Monte Cook Back to Work

[Winnah]

I can't manage hilarious.

It's wind. So therefore invisible. It can read your mind. Because it is just the wind, it's immune to everything, including magical weapons, unless you can somehow become ethereal. Also, it takes half damage from haste...

So basically an invisible tornado rocks up and smacks the shit out of an adventuring party. If anyone even thinks about using tactics that can defeat it, there is a good chance it will know, and take action to prevent it or flee. Plus it does not need to make attack rolls to hurt you, because it is the wind.

Typical Gygax "Fuck You" monster.

[icyshadowlord]

So a bunch of Wind Walkers would be a good alternative to the "rocks fall everyone dies" as a sign of showing that the players were being stupid? Because those things seem less like a monster encounter and more like a punishment for stupid players doing stupid things. And imagine if there was a magic item to control those things...

[Fuchs]

There is no good alternative to "rocks fall, everyone dies", since that in itself is a stupid idea to begin with.

If players are being stupid, you talk to the players, you don't fight some stupid placeholder battle with characters.

[icyshadowlord]

I always thought "rocks fall everyone dies" was a joke.

But yeah, I can't help but wonder if Gygax made a monster WORSE than the Wind Walker.

[Winnah]

I only encountered a windwalker in a second edition game. Pretty sure the DM just decided to import it to 2nd edition in order to kill my character.

I was a smug teenager playing an Illusionist. I was playing an Illusionist because I had good rolls and my previous character had been ungraciously killed by an Illusion, Spectral Image or something. My tactics were pretty simple; Use illusions to reproduce whatever punishment monster the DM would throw at the party in order to overcome challenges, such as Green Slime, Yellow or Brown Mould, Shadows, etc. The DM did not appreciate my clumsy attempts at satire.

As for other nasty critters from previous editions?

Rakshasa. Only vulnerable to clerics with crossbows.
Rot Grubs. Not powerful, but hard to detect.
Ghosts. You don't ever want to encounter more than one.

That's all that immediately comes to mind.

[ScottS]

What book/source was Windwalker in? Also, WTF?

[Username17]

What book/source was Windwalker in? Also, WTF?

It appears in the original AD&D Monster Manual with the text I quoted. People don't remember them much, because they were so insane that they were almost never used and their iconic picture is just a chunk of white space (because they are invisible, get it?). They also appeared in Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume One for 2nd edition, but I have no idea what powers they had in that incarnation.

-Username17

[shadzar]

Walmart has similar positions wherein the position is called "marketing", but they are more in deciding WHAT to market, rather than getting existing things INTO the market.

Walmart, for the most part, does not develop its own product lines. It's a distributor, not a producer. So when a Walmart manager decides WHAT to market, it's making a decision between a contract with X producer and Y producer, not making a decision between F in-house development idea and G in-house development idea.

walmart doesnt jsut sell Mary-Kate and Ashley fashion, they have their own line of products, just like EVERY other store out there, even their own line of groceries items.

walmarts are regional, and those things in your local store, but not on the website, are those regional items.

some global brands they own still go through regional marketing to tell how to manufacture them.

if you think walmart doesnt make their own things and that some corporate office makes all the decisions you're loony.

they have a central warehouse for common mass produced things but individual areas carry specific products and they are made local to that region and marketing decides HOW and WHAT is made at the regions.

there are different walamrt brands for thigns on the east coast and west coasts, because the distance means people want different things.

a walmart manager takes what he gets on the truck, or with ENOUGH (1000 customers) interest can get something new in. a walmart manager has little more say in his store than a cashier and stocker combined.

there is a 60 percent chance that YOUR walmart marketing department is IN the walmart near me, as that regional director of marketing works 60% of the US.

some people are thinking of the marketing department as in0-house adwertising department, and neglecting that marketing, while working with advertising, makes decisions on WHAT to market.

in the case of D&D, what and how to market it means marketing is OVER R&D.

marketing says the books arent making enough so cut 100 pages and lower the price $5 to make a book look like a better price, while increasing the profit margins on that book. they decide if too much is spent on art when they get the accounting reports so full-page art becomes half-page art.

marketing takes what R&D and accounting gives them, and decides how a product is to go forward, then passes that down to the designers and producers and passes it along to the media, and gets the proces for making the books.

books, board games, digital media, etc....

simple example...marketing decides if your grocery store carries florida of california oranges....as well how to display them. so not only HOW is gets to market, but WHAT gets to the market.

[ScottS]

It appears in the original AD&D Monster Manual

...That's pretty badass. (It's that old-school but it's probably the only 1e MM creature that I've never seen used or referenced outside of this conversation; actually I just looked through the index again, and the only other creature in that WTF category is the "masher".)

