MM excerpt: phane

[ryryguy]

rituals, etc.?

There is nothing EPIC about the phane. It is not frightening. It is not profound in any way. It is a 26th-level creature cannot affect the wider world in any truly significant way. The only way this 26th-level creature can threaten the kingdom or provoke an apocalypse is by hitting people, one at a time. It is an orc with bigger numbers in its stat block.

Oh, and it makes you look old, for a little while. Ooh, scary.

Go on, this creature was meant to be created as a living weapon in the primeval war between deific entities. It basically defines epic. It's the sort of thing campaigns are built around. But just try to extract from its stat block anything resembling a plot hook. I dare you.

It's just so damn shallow.

I can see where humble minion (and others) are coming from on this. The old style "make something really terrifying/difficult/awesome by breaking the usual rules, making up new ones" did have a certain dramatic power... troubles at the table aside.

But a few counter-thoughts...

This is just a stat block, primarily for use in an encounter, so asking it to provide plot hooks may be asking it to pull a little too much weight. One thing in particular - rituals are the 4e mechanic for impressive effects outside the scope of an encounter, right? Might an epic baddie like the phane have access to some impressive rituals allowing, let's say, the creation of evil twins, or the ruining of an entire kingdom's harvest by causing the seasons to skip summer, or whatever?

These wouldn't be mentioned in the phane's stat block, and perhaps not necessarily with respect to the phane specifically. But maybe some general guidelines in a section in the DMG about "making BBEGs"? (Actually I wonder, has there been any mention about monsters/NPCs using rituals at all? Maybe it's just out of scope so far.)

Another issue: would that poor phane really be reduced to eliminating the town guard one at a time with its none-too-impressive melee attacks? Of course, we all know that the DM could easily wave the story wand and have the phane turn all one hundred guards into withered corpses in a single round. But in addition, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some general mechanics and/or guidelines about how creatures are extra effective against foes that they completely outclass. "Outclassed" could be determined by that whole "PCs of destiny" thing, level or tier comparisons. Perhaps heroic-tier characters get no saves at all against epic-tier powers? Perhaps it is still "save or die" if you're 10 or more levels lower than the power?

That sort of thing seems to me like it would be a much better way to handle the situation rather than having to put specific "also, it instantly kills wimps" language in every epic creature's power descriptions. If it's not covered in the official house rules it would seem to be easy and obvious to house rule. (I guess the advantage of some rules for this over the story wand is to give PC's a chance to save those town guards before they crumble to dust and blow away...)

 

[Hussar]

Originally Posted by Kamikaze Midget
Most of this conversation has been various parties telling me that "evil twin" encounters are so horribly complex that they have no place in a game of such beautiful simplicity as 4e, and that such a creature would be horrible, if it were to exist, and thus should only exist, if at all, in the strange realm of my own house rules, never violating the sacrosanct territory of a core book.

Forgive the hyperbole.

No, you are misreading what I, at least, said.

What I'm saying is that an "Evil Twin" ability is too difficult to run OUT OF THE BOX. It is not too difficult to run using the 4e ruleset.

That's why you don't include it in the stat block. If it can't be used out of the box, it gets axed. Full stop. If you want to run that plot, more power to you. If I want to make my phane a really powerful displacer beast, more power to me. If I want to be able to put a phane on a random encounter list, I should be able to, without worrying that this creature will grind my game to a halt.

That's the only point I'm trying to make. YES you can run your evil twins scenario. I doubt very much you will need specific templates for this. NO most DM's cannot run that scenario blind.

Sure, if you've been playing with your group for the last two years, starting at level 1, you know the abilities of that group. What about convention DM's? Or groups that start at level 25? I'm supposed to know the abilities of a character I've never seen played?

The whole design philosophy is to enable DM's to not have to do hours and hours of prep work designing a single encounter that lasts for an hour at the table. Sure, you might be able to wing handling 5 23rd level NPC's blind, but, again, I know that I can't.

So, yes, if you want to do this scenario, you can. The mechanics certainly won't stop you. BUT, they will also not encourage you to do so either.

 

[Stalker0]

humble minion
There is nothing EPIC about the phane. It is not frightening. It is not profound in any way. It is a 26th-level creature cannot affect the wider world in any truly significant way. The only way this 26th-level creature can threaten the kingdom or provoke an apocalypse is by hitting people, one at a time. It is an orc with bigger numbers in its stat block.

