D&D 5E Wandering Monsters- Bird People

[Argyle King]

Awesome! We can call them something like eagle-bear or, birdbear, or bear-owl.

I think Dire Corby could still work fine as the name. What I had in mind was something akin to the Terror Bird, but with four legs, and more adapted to underground living.

It's not a very good mental image, but the best way I can try to explain what I have in mind is to take an ostrich, but give it a body style more similar to a tiger. That is, imagine a quadruped body placed on four skinny -but surprisingly strong- bird legs which each end in razor sharp talons. The body would still have feathers, but they'd be small fine feathers which now only serve the purpose of keeping the creature warm, and have no use for flight. At the back of the body is a set of tail feathers; at the front is a head which has no teeth, but makes up for that by having a beak which can easily rend through flesh.

You can shoot through enemy in 4E (with a modifier for cover) and you can shoot at things you can't see (Total Concealment modifier applies). Not trying to argue against your basic points, but correcting some mistaken ideas you seem to have about 4E.

You're right. I had thought Line of Effect would be blocked, but I double checked. In that case, 4E is further away from my style of play than I had originally thought.

I enjoy playing 4E, but I'm picking on it because that seems to be game being implied by the posts I was replying to. Also, it's a good example of a game in which I'm not opposed to the individual pieces, but the way those pieces are fit together create an experience which isn't exactly what I want. I feel the same about flight; flight by itself isn't necessarily what I have a problem with.

Over all I'm with @Kamikaze Midget on this - disallowing flyers completely is just banning some folks' fun. Make it an option - "non-core" if you insist on all that core/optional baloney - for people who want a 'full fat fantasy' experience. Form a combat-tactical point of view, if nothing else, it's great - not because it's "powerful", but because it enables lots of fun fantasy tactics - a game that has tactics all of its own, rather than being hidebound to what we imagine real world historical tactics to have been (often wrongly).

If that's the way you want to play, there's nothing wrong with that. Personally, I prefer a much different style of fantasy. I'm ok with cinematic action; I prefer my fantasy to have some touches of cinematic action, but I also strongly prefer that what the game considers to be good tactics to more closely align with what actually are good tactics. While I had good times while playing 4E, I had to retrain my brain to be able to enjoy it; there are a lot of things that only made sense to me in the context of 4E. The same is true of D&D in general as well as some other games, but I use 4E because that was the experience in which is more pronounced for me.

That's not being hidebound; it's wanting a particular play experience, style, and tone to the game. I don't view flight by itself to be an obstacle to what I want, but I do view the way D&D usually handles flight in conjunction with some of the other recent choices the brand has made to be an obstacle to that. To be honest, the amount of hope I have that D&D 5th Edition will produce the style of game I want is pretty low. I'm not upset by that; it's just the way it is, and I understand that the design choices being made are far more conducive to the experience that you and Kamikaze want. In some of the early playtests, I started to think differently, but currently I'm where I am.

The point of saying that is to say that what are deemed as "fun fantasy tactics" varies quite a bit from what I (think) you want and what I want. I don't want DBZ style teleports to be common. That's not to say that is necessarily unfun; it's simply not what I want out of my baseline fantasy experience. While many people may imagine real world tactics wrongly, I'd put forward that even those wrongly imagined tactics are much closer to what I want than 4E tactics. Again, I'm not suggesting 4E was badwrongfun; just very different from my expectations.

In no way do I believe fantasy tactics should exactly mirror historical battle; that wouldn't make any sense either because people have things available to them in a fantasy world that were not historically available. Having flight and flying creatures allows aerial tactics which were not available until much later; having magic opens up all manner of things. Still, what I'd prefer is something more grounded; something more blood and guts as the baseline, and then with the fantasy impacts and changes to the world extrapolated from that. I'll again say that flight by itself isn't necessarily something I oppose, but I do oppose it when thinking about it in the contexts of D&D I'm most familiar with. It's certainly possible that 5th Edition might handle it in a way that I'd be fine with, but I'm skeptical.

 

[Klaus]

The dire corby looks a bit similar to the hook horror. Maybe there could be a relation there?

 

[pemerton]

The dire corby looks a bit similar to the hook horror. Maybe there could be a relation there?

I was thinking the same thing last night! And aren't they both Fiend Folio monsters?

 

[Klaus]

Yes, and IIRC, both were illustrated by the same artist.

 

[Dwimmerlied]

That's an intriguing idea, and the best I've read so far concerning the creature. Is there an established ecology of the Hook Horror?

 

[pemerton]

Is there an established ecology of the Hook Horror?

Yes. It was discussed in one of Mearls' L&L columns. And then prompted a long thread here, but I don't have a link to it.

