D&D 4E Thing I thought 4e did better: Monsters

[Grazzt]

There is also no guarantee that they had those spells available in the first place.

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True. A 12th-level magic-user only got like four 3rd-level spells in 1e. Fireball was obviously one of them since it's mentioned in the article. And if that group is like every other group I played with or DM'd in 1e and about every edition since, lightning bolt is another spell that m-u memorized. Dispel magic, haste, hold person is probably another one (at least). I honestly don't recall too many, if any, m-u characters in 1e bothering with protection from normal missiles.

 

[cmad1977]

How seriously do you mean this?

I mean, does the same thing go for PCs to: that we don't need those dozens and dozens of pages of spell descriptions; the table of weapon details; etc, because it's all about the players bringing their PCs to life through evocative roleplaying?

It seems to me that, no matter how evocative the GM is, if a dragon is going to be different from (say) a giant rat in an encounter, than that needs some mechanical expression: at a minimum, it has to be harder for the PCs to defeat the dragon than the rat (in D&D this is more AC, more hp, better saves - these mechanics have been pretty stable over the years) and the dragon has to have some sort of dangerous multi-target attack that refelects its ability, in the fiction, to breathe fire (in D&D this is the AoE "breath weapon", the mechanics of which have varied over the years).

Once you get into the minutiae of action economy and the like - which have tended to get more complex, in D&D, as the years go on - then if the dragon is meant to be an exciting solo threat some way is needed to handle this too. No amount of GM hamming it up is going to compensate for a lack of off-turn actions in 3E, 4e or 5e. So the GM can either fiat those things, or have them written down in a stat block. Writing them down doesn't make them more interesting, but it doesn't make them less interesting either.

Role playing isn't 'hamming it up'. That's acting. Role playing the bad guys to me involves having them make decisions in(and out) of combat that further their goals.
Whether they be zombies who's main interest is bringing their foes to the ground and eating away, the momma bear who's primary interest is protecting her young, or the Elite Gaurds protecting their Death Knight lord.
The NPCs are not limited by their stat block. They are limited by DMs that only use the stat block and treat the NPCs as 'mobs' as opposed to beings with goals.


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[Jester David]

There was - it is discussed and examples given in DMG2.

I'll take your word for it. However, as a rebuttal "The problematic rule was patched... in a splatbook released a year after the core rulebooks" feels a little weak.

Checking the compendium, I can see 3 traps with the "minion" group role, with just two in the DMG2, along with three elite traps and several more standard traps. So I imagine the "minion traps" concept received somewhere between a column and a page of attention.
Looking at the compendium I can count a total of 631 traps in all of 4e (compared to the 5326 creatures). So 3/631. Minion traps don't really feel representational. Even the designers seem to have ignored the concept...

 

[pemerton]

Cloudkill might've worked to take out some of them,depending how how spread out or not they were. But the M-U would have to be careful with that spell. Depending on his positioning, if he caught any party members in the cloud, they'd have to make a saving throw or die (since it says the party was 6th-12th level and IIRC 1e cloudkill affected creatures up to and including 6 HD/levels).

Cloudkill has a range of 10' and is 40' x 20' x 20' high. It last for 1 minute per level (so minimum 9 minutes), and moves away from the caster at 10' per round. And "it will not move back towards the caster."

So as long as there is no 6th level PC more than 9' in front of the caster, there is no threat to fellow PCs.

The spell description expressly says that "it is ideal for slaying nests of giant ants, for example". The same thing seems true for nests of kobolds.

Protection from normal missiles wouldve worked to protect whomever the m-u cast it on. But unless he memorized multiple protection spells in lieu of other stuff, not many in the party would benefit.

If you read the editorial (Dragon 127), you can see that this is not a "time-sensitive" adventure: the PCs are raiding the 10th level of a pretty classic dungeon ("mega-dungeon" in the modern terminology). So it should be no trouble for the PCs to spend a day or two of dungeon exploration systematically clearing out the kobolds. Protection from Normal Missiles lasts 1 turn per level (so minimum 9 turns if we assume the MU can also cast Cloudkill). A 9th level MU can memorise 3 of them, which should be enough to protect a squishy or two plus maybe one front-line guy.

A relevant 4th level spell is Dig: 30' range below ground, lasting 1 round per level and excavating 5' x 5' x 5' of earth or mud per round. 9 rounds of this will clear out 45' of kobold escape tunnels. And if the tunnels are carved into stone rather than earth, there is 5th level Transute Rock to Mud, which (at 9th level) has a 90' range and will turn 20' x 20' x 180' of stone to mud. "Creatures unable to levitate, fly, or otherwise free themselves from the mud" - this would include kobolds, especially metal-armoured ones - "will sink and suffocate".

