Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
Sorry, didn't realize that was a question. In my games, I generally only allow civilized races. Basically, I want races that could walk into the average city in Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms without attracting attention for how rare or weird they are. Which generally means the races that have been in a player's handbook in any edition of D&D. Which basically means no Orcs, Kobolds, Goblins, Bugbears, Hobgoblins, etc. Since most of the cities have been actively attacked by them and consider them enemies. Though, I have considered exceptions to this rule for various games.
It is a role playing rule as well. I certainly would like to see rules for nearly every humanoid race who doesn't have super powers to be used as PCs for DMs who want that.
Nope, just me. That's why I said "The way *I* see D&D".
Nope, see above. Though, I would like to see magic toned down fairly dramatically in D&D. At least in terms of campaign altering spells like teleport, etc. But that's not really related to this topic.
We do that too. The hero's journey doesn't necessarily have to be Epic. It, at least for me, just has to involve overcoming fear and fighting against nasty things that only you have the ability to beat. You fight deep into caves because you are an adventurer...trained in skills most people don't have and with the courage to use them in the face of death.
It means something to me when I see someone claw their way from 1st level to 10th level and then defeat that Beholder. They wouldn't have been able to defeat it at first level, but they fought their way through danger after danger and survived in order to get there.
Something about a Dragon who shows up, likely without any experience at all in order to adventure with the rest of them makes those accomplishments a lot less important. After all, why bother risking your life training yourself for years in order to be good enough to take on a beholder when there is already adventuring dragons out there taking care of the problem for you.
I've always considered part of the reason the world NEEDED adventurers is that no one else was brave enough or had the mentality to do the adventuring thing. Therefore it gave the PCs a unique "You are the only ones who can do this" vibe.
Should? I don't know. I know there were plenty of discussions about making lowered powered versions of many other extremely powerful creatures to allow them to be played at 1st level. Some of the Monster Classes that existed in 3e allowed you to play some pretty nasty creatures at 1st level. Dragons? Probably not.
Though, it's so much easier to be able to start a character at 1st level and continue it throughout a campaign rather than play something you don't want to play and switch to what you actually want later. I have a large beef with people continually switching characters in my games. Mechanics that encourage it make me frustrated.
I never said they should ignore your playstyle. I simply stated why I didn't like monsters as PCs in my games. I don't know where you got that I was trying to remove these rules from D&D entirely. I just said they were hard to do and if they were going to implement them I'd like them to be balanced so I could use them.
Most of my games ARE dungeon delving. It's still about heroism as I mention above. I just like PCs to be extremely above average for their race and fighting monsters way beyond the power of the average member of their race.
There's a reason that there is almost no fairy tales about the dragon who saves the kingdom from the invasion and why there are so many tales about brave knights. We as humans like stories of bravery and heroism. We use Halflings, Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, and so on as proxies for Humans with slightly different personalities. We can still see ourselves in them.
Some monsters simply have an iconic ability that is way beyond what a PC should ever possess. If you want those races to be playable in game it always comes down to 3 solutions: Allow the ability anyway and simply allow that PC to be more powerful than everyone else, change the iconic ability so it's less powerful, or remove it entirely. Basically, none of these solutions is satisfying to me. A Mind Flayer without a Mind Blast isn't a Mind Flayer. A Mind Flayer with a Mind Blast is over powered and shouldn't be allowed into the game.
Doesn't sound all that much fun to me. But most play experiences are subjective and are often more about the players at the table and the table banter than the game itself. I hate intra-party fighting and conflict. Fighting(even friendly fighting) other PCs and having to keep them in line all the time is one of my least favorite things to do in an RPG. I play them to work together not to have to constantly babysit one of the other PCs who might wander off and get himself arrested for murder if I don't constantly pay attention to him.
As a side note, IMHO, a Wizard who is capable of killing someone easily and role plays being scared of them isn't roleplaying correctly. If I have a gun pointed at your head from 20 feet away and you threaten me, I'm not going to be scared.
It doesn't sound like you fought any real encounters or did much combat that wasn't between party members. It was mostly roleplaying. In most roleplaying situations where there is no goal, each person is on equal footing. After all, you are mostly just saying what your character says and does.
