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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ilgatto" data-source="post: 9794594" data-attributes="member: 86051">eah, I’d also go for the spittle being a missile discharge. In which case it wouldn’t be a “breath weapon” (well, dammit, it might, as [USER=4937]@Celebrim[/USER] suggests with his notion of a breath weapon being an alternative to a bite attack). If it isn’t, I’d say its effect would start counting, as it arguably does with the manticore’s tail spikes (missile discharge, massive damage count).But then the problem is gonna be how to value a “blinding attack” and an attack (or, dammit, defense) causing lasting “blindness” (e.g., nymph). And then there’s the notion of “helplessness”. Yeah, blinding/blindness is a really tough cookie, though there’s a chance that things may become easier when the subject of spells/spell-like effects comes up—which it probably won’t.I’m curious. Where do you get the 30/15 thresholds from?I’d agree in principle, though there’s a lot of buts. One of which being that—if one were to use that rule—a fatal disease doesn’t really qualify as “near instant death with regard for hit points”. And then there’s the question on how one should interpret the fact that the giant rat gets minimal xp for its minimal chance of causing a (non-fatal) disease. And the notion that the giant tick gets 5×SAXPB plus 1×EAXPA for just being abilities to drain some blood and have a 50% chance to inflict a disease fatal in 2-8 days, especially because being able to drain blood is sometimes awarded an EAXPA (e.g., giant lamprey). My guess so far is that draining blood at a rate of “more than one die per round”—i.e., 1d6—may somehow be worth an EAXPA, but the evidence is too weak for a final conclusion.Absolutely. And I’d add Demogorgon’s “insanity gaze attack” to that. Though there’s caveats there as well. For, if special/exceptional abilities are based on “the potential to inflict damage”, then strength drain is a thing, but “temporarily” losing a couple of points of Intelligence isn’t really that much of an issue, although the magic-user in question might disagree.The main problem with stat losses is that the xp values of monsters than can cause them are pretty hard to analyze (e.g., lamia, quasit, intellect devourer).I'm not sure at all, and I was rather pleased it didn’t feature in the xp table for monsters on p. 85, for xp-wise there’s a lot of problems with psionics.If one were to treat them in much the same way as the DMG does “use of minor (basically defensive) spells” and “spell use”, or as suggested in Dragon #89 (p. 49), then where’s the cut-off? Also, there’s huge problems with monsters being able to use (minor) spells, spell-like effects, or whatever else Appendix E might call them. For one, there’s some evidence that “spell use” means “being able to use spells as PC spell-casters can”.And then there’s this: I’ve never used, or studied the subject of, psionics to any great extent, but IIRC psionic attacks are only relevant against other psionics, with the exception of psionic blast—and whatever the mind flayer’s “mind blast” and “mind blast of psionic power” is (which isn’t psionic blast coz it doesn’t have that). And the mind flayer having this weird ability likely being the result of it originally having “Mind Blast, a wave PSI force” (The Strategic Review, Vol. 1, No. 1) doesn’t really solve the problem in a meaningful way.So far, whenever I had to allocate xp to a psionic monster the PCs could encounter in a session (they never actually did), I’d just use whatever Appendix E says, or give it another EAXPA (e.g., bandit magic-user) and quickly forget about.Here’s to hoping that trying to analyze the xp values of spells, et al.. will shed some light on the psionics situation—hope springs eternal and all that.</blockquote>

Verification