New Design & Development: Encounter Design

[Intrope]

Among other things, how does she keep from petrifying her teammates?

Battle Burkha?

 

[Mortellan]

Another design article that churns my stomach for some reason. Life isn't fair. Sometimes the PCs should be outnumbered/classed, sometimes the PCs should have the upperhand. This fair and balanced approach to encounters smacks of boardgames not an RPG.

 

[Rechan]

Another design article that churns my stomach for some reason. Life isn't fair. Sometimes the PCs should be outnumbered/classed, sometimes the PCs should have the upperhand. This fair and balanced approach to encounters smacks of boardgames not an RPG.

Because a system made to ensure that two encounters of the same level are the same level of challenge clearly means that there will never be any room for variation.

 

[FireLance]

Another design article that churns my stomach for some reason. Life isn't fair. Sometimes the PCs should be outnumbered/classed, sometimes the PCs should have the upperhand. This fair and balanced approach to encounters smacks of boardgames not an RPG.

Just because the DM may find it easier to put together a more balanced encounter, it doesn't mean that he will be required to run nothing but balanced encounters, any more than the CR system requires the DM to send only a single creature of CR equal to average party level against the PCs.

 

[Mad Mac]

Another design article that churns my stomach for some reason. Life isn't fair. Sometimes the PCs should be outnumbered/classed, sometimes the PCs should have the upperhand. This fair and balanced approach to encounters smacks of boardgames not an RPG.

Eh. It's not hard to throw in additional or higher level monsters when you're looking for more of a challenge. Figuring out a balanced baseline is the tricky part, and the part I'm glad to let the designers do the grunt work on for me.

 

[Jhaelen]

They MIGHT give us the tables, but I have a feeling that if they disguise the table slightly in the finished product less people will complain about the fact that monsters' stats have so little difference between them. I'm not ruling out that they will be in there. I just get the feeling that they are all excited about the things they are doing to create monsters behind the scenes that they are talking about it.

In the end, I feel that we'll get a "Creating a monster is more art than science, so we didn't include actual monster creation rules in the Monster Manual. If you need a quick and dirty method of creating a creature, turn to a page in the book with a monster about the level you want and the role you want and then give them 2 abilities that make them seem like a different creature. Or, simply wait until the Monster Manual 2, 3, and 4 when we give you real stats on all the creatures you want."

Yep. That's what I expect, as well. I hope it will be fairly easy to reverse-engineer the monsters to get those generic tables.

And I think you can turn pretty much every kind of monster into a representative of a certain role:
Beholder-Brute? Ever notice Beholders have a pretty big mouth? Add a couple of additional rows of teeth and up their speed and they should be quite scary in that role even if all of their eyes are non-functional.

Gelatinous Cube Mastermind? Whoever said there could only be Brains-in-a-jar? How about a Brain-in-a-gelatinous-cube? Assuming, of course the gelatinous cube actually made it into 4th edition. This is one of the monsters I could definitely do without. But I guess it's in, since there's a mini in Desert of Desolation...ah, well...

 

[Scribble]

I can't imagine it'll be any harder to run "party vs. one big monster" fights in 4E than it was to run "party vs. a number of smaller critters" fights in 3E. IOW, the "group vs. group" thing is an assumption, not a hard and fast rule.

For evidence, you need look no further than the fact that the very first example of 4E combat we got was a party vs. a red dragon.

I've seen no conclusive proof stating that Red Dragon didn't have multiple personalities!