Don't get me wrong, I understand where you are coming from. It was super cool the first 5 or 6 times we played monsters as well. It was different. We weren't roleplaying the same situations we had always role played. We instead got to play the "what if" game. What if a Dragon entered town, how would everyone react? Wouldn't that be hilarious? What if an Ogre came to the front gate of a city and demanded entrance? And so on. Then, once you've explored those situations a number of times, you realize that you are spending so much time dealing with THEM and so much less time searching for the Rod of Seven Parts in order to destroy an evil demon.
Same thing. Imbalance is a lack of Balance.
I understand they are working on it. However, as I've said above there's no good solution to the problem for many, many monsters. Orcs and Bugbears, sure....they are big, strong humans that don't have any super magical powers. For other creatures, it just isn't possible to balance them.
Or in 20th level parties. Just no dragons.
In 3.5e there was an entire book showing you how to start creatures like Firbolgs at first level. One of the options in the poll was that there should be a lesser powered version of creatures to allow them to be played at low level.
But my point is that the ability of a Mind Flayer is overpowered at EVERY level. So it doesn't matter when you start as one, you already have an advantage that every other PC will never receive.
That's because the non-standard races are clearly better. Who wouldn't choose them given the choice? They have extremely powerful abilities that you can't get if you choose a normal race.Do you know how often I've ever seen a party of 4 standard races? Never. Especially at higher levels, where a dragon would be present under virtually EVERY model. By that level every party member can have ungodly power or gear, heck, they can even kill powerful dragons by that point in a matter of SECONDS. Hardly heroic
But it is still heroic. Yes, they may have super powerful abilities, but they worked to get those. They were once an average human perfectly capable of being killed by a dagger. There is still a little bit of lingering fear from a time where fighting dragons would have been considered absurd.
Which is quite different from "I'm a Fire Giant. I'm capable of leveling entire cities by myself...always have been."
Well, first of all, it's likely that with the stat modifying for being a dragon, the dragon has a more insane CHA. They also have a list of spells if they are old enough. Capable of charming people as well.
I know when I played a dragon back in 2e that I had the highest of almost every stat and could cast essentially the same number of spells as our Wizard. While having the best AC in the group. Though I rolled low for hitpoints and was still the laughing stock of our group given how close I came to death every combat.
But beyond that, I was referring to the NPC assuming the dragon was the leader...because he's a dragon. So the DM would have NPCs approach him first and ask for his approval before speaking and no matter what the party agreed to, they made sure the dragon agreed. If he didn't, they'd ignore anything else the rest of the party said.
After all, the average person(and probably rightfully so) believed that a dragon was much more powerful, majestic, rare, and worthy of respect than some Elf in armor with a sword.
This was an average interaction for us:
DM: "As you approach the city, you hear shouts of alarm as they yell out 'DRAGON!'. Before you can can reach the gates, there are now 20 men with pikes guarding the entrance. They all look extremely scared but hold their ground. They don't approach. After a few tense minutes, a man in robes walks up behind them, using them as a shield as he yells out to make sure the dragon can hear, 'What have we done to offend you, Dragon? Or perhaps their is something we can help you with. We live to serve the Draconic kind.' You can hear a note of desperation in his voice. He knows he would lose if he was forced to fight the dragon."
Bard: "Alright, I walk up to him and I say that we are just looking for a place to stay for the night."
DM: "The man looks up at the dragon and says 'Is this one of your servants, great drake? Would you like us to negotiate with him?"
Bard: "Look man, I'm right here. You don't have to talk to my dragon friend, I'm our leader."
DM: "The man looks up at the dragon expectantly, afraid to respond to the Bard and invoke the wrath of the dragon for paying attention to his servant over him."
Dragon: "Sigh, I say that it's ok and he can talk to the Bard as he speaks for me."
DM: "The man looks down and says, 'How can we help you, servant of a dragon?'"
It can be, the first time. But it gets tedious. In most of our games, we've long got bored of roleplaying common social situations. Most town visits consist of "You go back to town, you find an inn to rest for the night, it costs each of you 5 sp. In the morning, you are on your way west..."
When we had monstrous PCs, it was always a large discussion of logistics...Is the monster PC going to be accepted in this town? Can they fit through the entrance? Is the bed in the inn strong enough to hold them? How much extra money does it cost for their food, given their size? How many people gawk and stare or ask him questions? How does he answer?
