Monsters that mark: A pain for DMs

[Stalker0]

I will say this was my least favorite part of 4e monsters in the playtest I ran. The monsters that did marks was annoying in many cases.

Further, we used poker chips to note status conditions. So if the paladin marked a monster it got a blue chip. If the fighter, it got a green. But when my hobgoblin solider marked someone, I used a white chip. Next round, which hobgoblin was dong the marking, hobgoblin A, B, or C?

 

[Kunimatyu]

Kunimatyu

Did you have a problem keeping track of status conditions in 3.X? Or did you just not use monsters and opponents that applied them to PCs?

Nope, but then again, I rarely had to worry about conditions that required me to keep track of which monster caused the condition, nor was it common for PCs to be able to throw around that same condition.

 

[The Little Raven]

Nope, but then again, I rarely had to worry about conditions that required me to keep track of which monster caused the condition, nor was it common for PCs to be able to throw around that same condition.

All monster marks we've seen are only applied after a successful attack and only last until the end of the monster's next turn. So, you basically need to remember which "soldier" is attacking which player, and whether he hit this round or not.

 

[small pumpkin man]

For the sake of their sanity, a dungeon master might wish to avoid doing so, but nothing about marking suggests that they're 'doin' it wrong' by running several creatures possessing the ability. Would it not strain credibility that, in every encounter, the timid casters outnumber--often significantly--their guardians?

There's Soldier, Brute, Skirmisher, Lurker, Artillery, Controller and probably more than that, but Soldiers are only one monster type out of many and a lot of Soldiers don't mark. If Marking is the problem people are saying it is (and it does sound annoying), not putting more than one or two monsters with mark in (or swapping it out for another Soldier ability) will likely become annoying to DMs, but there's enough other options that it's not something that's going to even become visible to PCs, let alone "strain credibility".

 

[KPCMammon]

What about going the other direction, putting the tokens on the monsters that mark the characters?

Each character could have a different colored token, and if they see a monster with their token they know they need to attack it.

Or the DM could say: "Bob, that gnoll next to you swings his flail at you and marks you for your next turn." Considering players are only marked one round, and only need to remember one mark (new ones override old ones) it doesn't seem that bad.

Of course, I just ignored marks entirely when I was running dragonshields, didn't seem worth the trouble (the pally was missing either way).

 

[small pumpkin man]

All monster marks we've seen are only applied after a successful attack and only last until the end of the monster's next turn. So, you basically need to remember which "soldier" is attacking which player, and whether he hit this round or not.

Huh, I didn't notice that, and it's also as far as I can tell a low level thing, high level Soldiers have MUCH nastier abilities which generally don't care who you're trying to attack.

 

[keterys]

Instead of the marking mechanic, a reasonable substitute might be something like:

Marked for 1 round:
target suffers a -2 penalty to attack rolls.

Marked (no duration):
'target is blocked for 1 round'

Blocked: Target is slowed and provokes opportunity attacks for shifting and suffers a -2 penalty to non-melee attacks.

And then you'll want to kill the soldiers for being annoying

Haven't noticed marking being too bad, yet... but haven't done battles with lots of marking going on. Not sure how well it'll be received.

 

[Kunimatyu]

Ket,

I like those ideas -- what if a monster mark (at least, the kind that is caused by a successful monster attack) just prevented you from shifting next turn?

 

[Rykion]

If I get a headache tracking which monster marked which PC, I'll just stop keeping track. Instead I'll just let a marked PC ignore the -2 penalty when attacking any monster that can mark. That way the crunchy monsters are still protecting the squishy monsters. It should work fine as long as all the marking monsters go on the same initiative. It does mean that a dead monster's mark will last until it would have had its next turn. Once all marking monsters are dead, I'd remove any remaining marks.

 

[Zelgadas]

If I get a headache tracking which monster marked which PC, I'll just stop keeping track. Instead I'll just let a marked PC ignore the -2 penalty when attacking any monster that can mark. That way the crunchy monsters are still protecting the squishy monsters. It should work fine as long as all the marking monsters go on the same initiative. It does mean that a dead monster's mark will last until it would have had its next turn. Once all marking monsters are dead, I'd remove any remaining marks.

That actually makes me wonder whether or not WotC has already thought of this; I mean, it's bound to have come up in playtests, right? We already know that monsters don't necessarily follow the same rules as PCs; maybe a monster mark means something a little bit different. Maybe it does simply mean that you suffer the penalty whenever you attack a monster of a different type, or some such. Thus, kobold dragonshield 1 whacks you and hits you with a mark, so you suffer a penalty when attacking the kobold wyrmpriest and the kobold slinger, but not when attacking kobold dragonshields 1-5. As you said, the mark is still effectively serving its purpose; protecting the squishy monsters from the guys with large metal objects via a wall of meat shields. Of course, this is all just conjecture.