Mearls redesigns the Ogre Mage

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Must not forget to mention that this mesmeric whispers should be a language-dependent, mind-affecting, charm effect.

As a rule of thumb, an ogre mage controls inhabitants of any settlement within a day's journey of its lair equal to 1d4 + its Charisma modifier.

What is "equal to 1d4 + its Charisma modifier"?

Possibly... the number of day's journey out from its lair?

 

[Mad Mac]

Eh. So the old Ogre Mage is a worthy CR 8 if you stack the deck in it's favor? That's not CR, that's a circumstancial modifier to XP. Like when CR 1/4 Kobolds kill a bunch of 5th level characters with their super-duper traps of doom. Doesn't mean Kobolds are suddenly CR 8 critters.

I mean seriously, an Ogre Mage can cast charm person and disguise himself. That's not much better than a 1st level Sorcerer. And I'm sure a determined enough DM can turn that 1st level Sorcerer into a horrifying mastermind with enough mind-bending plot manipulation. I guess Sorc's are just massively under CR'd, or something. Apparently I've just been going about this CR thing all wrong. On reflection, a mid-level Sorc has access to powers a mere Ogre Mage could only dream of! He'd be unstoppable!

Or not.

Ogre Mage: Wa Ha Ha Ha Ha! You fools! I've been following you all this time, tying your shoelaces together, spitting in your food, and even telling every barmaids within 20 miles about your little fungus problem! My dire villiany know's no limits! Bow before me in fear! Grovel beneath my...

*Party Fighter bops him over the head with a large wooden mallet*

Ogre Mage: You brute! How could you! I'm going home! *turns invisible and fly's home crying like a girlie girl*

Fighter: Can we trade him in for a new archvillian? If he keeps hanging around like this, our street cred is going to be shot. People will think we're friends with that twerp.

Thief: It's not that bad.

Fighter: No?

Theif: Nah, I totally gave him an atomic wedgie when he wasn't looking.

Mage: And I put an arcane mark on his forehead that means "Loser!"

Fighter: Heh. Next time lets give him swirlies in the girls bathroom.

Thief: Won't he just turn to gas and fly away?

Fighter: Even better. I can stick him in my fart jar.

Thief: Your what?

Fighter: Don't ask.

 

[Taraxia]

"Typically in combat" is the operative term, isn't it? I think I did state that, if you play an Ogre Mage to its strengths instead of to its weaknesses, it can be a CR 8 "encounter". It simply is no dungeon fodder. It is this untypical kind of challenge that you can't hack at with your sword right away. It has allies, some of them in high places, it looks like a perfectly normal person, it can, with a bit of luck, even charm your group fighter at the tavern while you're asking around for rumors about it. It's hard to track, hard to corner, and hard to finish off eventually.

Or course, if CR is determined exclusively as a measure of how a monster stacks up in direct combat when met in a 10'x10' room deeply underground, a few monsters in the MM need to be redesigned. But I doubt that this kind of too narrow focus would do a service to D&D. Having some kind of baseline is one thing...hammering every deviation down to it is another.

This is *horrible* logic. Defining "social" CR is almost impossible, since it depends on tons and tons of plot factors (whom the PCs know, what their reputation is, etc.) By this reasoning the average monarch, who has, say, around 8 aristocrat levels, should have a CR of, like, 22, since *assassinating* the average monarch requires a fairly large number of high-level characters. You'd have to base the monarch's CR on the patriotism of the average citizen, the army of the nation, the palace defenses, the politics of the royal court, etc., etc.

This would make CR almost impossible to calculate and extremely difficult to convert from situation to situation. The whole point of CR is to determine how easy someone is to kill someone in a fair fight -- which, face it, is what the average party of D&D adventurers spend most of their time doing -- not how easy it is to outmaneuver someone politically and whatnot. Doing the latter would be almost impossible to run in a fair way.

