How much of the anti-4E sentiment is actually justified?

[Josh_Kablack]

Chicken Linky Link

[Vnonymous]

haha watch me rip apart shadzar, obviously the greatest intellect on the gaming den and ignore kaelik, because he is obviously the dumbest person here

Pretty sure you just accidentally implied that I am the greatest intellect on TGD.

There's obviously a margin of error - Plebian and Shadzar have both put up fantastic showings.

[Shazbot79]

Because Jump, Climb, etc are things animals do...

Chickens. Skill ranks.

[Shazbot79]

My chicken takes Craft and uses it to make additional chickens...

I think that actually falls under "performance". Buh-dum-tish.

But yeah...no sane GM is ever going to have a meaningful interaction with a mundane chicken that involves more than a low DC survival or profession: cooking check.

[tzor]

Enough with the chickens! I want stats for ...

Penguins!
How can I have a vast army of werepenguins without the stats for a penguin?

[RobbyPants]

What? Commoner 1 is an NPC class so the character rolls his starting HP, and assuming no stat bonuses he's going to be at 2 hp (which dies to a dog in 1 hit).

[nitpick]The dog will KO the commoner that often. It takes 12 points of damage to actually kill the commoner. So the whole "needs medical attention" statement is pretty accurate.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume the dog won't try to CdG the first commoner he KOs. Even if he does, he gets AoOed for his trouble.

[Plebian]

the dog can't do less than KO the commoner, and it can easily do enough to push the commoner into losing a hitpoint every round unless he nails that 10% stabilize chance

[Novembermike]

I thought there was a rule where non-players didn't go into the "dying" state, but that might have been an alternative rule to cut down on paperwork during fights.

[MGuy]

I still can't believe that someone is seriously making it a mark against a system that you have the ability to stat up Chickens. There are poisonous spiders, snakes, etc of various sizes. How the is being "able" to stat something up a mark *against* a system? I will never be able to recover from my disbelief until I forget about this.

This troll has committed *sunglasses* a serious fowl.

[Doctor Kenny Loggins]

You wouldn't need to roll. Basic statistics gives you a % of chickens and other mooks that are likely to survive.

Sure, you can magic tea party it.

In 4e, the way how I'd give the AC of a rhino? It would depend on the level of characters it was up against.

No, it would depend on the level of the monster. You can put whatever level monster against whatever level players you want. It's stupid to make level 16 characters actually run a combat against level 4 monsters, but that doesn't mean you can't do it and be stupid.

Pretty sure you just accidentally implied that I am the greatest intellect on TGD.

Don't worry, you're an idiot too.

[violence in the media]

This troll has committed *sunglasses* a serious fowl.

I hate you so much.

[Plebian]

I still can't believe that someone is seriously making it a mark against a system that you have the ability to stat up Chickens. There are poisonous spiders, snakes, etc of various sizes. How the is being "able" to stat something up a mark *against* a system? I will never be able to recover from my disbelief until I forget about this.

because following PC character generation for a chicken is basically the most hilariously stupid aspect of treating all creatures as PCs and all it highlights is why it's such a bad idea to treat non-PCs as PCs.

[fectin]

I still can't believe that someone is seriously making it a mark against a system that you have the ability to stat up Chickens. There are poisonous spiders, snakes, etc of various sizes. How the is being "able" to stat something up a mark *against* a system? I will never be able to recover from my disbelief until I forget about this.

because following PC character generation for a chicken is basically the most hilariously stupid aspect of treating all creatures as PCs and all it highlights is why it's such a bad idea to treat non-PCs as PCs.

So, all creature stats must be generated by the PC character creation process?

[RobbyPants]

I thought there was a rule where non-players didn't go into the "dying" state, but that might have been an alternative rule to cut down on paperwork during fights.

I think that's just a house rule. I've come up with similar rules in the past to reduce this window for NPCs and to widen it for PCs. It's probably done pretty commonly.

[MGuy]

I still can't believe that someone is seriously making it a mark against a system that you have the ability to stat up Chickens. There are poisonous spiders, snakes, etc of various sizes. How the is being "able" to stat something up a mark *against* a system? I will never be able to recover from my disbelief until I forget about this.

because following PC character generation for a chicken is basically the most hilariously stupid aspect of treating all creatures as PCs and all it highlights is why it's such a bad idea to treat non-PCs as PCs.

