Rust Monster Lovin'

[MarkB]

Whaaaat?

A rust monster is going to, on a really good day, eat at the most two pieces of equipment, unless the players are so dense as to stand there and keep letting it get them. And all you have to do is wander down the hall until you find a pack of kobolds and snag their equipment, fer crying out loud. This idea that a rust monster is in any way a game breaker is just nuts.

For a fighter with a tight focus, 2 pieces of equipment could easily comprise the majority of his current character wealth. Most kobolds I've met aren't that rich.

 

[mearls]

Now as a hypothetical example, this article is a great demonstration of how R&D will monkey with something sent up from design! It would probably have been less incendiary if you had used a completely new example, or perhaps a flumph. But since R&D is concerned with how people play the game, I don't see why you should be dismissive towards critics of your design philosophy. They are part of your market too, after all, right?

Sorry, I should have been much clearer with that quote. I don't mind criticism of my work in the least. It's a big part of learning what people like. The entire point of the column is to generate discussion.

What I do mind is this sort of assumption that the changes have something to do with dumbing down D&D for 14 year olds. I've seen this repeated attitude that young players are too dumb or whiney. That bugs me, because in my experience stupidity and whinining are distributed across age categories. It bugs me even more because it seems like a convenient excuse for older gamers to hate on younger ones.

 

[mearls]

I am not going to add to the reasons to the pros and cons.

Simply put, revamping the Rust Monster to me in such a way as to have items "heal" would take away any coolness the creature ever had.

The whole point of the monster was to have metal bearing characters quake in fear at losing thier shiny stuff. Take that away, you take away the soul of the beast.

At least IMHO.

I think you're right. Someone else wondered if people would react the same way if the monster was a new creation, and I think the answer is no.

There's a lot of talk in R&D about making monsters sticky. We think of it in terms of mind flayers, drow, and other "cool" monsters that show up a lot in campaigns.

I think the rust monster is a demonstration of another kind of stickiness: a rust monster has a big effect on the campaign and how you play the game. When you fight a rust monster, the game is radically different for at least one encounter. The redesign fumbles that away.

This entire thread has provided some very interesting food for thought.

I'll try to follow up when I can, but I'm busy tonight and tomorrow, plus I suspect I'll have a lot more work this week than last. Friday was (for a variety of reasons) an exceptionally slow day. Still, I'll read upon the thread when I can.

BTW, apologies again if anyone interpreted my snarkiness as resentment towards people who dislike the ideas I had. It was directed towards the resentment I saw towards the alleged attitude of younger players. I'm making prototypes here, so to speak - they're meant to get dirty.

EDIT: One other thing - I'm curious to see the reaction to the next two monsters I mess with. In both cases, they become significantly tougher at a lower or same CR. If anyone thinks I want to make D&D safer for PCs, I challenge you to play through The Three Faces of Evil from Dungeon magazine.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

But we're a self-selecting group. None of the newbies who 'encountered a rust monster, got their equipment toasted by it, got TPK'd in the next room, and gave up because this game was stupid' bother to post on Enworld. They just silently stopped playing.

We are not the only people that WotC makes D&D for. Interpreting everything through the lens of our own personal experience is not good enough.

a) I have yet to see a player stop playing silently instead of stopping with a loud display of disgust and a tirade of why he thinks the game was dumb and silly.

b) If I have to take a representative statistical sample every time before I post something on ENWorld, I guess I won't get more posts in for the next 2 years or so. Everybody here is posting from or interpreting through the lens of his/her own experience, and I doubt that is going to change soon (or at all ).

c) The same newbie would have stopped playing when his character gets killed and eaten by a carrion crawler (6-8 saves vs. paralyzation anybody?), dismembered by the ogre, or bloodsucked dry by a swarm of stirges. Some people think Monopoly bland or silly, too, and stop playing because they habitually land in jail. Still no reason to change it from "Go directly to jail, don't cross Start, don't get any cash" to "Go to jail, collect any cash you are due while crossing the playing field, and if you roll a 1 on 1d6, you're scott free".

Whizybang, I agree with your suggestion of a few variant rust monsters...or simply new monsters with a comparable ability. If this suggestion had been a new monster, I wouldn't have given it a second thought, it was more about the direction some design decisions went in remaking it that drew my attention.

Mr Mearls, this was not meant as a criticism that you were trying to "dumb down D&D for young newbies", just so I'm not misunderstood. I actually welcome any attempt to simplify D&D as it is for new starting players of younger ages. But even then it's easier to go with "monster hits, rusts your sword and starts eating it" than "monster hits, puts your sword under a magical curse that weakens it with time until it can eat it, if you don't get it out of reach in time". Less bookkeeping and a more immediate effect create a more memorable impression of the threat a monster represents, in my opinion.

 

[Hussar]

I have to admit, the Gray Ooze did flit through my mind. Difficult to spot - practically impossible in many cased - a single hit followed by a grapple and you might lose your shirt quite literally.

