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

[mhensley]

It sounds like the nightmare of figuring out what a monster got by adding x hit dice is thankfully gone. I hated looking up the BAB/Skill points/feats/ CR of monster type y because I added 10 extra hit dice.

Sounds wonderful to me.

Yep, me too. This is why my group hardly ever runs into vampires or dragons as I don't want to sit down and build the damn things.

 

[simply not edible]

You could jump to that conclusion...

With all that jumping to conclusions going on aound here, I'm surprised no-one hasyet taken out his mat...

 

[Dragonblade]

But if I told you, "Monsters of level X have a baseline of Y hit points," then also told you that monsters filling a certain role have Z% more/less hit points, and gave you guidelines for how to make it tougher without completely breaking the encounter...doesn't that solve that problem as well as a formula? I mean, if the issue is judging appropriate power levels, and I tell you what the appropriate power levels are, doesn't that resolve the issue?

It certainly does! This is one area of 4e that I'm totally loving! I used to run fantastic 1e and 2e games that were universally acclaimed by my players. And then 3.5 came along. It smothered all DM creativity with endless systems and formulas. DMing became a chore and I only did it when I could run a module where the stat blocks had already been calculated for me.

4e looks like it will free me to once again just create monsters and encounters based on what I think would be cool rather than fighting with the monster advancement system in place currently and accounting for every feat, skill point, bonus, etc.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm on record of being suspicious of 4e's monster design philosophy, but I don't mind this.

Monsters do need to be designed with how well they can survive against a party of PC's in mind. The 3e method didn't do it easily, without jumping through a lot of hoops and carrying a lot of extra baggage. It would be like trying to create a swashbuckler PC by multiclassing Fighter and Rogue. Yeah, it might look vaguely similar in the end, but you ended up with a lot of baggage that you just didn't need. While you could refine the 3e method to do that, it makes more sense to go for the jugular and design for the party.

Now, I still think that the monsters could be chock full of FAIL on the level of "Ally" and "Anybody," as in they could make very little sense in the world, and they won't be useful to the party at all except as XP speedbumps (and they won't be designed with their use as PC's in mind). I'm still concerned about this.

But giving me a kind of menu of options for the monsters is pretty okay. I would infinitely prefer it if such a system could be reverse-engineered for PC use, but I know they're not really concerned about that. I am concerned, too, with how well the monsters will work in the world. We don't need more Phantom Fungi and Ythraks. I worry, in short, that the design focus is too narrow. Which will probably make some really cool XP bumps, but it might not hold up the other levels that I need it to hold up on.

 

[Khairn]

I can definitely understand the hesitation that some players have when faced with this kind of design format. Personally I have no problem with it and it jives very well with my attitude towards monsters.

I believe it requires a very good GM to use this format well, and it can be very easily abused by some GM's. How to prevent (or mitigate) that abuse is to me the more interesting challenge.

 

[Steely Dan]

I love that all Fey won't have a crap BAB (attack bonus) and Fort save (Fort defence) simply by virtue of being "Fey".

I was also sick of having to give undead an extra 14 HD to bump up their to hit…

 

[Gort]

I found that the "hit dice advancement" stuff really broke down at high levels - undead with billions of hitdice, and so forth. I think the worst offender was the Death Knight, who was supposed to be a hand-to-hand undead type, but at CR 15 had an attack of +12 or something.

 

[Anthtriel]

If I were to guess, I would say that we are right back where 2E left off in monster design, with good improvements in the design know-how, but not in the actual methods.

Which is fine by me. The 3E system looked mostly great at the beginning, but after a relatively short time I started using DM fiat anyway, because the system had some glaring, downright moronic flaws built in and was just way too much of a hassle.
So why waste perfectly good pages on a system that rarely works properly anyway?

 

[I'm A Banana]

HD Advancement can work.

The idea is to make it more of a kit than a law, so that you can pick and choose based on the invidual monster (or role) what to advance at what rate.

And to disassociate HD from *all* forms of advancement.

3e had a pretty flawed view of it, but the core was not a bad plan.

 

[Gundark]

I found that the "hit dice advancement" stuff really broke down at high levels - undead with billions of hitdice, and so forth. I think the worst offender was the Death Knight, who was supposed to be a hand-to-hand undead type, but at CR 15 had an attack of +12 or something.

In the Age of Worm Campaign that I ran, you saw things like + x "profane" bonus to attack rolls and the like to get higher CR undead to be able to put out the attacks.