The Cunningly Disguised MMIV Preview

[Pants]

You think this game is supposed to be fun?!

I don't know where I got the idea...

 

[Khuxan]

I prefer that, actually. It's easier to have the magic items already figured into the stats. It's a time-saver in cases where I don't want to bother figuring out what sorts of magic items it should have and figuring out what they would do.

If I want to change the items (and recalculate the stats accordingly) I can do that, just as if I want a monster to have a few more points of intelligence or strength, or a different number of hit dice, or any other variance from the assumed norm, I can do the recalculation involved in that.

Just as it's good that they give you a default average strength score instead of forcing you to roll each creature's strength randomly (with appropariate adjustments), it's good that they give you a default treasure. Those who want more variety have to do more work, true, but those who don't want more variety don't have to do any work at all. And that suits my laziness.

QFT

 

[sjmiller]

Aw, you took a facetious comment seriously.

You're no fun.

What can I say? I am a curmudgeon. It's my job to occasionally take things seriously that others say in jest. Be that as it may, I had a chance to talk to a few other DMs this weekend who do not frequent this fine establishment, and most of them are probably not going to buy MMIV either. The general concensus was that we hardly use most of the creatures in the monster books we have now.

 

[Ashrem Bayle]

That's interesting -- I never noticed that tidbit before. I assume this stacks with armor check penalties, so that scale mail would impose a total Jump modifier of -8? (-4 for armor check penalty, -4 for speed of 20 ft.)

I never noticed it until I noticed that my heavily armored characters created in PCGen seemed to have terrible jump checks.

 

[delericho]

The example given fixes almost all of my gripes about the new stat-block. Can't say I'm a fan of these new ultra-verbose formats that Wizards are developing for monsters, spells, magic items, classes and so forth, though. It feels like I'm getting less for my money, somehow.

 

[frankthedm]

And the creature itself, a redspawn of Tiamat, is pretty cool - although I think the CR might be a bit off.

Not that off when dealing with PCs who have access to the splat-book material. If the party is core rules only, I’d tend to agree with you. But when the barbarian is Leap Attacking, the Cleric is casting Resist Energy, Mass, the wizard is launching a sudden empowered lesser cold orb and the goliath fighter has a weapon a giant would find hefty, no, the CR is just right...

Plus CRs are supposed to be determined on what will challenge the party. Wotc is realizing that Caster level X does not = CR X, as casters die so fast it is not funny and that classed NPCs are very weak overall. This guy is quite dead if he gets grappled.

Minis wise... Looks like the draconic bullete is the Redspawn Firebelcher.

http://wizards.com/dnd/images/mi20060427_silh03.jpg

 

[DaveMage]

I like the Lore sections, but I too could do without the large entries covering the society and ecology at the cost of more monsters being in the book.

Well, actually, in a perfect world, I want it all, but then each monster book would be 480 pages and cost $75.

 

[Nebulous]

I like the layout and WILL be buying MMIV. MM3 was one of my favorite in the series from Wizards and i look forward to reading oodles of info about ecology again. It's nostalgic...

 

[Staffan]

Well, actually, in a perfect world, I want it all, but then each monster book would be 480 pages and cost $0.75.

Fixed it for you. We are talking about a perfect world, after all.

 

[Nellisir]

Well, actually, in a perfect world, I want it all, but then each monster book would be 480 pages and pay me $75

Fixed it for you. We are talking about a perfect world, after all.

Fixed it for you.