I can see that Tucker's kobolds might be a modest logistical problem, in that it might take a party with a 9th leve MU a week or so of spell memorisations to actually clear them out. But the idea that they are some sort of undefeatable terror I find hard to believe.

As to whether it is good for the game to place a challenge that is fairly straightforward to defeat, provided that the players go through the right logisticial hoops of spell memorisation and deployment - that's a matter of taste. Personally I think there is a significant risk of this becoming tedious play, but sometimes it can be interesting as long as it doesn't occur too often.

 

[Argyle King]

I find myself in an odd place when looking at 4E and 5E.

In the past, I've been openly critical of 4E. A lot of things about it bugged me. (Though, to be fair, it did a lot of things I liked too.)

That being said, I find that I'm less enthusiastic about 5E.

Overall, I think that my opinion of 4E is that I liked some of the mentality behind encounter designed, and I liked the game that I felt like was advertised in the preview books, but I wasn't happy with how the mechanical numbers actually worked in play.

For me, one of my favorite parts of 4E was the cosmology. I'm aware that many people disliked the changes. I liked most of them. I felt that the addition of Shadowfell and Feywild was cool, and it allowed for the game to have space available for monsters which were often too similar to each other in past (and I guess future now that 5E is out) editions.


...but to say that 5E monsters are a bag of hitpoints (and I agree) and to then suggest that's a step backward from 4E is odd. My experience with 4E was that combat would often drag due to the encounter outcome being obvious (typically that the PCs were going to win) even though the monster still had HP to chop through.

Still, I did like the encounter design mentality of 4E vastly more than 3rd. I liked having a lot of creatures in a combat. I also liked that the power curve between levels was lower, and it was fairly easy to level creatures up or down. I liked that traps and moving pieces were more dynamic and interactive.

My weirdest experiences with 4E were in finding that I enjoyed the game most when I ignored most of the 'official' advice on how to run it. Toward the end of 4E, how I built monsters, skill challenges, and encounters was drastically different from what the WoTC seemed to support. I felt that Essentials was a step in the wrong direction.

 

[Jester David]

It seems to me that, no matter how evocative the GM is, if a dragon is going to be different from (say) a giant rat in an encounter, than that needs some mechanical expression: at a minimum, it has to be harder for the PCs to defeat the dragon than the rat (in D&D this is more AC, more hp, better saves - these mechanics have been pretty stable over the years) and the dragon has to have some sort of dangerous multi-target attack that refelects its ability, in the fiction, to breathe fire (in D&D this is the AoE "breath weapon", the mechanics of which have varied over the years).

A rat will run to a bit of peanut butter on a trap and get killed by a swinging bar. They're morons.
A dragon is a centuries old beast of cunning, that knows to avoid obvious traps, and when to fly away and when to attack via an ambush. It knows to take advantage of the terrain, it's abilities, and to lure other people into a trap.

None of that is in the statblock beyond the Intelligence score. But an adult dragon shouldn't just charge at the party like a Tyrannosaurus Rex

 

[TheCosmicKid]

None of that is in the statblock beyond the Intelligence score. But an adult dragon shouldn't just charge at the party like a Tyrannosaurus Rex

Well... if its objective is to terrorize, it might. Depends how arrogant the dragon is and what it thinks of the party's abilities.

I've discovered that 5E greens can do a feline stalk-then-surprise-charge, which is fun.

 

[pemerton]

There is also no guarantee that they had those spells available in the first place.

True. A 12th-level magic-user only got like four 3rd-level spells in 1e. Fireball was obviously one of them since it's mentioned in the article. And if that group is like every other group I played with or DM'd in 1e and about every edition since, lightning bolt is another spell that m-u memorized.

I think that [MENTION=6788732]cbwjm[/MENTION] was referring to spells in spellbooks, not spells memorised.

As far as the latter is concerned, if Tucker's kolbods are as big a deal as Roger Moore makes out, you memorise a load of spell just to deal with them: not fireball but PfNM; Cloudkill; TMtR; Dig; etc.

This is simply following Gygax's advice to players on p 107 of his PHB, where he suggests that any succesfful dungeon expedition depends upon (1) setting an objective, and then (2) ensuring that the balance of party members, equipment and spells memorised is such as to conduce to acheiving that objective.