 

[Balesir]

I think Dire Corby could still work fine as the name. What I had in mind was something akin to the Terror Bird, but with four legs, and more adapted to underground living.

Wasn't there something called an "Aicherai" or something that was similar to that? I remember a sort of round body with beak and four taloned, bird-like legs.

That's not being hidebound; it's wanting a particular play experience, style, and tone to the game. I don't view flight by itself to be an obstacle to what I want, but I do view the way D&D usually handles flight in conjunction with some of the other recent choices the brand has made to be an obstacle to that.

Sorry - I think my use of the word "hidebound" was more deprecating than I either meant or should have been. I enjoy "real style tactics" games, too, in many forms. But I see a need for games that allow for more original tactics that aren't rooted in the realities of real world physics and biologies, too, and I don't see many games that do that well around. If I want "real world tactics but with slight fantasy tweaks" I can go DragonQuest, RuneQuest, HârnMaster, RoleMaster, GURPS, Castles & Crusades or any one of several others that I have played and enjoyed. If I want genuinely different fantasy tactics that have to be figured out by the players rather than read in a book, however, my choices are a lot more limited.

 

[Nymrohd]

The Achaierai are evil avians from Acheron who enjoy torture.

 

[pemerton]

The Achaierai are evil avians from Acheron who enjoy torture.

And are also from the Fiend Folio. And hence ripe for linking to Dire Corbies (which are NE, not CE).

 

[Argyle King]

Wasn't there something called an "Aicherai" or something that was similar to that? I remember a sort of round body with beak and four taloned, bird-like legs.

Sorry - I think my use of the word "hidebound" was more deprecating than I either meant or should have been. I enjoy "real style tactics" games, too, in many forms. But I see a need for games that allow for more original tactics that aren't rooted in the realities of real world physics and biologies, too, and I don't see many games that do that well around. If I want "real world tactics but with slight fantasy tweaks" I can go DragonQuest, RuneQuest, HârnMaster, RoleMaster, GURPS, Castles & Crusades or any one of several others that I have played and enjoyed. If I want genuinely different fantasy tactics that have to be figured out by the players rather than read in a book, however, my choices are a lot more limited.

I can understand that. I do play GURPS; I'll say that's one of the things which drew me to the system: I could do everything I was capable of doing with D&D at the time, but in a manner which was far closer to how I envisioned the world (even a fantasy one) working. I'm currently running Dungeon Fantasy, and so far I'm finding it to be an excellent middle ground between how baseline GURPS works and what I want out of a D&D-style campaign.

I'm not opposed to "fantasy tactics." D&D 4E was heavily built around that (imo,) and I did enjoy it despite not being a fan of some design choices. That being said, I also have some limits to how far a game can go before it feels out of touch with me; that is a problem I -at times- had with 4E. I could enjoy the game, but doing so -for me- required me to think of playing a rpg far differently. I still did roleplay, but -when it came to making choices for my character- I made choices based on what the game said I should do and in terms of moving a piece rather than making choices based on what I felt I would actually do given the situation.

In hindsight, I can't really even say that was necessarily unique to 4E though. To some extent, I think that happened for me with 3E too, but I didn't know any better to notice since I was still fairly new to rpgs in general and was still feeling out what my preferences were. One area in which I feel 4E got right was to lessen the power curve between levels. I say that because (in hindsight) one of the things that was hard to accept about the way 3E worked was that there were so many high powered NPCs running around, and yet they'd hire barely competent PCs to go slay monsters. To expand on that, I was a player who often took Leadership as a feat. I wanted to lead armies; be a lord; etc, but -in actual play- those lower level followers were virtually useless. Sure, my cohort would be pretty good, but my character could solo an enemy army easier than my own army could do battle with them; that was a much different style of fantasy than what I wanted.

I'd like to have a game in which my PC is larger than life, but no so far removed from the world that he isn't part of it any more. Sure, I may be able to slay 4-5 opponents, but I'd like my heroes to be leading armies rather than fighting them. In general, I'd much prefer my experience be closer to Game of Thrones, R. Howard's Conan, Arthurian Fantasy, and Dragonlance* than Dragonball Z, Naruto, and the most recent Final Fantasy** games.


*Yes, I realize that it's a D&D setting. The way I imagined it when reading it was as a war campaign. While it was a romantic story, and it had plenty of comedy and humor, I also felt as though it had an underlying grit to it that helped bring it to life. I read Dragonlance before I ever played D&D; I largely credit it with making aware the rpgs existed and prompting me to take the first step into playing them.

**Don't get me wrong, I used to love the series, but for years it's been moving away from my interests when it comes to fantasy.