Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3986292" data-attributes="member: 2067">Well, 4e seems to be embracing the same philosophy as SAGA in that bonuses shouldn't be common and minor, but should be rarer and more significant. So random +1's and +2's will likely be whittled down anyway, and the bonuses there still are will be large enough that you notice them (especially because there's less of them).But putting the backstory with a "+20 Blacksmith" note is a complimentary, not incompatible, goal.I'm building cultural qualities in the middle of my game, AND running combat in almost every game, using statblocks I'm unfamiliar with.Why can't we have both?The combat statblock? No, that doesn't need to include this stuff. But it does need to be included, preferably called out in a notation, not shunted off in the middle of a paragraph somewhere. And it does need to be ALREADY DONE FOR ME. Which is what I mean when I say I don't want monsters that are just XP speedbumps, I want monsters that exist in context in the world. 4e could easily just give me the former and expect me to do the latter, and that would irk me every time I opened the MM, because it would be work I had to do to make the monster usable for me. All those roles have one glaring problem.They're all combat roles.Nothing about "brute" will tell me if the creature is, for instance, a herbivore or a carnivore. Nothing about "mastermind" tells me which creatures it especially hates. Sure, do that. And give DM's like me a "noncombat stat block" where they have skills and alignments and environments and ally creatures already mentioned for me. And I'd be a happy little pea in a pod.But the talk so far says "Give me a streamlined monster with no information other than the barebones combat stuff!" and that, for me, blows.</blockquote>

Verification