Mearls redesigns the Ogre Mage

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Who cares whether it's the "right" amount of XP. That's an arbitrary decision anyway, since so much of an encounters difficulty is situational. Should a critter at a given CR award less XP for an experienced group of players because they find it easier?

Um, yes?

No one is saying that DMs can't or shouldn't tweak things on their own, just that the baseline needs to be clear and consistent to make those sorts of variations more predictable for the DMs. Especially in previous editions, everyone has had the experience of tweaking things and finding the players just walking through alleged challenges with ease or having a TPK from something that was supposed to be a walk in the park. The standardization of 3E means that tweaking things is less likely to have unpredictable results.

 

[occam]

In the end what gets me is not the end designs, but the implicit assumption that the only use of a monster that matters from a design standpoint is how it works in toe-to-toe battle and assuming that this is the only way a party will ever deal with a monster (or how the monster will deal with them).

Hear, hear! There are a lot of interesting things ogre magi can do with those low-level abilities that don't involve using them directly against CR-appropriate PC parties. Take a good look at the ogre mage writeup in the MM; this is not a creature sitting in a cave waiting for some adventurers to blunder in and clobber it. An ogre mage is actively involved in society, using abilities like charm, sleep, and polymorph (or change shape in the errata) to further his nefarious ends among the masses of weak and stupid humanoids surrounding him. Sure, they aren't much use against a party of 8th-level characters; that's what the cone of cold and the escape abilities are for, as well as a coterie of ogre allies and other combat brutes.

Ogre magi can be interesting to run as written, if they're used in an appropriate way, one that takes advantage of their strengths and doesn't put them in a weak position with infeasible goals. Ogre magi are supposed to flee direct combat after a round or two; that doesn't make them poorly designed monsters. They're just not meant to be hack-n-slash fodder.

That said, I do kinda like the Mearls take on the monster, and would probably use it as a variant. You can't have too many oni!

 

[Razz]

I never had a problem with the original Ogre Mage, I always use all of its abilities. The sleep is good if it's dealing not with low-level parties, but NPCs. The charming was good for it to have a suitable meat shield if it needed one against the PCs.

And Cone of Cold is not bad for a CR 8 creature. Neither are its hit points since the darn thing has regeneration 5.

and what are Associated Classes? I noticed that in the MM4 and can't find what they say they are anywhere.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Adding a couple sorceror levels is easier than adding a couple hand-picked abilities?

Hand-picked by whom?

 

[mearls]

I don't have time to post much today (going to the ballgame tonight), but I wanted to make one observation.

Try adding 6 levels of beguiler (PH II) to an ogre mage (+3 CR for 6 non-associated class levels, IIRC) and compare that to the old CR 8 ogre mage. I think it makes for a satisfying trickster/manipulator type.

A few people have said the flavor is gone. I'm curious about that. If you replaced the stat block in the MM with the revised stat block, but kept everything else the same, what flavor is lost?

 

[Sammael]

Rip summed it nicely, so I don't feel the need to repeat it. Basically, you turned the O-M into another brute melee monster (with SLAs) instead of the "master manipulator" it used to be. We shouldn't have to add class levels (from a non-core book to boot) to make the creature work in its original role.

 

[Endur]

All the recent redesigns seem to be focusing on the idea of fewer abilities to make it easier for miniatures. Monsters that once had ten or twenty abilities are now being cut down to four or five. ie. Ogre Mage, Demons, etc.

Makes it easier to play, but reduces options somewhat.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

All the recent redesigns seem to be focusing on the idea of fewer abilities to make it easier for miniatures.

According to people who aren't the designers themselves.

 

[Sammael]

I don't think the redesigns have much to do with miniatures, but they do have a lot to do with perceived difficulties in using certain creatures. I don't necessarily think all the perceived difficulties really exist, but it's true that there are a lot of monsters out there that aren't exactly examples of stellar design. On the other hand, the Andy Collins/Mike Mearls school of thought calls for a huge oversimplification of everything (as seen in the authors' blogs), to the point which Mark CMG refers to as "dumbing down the game."

This is further complicated by the notions that combat is the most important part of the game and, at the same time, that the PCs' aren't supposed to be truly challenged in combat, because things like loss of equipment and (heavens forbid) character death make them cry (and possibly not play the game anymore, hence reducing WotC's income).

At this point, I am truly dreading any further revisions of the game because of the design philosophies of people who are currently employed by WotC.

 

[Mad Mac]

Hold on now...how does the ability to cast piddly 1st level spells like charm person and sleep make something a "master manipulator"? If that was true, 2nd level Sorcerers would rule everything.

The old Ogre Mage doesn't really do anything. He flys around while invisible and regenerates hps and plays peekaboo with darkness spells and chuckling evilly before vanishing in a puff of gas and....uh, that's it. Goes on to further terrorize the populace with 2 1st level spells again, I guess. He sure as heck can't pull anything on a party anywhere near it's CR. Even the Cone of Cold is only annoying, and after blowing his wad, the Ogre Mage has no other recourse but to run away somewhere and come back tomorrow.

I mean, if I was a PC, there could be no better news than that the evil Mastermind was an overgrown doofus who's astoundingly deep arsenal of tactics was to cast charm person a lot and run away if confronted by anything stronger than a flumph.