CR is a tool for gauging things for standard D&D *encounters*, not a general identifier for "how good" a monster is. There is no stat to determine "how good" a monster is once you factor in plot-based, RP factors, and it's not really possible to have one -- that's something you have to determine ad hoc based on what's actually going on in your campaign. In certain campaign worlds the Ogre Mage could be a very powerful manipulator (low-magic, lots of small, isolated villages); in others he'd have a much harder time (high- or wide-magic, a strongly civilized society that places a lot of emphasis on documentation and identification).

 

[coyote6]

The devil (or, in this case, the ogre-mage) is in the details.

From the new stat block:
"Deceptive Veil (Su): As per the spell disguise self, save that the ogre mage can appear to be up to one size smaller."

So the OM v.2.0 can pass off as a human, elf, dwarf, etc.

Until he has to squeeze his Large self through a Medium door, and people see the allegedly 5 ft tall elf ducking and twisting to get through the 7 ft. tall door. Then watch the hijinks that come when he has to sit down in a chair . . .

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Eh. So the old Ogre Mage is a worthy CR 8 if you stack the deck in it's favor? That's not CR, that's a circumstancial modifier to XP. Like when CR 1/4 Kobolds kill a bunch of 5th level characters with their super-duper traps of doom. Doesn't mean Kobolds are suddenly CR 8 critters.

And since when is using a monster's powers to its biggest advantage "stacking the deck in its favor"? That's what the CR is about in the first place. The Ogre Mage's strengths are its ability to charm people, appear as a normal person, and be pretty damn hard to catch at it. So suddenly it's "stacking the deck" when I actually make the monster use its powers as they are meant to be, instead of dumbing it down to just another dungeon encounter waiting happily for a group of adventurers to slay it in single combat?

This is *horrible* logic. Defining "social" CR is almost impossible, since it depends on tons and tons of plot factors (whom the PCs know, what their reputation is, etc.) By this reasoning the average monarch, who has, say, around 8 aristocrat levels, should have a CR of, like, 22, since *assassinating* the average monarch requires a fairly large number of high-level characters. You'd have to base the monarch's CR on the patriotism of the average citizen, the army of the nation, the palace defenses, the politics of the royal court, etc., etc.

This would make CR almost impossible to calculate and extremely difficult to convert from situation to situation. The whole point of CR is to determine how easy someone is to kill someone in a fair fight -- which, face it, is what the average party of D&D adventurers spend most of their time doing -- not how easy it is to outmaneuver someone politically and whatnot. Doing the latter would be almost impossible to run in a fair way.

CR is a tool for gauging things for standard D&D *encounters*, not a general identifier for "how good" a monster is. There is no stat to determine "how good" a monster is once you factor in plot-based, RP factors, and it's not really possible to have one -- that's something you have to determine ad hoc based on what's actually going on in your campaign. In certain campaign worlds the Ogre Mage could be a very powerful manipulator (low-magic, lots of small, isolated villages); in others he'd have a much harder time (high- or wide-magic, a strongly civilized society that places a lot of emphasis on documentation and identification).

CR is not just there to calculate the encounter-worthiness of a monster either, even if it's generally used to do that. CR is used to gauge how many XPs a challenge is worth. And conversely, it means the encounter should be presented as the challenge it can be, not as a standardized encounter situation. The CR of a monster is based on how big of a challenge it poses to a group of adventurers if it uses its abilities to the fullest to defeat them. The Ogre Mage's abilities, used to their fullest, mean the monster has a handful of charmed allies around it, lives in a place of comfort where it can appear as a normal human while indulging its vices, and is generally hard to kill

Even in the dungeon, the Ogre Mage is a worthy challenge if the DM takes a little care to not run it like a standard random encounter that the PCs run into while rounding a corner. Charm the figher, thief or barbarian from a distance (70 feet), join the group in a humanoid shape, and at some point take over the group, neutralize the casters and enjoy a good meal. And here's the question from that...if it charms the group barbarian to help it against the adventurers, is the barbarian suddenly a separate challenge, with its own CR, and do the characters get XP for overcoming him, or is the charmed barbarian part of the Ogre mage's CR 8, and the group will get the XP for that when overcoming both? And if it's the second, why should that be different with other allies an Ogre Mage gets through its powers?