[Username17]

It appears in the original AD&D Monster Manual

...That's pretty badass. (It's that old-school but it's probably the only 1e MM creature that I've never seen used or referenced outside of this conversation; actually I just looked through the index again, and the only other creature in that WTF category is the "masher".)

The Masher was an 8 hit die giant fish with giant poison spines on its back. No one knows why it is called a "masher" because it fights with poison spines and does not in fact mash anything. But the short of it is that the Masher is an underwater closet troll that has no culture and came with no artwork. No one cares about them. There is not one interesting thing about Mashers, and no one cares.

-Username17

[tzor]

It appears in the original AD&D Monster Manual with the text I quoted. People don't remember them much, because they were so insane that they were almost never used and their iconic picture is just a chunk of white space (because they are invisible, get it?). They also appeared in Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume One for 2nd edition, but I have no idea what powers they had in that incarnation.

I'm definitely going to have to look that up when I get home. I could have thought it was the invisible stalker that had the chunk of white space as the iconic picture. Guess I'm just getting old.

[shadzar]

TSR 2009 - Monster Manual (1977)
Wind walker, pg.101

other appearances: Strategic Review #3 (1975), ALQ2 - Assassin Mountain (1993), Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume One (1994)

[shadzar]

http://montecook.livejournal.com/247101.html

The Chapel Perilous
Monte Cook's Journal

Sep. 25th, 2011 at 5:51 PM

Back to the Laboratory

A short while ago, I started working for Wizards of the Coast again, on D&D. I am currently working with talented members of the R&D staff, exploring various options and experimenting with the game. Which is to say, doing what I really love. At this point, you can think of me as a mad scientist in a rpg design laboratory, concocting crazy creations to see if any of them have any value.

more at the link....

[Swordslinger]

Clearly, the spells and their level has evolved by a lot and anyone who has actually played all of the editions knows that.

The low level spells evolved during 3E's playtesting. The mid and high level spells, not so much.

Now, monsters never played the counter game like players were. They have always been explicitly supposed to lose fights, even the puzzle monsters who were supposed to vex the players until the one right effect was found. It's always been known that the toughest fights were against mirror-match monsters like drow where they used actual classes, and that's because they were playing the counter game.

That's just the problem with 3E though. The super spells force the counter game. If you don't have the proper counter in many cases, you just lose. It's not just an easier fight. It's an auto-loss. Any way you look at it, it's just poor design, given that the game it supposed to be primarily about slaying monsters. The fact that NPC wizards were the best is a bug, not a feature.

Surprisingly those five volumes devoted solely to monsters in 3E are not just for show. If the intention was that NPC wizards were the real threat, they would instead produce a manual of NPC wizard stat blocks.

Trying to do that with 4e is to make a whole other game with different assumptions that only has the flaws of 4e as it's legacy mechanics. I mean, once you ditch all the powers and all the rituals, 4e is like 50 pages long and you'd need to add 200 pages of 3e crunch to replace what was taken away.

I wouldn't say that. The 4E Rules compendium is actually rather long, and contains no class powers of any kind.

That's a new game. At that level of content, you are better off actually writing your own game and trying to make some money off it.

Possibly true, though I'd say the same thing about Tomes really. The page count on the Tomes is definitely up there with the latest Essentials class books, especially if you strip out the basic rules, combat and equipment sections.

There is literally that little that you'd want to salvage. Skills would go, powers would go even to the point of the random-generator titles, all the feats would go but you'd preserve the idea of feats, class names would stay but all the class powers would go, all the power and rituals would go, and all the monster powers and stats would go. A lot of the map assumptions would go for a less fiddly system. The whole idea of marking and bloodied and healing surges would go.

Really? You'd get rid of surges? I thought that was one of the better ideas in 4E. Gets rid of the old lame wand of CLW from 3E that took way more time to resolve.

That being said, I think the core system of 4E is actually pretty solid, the basic round structure (minor, move, standard), the immediate action, opportunity attacks. Granted a lot of those things were in 3E too under different names, but 4E cleaned a lot of that up. I have yet to meet a 3E player in real life who really understood how 3E immediates work with swifts. 4E just cleaned up so much of the wording and simplified things such that everyone I've played with seemed to understand it so much better.

Also things like the level bonus (half your level to defenses and attacks) are a great concept, as they avoids a lot of the craziness that happens to 3E at high levels where the numbers go all out of whack. Saving throws each turn to end effects was also a good idea, since it kept people involved, as opposed to the 3E version of "you're out this combat, come back in 20 minutes."

I found 4E to have lots of useable ideas, just out of the rules compendium. As for the powers themselves, you're right, they're absolutely very bland, though not that I think most of the 3E classes are any better. The 4E fighter may be bland as crap but he's still less bland than the 3E fighter or barbarian.

