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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 7006101" data-attributes="member: 87792">Go watch Dancing with the Stars or whatever and tell me that everyone moving across the floor at the same speed is moving in the same way.It's a horrible design decision IMO and leads to a mass of wasted time looking things up in the index.Nope. 4e reduced the statblock to the combat and directly contested abilities. I have had black dragons corrupt water into fetid swamps (and not just the obvious way). I've had them summon darkness.What I haven't had them do is do so as a rote thing in six seconds in combat. They do it because they are black dragons and not because they can cast spells in a formulaic way because they are wizards. 4e, unlike other editions of D&D, gives me this freedom in worldbuilding. My dragons don't cast spells as if they were wizards with Star Trek style prosthetic foreheads. They change the world through their impact on it and sometimes through their spells because that is how the world works.The 4e ones are gloriously incomplete. They give me mechanics where I need mechanics. And they give me the freedom to build the world the way I picture it.The dragon always has acid blood. The dragon, before it has been bloodied, simply isn't shedding copious amounts of blood and quantity of blood matters.As for why acid doesn't affect magic swords? I think that question answers itself.All non-fledgling Monster Vault era dragons have Action Recovery. Also all Monster Vault era dragons have instinctive something - but whereas the instinct of a black dragon is to devour, the instinct of a green dragon is to hit and run with a flyby attack and the instinctive action of a blue is to throw lightning.They instinctively react at the same speed - but why should the instincts of the different dragons all be the same?They use their tail sweeps as reactions because they aren't looking that way. They are looking at whoever they bite or claw - the tail sweep to protect their flanks is based on instinct.Here we get into Watsonian and Doylist principles. The dragon roars in pain and breathes over everyone the first time it gets hurt. And the battle kicks up a gear at that point.They have largely the same in 4e. But enough differences that they actively behave differently.And I then asked you what the point of such ginormous stat blocks was to you. I've no objection to tiny statblocks. (I've been known to have NPCs with a single dice stat in Cortex). I've no objection to large ones when they tell me what I consider important.The 4e ones don't any more than every human does. But every (Monster Vault era) black dragon is not just recognisably a dragon but recognisably a black dragon if you watch how it reacts unless there is a very good reason for it to have completely changed its natural reactions.As mentioned all Monster Vault era dragons do in 4e (and the MV era dragons replace the anaemic things in the MM1).Red dragons can charge. Blacks do it as a reflex.I don't - because that's not the way to approach 4e monsters. The way to approach 4e monster design is to start with how you want the monster to behave and write that up as powers, almost entirely ignoring feats or other monster abilities. You don't bother looking for feats or spells so the monster does it exactly the way the wizard does. You just give the monster the abilities it needs. You don't start with a list of powers to pick in monster design. You start with a blank page and the setting.And this makes no sense except in a D&D specific fantasy world where classes are a thing. Which means you need to start with classes and levels. You're starting with D&D mechanics. This is the literal opposite approach you take for good 4e where you start with the setting and then use the mechanics you give the monsters to approximate the setting.I did. It's a far more ferocious monster in play; monster design improved over the course of the edition.All creatures in 4e can charge. Every single creature in 4e that has any sort of basic attack (which is denoted by a dagger with a circle round it) can make a charge attack unless it specifically says otherwise. Only the Black Dragon gets a free charge as an instinctive action.And the cookie cutter nature of Charm in most editions of D&D bugs me. Charms are far more varied in mythology than "You are my new best friend". And that sort of effect is more interesting when it takes more than six seconds. That green dragons appear to have a touch of angler-fish about them doesn't bother me in the slightest.So don't use them. 4e has a much more mythological take on the universe than AD&D - and for all Wyatt said it wasn't about tripping through fairy rings, there is no better edition of D&D Again, don't use them if you don't like them. I've had a 4e campaign restricted to martial classes (including barbarians and monks) and it worked absolutely perfectly.Take away the race. Gnomes in pre-4e D&D had an identity problem in differentiating themselves from halflings and many things were tried including Dr. Doolittle and Tinker Gnomes. Gnomes in 4e meanwhile are small Fair Folk and very different from both Dwarves and Halflings. They fit perfectly into many mythologies from urban fantasy to Celtic Myth.If there had been a single much-loved gnome archetype shared throughout D&D then the loss of it for the Fair Folk might be a big loss - but there wasn't. Dragonlance gnomes were very different from 3.5 PHB gnomes, so 4e took the race without an identity and built on its past while underlining the mythology.And if the world you want to play in works best without gnomes and (4e) Eladrin, and the whole of The Feywild/Faerie then that works. Unless you are playing a kitchen sink setting then the Fair Folk are removable - but for a mythological inspired setting the simple presence of the Fair Folk and the rules handling them so elegantly is amazingly useful.Claw/Claw/Bite/Wing Buffet/Wing Buffet/Tail Slap. It gets tedious and fiddly to resolve (especially as the wings attack different sides). Visualising the whole thing makes me think the dragon is flailing.Neither auras nor shifts were new to 4e. The shift was the old 5ft step.W. T. F?And I find this utterly ridiculous. Even that is a character beat.Come join us in 4e then! Where we don't have the monster's non-combat abilities hard coded by the system. And where magic actually feels magical rather than a matter of looking up the right pre-made ability on p52.And a 5'6" player who's played basketball three times a week is simply better on the basketball court than I am. Because they practiced at it. Which says that I care nothing for basketball.</blockquote>

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