How many monsters does a D&D edition need to start with?

[Ancient History]

A traptalker is just a rogue based around Charisma rather than Dexterity; or else a specialist bard of some sort. But it's like having a fighter based around Intelligence by taking feats from the Combat Expertise tree; a little odd, but not unfuckable in context.

Re: monsters in other games

I sort of pointed this out in my last post (which every fucking one of you tl;dr), but the whole Creature Ratings system devised in D&D3 was a major departure from how things were done with monsters before. In AD&D and pretty much every other game there were little to no guidelines for what monsters were "appropriate" per level/experience. You're fresh out of the core book Shadowrunners and you run into a basilisk? Fuck you, deal with it. In AD&D and Earthdawn you only sort of felt your way into what monsters a party could handle by experience and maybe looking at the XP values they gave if you defeated them, and even then that wasn't any hard-and-fast guideline - I know more starting-out Namegivers that bought it when they attacked a Cadaver Man and thought it was just a typical Romero-style shambler. They learned fast or they got ripped the fuck apart.

But of course, the difference between D&D and Shadowrun or GURPS is that the latter have much more harsh limits on how much damage a character can take before they die. In D&D hit points and damage are supposed to scale, but they're notoriously broken and nonsensical. Now, SR and GURPS are nonsensical at the high level too - the amount of special bullshit that dragons have just so you can't put a sniper round through their head and be done with it is amazing. But if you compare SR with D&D, then there is a considerable advantage in dealing damage at lower levels in SR, and combat in SR is in general much more deadly than D&D at all levels, just because you have fewer hit points to deal with.

Note: I said in general. A fighter in D&D can easily triple their hit points in a couple levels, shadowrunners generally cannot, but there are some fiddly bits (troll bows, PPE, etc.) which make SR the bucket-of-dice game that it is. Still, as a rule of thumb, taking two bullets in the back of the head will kill many shadowrunners of any amount of experience, while you can literally pepper a mid-level fighter with arrows and they will still gut you like a pig and rip out your heart to eat the juicy courage within.

[Foxwarrior]

Nahh, your other post just didn't say anything so wrong it needed to be disputed. Well, I can't speak for the build-a-monster crowd. Oh, but calculating the CR at the end is the most important contribution that any creation system can provide. And the implication that simply saying that dragons have a 6d6 fire damage breath weapon isn't enough to establish something about the setting makes me cringe a little.

This post however, is almost completely unhelpful. I think we can take from it that you care a lot more about monster coolness than monster balance, but it's pretty demented to claim anything resembling "pistols and M61 Vulcans are equally dangerous, because either one kills you when pressed against your skull and fired"

[Ancient History]

And the implication that simply saying that dragons have a 6d6 fire damage breath weapon isn't enough to establish something about the setting makes me cringe a little.

Put it this way: it is not enough for monsters to only have abilities that apply in combat. A critter that has an attack that deals fire damage in combat should, by all rights, be able to set shit on fire out of combat. This is a rather fundamental and important thing. We do not remember beavers because they have big fucking teeth and can gnaw through your leg, we remember them because they dam rivers and you can get 60gp for their pelt so that the elves can make hats out of them.

it's pretty demented to claim anything resembling "pistols and M61 Vulcans are equally dangerous, because either one kills you when pressed against your skull and fired"

Pistols and M61 Vulcans are equally dangerous to an unarmored human or dog in Shadowrun. In D&D, it depends. No matter how swanky your Big Frikkin' Sword is in Dungeons & Dragons, I guarantee you there is going to come a level where it will take progressively more hits with that sword to take down a character than before. That's where the whole Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizard thing comes in: spellslinger damage scales up with level in a way that sword-swinging damage does not.

SR moderately avoids that to a degree because the amount of damage that a PC or NPC can take generally does not scale up significantly as characters advance. It's also why they put so many fuck-you protections on dragons, because if a PC could kill a dragon with a sniper rifle they will.

[Foxwarrior]

Then I have no idea what your point was.

Also, how on earth is a weapon that can kill you through a brick wall only as deadly as one that can't?