That's correct. Which is why we try to avoid allowing any PC that is going to cause a fuss. At least with an NPC, it can be fun to role play an odd situation. Though we don't make a habit of introducing such creatures as NPCs that often either.
It's that it gets in the way of the plot of the game. When we are playing "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil" and we are attempting to convince the King of Furyondy to lend us his army so that we can fight off a bunch of evil cultists who was to destroy the world it feels like we are getting absolutely nothing accomplished when we spend an hour of the session roleplaying just getting the dragon through the door.
Essentially, the session, which SHOULD have been about the roleplaying between the King and the PCs becomes dominated by the roleplaying of the dragon. The game becomes more about him than the plot of the game.
You're right, it doesn't. Nor did I say it did. These are just the reasons, *I* don't like monster PCs.
Balance is defined differently by different people. I believe balance to be "The sum total of your abilities are as useful to the game as the sum total of someone else's abilities while no one ability you have is extremely overpowering in the game."
Balance≠The same
It's hard to pinpoint balance because each game has a different focus and in one game being able to fly at will is extremely broken and overpowered and in another, no one cares because flying doesn't help you accomplish your goals. However, the goal should be as closed to balanced as possible.
The problem is that ALL roleplaying disadvantages are nebulous. The DM has a lot on his plate. Sometimes he's so focused on writing up a 30 page description of all the buildings in this town that he built and planning the encounter where you meet the mayor and discuss the gem you are searching for that he's willing to completely ignore the fact that "People hate Ogres and won't allow them inside their cities" because it disrupts the flow of his game.
Then again, he might be willing to ignore that disadvantage simply because he's tired of roleplaying NPCs who are angry at the Ogre. Especially if nothing concrete ever comes out of it. People hate him, but what happens if they try to attack him? Now you have to run a combat. How long will that take? What does that mean for the rest of the PCs who need information from someone inside? Or will they try to approach the city without the Ogre and will you have to run an entire session while the player of the Ogre sits there being bored because they have been excluded?
Easier to ignore the disadvantage and move on with the game rather than deal with the headache.
However, even if it isn't ignored, it still amounts to nothing. People don't like you, no big deal, just avoid people. And avoiding people works for 90% of all role playing disadvantages. If you are a player who doesn't care about interaction anyways, it just gives you an excuse not to interact and in exchange you can be more powerful than everyone else in combat. It's a win-win for these sorts of players.
But that's not what's going on here. Roleplaying and rules don't interact that way. Imagine instead that we were playing chess but there was a rule that said "You can play with a second Queen instead of one of your pawns but you must say 'I am an idiot for playing with this piece' each time you move it."
Sure, it has a "roleplaying disadvantage" but it's tactical advantage is so great that most people are more than willing to take the tradeoff if your goal is to win. Sure, saying the sentence each and every time gets a little tedious, but it's worth it for the power. If it gets common enough that everyone is taking that piece, it might be jointly agreed by the players to stop saying the sentence since it has no practical effect on the game and makes games take way longer. Which is what happens with most roleplaying disadvantages in D&D.
But on top of that, roleplaying is harder to enforce. If someone doesn't speak for an entire conversation does that fulfill their obligation of "Hates people"? Or do they have to actively run around shouting "I hate you!" If the DM makes NPCs walk further away from you on the street is that enough to enforce "People find your appearance horrifying"? Or do they have to panic, get pitch forks and summon the guard?
Let's assume it isn't laziness then. Let's assume an Ogre gets "horrifying appearance" and "belligerent" as disadvantages. The adventure is a dungeon crawl through a dungeon that is HUGE(like the World Largest Dungeon, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and so on). The party spends 99% of their time wandering from room to room opening doors and rolling initiative to kill whatever is inside. The party has no intention to talk to anyone in the dungeon.
Is this DM being lazy when the Ogre's disadvantages don't come into play? Is it fair to the other players that the Ogre is better than they are at the one things they do 99% of the time(fighting) because he has a disadvantage that will never apply?
The kit in question was "Swashbuckler". The text on it's disadvantage basically said "Since you are a swashbuckler, you often get caught in the beds of people's wives and have to run out of town being chased by angry husbands. You get a reputation for being a good fighter and because of that people come and challenge you to prove how good they are. People who know you will target you first because of your skill." You know, typical Swashbuckler movie tropes.