If the CR of every monster is based on the sole premise of "4 adventurers open a door, happen upon monster X and battle ensues", it's far too simplistic and actually pretty useless to gauge the XPs that a monster or a challenge are worth. And yeah, a challenge like "killing the king" should be plenty more worth in XP (and conversely in CR) than the measly CR 4 an 8th level NPC class would be. But, in contrast to the Ogre Mage, the power of a noble does not stem directly from the personal magical powers of the person (or not that often, at least). The allies an Ogre Mage has are a direct result of it using its powers to its advantage, so they are to be seen as part of the CR. They are similar to the buffing abilities other monsters get through spellcasting, in that they provide a tangible advantage against the characters, with the difference that a buff or protection spell only keep a sword from hitting, while the right allies will keep the sword from being drawn already.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Which brings us back to the original post in this thread, since that's exactly what Mearls is doing, for exactly that reason, among others.

The baseline has to be solid, and then DMs are more empowered to play around with NPCs, because they know the information they're given is more reliable than it is currently.

The question is if it's a good idea to reduce the whole system to dungeon encounter scenarios while trying to sell off the CR system as a good way to gauge the XP from roleplaying challenges, traps, and other decidedly non-combat situations, and using it in nearly every D&D supplement, no matter if it's a pure "dungeon" effect or something else.

Personally, I believe there is no way to really standardize everything in D&D down to a baseline of "standard combat encounter" without losing a lot of the flavour of the game. Instead, it would be more helpful if there were better explanations of how to use a given monster to its individual strengths, instead of trying to tailor every monster to a standard situation.

 

[James Heard]

Whether or not you can actually do it, trying to reduce everything down to a "single standard dungeon encounter" to use as a baseline is pretty admirable and good design. It doesn't even matter if it's arbitrary and no one plays that way: The idea is to establish a baseline so you can see where an encounter might deviate from the baseline and why.

And, as far as it goes, I think reducing monsters' complexity a little to where you don't have to explain how to use a monster to its given strengths might be a good idea sometimes too. If the monster's strengths are readily apparent then you can play to them or run against them at will, but if you have to explain those strengths and weaknesses all the time you risk devoting an awful lot of ink on stuff that isn't always a great value to everyone. It's often easier to add complexity to an encounter than remove it, most especially when that complexity might be accounted for in the reflection toward the baselines.

 

[Jedi_Solo]

I, personally, think that CR should be based on the combat/mechanical aspects of the monster as opposed to the social aspects.

A CR3 critter with heavy social abilities will always be a CR3 critter, the same with a CR5 or a CR8 or a CR325. As a player, it will much more fulfilling to have a decent fight after we expose the OM for what it is and pound it into a pulp in a decent fight as opposed to looking at it crosseyed and it dying from a heart attack due to fright from us being 5 levels higher that its combat stats would put it. I want a decent fight to end the storylines with, not be a schoolyard bully.

That said, there is no reason that a DM couldn't start messing with the PCs using the monsters social abilities a few levels before the PCs are ready to fight the monster. If a first level party runs into the town mayor (who is "charmed" by the OM) in the first session of the campaign, that's great. But to me, having the PCs figure out that the city officials are under control of the unassuming city clerk doesn't give the monster its CR. That is the story that takes the fight with the "City Clerk" from being a monster-of-the-week footnote to being a really cool encounter that is talked of for years afterwards.

CR should be based around a creatures staying power in a fight. When I have guest-DMed and I wanted a monster idea for the session I looked at the CRs to get ideas for the single session I was going to do. If I want a CR8 fight for the climactic fight I would want to know that a CR8 will (likely - barring the occational really odd roles) hold its own for a couple of rounds and not really be the same fight-wise as a CR5.

Some monsters would benefit greatly from a short sidebar pointing out odd stuff in the statblock, like that the Ogre Mage (old, or new with Mike's new charm-style power) is meant to play up the manipulative Oni and be more than a great-sword wielding blue skinned bully and would most likely be best used for a long term villian. But that won't put more fight into the creature when the party finally fights it.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

I, personally, think that CR should be based on the combat/mechanical aspects of the monster as opposed to the social aspects.