So, all creature stats must be generated by the PC character creation process?

I see now how people end up reading ignored people in other's posts. I don't think Plebian is even trying to be serious and should not be talked to. Comes in says that 3E does something silly with no back up explanation as to how. I mean seriously how is making numbers up any less silly than being able to follow solid rules in a game as to how a given thing should be statted? I'm going to have to start ignoring people's quoting of his posts now.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I was previously applying Hanlon's razor, and presuming him stupid rather than malicious. After reading the wikipedia article, I have come to realize that I was missing an important extension of this principle: "But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!"

[Plebian]

So, all creature stats must be generated by the PC character creation process?

it's nice that you strawman yourself so easily, but no baseline creature stats are just fine for some situations. but a statblock for things so mundane as chickens is pointless, and statting them up with PC rules is even funnier. if you ever have the need for a party challenge including chickens it won't even resemble the entry for chickens, with all the manual modifications you'd have to make to provide a challenge for any party past first level, so why not take less time and create a new stat block for it?

[Doom]

Yes, stupid and industrious, that's a good clarification.

[Winnah]

Chickens are pretty vicious. I know a guy that works at a free range farm and he has scars all over his legs. Once one of them draws blood the fuckers go into a pecking frenzy.

If he was a gnome or a halfing I can only imagine what they would do to his face. Especially with cockfighting spurs and the warbeast template...

[sabs]

And lets not forget that while 1 chicken may not be much danger, a whole roost of them being controlled by someone with animal control abilities, would be frightening.

[Shazbot79]

And lets not forget that while 1 chicken may not be much danger, a whole roost of them being controlled by someone with animal control abilities, would be frightening.

And would therefore be statted up as a "swarm" instead of a mundane chicken.

I can stat up a swarm in any system that has swarm rules, including 4E.

I still can't believe that someone is seriously making it a mark against a system that you have the ability to stat up Chickens. There are poisonous spiders, snakes, etc of various sizes. How the is being "able" to stat something up a mark *against* a system? I will never be able to recover from my disbelief until I forget about this.

This troll has committed *sunglasses* a serious fowl.

Troll? I would argue that the majority of my conversations on the den have been fairly constructive thus far. I genuinely enjoy visiting the TGD forums, even if my personal gaming preferences are not always aligned with the popular ideas commonly held here.

However, the idea that assigning skills and feats to mundane chickens adds any value at all to a system is so patently absurd, that I refuse to give this argument any gravity at all. Hell, maybe you've got tons of interesting things to say on other topics, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on this one. But chickens with skill ranks? I mean, really? Chickens with skill ranks?

[quanta]

And I think you could come up with answers in 3e, but it's going to take a calculator, and it's going to be really simulation breaking considering how as far as I can tell, you don't breathe any faster if you're digging compared to if you're sitting still. I also can't find the rules on how fast tiny or smaller or large or larger monsters breathe. Not saying they're not there, but I can't find them in the SRD.

I googled 'SRD suffocation Size" and immediately came up with this...

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm

Slow Suffocation

A Medium character can breathe easily for 6 hours in a sealed chamber measuring 10 feet on a side. After that time, the character takes 1d6 points of nonlethal damage every 15 minutes. Each additional Medium character or significant fire source (a torch, for example) proportionally reduces the time the air will last. When a character falls unconscious from this nonlethal damage, she drops to -1 hit points and is dying. In the next round, she suffocates.

Small characters consume half as much air as Medium characters. A larger volume of air, of course, lasts for a longer time.

To an extent large complex rules can be a pain in the butt, but these are (at worst) wasted page count. When I'm GMing I can ignore rules more easily than I can make stuff up on the go. As Kevin J. Anderson said with regard to novel writing - 'you can edit crap, but you can't edit nothing'. It is difficult to know whether a given rule will end up being important or not unless you work in a fairly constrained 'play space' of possible scenarios. At which point you're leaving what are possibly life-or-death decisions to the GM deciding to Tell A Story or flip a coin.

Though I'll likewise be honest and say I do enjoy (say) Tunnels & Trolls, where I can just say "chickens have a Monster Rating of 1" without needing a huge stat block for them.
Still, a 4E chicken has to NOT have stats to work - if you make it a minion for example, a super-fireball that destroys your village logically would leave many of the chickens alive due to minions taking no damage from misses.

