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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5722231" data-attributes="member: 2067">Those are good examples of the fluff that did make it in, and it's not bad story information. There's no real objection from me to that being included. Of course, the 4e MM also teaches you that with a DC 20 Nature check you, too, can know that bears claw things. Perhaps the less said about that the better, though. The talk here is about the ratio. The cascading effects of "Combat is central" and "Monsters are for fighting" yields a book largely filled with fighting stats, not with the cultural relationships between bugbears and hobgoblins. I may be an outlier, but I'm 2-B in your scheme. I think a game needs mechanics for what the players do, and that those mechanics should be diverse enough to handle many different types of challenges -- not simply combat challenges.I want good rules for how to resist a succubus's temptation, a solid system for using player abilities to uncover a succubus's true nature, and the rules to follow her back to the ruins beneath the old castle where she was originally summoned in an interesting and challenging way, topped off with a great climactic encounter between her and all of her willing servitors that runs smooth and cinematic.Combat's a key portion of that adventure, but it's only one portion of that adventure. The succubus's other qualities -- temptation, deception, dungeon protection, allies, etc. -- are mechanically important to me. I don't want to DM handwave all the rest of the game that is not on a grid. Those things naturally need a context, and that context is the story information. Story information tells me why I should want to feature the creature in an adventure, why I should want to use it narratively, what purpose it serves in the world of the game. A succubus should not just be a combat stat block and lip service flavor text indicating that she is a manipulator.I personally think the real dispute is about some core 4e design goals, and how those goals might not be what some people want D&D to be. Rich Baker, as much as he is in a position to talk about those goals, is merely the person talking about them. His stated reasons I completely understand, and acknowledge as legit. I don't think that is all there is, though I think that might be all he can reasonably talk about in a Rule-of-Three article. My claim is a little...orthogonal. The 4e MM has some story elements. I do take some exception when it outright replaces older story elements, but the claim that it has "no story elements" isn't literal so much as it is a description of how it doesn't meet the needs of some people (myself included). So a precious few story elements exist in the MM. However, the purpose of the 4e MM is pretty clearly to provide stat blocks for minis combat. That is what it spends the vast majority of its word count doing. I believe that purpose is flawed. Here, a comparison with older editions is worthwhile, because it shows that an MM isn't just about things you fight -- it is about interesting encounters. Now, it often wasn't as focused and efficient on that as it could have been, and that's a problem I would've LOVED 4e to solve. Instead of turning dryads into shrubbery monsters, they should've provided me with interesting ways to use the dryad that existed when 4e was being made: social encounters recruiting it to aide the party in fighting the goblins in its wood, or in asking it to stop sending treants to attack the nearby logging village. Exploration encounters to get through the forest despite the pernicious faerie magic therein. Investigation encounters when the party discovers that the dead loggers have been killed by some powerful druidic magic. Companion stats for when the elf druid in the party decided to recruit one for an adventure. I didn't need a war dryad. I needed a better instruction manual for the existing dryad. If the D&D game could give me that, and could support that with interesting story material for inspiration, I think I'd have a solid monster book. 4e's MM is the big war elephant in the room, though. The things therein are for fighting. That, for me, is necessary but insufficient.To a similar extent, the powers structure is also part of this problem, what with the "attacks and combat utilities" being the only interesting and varied rules bits that players get to use, but that's a whole other kettle of fish (though certainly related).</blockquote>

Verification