[Ancient History]

Because they can both kill you. You cannot often get more deadly than a weapon that can kill you. Your average steel sword is a fine and nifty weapon in D&D, but after about 6th level it is almost useless against the enemies you face unless it is enchanted or you can throw fire on it or something, and even then you're going to be dealing 1d6 + Str damage against enemies that have ten times as many hit points. In D&D, the higher up you go the fights are often either instantkills or really long, drawn-out affairs - in Shadowrun, fights at all levels tend to be rather nasty and brutish, particularly if you don't take cover when the bullets start flying.

[Avoraciopoctules]

You can get more deadly than a weapon that kills you. What about one that turns you into a shambling zombie that attacks your former allies? Like a Wraith Sword in Dominions 4.

[Foxwarrior]

Okay, so I guess your point is that D&D can have fundamentally more well-defined CRs, because you'll eventually reach a point where the monster poses no threat whatsoever. I guess that's fair, but just because knives and nukes are both threats at every level doesn't mean you can't tell which one is more dangerous.

[K]

K, can you please explain what you mean by a trap and a monster, and in what ways they differ? Because at this point it seems like you define a trap as anything which falls outside your definition of monster. And you haven't given a positive definition of what you mean by monster, only a negative one by that some things don't count as monsters because you think they are boring.

Sure. I've explained it about six times, but I'll try again.

Imagine a standard DnD encounter with a PC, a pressure plate trap that fires arrows into part of the room, and a monster. The pressure plat trap is a trap like any other: it's an object in the room with AC and HPs and will not work any more you if damage it enough.

This trap also has a lever on the monster side that causes the arrows to fire if you spend an action to pull it, but it also stops working of you smash the trap.

You start combat and roll initiative. Monster and PC take actions on their turn, and the trap acts whenever someone steps on the pressure plate or pulls the level.

Now imagine a pack of dogs acting the same way as the pressure plate and level arrow trap. They have HPs and AC because they exist on the battlefield and they act when triggered, and otherwise stay in one place and attack when someone gets near them. You don't roll initiative for them, you don't give them independent tactics, and they don't get actions in combat unless it's part of someone's action or is a response to a specific trigger action (in this case, "getting near them"). The monster can tell the dogs to attack someone that round by spending his turn commanding the dogs in the same way that he could spend an action to pull the level in the previous example. They stop attacking and revert to their default action when they aren't being commanded in the same way that the trap doesn't do anything when there is no one on the pressure plate or pulling the level.

Now, the 3e system is to stat all five dogs, give them independent turns and actions in combat, decide their individual motivations and tactics, track their HPs and status separately, and turn a simple two-unit combat into a seven-unit combat that takes three times as much time.

[Voss]

Okay, so I guess your point is that D&D can have fundamentally more well-defined CRs, because you'll eventually reach a point where the monster poses no threat whatsoever. I guess that's fair, but just because knives and nukes are both threats at every level doesn't mean you can't tell which one is more dangerous.

Eh? His point about knives and nukes is the opposite: you can completely tell which is more dangerous: Nukes [D&D spells] are overkill at the start, but become relevant and stay relevant forever (though you won't be using the same spells, necessarily. Or ever, in the case of most evocations, because they're the knives of the spell set).

Knives [D&D weapons] start relevant, but rapidly don't actually matter at all. If a melee guy is at all capable at high level it isn't because of the sword: the threat comes from the giant pile of buffs giving a static bonus and possibly a way to reliably multiply that total. Whether the base weapon does 1d4 or 2d6 absolutely ceases to matter.


Short version:
vs a goblin, a sword is as good or better than a spell
vs a 20 HD creature,the sword is trivial. A spellcaster, on the other hand, can obliterate it with a single d20 roll. At this level you can totally put a sword to a guy's head and push, and he'll be absolutely fine. He might even giggle.

[Username17]

The interesting part your post is that you assume that a roc has to be a pile of numbers.

Why? Why can't it have some cool flyby attack? Wing buffet? Armor-piercing beak stab?

The reason it can't have those things is that then you're playing 4e where all the monsters do crazy stupid unpredictable stuff. The game system should be interesting and have tactical choices in it, the monsters should be piles of numbers. If the party has no way to know whether a new monster they are fighting is going to blow them back with its wings or have an armor piercing feather explosion the moment it falls to half hit points, the players have no way of making rational tactical choices. Their decisions are meaningless, because the inputs and outputs are giant unknowns.

