D&D 4E Keith Baker on 4E! (The Hellcow responds!)

[Lizard]

Like all my monsters, when Bodaks aren't being sliced up by PCs they spend their time backstage at the craft services table.

I am a much harsher taskmaster than you.

Perhaps the bodak wasn't the best example, but we've only seen a few official monsters. Cut me some slack. Point being, any monster power/ability/gimmick that works ONLY on the 1% (if that) of the world with PC class levels is SOD-breaking.

Like many people of my advancing years, my early adolescence was shaped by Star Wars...before it was even 'Episode IV'. It was just 'Star Wars'. Anyway, the most important line in the movie, to me, was "Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars..." Why was that important? Because we weren't ever told what the frack the Clone Wars were or why they mattered or anything. The characters didn't stop to explain things to each other that were part of their shared history. It was, to my 12 year old mind, mind blowing. The world existed outside the movie screen! The universe extended beyond the tiny slice of it we were watching. That long-ago realization has shaped almost all of my creative work. There are infinite stories to be told in any good universe, and just because we're focused on one doesn't mean the others aren't happening, somewhere.

Remember the old SW RPG ads? The "What's this guy's story?" ads? Those were great. They captured that exact spirit, that sense of "Everyone has a tale, even that guy who appeared for two frames in Episode V."

I don't get that feeling from 4e, the feeling that the game exists to model a world. It's not "all the world's a stage", but, rather, "You see this stage? That's the world. There's nothing beyond it."

There's nothing which can keep me from using the 4e rules to run the kinds of games I prefer, but I'd rather work with the rules than against them.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'm going on designer statements that monsters are assumed to 'live' for a single encounter, and are balanced for that and that alone. As to whether anything is specifically broken, that will probably show up only in Actual Play TM. I am concerned over the lack of healing surges for monsters, but there may be rules in the DMG for dealing with what happens when a PC or NPC uses a healing-surge dependent power on a creature which doesn't have them. (The bodak, for example, 'eats' healing surges, a nifty mechanic. But if only PCs have them, how does the bodak feed when there's no PCs to eat?)

I think "problematic" monsters would be Solo monsters. But then, ever tried to run a party with a (large or larger) Dragon as "pet"/"befriended ally" in 3E? It probably would be next to impossible to balance (do Dragons even have an ECL/LA listed?), and very hard to run in any real combat encounters. I guess the "running in combat encounters" thing will get easier in 4E. And maybe even the balancing thing (just subtract the Dragons XP from an encounters total XP. But then ensure that the Dragon is actually engaged )

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

"The DM can make it up" is always an answer to any question about any rules in any game, but, is it the BEST answer?

Depends. For some things, yes. Others, no.

I mean, you don't want the DM making up stats for monsters randomly. It sucks to fight the BBEG after an entire campaign of buildup and find out the DM set his AC and hitpoints so low that he died in the first round of combat without being able to act. So, you want a working formula for the difficulty of monsters.

Do I want the DM to spend all his prep time running combats between the Bodak and the other residents of the dungeons to see if he can successfully defeat them or if he dies in the process just so that he can realistically model which creatures are left alive when we decide to go back to town for a week before returning to the dungeon? No. In this case, I'd much rather the DM just "make it up".

A PC mind-controls a foe and sends the foe to fight the Bodak. The Bodak decides to eat some healing surges. The PC, noting that his forced ally is about to die from other wounds, uses a power to heal said ally (to keep him distracting the bodak as long as possible). Does the ally have healing surges left? "He does if the DM wants him to" is a valid answer, but not a good one. It puts the DM into deciding the conclusion of the story, not just the beginning of it.

I can't tell you what the rules are. However, rest assured that there ARE rules for situations like this and you won't have to just make them up. If it involves combat, there are likely rules for it in the book.

Outside of combat or things that don't really qualify as "combat", making things up generally works faster and better. Similar to the example of the Bodak above and whether you'd actually roll the dice to run combats between the Bodak and the monsters in the dungeon...you wouldn't in probably either edition. It doesn't involve the PCs directly.

Your concern as a DM is strictly: How does this affect the players and the storyline? And there are a LOT of metagame factors that need to be considered. If you decide that the Bodak, left alone for a week would kill everyone in the dungeon, are you depriving the PCs a bunch of interesting combats that you put into your adventure for a reason? Are you making the adventure no longer give out the right amount of XP or lowering the difficulty to the point where the adventure isn't a challenge anymore?

 

[mach1.9pants]

That 4e should have said "Players should begin at third level, allowing for a lot of variety and multiclassing options; first and second level should be use for modeling weaker NPCs or if the players desire a challenge. The game presumes a third level starting point for players." Then balanced the game around it.

That would have been a very good compromise, even if it involved more work.

