Monster Catalogue vs. Monster Creation Rules (vs. Why Not Both?)

[overgeeked]

The system I have seen for Dragonbane in Dragonzine 2 is better than most I've seen and still isn't going to satisfy someone looking for a "bulletproof" system.

As long as there are dice involved, there’s no such thing as a bulletproof system. It really does seem like tilting at windmills to try to make things “balanced” in any meaningful way re: monsters vs PCs. So much easier and more immersive to put in whatever logically belongs in a given location and let the players decide what to do about it. Did you sneak into an orc village? Then there’s a whole village of orcs there. Not some kind of weird subsection of orcs that just happen to be a perfectly calibrated bite-sized chunk. As much as I think there’s a lot RPGs can learn from video games, this kind of managed-pull combat is not one of them.

 

[Professor Murder]

By running away? (Bravely, of course.)

Possibly. Or by finding non-combat solutions to overcome an obstacle. Or it can be simply tabling dealing with a threat until the group has a better shot at winning.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Of course we're not. We don't need reductio ad absurdum to realize that all Monster Creation Rules are inherently flawed, arbitrary (at least somewhat), highly prone to error, and strongly dependent upon table variation.

However. If a game abandons any attempt at rules / guidelines / guardrails / whatever -- that irks me. Because I pay for games so that I don't have to do as much work. Of course I expect to do some work, but equally I expect the designer to have laid enough groundwork and put in enough trial and error that I am not a beta tester. That said...

I generally agree, but do have to note that its an easier run with some games than others, and a big part of that is how consistent the base design of the system is in the first place. An effect based system gives you a lot of tools for comparison quite early; an exception based system far less so. This is probably a bigger factor than the complexity of the system when you get right down to it.

... as they always do once the beta test begins in earnest. And by "beta test", of course I mean, "Thousands of players buy the game and play it." That said, if a game comes out of the gate with clearly ill considered monster / encounter rules, that's (to me) a failure in today's day and age. It's a failure because, (A) we have decades of TTRPG experience and published rules to draw upon, and (B) it's never been easier to get feedback on your monsters than it is now.

Though it depends on some level on how similar the rules you're using are to extent rules how much the latter helps. I can see elements of 13A that made it both easier and harder than many other games, and some parts of it were easier to work with than others (they were generally conservative on how many opponent units they suggested--enough so that a player group that at all had their act together could steamroller over their suggested value--but while they realized that double strength/Large and triple strength/Huge monsters were a little fraught, I think it sunk in much more over time).

100% agreed.

It strikes me as telling that over four decades of RPG-ing, the most fun and most success I ever had making monsters was in 4e D&D and 13th Age (1e) where the rules were relatively minimal and easy to apply (and even the secret sauce of special abilities was easy, particularly with 4e's digital tools that allowed me to drag-and-drop from another monster), and the least fun and least success I ever had was in 3e D&D where the rules were not easy to apply despite being very extensive.

Well, it didn't hurt that the D&D3e CR system progressively broke down over levels, either. By the time you got to 10th level it was 95% of the time overstating how dangerous monsters were and 5% understating it, perhaps severely.

No surprise that for games with even simpler systems, monster creation becomes that much easier (Fate Accelerated monsters are what, 3 numbers?), until you get to the point that the monster doesn't have any stats at but is some game-rule level of punishment the PCs try to mitigate (Blades in the Dark "monsters" are some amount of Harm / positional disadvantage, and that's it).

I do imagine that does make it simpler. It also seems markedly uninteresting to me, but that's just me and I realize BitD is doing different things than most games.

Yes. I'd also like the designer to break down the examples and show their work: how was Generic Humanoid Enemy built via the system, vs. Terrifying Flying Lizard, vs. Lovecraftian Ancient Evil, vs. etc?

It'd be nice, but design notes are thin on the ground at the best of times.

And even if part of the answer is, "I [the game designer] deliberate deviated from my own rules because it seemed cool" -- then SAY THAT!

Yeah, there are 13th Age monsters that clearly don't fit even the limited number categories suggested, and you're left kind of to yourself to figure out why.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The more a game is an exercise in tactical combat, the more it will benefit from a catalog of monsters. This is both for the novelty of encountering different challenges, and the likely necessity of antagonists at different power levels.