It's completely disempowering to the players to have all the tactical effects be in monster writeups the DM made over the week. The players weren't looking over his shoulder, and they don't know what those writeups contain. Special attacks are only "cool" if they are somewhat rare. If everything has special attacks, then nothing is special at all. You're just playing apocalypse world and stupid unpredictable shit is happening all the time with no explanation.

The good way to design things is the way where the monsters have real choices but the players can know what those choices are because they are part of the system. That means making a robust system of combat maneuvers that people will actually use (so, more like Champions and less like D&D), and it certainly doesn't mean putting three flavors of bullshit special attacks on every giant badger and bird.

3e already went down that route to an extent, and the degree it did was good. As we previously mentioned to PhoneLobster's chagrin, you can use the normal jumping and crawling rules to have a giant shark jump into a boat and start flopping around biting people using the actual rules. This is a good thing. Having exciting and unusual events transpire organically and emergently out of the numbers and normal interactivity rules is the whole point of having an RPG ruleset in the first place. Every time you have to pull a special ability out of your ass for a monster to take a cool action you've failed just as thoroughly as if you had made a feat to allow a player to take a cool action.

Actions, both on the player side and the monster side should be handleable with the raw numbers and basic stunt rules whenever possible. As such, a majority of monsters should be nothing but numbers that are simply unusual enough that they have a different set of preferred basic stunts.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

As we previously mentioned to PhoneLobster's chagrin, you can use the normal jumping and crawling rules to have a giant shark jump into a boat and start flopping around biting people using the actual rules.

Wait, did someone actually claim that?

Because seriously. Your first level shark you guys have such a hardon for has no ranks in jump, and has 13 Str.

On a natural 20 it jumps barely 5 feet/1square high, then, because it is untrained, it lands prone.

So yeah, bull-fucking-shit there are workable rules for that in 3rd edition.

[K]

It's pretty tragic that there's so much more interest in making monsters than in improving the terrain design, really. You need ability complexity and WoF-nonsense on the order of a Magic: The Gathering player to make an endless series of fights in an open field interesting.

I have a bunch of ideas for terrain, but even mentioning a few of them has led to so many accusations of insaaaaaaanity that I never cared enough to elaborate.

The problem is that making terrain important goes against the traditions of DnD. You have to fundamentally redesign the game to make terrain fun and integrated with the combat and non-combat and people will never forgive you for that.

I honestly don't think that the DnD IP is a worthwhile license any more because the amount of hatred you will get for trying to improve it is truly epic. You are better off creating a heartbreaker without any of the baggage like the six stat system, the +1 sword, and people's firm and fanatical beliefs in the physical abilities of gelatinous cubes.

[Username17]

As we previously mentioned to PhoneLobster's chagrin, you can use the normal jumping and crawling rules to have a giant shark jump into a boat and start flopping around biting people using the actual rules.

Wait, did someone actually claim that?

Because seriously. Your first level shark you guys have such a hardon for has no ranks in jump, and has 13 Str.

On a natural 20 it jumps barely 5 feet/1square high, then, because it is untrained, it lands prone.

So yeah, bull-fucking-shit there are workable rules for that in 3rd edition.

You know it gets a considerable bonus from having a large movement speed (+12), and also we were talking about the large shark, which has a higher strength bonus (+3).

But please, go on about how you totally know 3e D&D rules, even though you obviously don't. It's actually really funny.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

, and also we were talking about the large shark, which has a higher strength bonus (+3).

No you fucking weren't, you fuckers were insisting on a level one base line animals for level one base line adventures. And that guy is Medium sized. Stop shifting your goal posts.

Worse really, as a creature longer than it is tall that pretty much qualifies it as a quadruped under 3rd edition size rules. Which penalizes it further for jumping (for some insane reason). So actually the medium shark is jumping HALF the height for it's DC and even with a +12 speed bonus a natural 20 is only making 4 feet in jump height, and cannot in fact jump any higher. Averaging about 2 foot.

Mind you even if we inexplicably let you claim a shark is a Bipedal creature for jumping purposes or shift goal posts to a Large shark, the actual AVERAGE jump for a medium shark would still be only 5 feet, and the AVERAGE jump for a Large shark is 6 feet, or 12 if we call lie and call it a biped.

The ability to MAYBE jump 1 square, and to reliably do it if you fudge the rules is a fucking non-ability.