Here's the rub though. If you use an encounter that will kill the swashbuckler for sure, then you are essentially saying "This kit is off limits...take it and I will kill you." If you use an encounter that he has a reasonable chance of winning, he has an even better chance of winning because of his kits powers. Also, you are now asking 3-5 other players to sit around for an hour and watch you run a combat with just the swashbuckler. Which is no fun for them. Do this and players tend to get bored, pull out their phones or leave the table to go watch tv while the battle is going on. Then it becomes a hassle to get them back to the table afterwards.
Great, but that's a real, tangible combat disadvantage. Not being able to see your enemies is bad.
Yep.
Yep. That was his goal. Become the worlds greatest combat monster. Oh, and prove to me that Combat and Tactics contained stupid rules. He stated this as a goal WHILE he was making up his character. No one else was around. I ran a game with just him to see if he was right.
Well, I wasn't THAT much a rookie DM. Been running games for at least a year or 2 before this point. I used to always let my players do whatever they want. I didn't feel it was my place as DM to change the rules. If an option was offered in the book, it was meant to be in the game by the author and therefore should be allowed.
My opinion has changed slightly since then. However, I still believe that a DM should be able to rely on the rules. Any game where 90% of character building requires the DM to interfere and prevent options from being taken is one I'd prefer not to play. I want the system to be balanced enough that I can say "Make up 5th level characters for Saturday" and not have to worry about what options anyone in my group takes.
I hate doing this. It requires I spend 10 times more time preparing my game and it feels...wrong.
It didn't look insane. And I truly believed that the role playing disadvantages were a valid balancing method for his powers. Sure, he had a bunch of really powerful abilities, but D&D wasn't just about combat. He'll get himself killed for sure by making enemies of every person he meets. That'll show him for attempting to power game. Maybe next time he'll take only ONE disadvantage instead of ALL of them.
His POINT was that the rules let him build an insane character and that rules shouldn't allow that so we should throw the book out and never consult it again. The rules let him abuse them. So why are they not to blame?
The point of Skills and Powers was that it was supposed to be equally compatible with all adventures and books already out there. It was an addon to give more flavor to characters. They were encouraged to take a quirk or two to make their character more rounded and in exchange given an benefit or two. But there were no limits on the number of quirks you could take. Each of them gave you a point value:
+10 Angry all the time
+15 Horrific appearance
+5 Unsettling to people around you
Then you could take advantages for points like:
20: Cast spells as if you were a wizard of the same level as your class
10: Cast spells as if you were a cleric of the same level as your class
I was using standard NPCs from a town I pulled out of an adventure. I don't like making up my own towns. I figured those stats were for "average" guards that you could expect in an average town. The game rules, IMHO, when used exactly as written should create a situation where a PC's power lines up to that of average NPCs. If you have to powergame new NPCs just to defeat them, the system shouldn't allow the PC to be that powerful.
See above, he really was trying to prove a point. However, he wasn't a villain per se. As he pointed out, he couldn't help the fact that people attacked him for no good reason. He was minding his own business. They simply couldn't walk past him without him mumbling an insult to them...plus everyone was freaked out by him and hated his face. He just defended himself. Yeah, he killed them...but they attacked him first. He was CN and we did argue about his alignment switching to evil, but he said he didn't care. The point was that his combat ability was absurdly powerful in exchange for disadvantages that wouldn't even affect him 90% of the time while he was out in the wilderness or in a dungeon.
Wow...it must be nice to have such principled players. No, in my game that would end with the other PCs saying "All you did is tell the king to kiss your butt, he overreacted and tried to kill you. You are our friend, we couldn't allow him to kill you so we helped you kill all his guards who attacked us and the king for attempting to kill our friend. Come to think of it, I think that makes us in charge of the country now. Send word to the army that we are in charge now. If anyone disagrees tell them to come here and kill us. We should be able to defeat them easily."
Umm, yes. If a room full of guards can't defeat the raging barbarian then the barbarian is too powerful. Especially if the guards are made up using the rules as an encounter that was supposed to be "hard" for a group of PCs.
