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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 2981156" data-attributes="member: 22779">When you think about it for a second, it's very interesting.If a player makes a one trick pony character, we typically consider that a bad thing.  Most DM's will chuck in stuff to show why being a one trick pony PC is not good.  At worst, we tend to lump such players together with epithets like "powergamer" and "twink" or even "munchkin".  Why should monsters be any different?  Why should we have a single monster for every niche instead of several monsters that can fill several niche's?  As a comparison, take rust monsters vs babau.  Both are capable of destroying equipment.  Yet, a babau is capable of many, many more things, from being an assassin type villain, leader of a cult, sneaky bastard, straight up thug, etc etc.  So, if  I need a "remove PC wealth" monster, I have the choice of using a rust monster or using a babau.From an adventure design point of view, which encounter is going to be more interesting?  My vote is for the babau simply because it's a heck of a lot cooler than a big bug that eats your sword.  It's a demon after all.  Demons are cool.  Whacking demons is what D&D is usually all about.  And, at CR 8 (IIRC), I can use a babau in a very wide range of encounters.The new design approach seems to be centered on the idea of pushing creatures out of their niches and giving them a much broader utility.  The MMIV seems to be geared in this way as well.  Instead of a book full of niche monsters which may or may not ever see play, it works as a template book for how to use creatures in a broader sense.  Sure, there are still niche creatures, after all, if you don't use dragons very much, you aren't going to use spawn.OTOH, now that you have spawn, you can use dragons a little more easily.  Instead of the dragon sitting in his lair on a pile of gold, now he has a ready made army of thralls to send out and do his bidding.  Personally, I run Scarred Lands, so MMIV has very little use to me (no dragons), but that doesn't mean its a bad book.  I think the new approach has some serious merits.</blockquote>

Verification