Cailte said:
Hey look its a problem that every prior edition of DnD has had, but you only want to complain about it for 4E?
Please.
We have seen game mechanics for 1 creature, about 6 feats, 3 class abilities and 1 race and you are jumping to conclusions that the situation will be worse than it was in prior editions - that's pretty much hogwash.
Worse what you seem to really be saying is that the game is at fault for players doing smart things through the mechanics of their class, the resources the GM gives them, or just plain old role play. Which is definately barking up the wrong tree.
3.XE was a step in the right direction; the use of monsters with ECLs as well as explicit class abilities to get monsters on your side. My hope was that since the rules encoded that, for example, druids could enlist the services of thoqqua briefly, that core material would being to operate under the assumption that parties that included druids (or prepared casters of any stripe) past a certain level could use thoqqua-abilities for their own ends.
Thoqqua have the magnificent ability to rapidly bore through solid stone and leave tunnels behind. This, needless to say, is an extremely useful ability for a dungeon-delving adventurer.
Now, the 2E/4E mindset, this isn't an issue; thoqqua burrowing ability isn't on the list of PC abilities, so we don't need to worry about it. But what happens when, through cleverness, a PC does manage to gain control over a thoqqua? You have, in essence, replaced whatever higher-level challenge encoded into the solid stone the thoqqua is now melting at speed with however difficult it is to gain control over the thoqqua. Now this sort of thing can be exciting and interesting. But if you want to have dungeons the PCs can't casually burrow through with a decanter of endless water and a cooperative/coerced thoqqua, you either need to take the monster ability into account, or find some way to foil the cooperation/coercion. But even if you do manage to do so in-game, remember that in-game problems have in-game solutions; if you rule that the thoqqua builds up a resistance to charm spells on account of its long domination, not only must you remember this rule for further charm spells, but you're not stopping the PCs from nabbing another thoqqua and starting again.
In the end, I find it far simpler to start from the assumption that a) monsters should be balanced according to potential effect on the game world, not just expected combat ability against a set of PCs, and b) throwing a monster with a disproportionately high effect-level at PCs should be a matter of consideration for DMs as much as throwing a disproportionately high-level magic item. In both cases, careful use of the presented resource can drastically affect the game world. We're getting a system designed with careful attention to balance on effects in the game world for magic items. Why aren't we getting one for monsters?
zoroaster100 and
rkanodia: How do you enforce this lack of bleed-over in the face of dedicated PCs making the attempt to gain said abilities? If a PC wants to stop and research the Ritual of Endless Night that the evil villain was attempting to perform, what happens then? Well, you can fiat failure; despite the fact that the PC is both smarter and more knowledgeable about magic than the villain, you simply don't let the PC learn the ritual. This tends to produce discontent among the players. You can add requirements that make it unlikely that the PC will continue, but PCs have a bad habit of circumventing requirements, and then you are left with a general lack of excuse not to have the ritual work. Even worse, you need to make sure that the villain wasn't going to run afoul of those very requirements; otherwise the PC will simply make an effort to learn the improved ritual the BBEG was trying to use. Finally, you can simply say to the player out-of-game that you're not going to let him learn the ritual, come up with an appropriate reason in-game that the player is happy with, and move on, but having to do so means you've uncovered a weakness in the system.
The reason we play a game with dice and numbers is that most of us like having shared, codified assumptions about what our characters can and cannot do in the world. Having success or failure depend solely on the DMs desire at the time is free-form storytelling, not playing an RPG. (Yes, it's still role-playing, and often quite fun, but you do kind of lose the game aspect.) Having stats for combat and magical ability means that both the ability of the BBEG to invoke the Ritual of Endless Night and (if desired) the PC's lack of ability to do so should be in the system; what's the point of putting points into things like Spellcraft and Knowledge(Arcana) if the GM will arbitrarily decide what can and cannot be learned by the various characters of the game?
I recognize that it is damn difficult to maintain a system that uses the same rules for PCs and NPCs and also come up with interesting NPCs on the fly. However, I think the answer is not to come up with random stats, but instead to publish sets of almost-complete encounters and NPCs, along with ways to customize them.