Gumshoe occupies an interesting middle ground - in most of its games, humans comprise a large segment of the opposition. It's a lot harder to design a human enemy in tactical games - in D&D, you essentially have to make a character - but trivial in that system.

Eh. I'm not sure. While there's a temptation to overdo, its entirely possible to reduce Hero System opponents (even at superhero level, let alone heroic) to a very limited set of numbers without getting into all the bells and whistles a PC would be built with. Depending on how complicated you want the tactical functions to be, you can probably reduce them to three lines of text.

 

[Thomas Shey]

By running away? (Bravely, of course.)

The problem is (ignoring for the moment how well the game actually supports running away sucessfully) figuring out you need to do so before its too late.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As long as there are dice involved, there’s no such thing as a bulletproof system. It really does seem like tilting at windmills to try to make things “balanced” in any meaningful way re: monsters vs PCs.

This seems to suggest that there's a lot more routine swing in even some swingy systems than my experience provides. That doesn't mean you'll never get outliers, but if I can predict what will probably happen to an adequate degree in most combats, I don't need it to be 100%.

 

[GMMichael]

The problem is (ignoring for the moment how well the game actually supports running away sucessfully) figuring out you need to do so before its too late.

Well, on the topic of GM-designed monsters (are we assuming the game designers know how to do it properly?), there is no "too late" because the GM decides what the monster does.

@Professor Murder's assertion that calibration (of monster danger to PC abilities) is needed applies only at publisher-level. One GM can make adjustments, especially to her own creations. But once an ill-calibrated monster goes into print, a minor adjustment becomes a brand-wide problem.

PCs that stumble into an encounter and face death before they can run away don't have a monster calibration problem. They have a GM problem, or a we-completely-ignored-the-GM problem.

 

[Professor Murder]

Well, on the topic of GM-designed monsters (are we assuming the game designers know how to do it properly?), there is no "too late" because the GM decides what the monster does.

@Professor Murder's assertion that calibration (of monster danger to PC abilities) is needed applies only at publisher-level. One GM can make adjustments, especially to her own creations. But once an ill-calibrated monster goes into print, a minor adjustment becomes a brand-wide problem.

PCs that stumble into an encounter and face death before they can run away don't have a monster calibration problem. They have a GM problem, or a we-completely-ignored-the-GM problem.

GM skills dont manifest from the head of Zeus unbidden. They need to be nurtured by the game itself. Poor game design is design that assumes GMs will intuit how to make things work instead of showing them how they can work.

But a GM agnostic skill can be signaling to players that PCs are in over their heads. This can be blunt "This threat is too great for the PCs. PC fatalities are likely" or coached in the narrative. "The Beast of The Hexmarches has slain heroes greater than you. You must first seek the means to slay the beast before you stand a chance."

 

[Professor Murder]

Look, often the most basic of thumbnail math of a challenge is simple. How often will the PCs hit/effect the challenge? 50% of the time? Less or More? How many successful actions will it take to overcome the challenge? Multiply then divide by the number of PCs. Thats how many rounds very roughly they might expect it to take to overcome. Can they mitigate the threats of the challenge, like damage or status effects? In the end, can they go the distance?

A simple thing I check is "what do I need to roll for the monster to hit the best armored PC with the threats most used attack?" and "Same math but for the most squishy PC." For my playstyle, I want to hit no more than say <60% and no less that >30%.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, on the topic of GM-designed monsters (are we assuming the game designers know how to do it properly?), there is no "too late" because the GM decides what the monster does.

@Professor Murder's assertion that calibration (of monster danger to PC abilities) is needed applies only at publisher-level. One GM can make adjustments, especially to her own creations. But once an ill-calibrated monster goes into print, a minor adjustment becomes a brand-wide problem.

PCs that stumble into an encounter and face death before they can run away don't have a monster calibration problem. They have a GM problem, or a we-completely-ignored-the-GM problem.

While you are, outside certain "let the dice land where they may" ethos, correct, its not exactly virtuous for the GM to have to (blatantly or not) pull on the brakes because a monster is misdesigned.

(And for me, no, I'm not automatically assuming game designers know how to do it properly, at least early in the life-cycle of a game, though history suggests most of the time they're likely to make one tedious to deal with that excessively deadly most of the time).