Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 2937756" data-attributes="member: 813">Go back and read my Magic: The Gathering comments. MTG is almost 100% exceptions, yet the game is quite elegant because when you deal with an exception, it is a short, bite-sized morsel that does not require you to go consult three books for an explanation. Elegance is not the opposite of complexity.My paper tiger is not an exception. It is an "ability" of the monster to suffer more damage than usual. So it can have a 16HD breath weapon, but be killed as if it only had 4 HD. But all the rules about the monster are local to the monster. You cannot say giving the monster an unusual ability is complexity (which is bad) because then you end up with all your monsters having the same set of abilities. Yes, you reduce complexity if all monsters are claw/claw/bite, fire-breathing, acid-immune dragons. And while you can make that elegant design, that doesn't make it good design. (Or fun either)One of the "flaws" of standardization of abilities in 3.x is you have to know what the standard abilities do in order to see the keyword in the monster description and apply it correctly. The good thing about standardization is you only have one kind of incorporeality, not a dozen different kinds. The bad thing is you have to look up each keyword and understand how they work in order to run the monsters. Granted, over time you will come to know what they mean but that doesn't mean you always run them correctly. Incorporeality is like a half page of text. Do you really know how it works without refreshing your memory of it? I refer back to my 2e lightning bolt story now. I wonder how many 3.x DMs run some monster ability incorrectly without knowing because they think they know how it works but it they were to read it again, they'd discover they were wrong. (This paragraph has me planning to go read the special abilities section again....)</blockquote>

Verification