Mearls Monster Makeover: Beholder

[Justin Bacon]

I really don't understand the people who don't like it. It's so much better.

I'd call it a step in the right direction accompanied by two steps in the wrong direction.

Getting rid of the unnecessary special case rules? Good idea.

Adding a new special case rule? Bad idea.

Stripping out the antimagic cone? Unnecessary.

And, in general, I see in this redesign a desire to get rid of save-or-die effects. I can get behind that. But the way to do that, as I said earlier in the thread, is to fix the save-or-die effects -- not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Let me put it this way: The problem with flesh-to-stone is not that you're turning someone into a statue. The ability to turn someone into a stone statue is a paradigm of the fantasy genre, after all. The problem is that flesh-to-stone (like other save-or-die mechanics) sidesteps the standard damage mechanics and reduces the game to a single die roll: Make it or your character is effectively dead (barring supernatural salvation).

The fix is not to get rid of the effect (turning someone to stone), it's to change the mechanic which gives you that result. (Someone else's suggestion of having the effect deal Dex damage is excellent. Very similar to my Con damage solution to other save-or-die effects. It's been incorporated into my house rules already.)

The thing that concerns me even more is that Mearls seems to believe that charm effects and sleep spells are save-or-die effects. That proffered belief is, frankly, enough to make me question my generally high opinion of Mearls as a designer. It's completely nutty. Those effects have limited durations and cannot directly cause a character's permanent demise/removal from play.

I'm even more concerned when this over-reaction is taken in tangent with the "characters should never suffer lingering consequences from an encounter" re-design of the rust monster.

Although, now that I think about it, the rust monster re-design suffers from essentially the same problems as the beholder re-design:

1. Arguing that certain special case rules are problematic, and then replacing them with a different set of special case rules. In this case, the SRD rust monster is allowed to bypass the normal rules for damaging items. Mearls doesn't like it, so he replaces it with a different way of bypassing the normal rules for damaging items.

2. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater in response to a save-or-die effect. In this case, the SRD rust monster's save-or-die ability is targeted at equipment instead of characters, but the effect is the same: Make a save or we'll bypass the normal damage rules to destroy you.

Mearls attempts to solve the problem by removing the permanent effects of the rust monster's attack. But, in doing so, he's made two incredibly stupid decisions as a designer:

First, from a flavor stand-point, his mechanics no longer model rust. Rust causes permanent damage. Rusted metal doesn't magically heal itself ten minutes later.

Second, from a mechanical standpoint, you've made it more difficult for a rust monster to permanently damage items than for an ogre to do so (by sundering the item). You've taken the rust monster's schtick away because you're worried about items being permanently destroyed... calmly ignoring the rules for sundering items which are still found in the PHB and available for everyone to use.

The correct way to fix the rust monster (by removing his save-or-die ability) is simple:

On a successful melee touch attack, the rust monster's rusting ability deals 1d10 points of damage to a single metal object carried or worn by the target, bypassing that object's hardness.

... done.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Some really good points about changing the mechanics of "save or die" effects, Justin. I could totally see doing something like that for Flesh to Stone- you could make it a gradual effect for a failure (within "X" rounds, you will turn to stone; character is slowed in the meanwhile) or something.

 

[boolean]

The thing that concerns me even more is that Mearls seems to believe that charm effects and sleep spells are save-or-die effects. That proffered belief is, frankly, enough to make me question my generally high opinion of Mearls as a designer. It's completely nutty. Those effects have limited durations and cannot directly cause a character's permanent demise/removal from play.

I think Mearls is looking at things primarily at a per-encounter level. He's using save-or-die as short hand for save-or-sit-around-waiting-while-the-rest-of-the-players-finish-the encounter.

Charm, fear, sleep, and petrification are save vs. non-fun. Non-fun is bad.

 

[Justin Bacon]

The thing that concerns me even more is that Mearls seems to believe that charm effects and sleep spells are save-or-die effects. That proffered belief is, frankly, enough to make me question my generally high opinion of Mearls as a designer. It's completely nutty. Those effects have limited durations and cannot directly cause a character's permanent demise/removal from play.

I'm responding to myself here, but I wanted to broaden this point: Frankly, looking at the material appearing on the WotC site this year, I've come to the conclusion that the entire design team is spending way too much time looking at the trees and missing the forest.