As far as availability of spells in the spellbook is concerned, if (by 9th level) you haven't found the spells you need on a scroll or in an enemy's spellbook, you can reseach them. A 9th level MU has received at last 135,000 XP, of which probably 100,000 or so was gold pieces. The time required to research a 5th level spell is 6 or more weeks, with an average cost of 3250 gp per week, plus 1800 gp if the character doesn't have his/her own library - let's make it 5,000 gp per week for simplicity. With 16 INT the research success chance is 26% chance per week, rolling at the 6th week and every week thereafter. The chance of success after 10 weeks (50,000 gp) is about 75%.

One's fellow PCs may be prepared to kick in some gold, too, to help make this happen, if the kobolds are really that fearsome.

 

[pemerton]

Role playing isn't 'hamming it up'. That's acting. Role playing the bad guys to me involves having them make decisions in(and out) of combat that further their goals.

<snip>

The NPCs are not limited by their stat block. They are limited by DMs that only use the stat block and treat the NPCs as 'mobs' as opposed to beings with goals.

Can you elaborate?

I mean, do you think the mechanical capabilities of creatures (be they PCs or NPCs) matters to their ability to further their goals.

To give a concrete example: if a being's goal is to cause its enemies to flee in terror before it, do you think it matters what its hp, AC, to hit and damage numbers, etc are?

Even the designers seem to have ignored the concept...

I take it from this that you don't belong to the "It's all up to the GM's roleplaying" school!

My own view is intermediate between these two.

I don't need the designers to pay attention to a concept in order for me to use it. But if the fiction tells me that a certain being is meant to have a certain capability - say, a dragon can defeat an entire army of dwarves - than its mechanics should express that in some fashion. So the mechanics at least have to implicitly contain the concept in question (and designer examples might help bring this out if it's not otherwise obvious).

 

[pemerton]

A rat will run to a bit of peanut butter on a trap and get killed by a swinging bar. They're morons.
A dragon is a centuries old beast of cunning, that knows to avoid obvious traps, and when to fly away and when to attack via an ambush. It knows to take advantage of the terrain, it's abilities, and to lure other people into a trap.

None of that is in the statblock beyond the Intelligence score.

I think it can benefit the game when it is, in fact, expressed somewhere in the mechanics outside the intelligence score.

For instance, classic D&D had rules for evasion and pursuit which include the chance that animals, or low-intelligence creatures (eg ogres) would be distracted by offerings of food. This can also be used to adjudicate the prospect that a rat will enter a trap.

4e had rules that could occupy a similar functional space, though based on a very different mechanical structure, with its skill challenges.

But in any event, Mr Mind (from the old Captain Marvel comics - head of the Monster Society of Evil, and a hyper-intelligent worm) also knows how to avoid traps, to lure others into traps, etc. But I think that a dragon should have a stat block that somehow differentiates it from Mr Mind.

But an adult dragon shouldn't just charge at the party like a Tyrannosaurus Rex

Why not? That's more-or-less what Smaug did, and he was able to conquer one of the great dwarfholds of the age.

If the fiction tells me that a dragon defeated a dwarven army, the statblock should somehow express this. The GM "roleplaying" the monster is not, in my view, a substitute for that. (Unlike [MENTION=58416]Johnny3D3D[/MENTION] I have been fortunate not to have the issues he did with 4e - perhaps because I have been using MM3 numbers since late heroic tier, or perhaps just through seer luck - but I agree with him that, if in fact the mechanics aren't delivering results that correspond to the notional fiction, then something has gone wrong and one or the other clearly has to give.)

EDIT: In my 4e game I have run two dragon encounters. The first was at 4th level (or thereabouts), against a young black dragon from the MM. Despite the criticism I've seen of MM black dragons, this encounter went very well - the PCs got some archery off as the dragon approached, and then had to engage it in melee and cope with its darkness cloud (which the PC wizard was dispelling by channelling arcane power through a statute of the Summer Queen that the PCs had in their possession - mechanically, this was p 42).

The second was at 26th level, and involved an ancient white dragon and ancient blizzard dragon, the former being ridden by a frost giant chieftain. This was an aerial assualt on the PCs' Thundercloud Tower, which they were flying down the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. Given it was only a 27th level encounter it was a pretty close thing, and (in my view, at least) satisfyingly epic, ending with the PC fighter leaping onto the back of the dragon, pinning its wings and riding it to the ground as it crashed. From the point of view of fiction vs mechanics, I can easily believe that a dragon which was so hard for a group of demigods et al to defeat would be a fearsome terror to ordinary folk, and a suitable pet/companion for a powerful frost giant chieftain in league with Lolth and the Prince of Frost.