D&D 5E Low CRs and "Boring" Monsters: Ogre

[Imaro]

Picking the easiest thing I could find, 4 1st level fighters with dueling fighting style, long sword, mail, shield, I did some test runs myself. The fighters have 16 str and 16 con. The fighters do amazing damage for being 1st level and wielding a one-handed weapon, 1d8+5 (9.5 avg). They also have a very high AC 17. Their attack bonus is +5 and so need a 10 to hit the bandit captain while he needs a 12 to hit them.

Once per round, the bandit captain can make one 10 or 11 attack roll miss with his parry ability.

The four basic fighters are amazing. I think the result would be similar with GWF/greatsword group with 2 less AC but damage average increased from 9.5 to 11.3.

Basically, the fighters just do too much damage. With dueling they do a minimum of 6 damage per hit and just chew through the bandit captain, even if he has decent AC and good HP.

I think high AC may be underrated by people (well, me) and, wow, does a simple martial guy put out lots of damage. 4x9.5 average is 38 for a party of four vs. 18.5 of the Bandit Captain.

I'm sure there are other groupings of PCs where the Bandit Captain would do better (like anything squishier), but, like the Ogre, he can't stand up to 2x damage. Plus, with 13 hp the fighter needs 2-3 hits to go down instead of 1 like a wizard might.

The Ogre, on the other hand, is still really weak for a CR2 creature.

Just a quick question... how are you arriving at a +5 to damage?

 

[Sacrosanct]

Actually, no. The flavor text says that an ogre teams up with other cruel humanoids whenever possible. I think that was @Sacrosanct's point about ignoring the flavor text.

It absolutely makes sense for an ogre to have a bunch of goblin "underlings", or to be an underling itself for a giant.

Edited to add: Ninjad by moments.

I for one think it's quite humorous that he's saying that literally what is described under the ogre's entry is "tonally inconsistent with the point of an ogre".

 

[guachi]

Imaro - Dueling fighting style gives +2 damage combined with the +3 from 16 Strength.

I don't know if I randomly picked a really tough fight, though with what Hemlock has done it doesn't look like Mr. Simple-Fighter with a sword/shield is much different than some other martial combination. High AC + good damage = easy win.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

*snip* I think high AC may be underrated by people (well, me) and, wow, does a simple martial guy put out lots of damage. *snip*

It's not just you. The Internet conventional wisdom heavily overvalues DPR, and undervalues defenses including crowd control, grappling, mobility, and AC. This is partly because DPR is easier to calculate in isolation, and partly because defense is a little harder to use sometimes (e.g. mobility or hiding doesn't help the party as a whole much unless everyone is fairly mobile/stealthy).

5E's designers made a game where it's pretty hard to double your offensive output and really quite easy to double your durability. This means that if you want to kill really powerful monsters, you'll get more bang for your buck out of a good offense and a stellar defense (e.g. Paladin/Sorcerer/Warlock with AC 20, Devil's Sight + Darkness (concentration), Shield spell, and Agonizing Eldritch Blast) than you will from going all-out offense (e.g. Paladin of Vengeance/Warlock who burns all of his spell slots on high-level Smites with two-weapon fighting).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It absolutely makes sense for an ogre to have a bunch of goblin "underlings", or to be an underling itself for a giant.

I'm not seeing that description anywhere in the DM basic rules document. Even if you take it as a given, though, it's not thematically appropriate for the ogre to be the one applying crowd-control while the goblins wail on the party with their short swords. If anything, the goblins should be the ones holding down the party (though use of the Help action) while the ogre smashes them. The flavor text for ogres boils down to "Ogre smash!"

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'm not seeing that description anywhere in the DM basic rules document. Even if you take it as a given, though, it's not thematically appropriate for the ogre to be the one applying crowd-control while the goblins wail on the party with their short swords. If anything, the goblins should be the ones holding down the party (though use of the Help action) while the ogre smashes them. The flavor text for ogres boils down to "Ogre smash!"

The text about working with other humanoids is from the Monster Manual. And ultimately, you can play ogres however you want, but according to the text in the MM it is not strange for them to be found working with others.

 

[Dualazi]

Yes he did. He said there isn't any other option an ogre would take other than it's base attack, based on what I'm assuming is metagaming DPR. That's simply false.