 

[Clawhound]

There was a point in learning to design creatures that I discovered the "fudge the stats to make the monster work" step. At that point, all the internal consistency of 3e became absurdist. Why do we have all of these complicated rules if you add in a steps that add up to creator fiat? If you are going to design a creature, why not just design something that works in the first place in 1/4 the time and skip all the fiddly bits?

That's what keeps getting me. 3e said, "All built by rules," but once you peeked below the covers, you found everyone bypassing the rules. When I learned that 4e would go back to "creatures by fiat", I was much happier. They are now being honest.

 

[Benimoto]

Perhaps the bodak wasn't the best example, but we've only seen a few official monsters. Cut me some slack. Point being, any monster power/ability/gimmick that works ONLY on the 1% (if that) of the world with PC class levels is SOD-breaking.

That I can agree with. I hope there some kinds of rules for modeling monsters as allies in a fight, including healing surges, etc. I suspect there are, even if they're something totally different than the PC rules, like all monster get 1 healing surge per encounter or something.

I agree that 4e seems to center on the PCs a lot more, but I don't think that's all bad. To use Keith's argument before, the parity between NPCs and PCs in 3rd edition meant that if you wanted an NPC to have 1 skill, that NPC had to have 2-6 skills, corresponding hit dice feats, etc. In 4e, it seems that there's no reason why you can't flesh out an NPC with the full "player treatment" if you want to, just that you don't have to if you don't need to.

In other words, if you want to, you (probably) still can tell the story of "that guy" if you want to take a different path from the movies. But, if your D&D game does follow the movies, the DM isn't stuck making up a full statblock for every guy that appears onscreen for 2 seconds in Episode V. I mean, George Lucas didn't, and he still created a whole believable world in the Star Wars movies. Why should the DM have to?

 

[Lizard]

Your concern as a DM is strictly: How does this affect the players and the storyline? And there are a LOT of metagame factors that need to be considered. If you decide that the Bodak, left alone for a week would kill everyone in the dungeon, are you depriving the PCs a bunch of interesting combats that you put into your adventure for a reason? Are you making the adventure no longer give out the right amount of XP or lowering the difficulty to the point where the adventure isn't a challenge anymore?

Well, in my case, it's more, "If the bodak were alone in the dungeon, it would have killed everyone. The players, being cunning, will notice this. Thus, armed with the knowledge of what the bodak could do, I must set things up so it can't have done this -- perhaps it's contained somehow, and the PCs will inadvertantly break its imprisonment, or it will be deliberately freed." I find it's usually trivial to set up a dungeon-type environment which has all the encounters you want without having the players ask "Wait, why didn't the black pudding in room 1 eat the orc in room 2?" Because my players will ask that, and assume I have an answer, and that the answer is relevant to the plot.

As a real-play example...I want a minor demon guarding a treasure vault under an abandoned wizard's guild. I don't want the demon wandering the halls or teleporting away. Simple solution -- it's bound to the room outside the vault, empowered to kill anyone who doesn't know the password. There are no questions as to how the demon got there (the wizards summoned it), what it's doing there (they wanted a guardian which showed off what amazingly powerful wizards they were), or why it didn't kill everyone else (it was magically compelled). From my desire to have a demon to my setting it up so it was consistent within the very loose frameworks of high fantasy was about 15 seconds, but those 15 seconds of extra thought make for, IMO, a much more enjoyable game.

 

[Mallus]

...but I see it as a lot more work, because I have to make up a lot more rules on the fly for all the things it doesn't cover in the name of "simplicity".

Situational rulings != rules.

(I've always found that the game runs much smoother when you make that distinction.)

 

[Dunamin]

Well, in my case, it's more, "If the bodak were alone in the dungeon, it would have killed everyone. The players, being cunning, will notice this. Thus, armed with the knowledge of what the bodak could do, I must set things up so it can't have done this -- perhaps it's contained somehow, and the PCs will inadvertantly break its imprisonment, or it will be deliberately freed." I find it's usually trivial to set up a dungeon-type environment which has all the encounters you want without having the players ask "Wait, why didn't the black pudding in room 1 eat the orc in room 2?" Because my players will ask that, and assume I have an answer, and that the answer is relevant to the plot.

I run through the same concerns in my games, though I don't see why 4E should be less capable of handling this. The bodak is still very much capable of killing other monsters with its death gaze - the fact that this attack also may drain healing surges does not may make it less dangerous to critters who aren't PCs.

I could see a problem if a monster was designed in such a way that its only offensive capability lies in a power to drain healing surges or action points - properties that pertain mostly to PCs - but I'm sure the designers wouldn't make this mistake.

 

[Spatula]

When I learned that 4e would go back to "creatures by fiat"

Except that they are not.