[Seerow]

Really? You'd get rid of surges? I thought that was one of the better ideas in 4E. Gets rid of the old lame wand of CLW from 3E that took way more time to resolve.

Agreed. I'd also personally keep marking, as it is in theory a great idea for a mechanic that says "hit me, not that guy!" without being a taunt causing the DM to lose control over the monster. The penalties used in 4e may not have been enough to enforce marks successfully in some cases, but that doesn't make marks a bad mechanic.

Similarly, I'd be tempted to keep bloodied, or something similar to it at least. Of course, I'd go with a VP/WP system, or something close to it, and bloodied would be what happens when you actually take real damage, while for the most part healing surges would be used to replenish VP, so you don't have a guy shouting at you to shake it off, and suddenly go from bloodied to not bloodied. But the idea of certain powers activating, or enemies taking you seriously, after significant damage has been dealt is pretty iconic, I see no reason to get rid of it in concept entirely.



On the other hand, where K would keep the idea of feats, but rewrite them all, I'd just get rid of feats entirely. Feats were originally made for a game where some people got cool things, others did not, but feats were universal, and were supposed to be a balancer but failed at it. Feats have a huge amount of baggage associated with them, where just about everyone has different expectations of what they are supposed to be, and most of the things people actually want as feats (letting characters do cool things) are actually better off being powers, where you have some sort of resource limit to manage with it.

As long as everyone gets powers, feats that give you cool shit aren't needed. 4e recognized this, but left feats in the game as minor effects instead of awesome ones, which pissed people off going to 4e looking for 3e feats. So I'd rename martial powers to feats, and let them be the cool things that martial characters get to do. Casters don't get feats, they get spells. And if you still want a sub system to give people minor bonuses that anyone can take regardless of their class, then go ahead and introduce that. But call it something different, like talents or something, that has less baggage attached to it in the context of tabletop gaming.

[shadzar]

Really? You'd get rid of surges? I thought that was one of the better ideas in 4E. Gets rid of the old lame wand of CLW from 3E that took way more time to resolve.

actually it doesnt, since healing surges are jsut more HPs, and when you run out you can still end up with a sack of CLWs to keep going and not have to wait for surges to replenish.

tracking HP and knowing when to stop rather than continue on, will exist so long as HPs exist, and HPs SHOULD exist....

so no matter what other little thing you add to track, you are still tracking something and some people will not want to track it. even removing surges to add direct HP, people will run out and think it wrong they have to stop the adventure to rest.

both forms are a forced playstyle since inception, but at least having to rest doesnt remove SoD, versus infinite HP from strange crap like "Healing Word": GET UP YO MAGGOT AND FIGHT!, to give more HP...no real SoD there no matter what the movies try to show.

[Seerow]

actually it doesnt, since healing surges are jsut more HPs, and when you run out you can still end up with a sack of CLWs to keep going and not have to wait for surges to replenish.

Huh? Did you switch between 4e and 3e midway through here or are you saying that you can have a sack of CLW wands in 4e? Because you can't.

Anyway, I see surges as meaningful in 4e because they give a meaningful limit on HP, without making characters impossible to drop mid combat. If anything I'd like to see that expanded on a bit more: More surges and higher surge values, but lower base HP. So that you can get dropped in a couple of hits (as opposed to 4e's current slog fest), and combat healing is very important and keeps you going, while total hp sets your limit on how much you're willing to slog through in one day before calling it quits.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Healing surges aren't a bad idea, they're just implemented really poorly. Here are the problems I have with them:

1.) They're pegged to a stat that some people will want to advance and others will not. So if everyone in the party is playing something with a CON secondary or primary they will be more effective than those that do not if CON outside of that has a generic equal worth to the other stats. Which in 4E they do.

2.) They exacerbate the 15-minute workday problem. The amount of in-combat healing that a party can do in a combat is not the same for different party configurations. If your DM does 1-2 encounter workdays regularly or at all then it makes parties with a high number of in-combat healing resources perform better than those that do not.

So how would I do healing surges if I had to keep them in? Simple.

1.) The amount of healing surges is not per-day but per-battle (which is 5 minutes, 10, 30, or whatever discrete time unit you want to use). That way someone can't cash out by burning 4 healing surges in one encounter and then bailing out of the workday.

2.) Healing surges should not be class or role independent. It's okay for everyone to have just two healing surges. It's also okay for paladins to get three, rogues to get two, and wizards to get one. It's also okay for everyone across the board (or only certain classes) to get a healing surge from going from heroic to paragon tier. It's not okay for a wizard to advance some other stat they wanted to do independently of healing surges and get a benefit for it anyway.

