Vulnerabilities: an underutilized mechanism?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the real issue for WotC with resistance/vulnerability/immunity is the difficulty in designing generic adventure modules when you have a lot of monsters using these mechanics. As a DM running a specific game for a known set of characters its not an issue, but if you're a module designer creating an adventure for some arbitrary group of level 4 PCs there is no real way to know what kinds of damage types they will be able to inflict. Worse its hard to develop a theme out of a group of monsters that have a specific r/v/i. If all cold monsters are resisting cold and vulnerable to fire then what happens to the group which likes to use frost cheese? They are just pretty much gimped for the whole adventure whereas the party that happens to have a Flaming Weapon and the wizard that insisted on taking Fireball lucks out and gets to romp. This is pretty much why I don't think you'll ever see too much in the way of strong generic r/v/i. It was actually pretty rare in 1e and 2e as well, instead you mostly had MR.

As a custom thing in a specific game though, its great. The DM can take into account how much it will help the PCs ahead of time (or hurt them) and balance things out.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I know what WOTC make resistances/ immunities/vulnerabilities like they did, but I do not like it.

IMO, they made it the way it is to simplify the game and make sure everyone could play every turn. If you have lots of fire spells and the beasties have fire 20 or so, you are not gonna do much damage, if any even well into Paragon. Not doing anything is not much fun.

But on the other hand, laughing at resistances (especially by adding a second keyword via Arcane Admixture) is not really all that fun. Even if the creature can ignore one element, with that little trick you can still get around it easily, even variable resistance.

I like the idea of more vulnerabilities, especially ones that fit the creature type, like resist fire/ vulnerable cold. That has a long history in the game, and I think it should stay. But the idea of adding conditions or movement to attacks of a certain type is very appealing.

 

[ValhallaGH]

My PCs have no many ways to survive it is not funny (actions points, of course, plus luck points for every session [these let you have re-rolls] and fate points [one per level, can be used to avoid death]).

Ah! So you know of your party-murdering tendencies and have given them resources to compensate, rather than rely upon your own (unreliable) self-restraint.

Well done. It took me some time to reliably restrain myself.

Though my question was directed towards your DMing career, not towards one specific campaign.

 

[fba827]

I think the real issue for WotC with resistance/vulnerability/immunity is the difficulty in designing generic adventure modules when you have a lot of monsters using these mechanics. As a DM running a specific game for a known set of characters its not an issue, but if you're a module designer creating an adventure for some arbitrary group of level 4 PCs there is no real way to know what kinds of damage types they will be able to inflict. Worse its hard to develop a theme out of a group of monsters that have a specific r/v/i. If all cold monsters are resisting cold and vulnerable to fire then what happens to the group which likes to use frost cheese? They are just pretty much gimped for the whole adventure whereas the party that happens to have a Flaming Weapon and the wizard that insisted on taking Fireball lucks out and gets to romp. This is pretty much why I don't think you'll ever see too much in the way of strong generic r/v/i. It was actually pretty rare in 1e and 2e as well, instead you mostly had MR.

As a custom thing in a specific game though, its great. The DM can take into account how much it will help the PCs ahead of time (or hurt them) and balance things out.

That is a very important point -- they had to design for general parties (don't know what type of mix of powers will be there) as well as simplicity (it's a lot easier to subtract/add damage rather than track another condition/change). Changing for a specific campaign/group of PCs is entirely different and can be customized according to what you (as the DM) know to be their strengths and weaknesses.

 

[Derulbaskul]

Ah! So you know of your party-murdering tendencies and have given them resources to compensate, rather than rely upon your own (unreliable) self-restraint.

Well done. It took me some time to reliably restrain myself.

Though my question was directed towards your DMing career, not towards one specific campaign.

Um... something like that.

We play semi-sandbox. While there are consequences for bad choices there are also lots of way to escape death. If a player likes his character our goal is to complete the campaign with that character. That's simply what works best for our group but for other groups I realise it's not like that.

 

[Jhaelen]

Thanks for everyone's thoughts about this!

I guess, I'll start with a few minor adjustments to monsters to test things out. From a balance viewpoint it's probably easier to add vulnerabilities that don't just increase damage (and I'll grant they may even be more interesting).

Thanks for reminder about gricks! That's an interesting precedent for something similar to the 'resist weapon', I've been looking for.

I'm unsure about the argument regarding the difficulty of designing generic adventure modules. Looking at the H1-H3, P1-P3, E1-E3 modules they already showcase how WotC failed to balance the different damage types.

This 'campaign' against Orcus becomes a lot easier for groups with access to (at-will) radiant damage. Because it uses so many undead monsters it also becomes somewhat predictable regarding the kinds of energy types that the party should have defenses against.