Oh, and it makes you look old, for a little while. Ooh, scary.

Go on, this creature was meant to be created as a living weapon in the primeval war between deific entities. It basically defines epic. It's the sort of thing campaigns are built around. But just try to extract from its stat block anything resembling a plot hook. I dare you.

It's just so damn shallow.

Humble has a point here. There's a certain expectation from an epic creature, a certain scale of effect on the world that we aren't getting here.

For example, lets say the Phane's area attack extended across a 1000 mile radius, and did the same ageing effect + damage. Now from a party's perspective, little has changed as far as a fight with the creature goes. However, that creature could now take out an entire kingdom in a single action, ageing people to death (if we assume the majority of a kingdom are peasants that will die to that small amount of damage).

The creature as written has very little direct effect on the world, killing people one at a time. Now its still nigh unstoppable by conventional people, but its offensive is very small.

 

[humble minion]

I can see where humble minion (and others) are coming from on this. The old style "make something really terrifying/difficult/awesome by breaking the usual rules, making up new ones" did have a certain dramatic power... troubles at the table aside.

But a few counter-thoughts...

This is just a stat block, primarily for use in an encounter, so asking it to provide plot hooks may be asking it to pull a little too much weight. One thing in particular - rituals are the 4e mechanic for impressive effects outside the scope of an encounter, right? Might an epic baddie like the phane have access to some impressive rituals allowing, let's say, the creation of evil twins, or the ruining of an entire kingdom's harvest by causing the seasons to skip summer, or whatever?

These wouldn't be mentioned in the phane's stat block, and perhaps not necessarily with respect to the phane specifically. But maybe some general guidelines in a section in the DMG about "making BBEGs"? (Actually I wonder, has there been any mention about monsters/NPCs using rituals at all? Maybe it's just out of scope so far.)

This is a worthwhile point. It occurs to me that, stepping back from the phane for a minute to get a wider perspective, my major problems with 4e (based on what I've seen thus far) centre around its seeming combat-centredness and the lack of any ability to create lasting effects or changes in anything. Rituals may well be a mechanism to counterbalance this, but we haven't seen a ritual in any preview yet, so it's pretty hard to judge. C'mon Wotc, show us one! It's pretty much the deciding factor for some of us...

My other concern is that the phane doesn't have any unique capability about it. It just relies on a combination of speed and insubstantiality and inflicting minor penalties along with its hp damage to create the phane 'flavour'. There's not really a trademark ability there. I kinda worry that if this philosophy (building critters from a limited palette of abilities and status penalties and never, ever going outside that toolbox) will mean a certain sameness in how combat feels, and give both WotC and 3rd-party publishers problems in creating new monsters (post-MM1) without having them feel like retreads. Kinda early to be worrying about it admittedly, but that's the impression I get from the monster stat block we've seen so far.

Another issue: would that poor phane really be reduced to eliminating the town guard one at a time with its none-too-impressive melee attacks? Of course, we all know that the DM could easily wave the story wand and have the phane turn all one hundred guards into withered corpses in a single round. But in addition, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some general mechanics and/or guidelines about how creatures are extra effective against foes that they completely outclass. "Outclassed" could be determined by that whole "PCs of destiny" thing, level or tier comparisons. Perhaps heroic-tier characters get no saves at all against epic-tier powers? Perhaps it is still "save or die" if you're 10 or more levels lower than the power?

That sort of thing seems to me like it would be a much better way to handle the situation rather than having to put specific "also, it instantly kills wimps" language in every epic creature's power descriptions. If it's not covered in the official house rules it would seem to be easy and obvious to house rule. (I guess the advantage of some rules for this over the story wand is to give PC's a chance to save those town guards before they crumble to dust and blow away...)

An application of the mook rules to good guys. Interesting thought. It does make certain plotlines more difficult to run ("We must protect the 10-year-old noncombatant prince from the phane sent by an evil wizard to assassinate him ... oops, he's dead through proximity. Bugger.") but it's not a bad idea.

 

[webrunner]

I said this before but it seemed to have gotten lost:

Every monster in 4e starts at the top of a page.
Very few monsters take up a full page.
To make up for this, they include more than one version of those monsters so you still get as many monster options as usual, just now they're easier to read (since each monster section is one, two, three, or four pages exactly)

I don't see this Phane entry taking up exactly a page with the image, so I wonder if there's not a second phane statblock.

