeep Bibliomancers from Rashemi "Witches" from...etc., even though all three might favor evocation magic.

A magically-created volcano has been growing in an area, corrupting the creatures around with elemental fire and earth. You want them to still be clearly recognizable as whatever they were before that corruption, but also identifiable as a corrupted creature of the appropriate type.

You want to represent subtle but meaningful cultural/behavioral differences between different populations, e.g. two different tribes of ogres who practice both warfare and magic differently.

I would call all of these examples of modifying a stat block to make it feel more like the thing it’s supposed to represent. You’ve decided to represent something other than the bog standard version of itself, and therefore modified its stat block to represent that. This is not only possible under the model I’m suggesting, but necessary. Otherwise stat block wouldn’t feel like what you’re using it to represent.

I'm sure I could come up with more, but I think you get the point. Having a monster's statblock be totally inviolate, unalterable under any circumstances whatsoever lest it become not-immediately-identifiable, is a pretty serious limitation on creativity. But maybe we're talking past each other? It sounds like you see it as "ah, this monster is perfect in its identifiability with what it has, why would I want to change it?" But what I'm saying is that the identifiability isn't perfect, it's fragile. To change even one ability would make it unidentifiable.

I mean, yeah, being entirety unable to change stat blocks would be very limiting, but I don’t think that would be a problem. Reskinning something without making changes to it would not really be an option, but customizing a stat block to make the creature better represent what you need it to for a specific purpose should be entirely possible.

Okay, here's a good example of what I mean:

One of my favorite 4e combats ever--which was in a science-fantasy homebrew setting--was us fighting a handful of baddies who had turrets that could pop up, shoot us, and then retract to pop out somewhere else.

After the fight, the DM told us that he had reskinned those turrets from some kind of hopping-frog minion.

By the standard you had set here, it sounded like such a combat not only wouldn't have been possible, but should have been awful, because we should have instantly realized that these weren't, and could not be, turrets. We should have immediately known that he had reskinned something, which would almost surely have pulled all of us out of the experience and made it blatantly obvious how artificial it all was.

Well, I’d say any frog stat block that can so seamlessly be reskinned to a turret is probably not doing a very good job of feeling like a frog in play. So, in a hypothetical world where the standard I’m advocating for was upheld, I don’t imagine your DM would have been able to run that combat without having made any changes to the frog stat block. But it sounds like the part of the frog stat block they needed was that they could “pop up,” which seems both like an ability that would be quite good at making a stat block feel frog-like, and that would be pretty reasonable to translate to these pop-up turrets. I do imagine in this world, your DM might have needed to tweak the frog sat block a bit though, maybe giving them a ranged attack? It’s hard to know without knowing what these frogs’ stat blocks were and how your DM was using them.

If that isn't what you meant from what you said, perhaps I have simply been barking up the wrong tree. But it really does seem like the example above, taking a monster as-is but repurposing it for a different aesthetic and context, should be unworkable and bad in the design paradigm you've proposed.

Well like I said, I don’t think it’s realistically possible to make every monster perfectly identifiable by its abilities alone. I’m suggesting more of a guiding principle than an ironclad restriction. But, I think that generally speaking, if the this guiding principle is followed, straight reskinning would not be likely to have very satisfying results. But it shouldn’t be hard to make small changes from an existing stat block to make it represent something else, to very satisfying results.

 

[Hussar]

I think it would probably help to be a bit more specific about how you would achieve a monster "feeling" like a specific monster. I do believe 4e used this a lot for it's monster design. Some monsters were meant to be really slippery in combat, so, they would have extra movement before or after an attack which didn't trigger enemy attacks. Some monsters were meant to feel like real powerhouses, so, they had attacks that pushed an enemy. That sort of thing. Plus, the whole "striker" "skirmisher" "brute" etc thing really did manage to distinguish monsters from each other.

Which, because the monsters were designed around a specific "feel" meant that if you reskinned the monster, you would reskin a monster with a similar feel. No one reskins a giant frog as a turret. That's just silly. But, you might reskin an artillery monster as another artillery monster. Sure, that means it's harder to reskin anything as anything else, but, within a given theme of a monster, reskinning is pretty easy.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I like this experiment. Assuming that the setting depicted in the recent D&D movie is representative of WotC's vision for standard modern D&D setting assumptions (and I do), how suffused with magic would that world feel to the average inhabitant of, say, any official setting in the TSR era save obvious exceptions (like Planescape or Spelljammer)?

Pretty darn suffused, I'd say. And this isn't a knock against the film. I liked it quite a bit.

Maybe there is a simple explanation. 50 years ago, expectations were different.

Back then, in the real world, communicating on the internet from everywhere was impossible. Medicine can do things that were impossible back then and so on. So compared to 50 years ago we live in a world full of magic.

This probably has an effect on the Fantasy World.

Don't kniw something? Look up in the internet. Just cast a spell...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But it shouldn’t be hard to make small changes from an existing stat block to make it represent something else, to very satisfying results.