A CR3 critter with heavy social abilities will always be a CR3 critter, the same with a CR5 or a CR8 or a CR325. As a player, it will much more fulfilling to have a decent fight after we expose the OM for what it is and pound it into a pulp in a decent fight as opposed to looking at it crosseyed and it dying from a heart attack due to fright from us being 5 levels higher that its combat stats would put it. I want a decent fight to end the storylines with, not be a schoolyard bully.

That said, there is no reason that a DM couldn't start messing with the PCs using the monsters social abilities a few levels before the PCs are ready to fight the monster. If a first level party runs into the town mayor (who is "charmed" by the OM) in the first session of the campaign, that's great. But to me, having the PCs figure out that the city officials are under control of the unassuming city clerk doesn't give the monster its CR. That is the story that takes the fight with the "City Clerk" from being a monster-of-the-week footnote to being a really cool encounter that is talked of for years afterwards.

CR should be based around a creatures staying power in a fight. When I have guest-DMed and I wanted a monster idea for the session I looked at the CRs to get ideas for the single session I was going to do. If I want a CR8 fight for the climactic fight I would want to know that a CR8 will (likely - barring the occational really odd roles) hold its own for a couple of rounds and not really be the same fight-wise as a CR5.

Some monsters would benefit greatly from a short sidebar pointing out odd stuff in the statblock, like that the Ogre Mage (old, or new with Mike's new charm-style power) is meant to play up the manipulative Oni and be more than a great-sword wielding blue skinned bully and would most likely be best used for a long term villian. But that won't put more fight into the creature when the party finally fights it.

Well, just two points here. The entry for the Ogre Mage under Combat reads:
Ogre mages rely on their spell-like abilities, resorting to physical combat only when necessary. When faced with obviously superior forces, they prefer to retreat in gaseous form rather than fight a losing battle. Ogre mages hold deep, abiding grudges, however, and the unwise person who crosses one would do well to keep looking over his shoulder.

So basically, the Ogre mage is not that prone to face characters in direct battle anyway, if he's not definitely superior, but rather prone to vanish if the heroes prove too big for it to handle. Not that hard either, with Darkness and Invisibility on his side, as well as the shapeshifting abilities.

And second, a CR8 only means that a standard group of 4 8th level characters should expend roughly 25% of their resources while bringing down the monster, not that it is a climatic battle for them. For a good, climatic end fight, make them a mix of 5th and 6th level characters. Should still give them the chance to bring the monster down, might cost one of them a life, and will definitely be the kind of encounter that's talked about for some time after.

Also fits nicely with a storyline where the group comes into a village around 2nd level, starts having a few adventures around it, notice that something is not right with a few of the officials, strange things happening, people vanishing etc. They get sent on a red herring quest by the mayor to eradicate a tribe of humanoids who he claims are kidnapping citizens, that kind of stuff. After a few more adventures, the plot thickens, the first official is freed of his charm for example, the evidence points to a lowly clerk, the confrontatioin looms, the PCs have become 5th level by now, or 6th, and during the fight that might down one of their numbers from a Cone of Cold, the Ogre Mage reveals himself and causes plenty of havoc, being overcome only just so at the end.

Maybe a bit cliché, but the monster in question is 25 years old by now, too.

 

[Hussar]

And second, a CR8 only means that a standard group of 4 8th level characters should expend roughly 25% of their resources while bringing down the monster, not that it is a climatic battle for them. For a good, climatic end fight, make them a mix of 5th and 6th level characters. Should still give them the chance to bring the monster down, might cost one of them a life, and will definitely be the kind of encounter that's talked about for some time after.

However, if the CR of the creature has been dramatically overestimated, as in the CR is trying to reflect some sort of social CR, rather than a CHALLENGE rating, then the party of 6th level characters expend 25% of their resources as they waltz over the Ogre Mage AND they get extra xp to boot.

Wouldn't it make more sense for a CR 8 creature to be an equal combat challenge, regardless of what that creature is?