D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[clearstream]

Ah, I don't think the other role modifiers are likely to be diegetic. Just the "You are just a minion, and hence beneath me", and "Those are the overlords elite enforcers".

And surely not "You are a literal minion and therefore have 1 hit point"...

 

[TwoSix]

Ah, I don't think the other role modifiers are likely to be diegetic. Just the "You are just a minion, and hence beneath me", and "Those are the overlords elite enforcers".

I mean, you can certainly assign some kind of diegetic linkage to "minion", "elite", etc. But that definitely wasn't the point.

The expected usage is that the stat block will change depending on the context of the PCs. The same ogre in the narrative might be a level 4 elite early in the PCs career, but a level 16 minion once the PCs are in the high-paragon tier and an ogre has gone from a major threat to a speedbump.

 

[Pedantic]

And that's where Lanefan's argument breaks down. It depends on the assertion that a single mechanical expression of a creature must be the one and only expression it ever gets. Its mechanical expression is more important than the actual impact of the creature in context and the experience of a character of different strength fighting that enemy. Or, the rather rosy belief that it's possible to design a singular mechanical expression which definitely always produces the correct kind of experience, no matter what level the character is.

Is this not the whole sim point? The mechanics are a concrete representation of something that can be understood, and there is no "correct kind of experience." Or at least, the fixed nature of the mechanics is a design constraint; putting down stats for a housecat absolutely does define the housecat and now you have to live with mortally endangered commoner elf pet-owners or you need to redesign your health system.

For some maybe and can also empathise but only to a degree, because if I were sim-orientated, and I used to be more so, there would be things I'd first consider first rather than worry about minions, namely magic and hit points. To be honest I'm not sure how one can touch on minions and completely ignore how magic and hit points affect sim and world-building.

Minions are an attempt to circumvent the hit point issue, so I don't think you can avoid them if you're working on it. That being said, I feel like the term simulation is getting abused the same way I said gamism was earlier.

Hit points being variable based on context and hit points not modeling real world injury well are two different concerns, and which one is necessarily a problem for sim seems to vary from person to person.

 

[CreamCloud0]

+1 weapon? duelling? etc...

might do for goblins: would rarely get to ogre one-shotting damage

i was imagining an unarmed fighter (who hadn't specced into that), i don't know if either of those would apply in that situation, but yes while it might be possible to one-shot a goblin but as soon as you start looking at anything else slightly more durable it quickly stops being possible to defeat them instantly with your least effort.

 

[Enrahim]

I mean, I would say that the actual thing going on is that statblocks are inherently contextual.

Because that's the inherent problem of the concept of "CR". There is no such thing as a singular threat-level that is universally true for a specific entity. Its threat level actually is relative to the context in which it appears. The idea that we can capture this through an abstraction that never changes is, simply, a mistaken belief. It's a beautiful belief! But it's inherently incorrect in the vast majority of cases. We can define levels, at which certain power can be expected--but any singular monster is not inherently level 15 or level 5 or level 2358234804. The monster is what it is. The gameplay abstractions change in order to correctly represent how threatening a particular creature is.

So we take a singular ogre; let's say it's Corrupted Ogre, empowered by demon blood, so it's even a bit tougher than a typical ogre. If we consider its threat from a 1st-level perspective? Nearly impossible to survive. Don't represent it as a monster. Represent it some other way--such as a skill challenge or an environmental hazard the players need to flee from, because they simply don't have meaningful ability to kill it, or if they do, it's not because of their battle prowess, it's because they've found One Neat Trick (Overlords Hate Them!). Now, consider the exact same organism, how should it be viewed from a level 5 perspective? Probably a Solo. It's now just within range of 5th level characters to take down in a straight fight, but it's tough, and taking it on without separating it from other monsters is decidedly unwise.

Repeat this process at higher levels. Perhaps at level 8, the correct mechanical abstraction is an Elite: strong, but you could take on two or even three of them without really being concerned. Perhaps at level 11, it's a Standard: the party could take on a pack of these things without really worrying much. And then at (say) level 17, this particular organism is no longer a meaningful threat unless it arrives en masse. (There are proposals floating around for a "mook" or something like that, a step between Standard and Minion, something that doesn't fall in a single hit, but doesn't have a ton of staying power either; generally, they're two-hit wonders, but a single crit will kill them.)

This isn't changing the inherent characteristics of the creature. It is, instead, recognizing that the mechanical abstraction is our servant, not our master. We can--and should--change the mechanical abstraction if that more accurately represents the experience that a given character should have.

And that's where Lanefan's argument breaks down. It depends on the assertion that a single mechanical expression of a creature must be the one and only expression it ever gets. Its mechanical expression is more important than the actual impact of the creature in context and the experience of a character of different strength fighting that enemy. Or, the rather rosy belief that it's possible to design a singular mechanical expression which definitely always produces the correct kind of experience, no matter what level the character is.

I think I have been toying around with the ideas you sketch out here, and have failed to find a good way of doing so. From my understanding your proposal is to use differing rules framework for handling the same creature.