I guess I just don't really understand that. If it's identifiable as it is, how can small changes make enough of a difference for it to not be identifiable as that thing anymore?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Popularity with the fans is not my issue, or the topic we're discussing. In 1e and 2e, FR, while popular, did not overwhelm D&D like it has since (mostly 3e andc5e actually, 4e felt more grounded setting-wise). I'm not talking about what's popular. I'm talking about what D&D currently assumes as far setting defaults vis a vis prevalence of magic. And that has gone up over the years. A lot.

FR was popular from the outset. and was high magic from the outset (look at the old gold box video games). Krynn leaned heavily into player character exceptionalism. Magic is rare - apart from the PCs, and the baddies. There were some people trying to play Greyhawk as a low magic setting, but that depended on player character exceptionalism too. A ton of high level wizards came from Gygax's own campaign.

"Core D&D used to be low magic" is simply not true. It's always been readily available, at least so far at the PCs are concerned. What Eberron did is try to remove player character exceptionalism, by saying "what if the whole world had access to the same magic that the PCs do".

Runequest was kind of the low magic fantasy RPG in the 80s, although that did have PC ducks. And it explains why other RPGs took the high magic route. Pretty much all PCs in Runequest were Conan clones (even the ducks). All they could do was hit each other with swords. They didn't have many choices as to what they could do with a fight (you could target specific body parts), and one PC was pretty much the same as another.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I guess I just don't really understand that. If it's identifiable as it is, how can small changes make enough of a difference for it to not be identifiable as that thing anymore?

Most D&D monsters are only identifiable by their description. There are a couple of exceptions, such as the gelatinous cube.

 

[Charlaquin]

I guess I just don't really understand that. If it's identifiable as it is, how can small changes make enough of a difference for it to not be identifiable as that thing anymore?

Small changes would make it identifiable as a slightly different thing instead.

Maybe an example. Here’s a custom stat block with the “personally identifying information” so to speak removed. See if you can guess what it represents.

(EDIT: Sorry, I forgot to put in the reach for “Attack 2.” It should just be 5 feet.)

If you can’t already guess just from reading the stat block, some additional context is that you would always encounter these in large groups, you’d be unlikely to fight fewer than a dozen at a time.

Now, as recognizable as this monster would probably be just from fighting it, I bet I could turn it into something else pretty easily. Imagine, for example, that I tripled the health, increased speed to 40 feet, gave “Attack 1” a 15-foot reach and had it drag the target up to 10 feet towards the monster, increased the damage on “Attack 2” to maybe 2d6, and added another melee attack that did, let’s say 1d6 slashing and 2d6 necrotic damage. There’s a pretty specific thing I’m using those changes to represent, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you can’t guess exactly what it is (though feel free to toss a guess out if you have one!) But I certainly don’t imagine you’d mistake it for the thing the original stat block represents. And even if you can’t guess the reference for the altered stat block, I’m pretty confident that it would leave the exact sort of impression I would want the creature I’m referencing to leave.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Small changes would make it identifiable as a slightly different thing instead.

Maybe an example. Here’s a custom stat block with the “personally identifying information” so to speak removed. See if you can guess what it represents.

View attachment 392857
(EDIT: Sorry, I forgot to put in the reach for “Attack 2.” It should just be 5 feet.)

If you can’t already guess just from reading the stat block, some additional context is that you would always encounter these in large groups, you’d be unlikely to fight fewer than a dozen at a time.

Now, as recognizable as this monster would probably be just from fighting it, I bet I could turn it into something else pretty easily. Imagine, for example, that I tripled the health, increased speed to 40 feet, gave “Attack 1” a 15-foot reach and had it drag the target up to 10 feet towards the monster, increased the damage on “Attack 2” to maybe 2d6, and added another melee attack that did, let’s say 1d6 slashing and 2d6 necrotic damage. There’s a pretty specific thing I’m using those changes to represent, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you can’t guess exactly what it is (though feel free to toss a guess out if you have one!) But I certainly don’t imagine you’d mistake it for the thing the original stat block represents. And even if you can’t guess the reference for the altered stat block, I’m pretty confident that it would leave the exact sort of impression I would want the creature I’m referencing to leave.

It's pretty easily recognisable as undead and zombie-ish. There are better choices to reskin if you want to make something less undead.

 

[Corinnguard]

It was pretty annoying, as the only real spellcaster in the party (Fighter, Barbarian, Monk, and my Celestial Warlock).

It was the reverse situation for me when I first started playing 5e. The lone fighter in a party of spellcasters (Wild Magic Sorcerer, Bladesinger Wizard, Circle of the Wildfire Druid, College of Eloquence Bard).

 

[CreamCloud0]

No, you can play 5e without any magic on the character side. I have done, it is quite fun to play that way actually.

doesn't going 'totally no magic' on characters restrict you to like 4 classes(or 3 depending on how far you stretch the definition of magic) with access to barely half of their subclasses?