3.) If you want to keep encounter attrition (i.e. make it feel like the PCs have gone through a lot of battles) then you need to implement some kind of Tension mechanic. That is, as players burn through more healing surges it increases their offense but lowers their defenses. But there's a limit to how much offense you can gain but no limit to how much defense you can lose. This encourages players to not bail out after their 2nd or 3rd encounter, makes the effects of repeated attrition show, and stops people from doing pre-combat cutting unless it's supposed to be the climax.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Of course I have a low opinion on having reliable and/or frequent in-combat healing in the first place. But if you're going to do it you'll use the above.

[shadzar]

actually it doesnt, since healing surges are jsut more HPs, and when you run out you can still end up with a sack of CLWs to keep going and not have to wait for surges to replenish.

Huh? Did you switch between 4e and 3e midway through here or are you saying that you can have a sack of CLW wands in 4e? Because you can't.

the sack of CLW is a metaphor for anything that would offer more HPs, and there is NOTHING stopping a DM or players alike, form adding something like a sack of CLW to 4th. nothing stopped them from buying potions of healing in 1nd, 1st, etc from games that allowed/included Ye Olde Magick Shoppe.

so the problem is that no matter what, people dont want to stop and dont want their characters to stop, and that attitude doesnt really speak for the whole, and IF it does, or at least a majority, then the problem is people dont really accept HP as anything and want against want to be able to continue on no matter what.

surges do NOT solve the problem of the people who dont want their characters to have to rest. extended rest is still 8 hours, but that can be hand-waved away as well, as it was an idea from 1st/2nd that instead of 1hp per day of rest you gained it all back... but not everyone wants to play like this, so building around that concept corrupts the ability to play any other way without completely rebuilding most of the other systems in the game. wherein 1st/2nd nothing really would have been hurt by having nightly full healing replacing the standard nightly healing.

so surges solve NOTHING, save for letting the cleric characters be able to do what they want when playing with oppressive players that want to treat them as a walking med-kit, rather than being more careful with their HP. which comes back to the problem surges should help with the "15 minute workday", because no matter what is used, some people just want to keep going and not be held back by the lose or weakened by the loss of HP.

surges are like using some crazy scented air freshener in a smelly bathroom. sure you got rid of the bathroom smells, but you replaced them with the air-freshener stench...so you accomplished what exactly?

[hogarth]

I'm definitely going to have to look that up when I get home. I could have thought it was the invisible stalker that had the chunk of white space as the iconic picture. Guess I'm just getting old.

The wind walker somehow managed to slip my mind altogether.

[Seerow]

the sack of CLW is a metaphor for anything that would offer more HPs, and there is NOTHING stopping a DM or players alike, form adding something like a sack of CLW to 4th. nothing stopped them from buying potions of healing in 1nd, 1st, etc from games that allowed/included Ye Olde Magick Shoppe.

So because something existed in previous editions, and thus players used them, nothing stops DMs from homebrewing and causing the same problem in a different system?

Do you even listen to yourself? Sure the DM can homebrew in something that completely breaks the healing surge paradigm. He can also homebrew in player abilities that never miss and instakill anything. The possibility of somebody adding something to the system does not make the system itself a bad one.

Besides, if players wanted to adventure longer, why would the DM go the route of offering surgeless healing rather than something that works with the system, like increasing surges per day, or recovering X healing surges after a milestone?

Honestly, given the problem of 3.5, I have no problem if players want their characters to be able to adventure longer. I disagree with the idea that wanting to adventure longer automatically means abandoning healing surges as a method of resource management. It just means modifying them.

[PoliteNewb]

I'm not really into having a big argument about Wind Walkers (which are an obsolete bullshit monster, no dispute), but I did want to point something out re: this...

Magical barriers are solid to them, but recall that they are fucking ethereal and can go through fucking walls. Also they are conspicuously Neutral and not summoned, which means that any magical barrier you can create at 7th level is either powerless against them on first principles

Protection From Evil was oddly named in 1E, since it affected plenty of things regardless of alignment. It specifically calls out in the spell description that it affects wind walkers (and elementals, and xorn, and other stuff). And Protection from Evil 10' radius is gained at 7th level...so as long as you have a 7th level Cleric with the party, you're probably safe. Just saying.

I'm definitely going to have to look that up when I get home. I could have thought it was the invisible stalker that had the chunk of white space as the iconic picture. Guess I'm just getting old.

Nah...the 1E MM didn't have pictures for Wind Walkers, Invisible Stalkers, Aerial Servants, Shadows, and probably other stuff (including most normal animals).

[fectin]

I always thought "rocks fall everyone dies" was a joke.

Depends on the provocation, really.

http://somethingpositive.net/sp05032002.shtml

[hogarth]

Nah...the 1E MM didn't have pictures for Wind Walkers, Invisible Stalkers, Aerial Servants, Shadows, and probably other stuff (including most normal animals).

I'm pretty sure there was some sort of picture accompanying the Aerial Servant entry in the MM.