 

[ryryguy]

An application of the mook rules to good guys. Interesting thought. It does make certain plotlines more difficult to run ("We must protect the 10-year-old noncombatant prince from the phane sent by an evil wizard to assassinate him ... oops, he's dead through proximity. Bugger.") but it's not a bad idea.

Actually, I think that if properly handled, it could make make those kinds of plotlines really fun to run. If you make the phane deadly to mooks using the story wand, it's hard for players to prevent it unless you also use the story wand on their behalf - tricky to do without putting things on rails.

But if there is some kind of rules framework behind things... perhaps an epic defender power might allow the defender to grant his "epicness" to the prince as long as the defender stays within a certain range? Then you could have an interesting tactical combat where the defender has to stick close to the prince while the phane & minions try to push/pull them apart. Maybe the defender can "soak" the attacks meant for the prince as long as the phane doesn't get too close? Then, a chase with the defender desperately trying to keep the prince far enough away from the phane while the other PCs take it down - easier said than done when facing those slow powers!

Well, I guess we'll see... but it seems like there's so much room for this sort of stuff with the tiers framework, all powers having levels, and so forth, I'd be surprised if there isn't at least something in this direction in the official rules.

 

[Hussar]

On the Phane being Epic -

Something to remember here is that the Phane is a controller. He's not there to rain devastation down on the countryside. That's for brutes. He's going to be the one standing behind three or four other baddies, directing them to wipe out the town. This thing has a 28 Int. It's the planner. The brains behind the brawn.

Could it wipe out a town? Quite possibly. It might take it a while, but, very little in the town is going to stop it. It's temporal touch ability, means that it's going to blow through a group in a very large hurry, particularly if the group is minions, which is pretty much what townies should be. It simply attacks, shifts, takes it's OA on the next target and shifts on and on and on. Conceivably, it could wipe out most of the town in one round.

Sounds pretty epic to me.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

On the Phane being Epic -

Something to remember here is that the Phane is a controller. He's not there to rain devastation down on the countryside. That's for brutes. He's going to be the one standing behind three or four other baddies, directing them to wipe out the town. This thing has a 28 Int. It's the planner. The brains behind the brawn.

Could it wipe out a town? Quite possibly. It might take it a while, but, very little in the town is going to stop it. It's temporal touch ability, means that it's going to blow through a group in a very large hurry, particularly if the group is minions, which is pretty much what townies should be. It simply attacks, shifts, takes it's OA on the next target and shifts on and on and on. Conceivably, it could wipe out most of the town in one round.

Sounds pretty epic to me.

I also wonder if we could take it beyond the realms of simply being a monstrous destroy towns through force. If it can leap through time and is somewhat shadowy/less material. I could easily see it being something that gathers information, perhaps leaps through time setting in course various events to lead to the destruction of a town, city, maybe a entire kingdom.

It has the intelligence to do so, so why not?

I could see a Phane starting cults, subtly destroying society in some places, assassinating key-figures to start wars, etc. By having control of time, and by having such high intelligence it doesn't need to be good at killing or have "evil PCs" (which still doesn't make sense to me, since that is dimension based not time based) to do its dastardly deeds.

 

[Hussar]

(which still doesn't make sense to me, since that is dimension based not time based)

The SF nerd in me wants a word with you.

But, your basic point is sound I think. This is not a ravaging beast. This is a mastermind.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

The SF nerd in me wants a word with you.

But, your basic point is sound I think. This is not a ravaging beast. This is a mastermind.

I know, I know going back in time, go to alternative timeperiod where normal time diverges, etc, etc. Still feels forced. It is still technically a parallel universe (which is essentially another dimension). Too many highschool lunches have been spent discussing time-travel, lol.

Since has to find the evil-PCs, etc, etc.

Could make a fine-plot point but as a combat power, bleh!

A Phane could actually make a really nice BBEG. I could see a Phane either for its own reasons, or under control of something else trying to throughout time set off a series of events to screw things over. The PCs after being requested by the Fates to stop this must uncover what the Phane has done (this be especially interesting for Star Warlock (for the one concept which is based of Fates and Time)).