Yeah, I found those too earlier. Notice that doesn't include tiny or smaller or large or larger. Unless there's some sort of standard scaling rules about doubling things for each size category up. And even if it did, it'd be more immersion breaking to me than a complete lack of rules given how apparently running doesn't make me use air faster than walking, and the respiration rates don't work anything like one would expect (linear scaling with body length (large is twice as tall, wide, and thick as medium and so on, right?) is... not the right scaling).

Also, I prefer to make corner-case decisions (price of food or time to suffocation being the current examples in D&D) as necessary or not have to worry about a shitty underlying template. Having to edit crap is worse than having to write from scratch. But when there's already crap, people are going to expect me to use it. But YMMV.

Any response that = "yes its there but the DM may disagree with it and change it" is irrelevant to any of what I said. The fact of the matter is those are just edge cases and as I've said, no you don't NEED to follow the rules but it is good for the game that they exist as long as the rules ~work~. It being "hard" or difficult" to calculate how long X creature to solve in Y size room is irrelevant and good for the game as long as the rules work to some degree. Now if you're arguing that knowing the rules for suffocating is ~bad~ then I can't help you because I completely disagree.

Do the rules need to work or do they need to be good rules? There's a difference. And I'd rather not have "rules that work but aren't very useful or well done".

I'm not arguing about the DM disagreeing with the rule about suffocation, I'm saying the 3e suffocation rules are dumb unless you assume they're just guidelines. But I honestly don't necessarily want those in my game. They can clutter the book, they lead to stupid crap and possible weird loopholes, and I'm not even going to use them if they are bad rules. It is very possible for a working rule to be bad enough that you are literally better off not having the rule. I don't know why that's weird.

I also highly disagree that difficulty or effort that must be spent adjudicating a rule is irrelevant. The difficulty or effort associated with a rule is a cost to using it. If the benefit of something is less than the cost, that something probably isn't something you want. So I don't want rules like that. Rules that aren't used are worse than nonexistent rules.

However that small shit aside it is absolutely important that people KNOW how a basic part of the game interacts with the world.

Depends how important that part of the world is. I seriously don't give a fuck there are no stats for chickens in 4e. Did someone find stats for a chicken in 3e yet? Chicken, 1 hp, 15 feet per round movement speed, not a minion. You can eat them. Boom, done. Either edition. I don't care.

Did you attack the chicken with your sword? It died. Stare at it really hard? It might have died; depends how awesome you are. How many chickens do you need to eat per day to stay alive? Depends, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

However, the idea that assigning skills and feats to mundane chickens adds any value at all to a system is so patently absurd, that I refuse to give this argument any gravity at all. Hell, maybe you've got tons of interesting things to say on other topics, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on this one. But chickens with skill ranks? I mean, really? Chickens with skill ranks?

To be fair, you could make a mighty Solo chicken in 4e with a class template. There's nothing against doing that.

[CCarter]

Well for larger/smaller creatures and suffocation I'd probably use the Teleport guideline where a Large creature counts as two Medium creatures, a Huge creature counts as two Large creatures, and so forth. There's enough rules for everything that you have precedents to design more. (EDIT: forgot to add, I think it would be a function of mass rather than linear dimension i.e. height-cubed, though warm-blooded creatures that are larger also have slower metabolisms).


Before I finally shut up about the chickens - I'd ask "so how do you run a cockfight in 4E" except I already know the answer I'll get here.

I'd probably MTP this as well if it was just going on in the background, but its not inconceivable that actual stats might be useful for if PCs put some money down and want to cheat with Aid or Bless or whatnot.

[Doctor Kenny Loggins]

I used chickens as an example because they were an area of design space that 3.x had also not covered.

The hilarious bits about chickens as minions being left alive because some people really don't understand minions are just a bonus. I'll give you a bit of insight as to how I've seen minions misunderstood: no sandstorm not created by a player as an attack would ever kill a minion in one round.

[Psychic Robot]

Minions are for fatbeards who want to live vicariously through their characters. DUDE I TOTALLY SLEW THAT GOBLIN IN ONE HIT I AM SO BADASS WANK WANK BLUBBERY TEARS OF JOY.