I want the rules to say "This is how powerful enemies need to be to easily defeat a PC of X level. If you use monsters of Y power, there is a nearly 100% chance that PCs of level X will die." Then, once those rules are in place, I don't want them to only apply to SOME PCs and not others. I don't want one character to be able to easily defeat monsters 10 levels above him because he took some OP class or option while another character who didn't take that option will die to monsters 5 levels above him.
Same thing with challenges. I don't want to make up a trap or puzzle that one character can bypass easily simply by flying over it while the rest of the group stares at it in disbelief hoping that they can make an impossible jump check. I'd prefer the difference between characters to be more reasonable. Where one character has a 80% chance of succeeding because he's trained in whatever skill or ability is required. While another character has only a 40% chance to succeed because he's bad at it.
Well, it once again depends on the edition and the particular rules. If, for instance, you are allowed to buy off your LA's then when you're level 20, you are a level 20 dragon fighter with the ability to fly at will and a breath weapon vs the guy who chose human who just gets the abilities of a 20th fighter. Basically, the dragon gets to be better in every way. It's clearly better and shouldn't be allowed.
But even lower levels than that. Let's assume that you've made an entire dungeon of pit traps and jumping challenges for a group of around 6th level. You expect that the Wizard might be able to fly for a short period of time, because he likely hasn't prepared more than on Fly spell. But that's fine. There's so many traps that eventually, he'll have to solve them the same way as everyone else.
Now add to that group some monster who flies at will. Especially if he can carry the other party members. Your entire dungeon of challenges were defeated by ONE ability that you, rather reasonably, assumed the PCs wouldn't have when you wrote it(well before the PCs chose characters). After all, the fly spell is 3rd level and with limited slots, the wizard likely wouldn't even have it prepared.
It really helps when you can estimate the abilities of a party based on their level without knowing their party composition. Any new options should attempt to keep the power level of a party the same. This includes new races.
The difference between a higher level spell and a race is that race is one of the fundamental parts of your character. When you decide what you play, race and class are pretty much the core of your character. If you want to cast Wish, you can be a Wizard and some day, if the game goes on long enough, you might be able to.
If you want to be an Ogre, you can't turn into one part way through the game. It requires abandoning your character, its history, and any emotional connection you might have with it and starting over again.
Level adjustment is still just a bad mechanic. It's nearly impossible to put a level equivalent on +6 strength and wielding a slightly larger weapon, for instance. In exchange, you lose out on attack bonus, class features, feats, hitpoints, and any number of other things. But +6 strength gives you +3 to hit, which might actually be bigger than the attack bonus you lost.
So, it creates this weird character who now had 12 hitpoints while the rest of the party has 50 but hits more often and harder than everyone else in the party. So much so that if he kills enemies in one hit, he might not need to worry about BEING hit...which might make his hitpoint disadvantage moot. But if enemies survive his attack, he might die to their first attack every combat.
It creates this weird, unpredictable, swinginess to combats involving these characters. To the point where I banned all monsters with an LA larger than 2 in my games to avoid it. Even later, I just gave up and didn't allow these characters at all.
Wow...that's rather hostile. But in response to your query, I don't think LA can work, no. I think that there might be a mechanic that could work here. But it would likely require making up a "monster template" that told you all the benefits you got as a "1st level" dragon. Rather than attempting to shoehorn this into the class system, or somehow duplicate the monster entry precisely I think it would be much better to make up monster classes and have monsters start as a first level in their class and advance only in monster levels.
You MIGHT be able to allow monsters to take class levels, but I suspect a lot of unforeseen, broken combinations.
I think the lesser "monsters" like Orc and Bugbears could just be races.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm getting at. But that is a very different mechanic to LA. It's instead just a form of multiclassing.
I agree, though I don't think the rules should just be "Here is a LA, take the monster out of the monster manual and use it's stats then take a class".
Monsters should specifically be built as a player option. Especially in D&D Next where monster design is very different than PC design.
It should instead say "You are a Dragon, you get +3 to hit, roll 10d8 hitpoints, +4 strength, +2 dex, you have a breath weapon, can fly, have claws that do 1d8, and have +6 to your AC. Then pick a class, you start at first level although you are considered to be 10 levels higher for purposes of effects that determine your level. You should only allow this race in games that are 11th+ level"
I don't think that allowing these races is impossible. I'm saying that having a huge sized creature with the ability to always fly might ruin campaigns and I don't personally like them.