I thought I did a good job getting this across earlier, or maybe I just assumed people grasped it from the opening statements of the thread, but this is a RAW discussion. In the base ogre's statblock, there is nothing unique, be it resistances, abilities, or secondary effects. There are few, if any, effective options to be found as a result of the ogre's stablock. As others have already shown, you can't even throw the cow by the rules, and if you houserule that away, you also have to houserule away the terrible damage. If you want to houserule cows and impalement and whatever, that's great. I don't doubt it makes your players have more fun. But all that is from you disregarding the rules, which is a tacit admission that the ogre isn't interesting enough with that. Basically...

the only reason an ogre would do the same base attack over and over is if there is no other reasonable option to the DM.

...is the complaint. That by the actual rules, not just hand-waving, they have few other options that are worthwhile.

No one is saying you can't ever have an interesting encounter with them, with the caveat that the DM has to go out of the way to do so. That's the problem here, that Wizards is ostensibly paid to design quality monsters, and the ogre isn't one of them. If I wanted to draft my own ogre with more options I certainly can, but that takes extra time and effort that really should have been conserved by a better product being offered by the professionals.

Maybe a javelin wasn't readily available. This is what I keep trying to get through, and apparently it's falling on deaf ears. The environment of the encounter matters.

Sure. Boring creature+cool environment can be a cool fight, but it's better if it's cool creature+cool environment, which isn't the case. They're independent of each other.

And what you keep refusing to acknowledge is that flavor does impart a functional difference. Flavor is what sets the encounter, it tells you how the monster will behave, how it will act, and in what types of settings it will be found. Those are all things that have a real and functional impact in the combat encounter unless you're playing arena style D&D. Since hill giants are literally meant to fill the role of "bigger ogre", there's not a whole lot of functional difference other than having the higher stats of being a larger and tougher creature. But there is another difference in that hill giants try to emulate the culture of those around them. So a hill giant will most likely be encountered in a different environment than an ogre, who just wanders around from place to place when the food runs try. The DMG gives two example of hill giants trying to live in trees and building dwellings with doors and windows. So even with two creatures that are intended to be very similar, that is still a functional difference because it impacts game play.

So what's the difference if the PCs decide to fight one? When it clambers out of its tree, what beside the environment makes it an interesting encounter? Anything?

If I've been saying that (mechanical details aren't important and a good roleplayer only needs fluff) all thread, then I suppose it's easy for you to find one quote of me arguing that the mechanical details aren't important and that good roleplayers only need flavor text. Just one. I'll wait. What you will find is me saying the fluff is equally important, but that's not the same as saying mechanical details aren't, or that good role players only need fluff is it?

Oh, you've never outright stated it, just repeatedly implied it by saying D&D without role-playing is a board game. What's interesting to me with this is you're willing to bend over backwards to try and show how you can houserule environmental effects, changing the mechanical rules, but are completely married to the fluff idea that they have a troupe of people with them. If you can change one you can change the other, and I would rather the ogre's statblock be good in as many situations as possible.

You argued that the flavor text doesn't add anything to combat. And that is blatantly false. How a monster behaves, how it reacts, and it's motivations affect how it handles combat because those things drive every decision, in or out of combat. it's a direct impact to combat.

It can be freely changed from table to table, there's no guarantee that it'll be used. For instance, every sentence about Maglubiyet in the MM is a waste of space for me personally, because he's not a god in my setting. The difference between fluff and mechanics is that fluff is under no requirement to be balanced. Having ogres have a different society or organization is not as at risk to kill off players as a poorly adjudicated house-rule you needed because of barren stat blocks.

I'd like there to be a compromise, because I do enjoy a lot of fluff. I've frequently bought books that have seen 0 use mechanically because I needed inspiration, but when I roll up a random encounter, I'd like it to work out the gate without me having to comb over every foe to iron out the kinks.
[MENTION=6778479]Shadowdweller00[/MENTION]

What's funny is all those 4e examples are present in 5e, again sometimes on the same monster (when they just lazily slap spellcasting on them) and some of them, like the longbow attack, have just as many rolls as in 5e. There's a litany of monsters in the MM with poison additions to their attacks, which is one of the reasons dwarves were rated so highly initially, and moving around who is rolling the dice is of little consequence to the resolution.

