D&D 4E WotC_Rodney: 4ed "take only what you want" monster design good

[Kraydak]

Blech.

Start with a balanced offense/defense creature. His example (massively boosting hp while leaving everything else the same) is the safest of the alterations available, and even it has a downside. Namely boredom. It doesn't show up all that often in tabletop games *as such*, but in CRPGs, facing off against opponents with WAY TOO MANY HP and wanting to go afk while they get worn down is all too common. Remember, boosting an encounter's duration means you decrease your maximum per-round damage inflicted on the party, and even if the party is close to empty by the end, you still lose excitement in exchange for an irritated "why won't it just die already". Whittling people down, even if it almost works, is rarely intense.

Massively boosting offense, while leaving the defenses untouched, isn't intense either. One round later its all over. No time for tension to build.

 

[nightspaladin]

For the last adventure I ran, I tried an experiment with 4e sensibilities and simply assigned abilities and powers to the villianous npcs instead of plotting out every spell and power. Though I will admit it takes so knowledge of what is exceptible at a given power level, it is much faster to create and DM.

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

His example (massively boosting hp while leaving everything else the same) is the safest of the alterations available, and even it has a downside. Namely boredom.

Unless it's not the only element in the encounter. A sack of meat is plenty of tension if the environment is quickly becoming hostile, if the party needs to make a hasty retreat, or if there are other enemies with unique abilities being protected by yon meat sack.

 

[helium3]

I wish I hadn't gotten rid of all my old 2E books. Isn't going back to a more ad-hoc "eyeballing" method of putting monsters together pretty much what they did in 1E and 2E?

If they provide nice guidelines and comprehensive tables it might work pretty well. I vaguely recall that there's going to be a table in the MM or DMG that'll list what attacks, hit points and defense scores are appropriate for a monster of a given level.

I just hope (if this is the way the new system looks at monsters) that they don't add a bunch of wonky rules in the later books that are hard to use without creating broken encounters.

 

[Incenjucar]

The main issue is that most monster classes weren't much better than NPC classes, especially considering the tendency to have fewer monsters than PCs.

Fun things like undead and their meager HP.

--

In 2E, they had a "build a monster" table where you just added XP to it as you added features.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

I really don't like this design style. I would much rather have the moster rules put down so that there is some semblance of order. What seems to be happening is they are takling what is already available, which is DM fiat monster changes and making it the only way to do things. I would much rather have rules that I can ignore than not have rules at all.

 

[Mistwell]

At this point I think there is no change WOTC can make that won't result in at least 20% of posters in this forum being negative about it. If the system becomes more flexible (like this change) people complain it's not structured enough and DMs could always Rule 0 the flexibility if they want to. If the rule is less flexible, then people complain they should not have to Rule 0 back in flexibility. They just cannot win.

 

[Voss]

Thats OK. Its balanced out by at least the same amount of people being positive about any change they see. But perhaps this isn't the best line of thought to get started on?

 

[Mouseferatu]

I'm amused that people assume that a wider degree of customization automatically means there are no underlying rules or formulas involved.

What's the Jump check on that leap?

 

[Voss]

5. He flat out says you can make changes without them affecting anything else.