Then again, how often do people use them?

IMO, a creature that is almost never used is not a well designed creature. Who cares how groovy it is? If it never sees the light of day, then it might as well not be there.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

I have to admit, the Gray Ooze did flit through my mind. Difficult to spot - practically impossible in many cased - a single hit followed by a grapple and you might lose your shirt quite literally.

Then again, how often do people use them?

IMO, a creature that is almost never used is not a well designed creature. Who cares how groovy it is? If it never sees the light of day, then it might as well not be there.

Last time I used it was in the second-to-last Iron Kingdoms adventure with my group, when they were clearing out the crypts beneath the church in Corvis. Was great fun when that innocent puddle suddenly attacked them. Although, I admit, it was the same game that saw me using the Face Sucker from the Munchkin Monster Manual on the elven ranger/wizard. But that's another story, and shall be told another time.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I'm always surprised at how people's first reaction is never to lift or educate, but to dumb down or blunt.

When you speak of "educate" what you really seem to mean is to teach your particular preferred style of gaming. And by "dumbing down" you really seem to mean is to build a game that also accomodates any other style of gaming.

While I am less than enamored with Mike's revision of the Rust Monster for reasons of mechanical complexity already mentioned, I think the general approach is attractive for a particular reason that transcends the details of preferred gaming style: it is a more interesting monster than can with accomodate a vast array of gaming style with very minor tweaks.

The original Rust Monster was like a creaky V-8 truck with no brakes and no seat belts -- fine for some specific tasks for those people who are happy to overlook some shortcomings, but inappropriate for general consumption.

The new Rust Monster is like a modern sedan with air conditioner and a good stereo system. This Rust Monster has more insectoid style, has more abilities, and fits easily into an ecology (if that floats your boat). It is trivial to imagine more dangerous variants that dish out more killing damage. It trivial to tweak up the item destruction qualities back to 1e levels. Or to push it down further and throw entire herds at those knights in shining armor and have it be bad enough to make them nervous but weak enough to not inconveniently disrupt the pace of the campaign.

What we have now is a Rust Monster that can be put into anyone's campaign out of the box. And it can be changed to fit more kinds of campaign style.

The bottom line is that is better game design.

So who needs educating?

 

[Hussar]

I suppose that's what it comes down to. Is an Aha Gotcha (tm) monster a good design or not. The whole idea behind it is that it will be very sparingly used. However, that means that you're taking up a spot in the Monster Manual for a creature you KNOW will only be used once or maybe twice in any given campaign.

Most campaigns are played at lower levels, if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed. There are only so many low CR creatures in the Monster Manual. Is it an example of good design to include such a monster among the limited space? Shouldn't a well designed monster be available for use pretty much whenever the DM wishes? An ogre is CR 3 as well. I can chuck in ogres pretty much whenever I please and no one will bat an eye.

If I chuck in rust monsters as often as ogres, my players would get a trifle miffed I believe. I know as a player, I'd be considering taking a monk in a campaign which featured hordes of rust monsters.

There are a number of nuclear weapon style monsters out there. Oozes, rust monsters, demi-liches, that sort of thing. Monsters whose footprint lasts a long time. Now, in the demi-lich case, that might be fine. It depends. But, again, you're not going to use more than one in an entire campaign in all likelyhood.

Maybe rust monsters, oozes and the like should go the way of green slime. Traps instead of monsters. Remove any attack from the rust monster, make it act as a trap to whack one or two items. Since this is likely the effect of a standard rust monster, why go through the entire process of having the naked guy with a club beat it to death?

If a monster has effectively the same result as a trap, shouldn't it be a trap and not a monster?

 

[Cam Banks]

There's a lot of talk in R&D about making monsters sticky. We think of it in terms of mind flayers, drow, and other "cool" monsters that show up a lot in campaigns.

See, I don't know about the above. I get that those are famous for being cool monsters, but do people really use them as often as you think they do? I've never used a mind flayer in 25 years of running D&D, and I hardly ever use drow (and haven't in 3rd edition). Mind flayers are so awful I'm literally scared to use them in any campaign of mine, and drow don't have any place in most of the campaigns I've run (Birthright, Dragonlance, etc).

I'm probably not the average gamer by any means, but seriously man - sticky seems to be entirely subjective.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[I'm A Banana]

I notice that a lot of "cool", sticky monsters also have surprisingly Rock/Paper/Scissors, All-or-Nothing, Party-Nuking abilities.

Mind flayers have Mind Blast and an instant death effect.

Rust monsters ('till recently) dissolved all of your equipment.

Githyanki can kill people in the Astral.

I will say that I would never use those abilities. But because they are XTREME, they stand out. They deviate radically from the norm, do their effects relatively simply, and leave players either unharmed or totally handicapped depending upon preparation and knowledge.

I wouldn't use 'em, but I'd never forget 'em.