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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6256571" data-attributes="member: 37579">As a DM, being incentivized to look up seldom used spells prevents players from surprising you with them.Neither system does this. You get advice on properly balancing monster abilities via advice to the DM on properly balancing monsters. There were lots of subtle things about monsters in 4e that were not covered by the creating monsters section. That’s your experience. Mine is me rubbing my temples and going “I just want a fight with duergars, why do I have to learn 8-12 unique powers and figure out how to synergize them in combat so my players don’t faceroll over the encounter.” Or having 3/5ths of an encounter built, and scanning through the Monster Builder looking for a level appropriate soldier or skirmisher that works with the rest of the combatants and can proc their special abilities. Ugh.Just ugh.I hate that so much. The whole “this power is too complex to be summarized so let’s remove it” attitude. The “this power has no combat use so dump it” thought process. I dislike the reduction of monsters from part of the world to speedbumps the PCs thump over during an encounter. Monsters as nothing more than big bads of xp to be wacked like piñatas until treasure falls out.Monsters are there to be antagonists for your players. Most of the time that means combat but not always. Sometimes that means roleplaying and diplomacy. Sometimes it means trickery and guile. Sometimes it means stealth and avoidance. Sometimes the PCs are interacting with a monster without realizing it. Sometimes a monster is helping the PCs. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that wizardly monsters should be a subtype of wizard. They should use wizardly mechanics. The monsters that cast spells should cast spells. And if a monster is going to use a power that is functionally identical to a spell just call it the damn spell. If something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck you call it a duck. If something looks like a fireball, has the same mechanical impact as a fireball then it’s a fireball.I knew what a fireball was years before I played D&D. Because it’s part of the fantasy zeitgeist. It’s part of the culture. It’s in forty years of books and video games. It’s universal. That’s the D&D magic system. Anyone can learn magic and it works reliably. Hence Eberron. If you want to change for you your world you certainly can (I’ve done so in the past and there are innumerable campaign settings that tweak magic), but by default that is how it works.Yes… that is was what I said. Blandness has its place. If you just need to deal quick damage, bland works. If there are a bunch of bland powers it makes the exciting and unique ones stand out. Bosses need to be exciting and dynamic, but mooks and minions don’t. The waves of colour coded flunkies the BBEG throws at the PCs don’t need a vast array of unique snowflake powers. Most 4e powers blurred together to me after a year of play. Because I had no idea what any individual power did, I often stopped narrating fights. It was really hard to find any memorable and exciting abilities when they are were unique snowflakes. http://youtu.be/A8I9pYCl9AQSee, I loved that. Because I had better things to do as a new DM than try and figure out the social structure of orcs or what a gnoll tribe was like. I was happy the book told me the baseline. And, even then, I knew if I wanted orcs to be different in my world they would be. For my very first campaign setting I happily ignored the book and made minotaurs a race. </blockquote>

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