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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4178371" data-attributes="member: 22779">I've been reading the responses to the Monster Manual previews and something strikes me.  People are complaining quite a lot that various monsters lack "interesting abilities" or "ways to do X" or "things to do outside of combat".  And it reminds me strongly of the complaints about the CR of various demon and devil lords in the Fiendish Codex books and the BOVD.The complaint generally went, "How can X possibly be a demon lord when he's only CR 23.  A big balor is bigger than that.  How can X keep his title.  He should be CR 50!"And, from a world building POV, they are entirely right.  100% true.  A CR 23 Demogorgon is laughable.  He's Balor chow.But, that point of view entirely ignores one salient point - monster exist to be fought and defeated.  A CR 50 Demogorgon will never, ever see play at 99.9% of game tables.  You may as well just declare him unkillable and not bother with any stats at all.And, even in the Savage Tide AP, they recognize this.  Dragon gives us a CR 33 Demogorgon, massively powerful.  Then the STAP gives us several hoops to jump through which knock him down to about CR 23.   Right where he started from.Why?  Because almost no one plays Epic games to that high of a level.  The vast majority of games out there tap out at around 20th at best.  So, giving us a CR 33 Demogorgon, while fitting from a world building POV, is pretty much a waste of page count from the POV of the game.4e seems to be countering this attitude.  They are starting with the effect that you want to get and then working backward.  You want game elements to be viable to be used right out of the box.  Anything beyond that is handed to the DM to do.  And, no, it's not simply Make <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Up.  That's terrible rules.  True.  It's, "Ok, here's the baseline, if you want to move beyond that baseline, here are several ways you can do so - Templates, advancing monsters, rituals, etc.  But, what really surprises me is that the world builders here are annoyed about this.  This really does shock me.  Why?  Why be annoyed about this?Think about it for a moment.  In 3e, monster abilities were extremely well defined.  Very carefully constructed.  But, because they were defined so clearly, your game world became defined by the mechanics of the game.  If a given element always works in a particular way, your game world has to reflect that.  So, if you had an idea that wasn't really covered by the mechanics, you had to bend and twist the mechanics to fit, or you had to change your idea.  Typically changing your idea was easier.Heck, Eberron revels in this.  A campaign setting designed from the ground up based on 3e mechanics.  Think about that for a second.  That means that the mechanics are so prevalent, so much in the foreground, that you can design a whole world based on them.4e appears to be far more permissive.  In 4e, it appears that you start with the effect that you want to achieve, and then use the tools they give you to explain that effect.  A succubus rules a kingdom from the sidelines?  Ritual power.  A phane has a bunch of "evil twins"?  NPC templates.In other words, it appears that your world building will actually be far less constrained by the mechanics than it was in 3e.  It has to be since the 4e mechanics are less concretely defined.So, why are all the world builder's here pissed off?</blockquote>

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