What I'd strife for as a design goal would be to have a vulnerability to balance every immunity and maybe add another vulnerability for every one to two resistances. I'm just not sure how much easier monsters become to kill. But that'll require some playtesting.

Using a healthy mix of monster types should make sure that no energy types become prevalent or the single best choice. It's something I always strife for when designing adventures.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well.... The whole campaign against Orcus theme certainly does emphasize undead, at least at many points. There are still quite a lot of other creatures, especially in some of the modules. For instance H1 certainly doesn't seem to focus on undead at all in particular. There are definitely some in the module, but mixed in with a lot of other stuff. I'm not really all that familiar with the following modules but from what I've seen of Thunderspire Labyrinth its a pretty mixed bag.

I'd think about it this way though. This whole set of modules is a campaign. I don't see any problem with a heavily themed campaign. As it progresses the players have a lot of build choices along the way and regardless of how they start out they're likely to emphasize the powers most useful to them over the course of the campaign. Yes, that means they will be picking up a lot of radiant powers, but even though the authors of the whole thing can't know what the party will be like to start out with, they can be pretty sure that by the later modules the encounters will need to be designed to work with a party fairly optimized to fight undead. That makes them more free to assume this will be the case.

Of course there are going to be groups picking up one of the later modules and diving into it cold who may not be tricked out to fight undead. I guess if I were handed a module full of undead and a party that was sorely lacking in radiant damage output I'd have to consider the options. Either the party needs to get some appropriate equipment or some retraining or something. Ideally you'd know you were going to run said module starting at 10th level or whatever somewhat ahead of time, give out some appropriate treasure, and undertake some foreshadowing to give the players a hint to maybe pick or retrain a bit when they hit 10th level so they can handle it.

We also don't really know the thinking that goes on between the core game designers who probably think in pretty generic terms about the rule system and the module authors who may not see things the same way and have different priorities. Certainly if I were designing a module I'd want to give it a fairly strong theme even though that might not work perfectly for every group. Everyone uses the same core rules but you can pick and choose which modules to run.

 

[CovertOps]

In a home campaign if I was going to do this I think I would balance the monsters that get more vulnerabilities against any PC that has some sort of at-will power that does that damage type. For example if the party has a rogue with a flaming weapon that can convert all attacks with the sword to fire damage, then if I was going to give a monster a vulnerability to fire I would also give it more HP's to balance that PC. I wouldn't worry too much about encounter or daily powers as those are situational and limited.

For vanilla 4e I don't think this works well because as hinted at above a really tough encounter for one group could be a cakewalk for another. That's not the sort of variation 4e was striving to achieve. This sort of thinking will lead you back to constructs/undead/etc. that are immune to sneak attack damage and other things like it that vary the usefulness of individual PC choices of powers or class and can dramatically increase the "swinginess" of encounters based on PC "build".

Ask yourself "What problem am I trying to solve?" Once you've figured that out then the changes you make should address that problem instead of just randomly giving out vulnerabilities to monsters because you felt like it.

Personally I don't like the grindyness of combats in my game so I give everything a +1/3 level bonus to damage on all attacks and that helps to both make the monsters more threatening and to make combat just a little shorter.

 

[Jhaelen]

Ask yourself "What problem am I trying to solve?" Once you've figured that out then the changes you make should address that problem instead of just randomly giving out vulnerabilities to monsters because you felt like it.

Well, as mentioned initially, the 'problem' I'm trying to solve is that powers dealing untyped damage are generally superior to powers dealing energy type damage.

As has been mentioned this is also kind of a reversal of how things were in 3e. In 4e the martial power source is the swiss army knife since it reliably damages everything equally.

What this ultimately means is that pcs using other power sources pay for their versatility by having encounters that become more difficult for them unless they restrict themselves to powers dealing untyped damage. And there is currently no 'pay-off' because they won't have any encounters in which it's to their advantage that they picked a variety of energy types (because there are too few monsters with vulnerabilities).

I don't like it that there is a single best solution to everything (excluding undead). I want to encourage the use of a variety of energy types. Reducing grind is a secondary goal.

 

[RigaMortus2]

Looking over MM1 and MM2, these are the vulnerabilities I found:
- undead, green slime & myconid: radiant
- eladrin & firbolg: necrotic
- treant & green slime: fire
- magma beast, phoelarch & water archon: cold
- fell taint & dimensional marauder: psychic

So, Green Slime is vulnerable to both Radiant and Fire. So if an attack has both keywords (Radiant and Fire), does the Green Slime take 10 additional damage (+5 from Radiant and +5 from Fire)?