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

Hit Points are abstract.
One can use mechanics available any which way they prefer to reflect the toughness of an Ogre as a minion in a similar abstract fashion.

IMO. They all run into issues. Many of which are gameplay issues. But yes theoretically you can use another. I’m not theoretically as opposed to a consistent system that doesn’t face the transition issues @Enrahim brought up. But trying to switch between 1 and the other seems quite off for sim.
 

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And yet they do.

They literally do. In 5e as much as any WotC edition--indeed, moreso!

You change the nature of your physical being every time you hit not just an arbitrary point of growth overall, but an arbitrary point of growth within one specific discipline.

Consider a character who gains level 3 Fighter, and then level 3 Rogue, and then level 3 Bard, and then level 3 Paladin, and then level 3 Sorcerer. They are now a level 15 Fighter/Rogue/Bard/Paladin/Sorcerer. They have never changed their ability scores one iota since they first started. Then, upon gaining each of levels 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20, they gain one more level of each class they had previously advanced. They increase their ability scores for five consecutive levels.

Meanwhile, the character who started as Wizard and ended as Wizard with no deviations along the way...gained those perks spread out across their entire run. Exactly the same five, but gained one every four-or-almost levels (the last is accelerated 1 level.)

You literally do change the nature of your character's being as they level just by virtue of the core rules, without a specific diegetic cause.
No rules system is perfect, @EzekielRaiden , and the example you provide is IMO weird and extreme and does you no favors.
 



To some degree, isn't this a good problem to have? Seeing aside scry and fry, I think it's probably for the best that the world have a bias toward small, flexible and highly powered teams over large military hierarchies to enable the whole adventuring premise in the first place.

Maybe, but it does mean that in a world of adventuring parties, defending against them is mostly an idiot's game. Certainly anything resembling fortifications has to have an asterisk next to it, because its not going to stop them and conventional defense strategies have failed before they even begun.

Traditionally, D&D parties were the winners because they were, in the end, more capable than the opposition, not because the opposition had little or no possible defense that was workable in the first place. In the thread this started from, the point was that the person talking Alzrius had it mostly right; tripwire systems in D&D are often just going to waste resources unless the defenders avoid using them until the attackers are committed (which defeats a lot of the benefit of it) because of hit and run tactics. And broadly speaking, I'm not sure you can disregard "scry and fry" or at least its less degenerate cases.
 


Don’t the normal stat blocks do that better?

Like I don’t have a particular issue with minions from a gameplay perspective, but they do seem to crap all over the sim perspective. In fact they probably make better gameplay.

I was definitely more concerned with gamism back when 4e was introduced so I get that perspective but minions don’t typically make sense from a sim perspective and I get that too.

I tend to agree that they're not a simulation (in the sense I'm using it, which is, again, to make it clear, excluding genre emulation which I think belongs elsewhere) tool; they're representing certain story tropes and expressing them in a way that makes it easy to handle in game play.

But then, I've also expressed my opinion that D&D and at least the adjacent games I'm familiar with were never where I'd have gone for simulation-centric play, and I think doing so is pounding nails with a wrench at best.
 

No rules system is perfect, @EzekielRaiden , and the example you provide is IMO weird and extreme and does you no favors.
It wasn't a request for perfection. It was pointing out that the specific thing you speak of is, in fact, part of the current system and I've never once seen you complain about such a thing before today.

I don't--at all--demand perfection in simulation. I am perfectly comfortable with imperfect simulation. But if your stance is that the game does not permit non-diegetic alterations of one's character, the plain and simple answer is no, it absolutely does.

There is no diegetic reason why Fighters should have greater potential for physical or mental growth than anyone else. They just do.
 

Certainly not, since the claim isn't true. It's often repeated though.

Keep in mind, Lanefan is of the opinion that a creature cannot ever have more than one, singular, statblock. Unless it's a PC, then it can have a statblock that changes over time as a result of context.


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.


Except it is one singular creature in the fiction. Why would it not have the same stat block? I don't care if you don't want to use a demonic ogre in a straight up fight against level 1 characters, that doesn't have anything to do with what the monster is. The party should be avoiding a straight up fight against something above their pay grade.

Want a creature appropriate for a level 1 party? Pick a level 1 CR monster. Maybe that ogre has goblin followers. Want to use an ogre against a higher level party that wouldn't be threatened? That's when it gets demonic blood. Don't believe in CR? Maybe D&D isn't the game for you.
 

put simply, i would say the elite/minion/ect rules emphasize more the relative strength of enemies that exists to the party across all tiers of play and how at some points that differential of power becomes exponential.
But the issue is that those CR 20 ogre minions (or whatever CR they are) still have sky high AC, attack bonus and damage. Far, far more than a standard ogre. The entire concept of the creature changes but it's still an "ogre" for gamist reasons.
 

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