And for all your "but it creates gelatinous cubes with reflex saves and THAT is what killed 4E!", what exactly DOES this "emergent jump behavior" do in 3E for say... an Elephant, a creature which in the much vaunted real world is incapable of jumping? Oh yeah, despite being a Quadruped it can high jump 12 feet in the air on an average roll and leap a spectacular maximum of 16 feet high, which is nothing compared to its spectacular ability to long jump at least 44 feet, then make a DC 15 reflex check to grab a ledge within 5 feet and dangle from it. With it's nose. Then climb up later.

But hey, fair enough, a medium sized shark can apparently jump a 43 foot chasm, grab a ledge within 5 feet, then climb up later at the rate of 15 feet per round using it's teeth alone.

So yeah. Brilliantly written emergent behaviors there. That's totally not a clown show that makes "Ooogahbooga Gelatinous cubes MIGHT have a reflex save!" seem kinda underwhelming by comparison.

[Username17]

, and also we were talking about the large shark, which has a higher strength bonus (+3).

No you fucking weren't, you fuckers were insisting on a level one base line animals for level one base line adventures. And that guy is Medium sized. Stop shifting your goal posts.

OK, I'm putting you on ignore now. You can go back a few pages where I talk about jumping sharks, actually fucking read what I said, and get a vague idea of why I'm doing that.

Or don't. I honestly don't care what you do anymore.

Arguing with you is like talking to a Republican who happens to also be a brick wall.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

Or don't. I honestly don't care what you do anymore.

Yeah, typical Frank, it's anything goes bipedal giant sharks when he thinks it helps his case, but the moment you mention high jumping elephants and cliff scaling sharks he is all "fuck you lalalalala I can't hear you!".

[Roog]

Worse really, as a creature longer than it is tall that pretty much qualifies it as a quadruped under 3rd edition size rules. Which penalizes it further for jumping (for some insane reason). So actually the medium shark is jumping HALF the height for it's DC and even with a +12 speed bonus a natural 20 is only making 4 feet in jump height, and cannot in fact jump any higher. Averaging about 2 foot.

Doesn't being a quadruped penalize vertical reach, not jump height? I'm also not sure how you are getting 44' long jumps and 16' high jumps for the elephant.

If a large shark is a quadruped, then it still has a vertical reach of 8'. Jump bonus +15 gives it a jumping grasp of 12'-16' (the medium shark gets 7'-9'). Long Jump average 25', high jump average 6'.

The Elephant has a +14 bonus, for almost the same distances.

Am I missing something?

[Parthenon]

Sorry K, but that doesn't really explain anything further than what you've already said. I still have no idea what you consider to be a monster, or what an animal requires for you to call it a monster rather than a trap.

And even the trap I have only a general gut feeling of what you mean.

I think you mean that a trap is any creature, group of creatures, or mechanism that can be bypassed by damage or skill checks and only uses it's/their abilities reactively in response to position, another mechanism, or monster/PC commands. Because that's the only definition I can come up with based on your description.

But, it still misses the fact that you call other proactive monsters traps because you think they are boring or that interesting and flavourful monsters with abilities letting them have interesting tactics would be classed as monsters since they are mostly reactive. And for some reason PhoneLobster calls terrain traps. The whole traps/monsters/terrain thing really is just messing with my head.

[K]

I think you mean that a trap is any creature, group of creatures, or mechanism that can be bypassed by damage or skill checks and only uses it's/their abilities reactively in response to position, another mechanism, or monster/PC commands. Because that's the only definition I can come up with based on your description.

Correct.

But, it still misses the fact that you call other proactive monsters traps because you think they are boring or that interesting and flavourful monsters with abilities letting them have interesting tactics would be classed as monsters since they are mostly reactive. And for some reason PhoneLobster calls terrain traps. The whole traps/monsters/terrain thing really is just messing with my head.

Ok, that explains some of why you are confused.

I've mentioned that several creatures need to be downgraded from monsters to traps. So bears will not get to be monsters any more and thus lost all proactive abilities, and you'd handle them as traps by abstracting them into the trap mechanic.

The trap mechanic also needs to be expanded to allow for reactive creature behavior. For example, the pack of dogs will probably run away instead of staying until death.

