Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4037060" data-attributes="member: 1054">Read the design&dev article on monsters, including the pre-4e ones (like the recreation of the rust monster). It was pretty clearly stated:"A monster lasts about 5 rounds in combat. That means it can do, at most, 5 things. Anything beyond that is wasted and redundant." (The corollary, that if a monster does everything it can do in Comabt 1, it is boring in Combat 2, is never considered...)Moreover, we're talking about combat -- or at least skill-related -- activities. The original question was "Why would you ever care about a cat's Balance check?" I showed why, using an example from real-world play, not an edge case I made up to prove a point. I also showed why combat stats for "normal" animals are useful.When you talk of "moving non-combat skills into narrative", what do you mean?If the 4e stat block for a cat is "Cats are agile.", with nothing to reflect this agility in play, it's useless when you want to determine if the familiar/animal companion/poymorphed wizard/beloved housepet can cross a narrow beam to escape a fire, run up a rope to get on a departing ship, or any other activity which tends to come up in adventure games, so we get back to "Make it up". Given that 4e gives everyone default skills, it's pretty easy to assume cats will be Trained in Acrobatics and Sneak (or whatever the 4e compressed skills will be called), and will likewise have a high dex (probably 14). Given that, you can fairly adjudicate things like the effects of dex buffing/debuffing on the cat, difficult surfaces, taking damage and trying to stay on (a familiar will have enough HP to survive some attacks), etc. A "purely narrative" description of a cat (no stats) does not give you this and turns the game into Amber (but without the ability to start play with your own private universe).</blockquote>

Verification