Celebrim
Legend
While the discussion over CR is interesting in itself, I think it misses the point of the rant. SKR was not arguing that the problem with the Effigy was that we could not easily assign a CR rating to it, or that the CR rating assigned to it was wrong. In essence, I heard SKR have two things to say in the rant, albiet not quite as clearly as is usual for him.
1) The design team at WotC - particularly with regards to the MMII - is not making great decisions with making high level monsters. Either they are making monsters which seem to break thier own rules to a certain extent (like giving DR to an incorporeal creature), or more importantly they are relying too heavily on 'gosh wow' and taking away character abilities (generally regarded as poor design practice) when designing monsters. He was picking on the Effigy, but the problem is more widespread. In fact, the problem is not just a problem of WotC. IMO, no one is designing really good high level monsters. Maybe this is a limitation of D20, maybe this is a relative lack of experience with high level D20 by the better minds in the business, I don't know. But its not being done. People all over the thread are commenting on limitations and bad choices in design that result in a majority of characters having limited contributions to the action. I think we could take it further. Once we get up to the epic levels, 99% of the monsters are designed to be defeated by one of two character types: high damage output 'fighters' (usually fighter but occassionally barbarians, psionic warriors, and even the occasional buffed wildshaping druid) or instant kill arcane spell casters (wizards and sorcerers). The problem isn't as bad as it was in 1st edition, but it is still there.
Part of this problem could be solved by making a concerted effort to design monsters that make the other classes (Bards, Rogues, Monks, etc.) shine by choosing a subset of abilities that did not negate some classes strengths. For instance, if we choose a 'ambushing monster' to play up the rogues strengths, we should avoiding making all of them immune to criticals to negate this. Instead, maybe we should have them provoke reflex saves, and maybe even will saves or be slowed/staggered so as to mitigate the party tanks special abilities. Maybe we create a monster that ONLY takes damage on a critical. Suddenly, the rouge's keen rapier is the parties best (but not only) bet. Not every high level undead needs turn resistance. Some of them might be allowed to be 'easy' challenges for parties with clerics, and maybe we have something with a touch attack that provokes hindering (but not devasting saves) so that the Monk in the party can shine.
But that is only part of the problem. The other problem is the escallation of violence that D&D has always experienced. The problem can be simply stated, "The higher level the combatants, on average the shorter the combat." AND THAT TO ME IS THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH THE SYSTEM. Because, it is exactly the opposite of what we want. We want, the more 'epic' (a synonym for cool) our characters become for the challenges to become more intence, more interesting, and 'better stories' both to experience and to tell. I find that doesn't happen, which brings us to what I percieved as the second point.
2) After some point, high level challenges are less fun for everyone involved.
I should qualify that by saying that there has always been a subclass of power gamer in D&D that enjoys defeating powerful foes easily, and the more easily that they defeat them and the more powerful the foe the more that they enjoy the game. So, there are probably some parties out there having a good time defeating Tiamat before she even gets an action, and rinse/repeat for every monster in the game. More power to them. They are important customers.
But they ain't everybody, and the converse to the above is that when Tiamat does get an action, probably someone in the party dies before they can get their action.
Imagine I'm running a campaign when the players are only 1st level, and I want to have a series of interesting combats punctuating the story I want to tell (just like any good action movie or adventure novel). At first level I might design an encounter in which the party faced a series of kobold combat teams carefully parcelled in waves so as to not overwhelm the party. I can assume that each player can kill a Kobold on average every 3 rounds (some less often some more), and that Kobolds won't seriously threaten anyone in the party in any given round without extraordinary luck provided I design them right (for instance avoiding for now x3 critical weapons). I can then 'story board' a fight with tence 'scenes' and expect to get to every scene (on average). I can expect to keep the players attention, and I can expect that they will imagine the encounter, play it in there head, and maybe even 'rewind' and reminense. I can keep doing this without a problem through probably the first 4 levels with no problem, simply by slowly incrimenting the challenge - goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, gnolls, ogres. BUT, eventually, this is going to stop working. Eventually, I'm going to get to the point that players can do so much damage that monsters die before I get a chance to fully 'display' them. For example, barring extraordinary 'scripting', I think it highly unlikely that an Androsphinx will EVER roar three times in a single combat with a party of 9th level characters. It might as well not even have the huge and interesting list of powers it has, because against the average tricked out 9th level party, its toast in 1.5 rounds. The only way around this is to completely buff the monster up before the players get there, which relies on the silliness of all tough monsters are always maximally ready for combat. No matter how well I script this, it is going to get trite.
So in order to get to 'display' the monster you have to rely on increasingly flashy abilities, and as those progress the ability of the monster to challenge the existance of any given monster on any given round increases to the point that the combat becomes 'who goes first'. Since typically I roll one initiative for the monster(s) and one initiative for each PC - it is the PC's.
One particularly bad example of this I experienced as a player (even at a fairly low level) occured against a T-Rex, when the combat degenerated into 'who the DM selects to bite will die' but the T-Rex will definately get beat down before he can eat all of us. T-Rex went down in like 3.5 rounds. Three player deaths occured. Bad DMing? DM inexperience? Yes and yes, but that wasn't the basic problem. The basic problem was kill or be killed. And from the opposite direction, feats like Multishot and classes like frenzied beserker and other 'cewlness' only contribute to the problem.