Monsters with interesting and flavorful abilities get to stay monsters. You can also use monster versions of boring creatures we downgraded to traps (bear is a reactive trap and devil bear is a proactive monster).

Terrain is like a trap in many ways, but you don't even track HPs or AC. it doesn't react to anything and instead just performs it's thing on an area, and generally we assume that it's immune to anything that doesn't change that kind of terrain. A lot of things in 3e like bat swarms could probably be abstracted down to that because no one wants to kill bats, and casting a gust or wind or a fireball should probably just clear them.

[PhoneLobster]

vertical reach

The vertical reach stuff and the contributions of size to Jump height are crazy and terribly written.

I'm pretty confident I've got mistakes in there, taking another look I should probably be either discounting vertical reach (and thus size) completely unless you care about grab reach rather than jump range, in which case you add it.

But the long jump still looks at least conceptually pretty solid, size, quadrupedal status, vertical reach have nothing to contribute and it's a flat out distance equals result. Though I may well just have some hasty math errors after struggling through the rest of the bullshit to get there give or take 5-10 feet there, whatever, elephants and sharks leaping 30 foot chasms and climbing the other side are still not quite right.

Climbing sharks precise movement rates could be open to dispute over what does or doesn't count as "Normal Movement", but similar badly written ambiguities in the Jump rules would mean opening that dispute opens you up to big bullshit arguments about losing your +12 jump bonus from speed as well.

Not to mention you also would then get into an argument that "climb checks need hands and feet!" vs "Yeah but plenty of other monsters seemingly climb check without hands, and some without feet, some without either AND without a Climb speed".

But I think all in all it just remains fairly clear there are not actually functional rules for shark jumping in 3E. The "emergent result" of a druid ordering their shark to jump is multiple referrals to different rule books and big arguments about ambiguities and then the eventual outcome with some incredibly bullshit inconsistent numbers where a shark can shoot sideways somewhere between 30-40 feet like a jet torpedo, climb walls faster than a human, but leap upwards somewhat worse than a human, and where elephants do indeed make ridiculous long jumps and jump clear over a human being, or even jump at all. Then, eventually the GM pulls something out of his ass, because seriously, mid look up it was clearly a clusterfuck in ever respect and taking far too long with far too many things to argue over.

The supposed advertised result of 3E shark jumping was that there was a simple quick, playable answer superior to the alternative Strawman that Frank demanded K's proposal inexplicably be of "Quick Gen a monster instantly in game and add a Jump ability off spell like ability list".

The fact is 3E sharks and Elephants were NEVER written with the intention of them being able to jump, or in the elephant case, to be unable to jump. And the generic jump rules, to the degree that they exist at all, and they are terribly bad, break down utterly the second you start inputting monsters not specifically "uniquely" written up for Jump into them because they choke the moment you try and feed in size or decide what a quadruped is. And all the monsters that DO jump have been uniquely "eyeballed" and "fiddled" to make them remotely practical and the rest are in crazy bullshit limbo. It meets every possibly condition that the demanded Strawman of K's monster generator was attacked for.

[PhoneLobster]

And for some reason PhoneLobster calls terrain traps. The whole traps/monsters/terrain thing really is just messing with my head.

I think I said something like "Terrain Hazard".

Most likely because my own trap rules and hazardous terrain rules in my home brew work off basically the same sub system.

Both are bits of map that attack you in various circumstances, most importantly during combat.

You care about "Sharks in the Sea!" because that's where you don't want to fall during your pirate combat, or while fighting trapeze artists on a plank over a shark tank. The water is literally hazardous terrain because it's full of angry teeth. Possibly in the ocean case a functionally limitless maybe even rapidly growing supply of increasingly frenzied teeth.

[Username17]

The trap mechanic also needs to be expanded to allow for reactive creature behavior. For example, the pack of dogs will probably run away instead of staying until death.

K, you are NOT GAINING ANYTHING!

At the point that your "traps" have morale, can be interacted with using social abilities, may be called upon to move into different sorts of terrains than the ones they were "created in", you have a creature. The wolf sneaks, spots, attacks weakness, fears death, likes food, and can swim if dumped into water, can climb if its prey goes up a hill, and can jump if its targets cross a crevasse. It already has to interact in all the ways a creature does, so it needs all the creature interactivity numbers!