This article is another good example of it: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060210a

Hmm.... The drow suck because:

(a) They have a +1 CR that you apparently don't think they should have. (Fair enough. That's theoretically an actual problem with the drow. They're certainly more powerful than a standard race, but probably not enough to support a full +1 CR.)

(b) They follow the standard CR = PC class level guidelines for humanoids, and those guidelines are busted. (Also true. I've been arguing for years that the guideline should be CR = PC class level - 2; Warrior/Adept level - 3; Commoner/Expert level - 4. But this is where they're staring at a tree (the drow) and missing the forest (the fact that the whole CR = PC class level guideline is screwed up. Trying to piecemeal in solutions to these relatively fundamental problems is sloppy design. It leads to a messy and complicated rule system.)

(c) They have a -2 to Constitution, so their hit points are gimped.

(d) They have spell resistance and darkness and these abilities cause the PCs to fail when they would otherwise succeed. (They're staring at the tree and missing the forest again: If you feel those abilities don't play well, fix the abilities. Don't nitpick the drow.)

But more worrisome, to me, is their reason for believing that spell resistance and darkness don't work well: They're not fun because they cause the PCs to fail.

What the heck are you talking about? This worrisome trend is reinforced when they analyze traps:

(a) Traps aren't fun because, if the character doesn't find them, the character will be surprised by them.

(b) Traps aren't fun because they'll make your players paranoid and your session will be consumed by characters taking 20 on Search checks.

We'll come back to the mind-boggling nature of the first assertion later, but first let us look at the layered stupidity of the second assertion:

For starters, you can't take 20 when the check carries penalties for failures. If after six years you, as a professional D&D designer, can't remember one of the most basic rules in the bloody game, you should probably be fired for gross incompetency.

Secondly, while it may consume a lot of time for the characters, resolving this type of thing doesn't actually take a lot of time for the players: They say what they want to search, they roll the check, you tell them the result. That takes... what? 10 seconds? Assuming you, as a DM, aren't being a jerk ("you said you were searching the door, but the trap was actually in the hinge, so you didn't find it"), your players won't get super nitpicky and gameplay won't bog down.

Finally, because it takes a lot of time for the characters, there are consequences for that: Monsters may stumble across them while they're doing an OCD impersonation in the hallway. The deadline they're facing to complete their tasks may be coming up. And so forth.

But, of course, monsters reacting realistically to PCs invading their lair isnt fun, according to this article, because it boils down to all the monsters in the world running into the room the PCs are standing in.

Well, sure... If your PCs are tactically incompetent, that might happen. And then they'll be dead and they'll know better next time.

The basic problem seems to be that the design team wants to support a very narrow style of play: You kick in a door, kill everything inside, and then run to the next door, kick it in, and kill everything inside.

They don't want you to be slowed down by caution because the door might be trapped. They don't want you to be slowed down because the loud noise might alert the entire compound. They don't want you to be slowed down because your equipment got damaged or because you faced a particularly debilitating encounter. (And they'll even try to speed up your mad dash from room to room by slashing the duration of buff spells.)

Nor do they want the monsters complicated by anything like an existence outside of combat, as can be seen in the next installment of this insipid series:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060223a

They boast about "fixing" the marilith so that she can't do anything except beat the out of you. Because, after all, why would you want a major demon who could raid the local graveyard and raise undead minions to serve her whims? Or desecrate the local shrine of the PC cleric's god?

Those abilities have to go. Why? Because if she can't use it in the 5 rounds between the time you kick down the door to the 10' x 10' room she's sitting in and the time you kill her, it's apparently meaningless to the design team.

And, to return to my thesis, this is another example of staring at the tree and missing the forest: Your immediate problem is that the marilith has a long list of powers, making it difficult for the DM to quickly pick out the abilities which will be most effective in a fight.

The correct solution to this problem is to introduce a suggested tactics section with the pertinent abilities. Possibly re-design the stat block to isolate those abilities most pertinent in combat. (The original division between Special Attacks and Special Qualities was a move in this direction. You could easily expand that division to include a line of "Buffs" and "Favored Attacks", with the other abilities listed elsewhere.)

The wrong thing to do is gimp the marilith's overall utility in order to pimp her out for kick-in-the-door style gaming.

