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General Tabletop Discussion
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What Monsters got nerfed from early D&D/AD&D to now/5e
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7644316" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>That's pretty close. Mummy was between wraith and spectre. Ghost was between vampire and lich. </p><p></p><p>The thing about shadow that made it such a problem is that its a attack had a quality that I describe in my writings as "level invariant", meaning that the normal protections that a player expects from being higher level like more AC and more hit points were in some sense bypassed by the attack. A ghoul would get relatively weaker over time because you'd have better AC and better saving throws. But the shadow, which is attacking your strength which doesn't change much as you level up, has an attack which would remain just about as deadly no matter what level you were. So while you might kill shadows more easily as you leveled up, you still had to respect them and still had reason to fear them.</p><p></p><p>Thinking about this a bit more, let me put in a different way something someone further up the thread has already said, and that is that I think one of the things 5e has gotten rid of to some extent is level invariant attacks. To a large extent attacks in 5e don't bypass defenses or if they do they don't bypass them as much and the cure tends to be simply be a "long rest". Monsters have gotten rather more uniform and have relatively fewer strengths compared to other monsters and require relatively less alteration of strategy. To replace those level invariant attacks, 5e simply reduces the ability of the PC to do things like improve AC so that the PC cannot as easily escape the danger presented at earlier levels. And in compensation, pretty much everything comes down to a hit point race so that if you want something to have higher CR really that just comes down to more hit points and a higher expected damage per round.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7644316, member: 4937"] That's pretty close. Mummy was between wraith and spectre. Ghost was between vampire and lich. The thing about shadow that made it such a problem is that its a attack had a quality that I describe in my writings as "level invariant", meaning that the normal protections that a player expects from being higher level like more AC and more hit points were in some sense bypassed by the attack. A ghoul would get relatively weaker over time because you'd have better AC and better saving throws. But the shadow, which is attacking your strength which doesn't change much as you level up, has an attack which would remain just about as deadly no matter what level you were. So while you might kill shadows more easily as you leveled up, you still had to respect them and still had reason to fear them. Thinking about this a bit more, let me put in a different way something someone further up the thread has already said, and that is that I think one of the things 5e has gotten rid of to some extent is level invariant attacks. To a large extent attacks in 5e don't bypass defenses or if they do they don't bypass them as much and the cure tends to be simply be a "long rest". Monsters have gotten rather more uniform and have relatively fewer strengths compared to other monsters and require relatively less alteration of strategy. To replace those level invariant attacks, 5e simply reduces the ability of the PC to do things like improve AC so that the PC cannot as easily escape the danger presented at earlier levels. And in compensation, pretty much everything comes down to a hit point race so that if you want something to have higher CR really that just comes down to more hit points and a higher expected damage per round. [/QUOTE]
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