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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justin Bacon" data-source="post: 3153455" data-attributes="member: 3795">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: <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060210a" target="_blank">http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060210a</a>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:<a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060223a" target="_blank">http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060223a</a>They boast about "fixing" the marilith so that she can't do anything except beat the <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> 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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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