I could go on: I could talk about the design team's disdain for rewarding player's choices for their character's skills (as exemplified by their desire to relegate all languages to Common). I could talk about how their short-sightedness only leads to more problems (for example, they eliminate active dungeons in which creatures move around, but then bemoan the fact that returning to already explored rooms holds no threat or interest).

Edit: Corrected my own stupid rules screw-up. That'll teach me to post at 3 AM.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

(c) They have a -2 to Constitution, so their hit points are gimped. (No they don't. You fixed that three years ago when 3.5 came out.)

Drow still have a -2 to Constitution.

 

[Cheiromancer]

Loved your post, especially this line (which I've edited a trifle):

They boast about "fixing" the marilith so that she can't do anything except beat the snot out of you. Because, after all, why would you want a major demon who could raid the local graveyard and raise undead minions to serve her whims? Or desecrate the local shrine of the PC cleric's god?

Those abilities have to go. Why? Because if she can't use it in the 5 rounds between the time you kick down the door to the 10' x 10' room she's sitting in and the time you kill her, it's apparently meaningless to the design team.

I think you can take 20 on search- it'd disable device that you can't take 20 on. I always think of someone rolling all the numbers in succession; if nothing bad happens on a 1 (like something exploding in your face) then you can continue.

Great post.

 

[wedgeski]

(b) Traps aren't fun because they'll make your players paranoid and your session will be consumed by characters taking 20 on Search checks.
...
For starters, you can't take 20 when the check carries penalties for failures. If after six years you, as a professional D&D designer, can't remember one of the most basic rules in the bloody game, you should probably be fired for gross incompetency.

You might want to review your *own* knowledge of the rules regarding searching for traps, and re-think this comment.

Secondly I'm in agreement with their assessment of random dungeon traps. They're uninteresting, mechanical, and *do* cause the game to bog down. Nothing irritates me more than when an interesting dungeon degenerates into a string of 'take 20's and Reflex saves. Big, complex obstacles which the PC's can observe, prepare for, and use their skills to circumvent make for much more satisfying gaming IMO. Random out-of-nowhere traps haven't been seen in my campaign for a long time.

In other respects, I enjoy articles like these because they give you an insight into a way of thinking that is necessarily detached from amateur designers like most of us (whether we ultimately agree, or disagree). For example, I actually might not be averse to powerful monsters whose abilities outside of combat are detailed loosely, outside the rules, allowing the DM to exercise them as he sees fit.

Take the marilith: "Powerful mariliths have been known to raise hordes of undead minions if given the opportunity and means to do so, and their inherent evil is often at the root of many apparent desecrations and blasphemies in lands where they roam." Tells me everything I need to know. If I want a marilith to invade the PC's home town with two-dozen zombies after drowning the paladin in scandal, I can do it. Who cares what spell I used?

As a DM I can make a monster do pretty much whatever I want *outside* of combat, because I have total freedom. In combat, I'm bound by fairness to apply only those abilities that reflect its CR. Out of combat, I can have it rule the world if I want.

Your mileage obviously varied.

 

[Greg K]

Sleep means you take no actions and can be coup-de-graced with ease by a weak minion.

That is the risk of being an adventurer, imo.

 

[Wolfwood2]

Right, which is why you don't trap doors and chests. You trap nondescript hallways, rooms that are designed to look like something valuable might be in them, and other places people aren't expecting traps to be.

You know, traps aren't free. Neither are minions. (Well, not always.)

Unless you're playing Tomb of Horrors, most dungeons were originally intended for creatures to be living/existing in and working in on a regular basis. Scattering traps everywhere on the assumption that someday it'll be an abandoned fortress with no active defenders doesn't make much sense.

The most efficient way to do things is to use active defenders, like guards and guard animals. Traps are there to discourage your own guards (or infiltrators pretending to be guards) from poking about where they're not supposed to be and hence reserved for stuff like inside your personal quarters and on the lock of your treasure chest and that sort of thing. (Maybe one trap on the entranceway or something to help stop someone who snuck past the gate guards.)

Trapping a nondescript hallway likely means trapping a hallway where the butler pushes the dinner tray up and down every day, and I don't see the point of that.

 

[Knight Otu]

I think you can take 20 on search- it'd disable device that you can't take 20 on.

I've always wondered why they didn't port over the "Taking 10 and 20" lines from d20 Modern to 3.5 (where it does state that you can take 20 on Search checks).