The problem I have found is weirdness happening in transitions. Let us make it simpler with a 2 tiered solution: skill challenges that cannot defeat on low levels, standard combat on higher levels. Chances are that when you transition you find either that the opponent become much easier to handle than with skill challenge ("why didn't we just do this before"), or gets brutally more dangerous ("we easily dodged away from this before, but now we cannot get away due to all the movement restraint abilities even if we try to escape").

Getting this right for one transition is hard enough. Getting it right for 2 sound really ambitious.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

+1 weapon? duelling? etc...

might do for goblins: would rarely get to ogre one-shotting damage

And yet it is--very much--part of the expected experience for D&D-alike games that one grows so great in power that things which were previously a major threat become so trivial, you swat them away like flies.

For goodness' sake, BECMI went there--but did so with ridiculous unreachable levels that people then actually reached by, more or less, cheesing the level system or being showered with rewards.

4e made it so earning that level of power was both actually challenging--if you generally respected the rules--and actually achievable. The price paid was that statblocks aren't absolute...which they never truly were anyway.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think I have been toying around with the ideas you sketch out here, and have failed to find a good way of doing so. From my understanding your proposal is to use differing rules framework for handling the same creature.

The problem I have found is weirdness happening in transitions. Let us make it simpler with a 2 tiered solution: skill challenges that cannot defeat on low levels, standard combat on higher levels. Chances are that when you transition you find either that the opponent become much easier to handle than with skill challenge ("why didn't we just do this before"), or gets brutally more dangerous ("we easily dodged away from this before, but now we cannot get away due to all the movement restraint abilities even if we try to escape").

Getting this right for one transition is hard enough. Getting it right for 2 sound really ambitious.

I don't think it's anywhere near that ambitious.

Remember that the skill challenge and the combat have completely different goals.

The skill challenge's goal is merely to survive and/or escape. It's the Fellowship running from the Balrog. Is that incompatible with Merry later getting the first stab against the Witch-King, objectively one of the most powerful of Sauron's forces? Doesn't seem to be so to me. Sure, the Witch-King and the Balrog aren't the same class of being, but the conceptual framework still stands.

If you're actually engaging in combat, the goal isn't mere survival, it's overcoming. Different goals, different process, different results.

All of the others are simply differences of degree, not kind. You generally wouldn't be using literally the exact same statblock 17 times in a row such that the players repeatedly fight literally the same mechanics and then all of a sudden they binary switch over. I mean, you could do that, but I'm pretty sure it would be really boring for both you and the players by the time you'd hit the 10th fight against literally identical enemies.

Instead, you space it out--a single Bloodcursed Ogre (solo) at level 5, a mere scout sent by its commander. Then, multiple levels later, you fight a squad of Bloodcursed Ogres (elite) at, say, level 9. Now it's a whole squad, with goblin scouts and conscripted local bandits and (etc.) because they're on a mission. Perhaps the squad might even feature different variants, where it now matters that one is a sapper and another is heavily-armored, because before, simply being a Bloodcursed Ogre was the most relevant detail. Then, again multiple levels later, at say level 12, you fight through a stronghold where Bloodcursed Ogres (standard) are the main type of enemy, and thus you see lots of them. And then finally at (say) level 16, you assault their horrendous overlord's keep, and you're cutting through mere Bloodcursed Ogres (minions) like a scythe through wheat, because now, only the overlord's commanders and underbosses are powerful enough to actually challenge you--and you finish by slaying that demonic overlord, breaking the blood curse and freeing the remaining ogres to whatever life they were leading beforehand.

Yes, it requires that you think carefully. Yes, it means that you can't literally just constantly reuse the same statblock over and over again. You shouldn't be doing that in any game. It gets horrendously boring to fight the exact same enemy a hundred times over just to gain a level!

 

[AnotherGuy]

Hit points being variable based on context and hit points not modeling real world injury well are two different concerns, and which one is necessarily a problem for sim seems to vary from person to person.

So what you're saying is they're abstract in both scenarios.
This is why I said my empathy goes only so far.

EDIT: See there are many ways to represent the toughness of an Ogre, not just hit points which is abstract any way you look at it.
You can have an Ogre with 1 hit point or x attacks
Place a damage threshold for instance of 15.
Any attack that does more than 15 damage kills the Ogre outright or x successful attacks kill the Ogre - whichever comes first.

In the same way you can cap hit points by Level (experience) or Size (meat) or any other combination.

Right now Hit Points provide the most abstract version, especially in the era of uncapped hit points, so the beef with Minions makes little sense.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I agree that there’s a fairly large contingent of D&D fans (conservative ones?) who will not accept a taxonomy that doesn’t give a privileged place to GM-led “sim” play.

That's how I feel, and I'm not ashamed of it. That's what the game of D&D was designed for IMO, and changing that should I think make it a different game. Not a worse game in any objective sense, but a different game that should go by a different name.

Again, all my personal opinion.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If one watched Starship Troopers Rico and his team take the better part of a minute to take one of those bugs down, but by the end of the show they take a few seconds. Similar concept.
It is not only that the mechanics depict minions to have less hit points but that they also do more damage than their standard counterpart, they may also have better defenses to avoid the kitten damage etc.
5e includes a little of this idea in the DMG by having Improvised Damage and its severity affected by character level.

One could argue (I would) that the increased efficiency of Rico's squad was due to their own increased prowess, not a change in the mechanical depiction of their enemies.