What 5e has done is go back to a dichotomy of brainless no-option offerings like the ogre, and ones with a plethora of options (casters). I prefer 4e's approach, where there was a more even spread, since if you look at creatures like the archmage, what are realistically the chances you go through even half of that spell list?

The parapet complaint is completely legit though.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

@Shadowdweller00

What's funny is all those 4e examples are present in 5e, again sometimes on the same monster (when they just lazily slap spellcasting on them) and some of them, like the longbow attack, have just as many rolls as in 5e. There's a litany of monsters in the MM with poison additions to their attacks, which is one of the reasons dwarves were rated so highly initially, and moving around who is rolling the dice is of little consequence to the resolution.

Not remotely. The number of rolls is mostly irrelevant to in-game complication. The ability to predict or derive the numbers quickly withOUT needing to flip back to the monster listing IS. Bounded accuracy means the bonuses in 5e tend not to be widely dissimilar. Individual monsters in an encounter group do not have wildly different general modifiers due to effective level (CR) differences. Attack ability DCs and Spell DCs are generally consistent and there's not a completely separate save ends mechanic. Bonuses and Maluses are consequential with the advantage/disadvantage mechanic, though 5e does have a few mostly meaningless adverse conditions. Spell-based special abilities, which you call lazy, have the advantage of being standardized, not requiring rote memorization of monster-specifics; on top of which there are not a ridiculous number of monster variants with unrelated abilities.

 

[Harzel]

I thought I did a good job getting this across earlier, or maybe I just assumed people grasped it from the opening statements of the thread, but this is a RAW discussion. In the base ogre's statblock, there is nothing unique, be it resistances, abilities, or secondary effects. There are few, if any, effective options to be found as a result of the ogre's stablock. As others have already shown, you can't even throw the cow by the rules, and if you houserule that away, you also have to houserule away the terrible damage. If you want to houserule cows and impalement and whatever, that's great. I don't doubt it makes your players have more fun. But all that is from you disregarding the rules, which is a tacit admission that the ogre isn't interesting enough with that.

My reading is that improvised actions and improvised damage are RAW. The section on Actions at the beginning of the MM points back to the "actions available to all creatures" in the PHB, which includes improvised actions. Do you disagree?

 

[Dualazi]

My reading is that improvised actions and improvised damage are RAW. The section on Actions at the beginning of the MM points back to the "actions available to all creatures" in the PHB, which includes improvised actions. Do you disagree?

I don't disagree. The ogre (or any creature) can dash, hide, grapple etc. or improvise weapons, the problem is they're frequently so bad at it (by RAW) that it's a non-option. The cow example used earlier is a great example of that. Even if you house-rule that it can be thrown, it would be an improvised range weapon, which would make it have garbage range and damage. If you go by the printed ruleset it turns a cool encounter opener into a free turn for the players.

Not remotely. The number of rolls is mostly irrelevant to in-game complication. The ability to predict or derive the numbers quickly withOUT needing to flip back to the monster listing IS. Bounded accuracy means the bonuses in 5e tend not to be widely dissimilar. Individual monsters in an encounter group do not have wildly different general modifiers due to effective level (CR) differences. Attack ability DCs and Spell DCs are generally consistent and there's not a completely separate save ends mechanic. Bonuses and Maluses are consequential with the advantage/disadvantage mechanic, though 5e does have a few mostly meaningless adverse conditions. Spell-based special abilities, which you call lazy, have the advantage of being standardized, not requiring rote memorization of monster-specifics; on top of which there are not a ridiculous number of monster variants with unrelated abilities.

By the end of 4e, you could fit the monster math on a business card, so no, at a given level it was not a strenuous feat to figure out what the hit roll was. In fact, that was a major complaint people had about the system; that they felt they didn't progress and instead remained static. Spell DC is no more or less consistent than this, since it's still dependent on the creature's stats and expertise, which is exactly what 4e used.

Instead of memorizing monster options, you instead memorize spells, then you realize you have to look them up again if there's any change in their slot expenditure, or if you forget anything about them, since they aren't printed alongside the actual creature. Spells also lack granularity, as the ones that can't be upped in slot level result in a weird situation where every creature that can teleport does so in exactly the same fashion and distance. This is why slapping spells like Misty Step on monsters in place of a teleport ability or move speed is lazy.