1) The design team at WotC - particularly with regards to the MMII - is not making great decisions with making high level monsters. Either they are making monsters which seem to break thier own rules to a certain extent (like giving DR to an incorporeal creature), or more importantly they are relying too heavily on 'gosh wow' and taking away character abilities (generally regarded as poor design practice) when designing monsters. He was picking on the Effigy, but the problem is more widespread. In fact, the problem is not just a problem of WotC. IMO, no one is designing really good high level monsters. Maybe this is a limitation of D20, maybe this is a relative lack of experience with high level D20 by the better minds in the business, I don't know. But its not being done. People all over the thread are commenting on limitations and bad choices in design that result in a majority of characters having limited contributions to the action. I think we could take it further. Once we get up to the epic levels, 99% of the monsters are designed to be defeated by one of two character types: high damage output 'fighters' (usually fighter but occassionally barbarians, psionic warriors, and even the occasional buffed wildshaping druid) or instant kill arcane spell casters (wizards and sorcerers). The problem isn't as bad as it was in 1st edition, but it is still there.
Part of this problem could be solved by making a concerted effort to design monsters that make the other classes (Bards, Rogues, Monks, etc.) shine by choosing a subset of abilities that did not negate some classes strengths. For instance, if we choose a 'ambushing monster' to play up the rogues strengths, we should avoiding making all of them immune to criticals to negate this. Instead, maybe we should have them provoke reflex saves, and maybe even will saves or be slowed/staggered so as to mitigate the party tanks special abilities. Maybe we create a monster that ONLY takes damage on a critical. Suddenly, the rouge's keen rapier is the parties best (but not only) bet. Not every high level undead needs turn resistance. Some of them might be allowed to be 'easy' challenges for parties with clerics, and maybe we have something with a touch attack that provokes hindering (but not devasting saves) so that the Monk in the party can shine.
But that is only part of the problem. The other problem is the escallation of violence that D&D has always experienced. The problem can be simply stated, "The higher level the combatants, on average the shorter the combat." AND THAT TO ME IS THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH THE SYSTEM. Because, it is exactly the opposite of what we want. We want, the more 'epic' (a synonym for cool) our characters become for the challenges to become more intence, more interesting, and 'better stories' both to experience and to tell. I find that doesn't happen, which brings us to what I percieved as the second point.
2) After some point, high level challenges are less fun for everyone involved.
I should qualify that by saying that there has always been a subclass of power gamer in D&D that enjoys defeating powerful foes easily, and the more easily that they defeat them and the more powerful the foe the more that they enjoy the game. So, there are probably some parties out there having a good time defeating Tiamat before she even gets an action, and rinse/repeat for every monster in the game. More power to them. They are important customers.
But they ain't everybody, and the converse to the above is that when Tiamat does get an action, probably someone in the party dies before they can get their action.
Imagine I'm running a campaign when the players are only 1st level, and I want to have a series of interesting combats punctuating the story I want to tell (just like any good action movie or adventure novel). At first level I might design an encounter in which the party faced a series of kobold combat teams carefully parcelled in waves so as to not overwhelm the party. I can assume that each player can kill a Kobold on average every 3 rounds (some less often some more), and that Kobolds won't seriously threaten anyone in the party in any given round without extraordinary luck provided I design them right (for instance avoiding for now x3 critical weapons). I can then 'story board' a fight with tence 'scenes' and expect to get to every scene (on average). I can expect to keep the players attention, and I can expect that they will imagine the encounter, play it in there head, and maybe even 'rewind' and reminense. I can keep doing this without a problem through probably the first 4 levels with no problem, simply by slowly incrimenting the challenge - goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, gnolls, ogres. BUT, eventually, this is going to stop working. Eventually, I'm going to get to the point that players can do so much damage that monsters die before I get a chance to fully 'display' them. For example, barring extraordinary 'scripting', I think it highly unlikely that an Androsphinx will EVER roar three times in a single combat with a party of 9th level characters. It might as well not even have the huge and interesting list of powers it has, because against the average tricked out 9th level party, its toast in 1.5 rounds. The only way around this is to completely buff the monster up before the players get there, which relies on the silliness of all tough monsters are always maximally ready for combat. No matter how well I script this, it is going to get trite.
So in order to get to 'display' the monster you have to rely on increasingly flashy abilities, and as those progress the ability of the monster to challenge the existance of any given monster on any given round increases to the point that the combat becomes 'who goes first'. Since typically I roll one initiative for the monster(s) and one initiative for each PC - it is the PC's.
One particularly bad example of this I experienced as a player (even at a fairly low level) occured against a T-Rex, when the combat degenerated into 'who the DM selects to bite will die' but the T-Rex will definately get beat down before he can eat all of us. T-Rex went down in like 3.5 rounds. Three player deaths occured. Bad DMing? DM inexperience? Yes and yes, but that wasn't the basic problem. The basic problem was kill or be killed. And from the opposite direction, feats like Multishot and classes like frenzied beserker and other 'cewlness' only contribute to the problem.
