NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4106641" data-attributes="member: 4937">I always play creatures at thier intelligence level.  For mindless or nearly mindless creatures, I just have them blindly charge in an uncordinated fashion.  Smarter creatures will use thier instinctive attacks, but won't recognize or react intelligently to things outside of thier experience.  Ogres for example are good at pounding things and will intelligently defend themselves, but don't work together and don't recognize when they are being out planned.  Wolves on the other hand work extremely well together and are good at realizing when they are being out manuevered, but (unless they are actually animal spirits) don't really know how to deal with missile weapons or magic except by running away.  Human level intelligence creatures will try to work together, and try to respond within the limit of what I think thier ability is.  Bright creatures I play to the best of my ability.  Creatures that I think are smarter than I am, I not only play as well as I can, but I use my metagame knowledge of the characters abilities and defenses against them, reasoning that a true superhuman intelligence would be able to divine these things from subtle clues.Likewise, monsters often run away rather than fighting to the death, and in doing so often expose themselves to greater risk of than if they'd fought bravely.  Zombies may be mindless, but they are also fearless.I like the game that way.  I'm not trying to beat the players.  I'm trying to bring thier story to life in a deeply emmersive and compelling way.  If the game is just about me demonstrating my tactical accumen, I'd rather play a game that was 'fair'.  And I wouldn't want to be the DM every night either.Goblins, orcs, gnolls, and kobolds only look somewhat similar on paper.  They play 'the game' of battle completely differently.  I'm not adverse to 4E helping to bring that out, and in fact I approve of the general trend of making +0 LA races more flavorful (which can really only be done by increasing thier power level somewhat).  However, I don't think it is strictly necessary, and having established my own preferred 'style' for the major races I won't necessarily want to relinquish it.</blockquote>

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