When you say "it's a trap", you aren't actually accomplishing anything. What you really mean is that it has a simple script for being an animal. But from a physical and social standpoint it's still a living being with all the normal numbers, and nothing you have said actually changes that reality. Indeed, even the simple script that you and I both agree it should have is something that should probably be emergent from the fact that it has animal intelligence. Which is yes, just another stat that creatures have. If you hit an ogre with a stupidity or berserk spell, it should go on the same kind of simple animal script as the wolf or bear is.

But none of that actually provides any advantage or clarity by being labeled "trap". That nomenclature gets you literally less than nothing.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

, and also we were talking about the large shark, which has a higher strength bonus (+3).

No you fucking weren't, you fuckers were insisting on a level one base line animals for level one base line adventures. And that guy is Medium sized. Stop shifting your goal posts.

Said the pot to the electric kettle. Or the virgin snow depending how much of a Frank fanboy you are.

Actually... they do. No MTP at all. The Shark has no land speed but they do have a swim speed and a jump modifier. The Large Shark has a Jump modifier of +15 while they are in the water, making jumping into small boats relatively easy. As a large creature, they can initiate a grapple at any time, and moving a grapple 5 feet to fall back into the water simply requires winning an opposed test.

I'll grant that these rules are kind of obscure, but they do totally exist. One of the things that is legitimately good about 3e in general is that when you have a weird situation like that, there generally actually is a way to handle it in the rules.

-Username17

Emphasis mine, of course, I doubt you'd have missed that if he'd gone that far the first time.

[Ancient History]

Okay, so I guess your point is that D&D can have fundamentally more well-defined CRs, because you'll eventually reach a point where the monster poses no threat whatsoever. I guess that's fair, but just because knives and nukes are both threats at every level doesn't mean you can't tell which one is more dangerous.

What the fuck are you on about?

Look, CR is still a relatively new concept. It has not existed for the majority of roleplaying game history, it still does not exist as such in the majority of RPGs. It is an artificial and maybe even bullshit watermark, a sort of "you must be this high a level to ride the dragon." It has never been done before in part because it is so difficult to balance critters against groups of PCs...and part of the reason for that is the way D&D is set up, where warriors do not have their damage scale upwards as they increase in level compared to critters or wizards. It means that as you increase in level in D&D, you have a growing disparity between the threat posed by lower-CR monsters to the PCs and between the PCs in the same party. There will come a time in your D&D3+ career where your steel sword is almost useless and you need to upgrade if you want to tackle the next CR. That's practically guaranteed. And if you keep going long enough, then those low-CR monsters you initially dealt with are not going to be able to even hit you, and even if they do then the damage they deal will be as nothing because your hit points have increased several times over compared to the damage they deal. (Then of course there is CR-inflating template nonsense, but that's another herd of animated magical ponies.)

And, it needs to be said, this is not the same situation in other games. I picked Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase because they often include guns, and firearms are inherently more deadly in those games than swords and crossbows are in D&D at nearly all levels of play. An experienced shadowrunner that gets shot is going to be relatively closer to death than an experienced D&D adventurer that gets stabbed. If you have 60 hitpoints and lose 6, you don't fucking care, if you have 10 health boxes and you lose 3 that is a cause for concern. A shadowrunner facing someone with a gun knows they face a potential for death, whether that's a hold-out pistol or a minigun; a D&D adventurer facing an orc with a sword is probably only worried about getting their armor dirty.

Bringing this back around to the nominal point of the thread, while CR is a nice concept designed to make life easy on Mister Cavern, it is not an absolute thing - it's all a bit of an asspull. It is not a design goal into itself, unless you specify what the fuck it means with relation to a given PC level. What does CR3 really mean? Does it mean that the critter cannot have stats/attack bonus/spells above those available to a 3rd-level character? Does that mean one CR3 critter should have a roughly 50% chance of killing a 3rd-level character when fighting one-on-one? These are the kind of things you need to think about and decide before you try to build a monster-generation system where the CR is a part of things.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I rather wonder if instead most traps might be better handled as monsters that simply have a 0 for most stats, and have a quality that makes them susceptible to Disable Device. If combined with a division between simple and complex creatures (where simple creatures only show relevant stats) it could still allow for a simple stat line. (I mean this largely sarcastically)