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Your thoughts on monsters having six Abilities
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<blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8564843" data-attributes="member: 19857"><p>I don't think it was out of "fairness" or simulationsim - from what I recall at the time it was mostly about <em>consistency</em> and <em>balance.</em> They wanted to have frameworks in place that were consistent. The lead designers were Jon Tweet, Skip Williams and Monte Cook and while I'm not as sure about Williams, I can say that Tweet's previous crunchy design of Ars Magica was very interested in consistent rules while Cook's previous (and subsequent) work has shown him to also be in the camp that the rules should be consistent.</p><p></p><p>So moving from a 1e/2e framework where there was very little consistency in monster design and it was more of a freewheeling approach to a framework where things were more laid out mathematically and consistently led to, I think, an overcorrection in the case of monster types. They had come up with the approach for consistency with PC class design and applied that to monster design by subbing in the monster type as a kind of class for the base stats. It doesn't work because monster type is more of a narrative descriptor than a game class - they eventually figured it out but by that point were stuck by 3e's design. It's one of the things that 4e fixed by creating monster roles for base stats that were separate from the type of the monster.and actually giving the monster a kind of "class" to build around.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jer, post: 8564843, member: 19857"] I don't think it was out of "fairness" or simulationsim - from what I recall at the time it was mostly about [I]consistency[/I] and [I]balance.[/I] They wanted to have frameworks in place that were consistent. The lead designers were Jon Tweet, Skip Williams and Monte Cook and while I'm not as sure about Williams, I can say that Tweet's previous crunchy design of Ars Magica was very interested in consistent rules while Cook's previous (and subsequent) work has shown him to also be in the camp that the rules should be consistent. So moving from a 1e/2e framework where there was very little consistency in monster design and it was more of a freewheeling approach to a framework where things were more laid out mathematically and consistently led to, I think, an overcorrection in the case of monster types. They had come up with the approach for consistency with PC class design and applied that to monster design by subbing in the monster type as a kind of class for the base stats. It doesn't work because monster type is more of a narrative descriptor than a game class - they eventually figured it out but by that point were stuck by 3e's design. It's one of the things that 4e fixed by creating monster roles for base stats that were separate from the type of the monster.and actually giving the monster a kind of "class" to build around. [/QUOTE]
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