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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4177839" data-attributes="member: 2067">What hoops? When did I say it had to be in the MM?No, I'm disappointed that the 4e phane doesn't have a nod to the ability that the 3e phane had to create time duplicates AKA 'evil twins' (amongst other things). If the 4e phane had such an ability, such a nod, such a ritual, such a description in its flavor text, such a note in its "encounter" text, I wouldn't have (as much) of a feeling of disappointment. Alternately, if the 4e phane were to bring some evocative coolness of its own, I wouldn't really care, but the 4e phane seems rather dull (if effective) with the "damage + status ailment" formula. The entry for the phane should be interesting and evocative of the phane's "plot potential." That's not 'the stat block,' but rather the entire entry in the MM. Yes, even if it's just a note that says "The phanes have learned a ritual to summon a creature's past self into the present, bound into their slavery. Use the 'Evil Twin' template on PG XX of the DMG to represent these time duplicates." Or something along those lines.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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Sure, but we're getting more than a stat block, here. For instance, when it's talking about designing encounters with the phane, instead of (just) an assorted list of other creatures from the MM, it could talk about time duplicates as evil twins and races against time to liberate people caught in a flow of time that the phane is feeding off of, aging them unnaturally fast, stealing their time from them. Viola! It retains the encounter coolness of the 3e phane largely intact. It doesn't expressly need any summoning ability or whatever, what it needs is to incorporate the old neat ideas into the new form so that the neat ideas can be retained. It doesn't really do that, and that's disappointing.</blockquote>

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