Can you have balanced limited and unlimited use abilities?

[Kaelik]

Wait, Kaelik, now I'm even more confused. Has your ability to remember context degraded to chatbot levels?

Or are you just saying that boring minions who can't do anything fun should get extra buckets of HP?

I'm saying that anything that in a game with well designed enemies, anything that comes in groups of ten will:

1) Provide absolutely no threat whatsoever, and therefore not matter if they have cooldowns, because using or not using cooldowns will be identically meaningless,
2) Be really easy to manage, but actually pose a moderate threat, or have some moderate use, or
3) Be abstracted into a swarm.

10 level 1 Necromancers (or for simplicity sake, 8) is an EL 4, combined with a BBEG who has any reasonable chance of bossing them all around, you have at least an EL 7 encounter. So if you have level 6 or 7 party of four, all those fuckers will die before acting.

On the other hand, ignoring all the bullshit that makes necromancy poorly designed in D&D, a level 7 Necromancer can just have 8 4 HD undead. While not particularly powerful, they at least get in the way and take more than one action to die.

So if your game is even remotely well designed, things that come in groups of 8, like minion undead, will be easy to manage, and things that come in groups of eight but are "hard" to manage, because they all have separate cooldowns will be not in any way a threat, and no one will care if the Necromancers use their special 1d6+1 lifedrain attack instead of their 1d6 attack, because any time they get hit at all they instantly die, and most of them will never get to act.

[Whipstitch]

Or are you just saying that boring minions who can't do anything fun should get extra buckets of HP?

If the alternative is creating a world in which the future in no way resembles the past because instead of scaling way beyond what ogres can handle you instead just end up fighting new "ogres" that now have a single hitpoint and are thus effectively much different opponents? Yes, bring on the bucketful of hitpoints. I'll bathe in that shit.

[Foxwarrior]

If I could understand your post, Whipstitch, I might ask you why you were bringing level scaling into this.

Kaelik: So, a group of 1st level Necromancers cannot exist in any situation where they would be a challenge? But they suddenly can exist once the players are high enough level to ignore them?

I currently believe that going for a more Exalted-style fluff where only a very finite number of Cooldown Characters exist in the universe would probably be more satisfying.

[Whipstitch]

If I could understand your post, Whipstitch, I might ask you why you were bringing level scaling into this.

We've got some dude saying that cooldowns might drag things to a crawl in some edge cases if you have a dozen people using them at once and that this is somehow a fundamentally worse problem than any of the terrible, terrible ideas MM has allowed to happen over the years. I disagree with that statement, in large part because the scaling went to shit on MM's watch, with minions being a prime example . Instead of having X hitpoints cease to be a big deal after a while they would do weird shit like having an azer warrior and azer footman both be the same level except one has a single hitpoint. Because of that, I bestow upon Kaelik the faintest of praises: You're not as retarded as Mike Mearls.

[Kaelik]

Kaelik: So, a group of 1st level Necromancers cannot exist in any situation where they would be a challenge? But they suddenly can exist once the players are high enough level to ignore them?

I currently believe that going for a more Exalted-style fluff where only a very finite number of Cooldown Characters exist in the universe would probably be more satisfying.

No you dumb shit. Level 1 parties don't fight 10 Necromancers because they instantly die and that is bad for the fucking game. You only fight things that are level appropriate, and you do that because a game where you fucking die sucks.

[GâtFromKI]

Fortunately, PCs never encounter an evil party. Only lone necromancers with useless minions.

And minions can't be low-level monsters, they have to be high-level minions. You can't fight a Ringwraith at low level, and then a group of Ringwraiths a few level later: the group of Ringwraith have to use different monsters than the solo Ringwraith.


Well, cooldown monsters can work, but it restrict the scope of your game.

[rasmuswagner]

Fighting minions who are leveled humanoids is already incredibly tedious in 3E.

[Kaelik]

Fortunately, PCs never encounter an evil party. Only lone necromancers with useless minions.

No you dumb shit, the party can only face things they have a chance in hell of beating. So they either fight a party of 4, not fucking ten, and you track their cooldowns, or they face ten, and you don't track their cooldowns because they are worthless shit roadbump of useless minions.

Describe the outcome of any possible encounter between 4 level 10 PCs and 10 level 10 Necromancers.

Answer: TPK.

Which is why a party of four level 10 PCs will face either a party of 4 level 8-9 Necromancers or a collection of 10 level 4 Necromancers, and you can track all the cooldown timers for the one round those guys are alive.

And minions can't be low-level monsters, they have to be high-level minions. You can't fight a Ringwraith at low level, and then a group of Ringwraiths a few level later: the group of Ringwraith have to use different monsters than the solo Ringwraith.

No you dumbass, you can't fight a group of ringwraiths that is both large enough that managing cooldowns is difficult and where each ringwraith is powerful enough to survive several rounds. Because that encounter is one that will kill the entire party.

So either, it doesn't matter if you track cooldowns because they are all weak as shit, or they are in small enough numbers that it isn't hard to track your cooldown. Or they are shitty minions without abilities that matter who can come in large relatively hard to kill groups without killing the party precisely because they pose little offensive threat.

[RobbyPants]

What Kaelik is saying makes sense. To sum it up, you will encounter a monster in three ways:

1) Solo. This monster is relevant and tracking a cooldown isn't difficult.

2) Small group. This monster is still relevant so long it it's not on its own. While it's more work to track a 2-4 cooldowns than one, it's still not that hard.

3) Larger groups. Anything larger will relegate these to "minion" status*. They won't live long enough or have a big enough impact individually on the fight to warrant tracking cooldowns for different abilities.


* This is, assuming we're talking about 3E D&D, where once you're four (or so) levels above something, it pretty much stops being a threat. It's attack and defense ratings start to slide off the bottom of the RNG, it doesn't have meaningful counters to your abilities, and you can meaningfully counter all of their abilities. If you're rolling individually for these opponents, it tends to result in "hunting for 20s".


It seems pretty straight-forward to me.

[Red_Rob]

Yeah, if you want to have a Necromancer-type minion you have something like the Adept - stripped down versions designed for massed NPCs but with a flavour of the original. Then you just tell GM's that the more complicated version is designed for Big Bads and PC's.

If a GM really, really wants to run lots of complicated monsters I guess you can't stop them. It'd be nice if that wasn't the only way to make a challenging encounter though (3e I'm looking at you!).

[Whipstitch]

And minions can't be low-level monsters, they have to be high-level minions. You can't fight a Ringwraith at low level, and then a group of Ringwraiths a few level later: the group of Ringwraith have to use different monsters than the solo Ringwraith.

See foxwarrior, this is exactly the kind of stupid bullshit I was crapping on earlier.


Anyway, GâtFromKI, yes, you can fight lower level stuff. If cannon fodder mooks are not lower level/cr monsters despite being less dangerous than the BBEGs this begs serious questions about what level and CR are even supposed to indicate in your system. Now, lower level critters won't be much of a threat, but that is the whole point and a necessary consequence of scaling your system past content as players gain meaningful power ups. This shit where you're trying to have your cake and eat it too by just giving monsters a new chassis to keep them relevant every few levels, on the other hand, can do real damage to the setting if you don't limit it to named critters that have grabbed some class levels or been given new gear or whatever. It needs to be the exception rather than the rule because lots of people will feel like it's super lame if you can't really learn from experience because every single monster type they have faced before suddenly busts out new abilities and can facetanks powers that felled them a few levels ago. That feels like running the treadmill rather than growing more powerful and it makes the game less fun and less coherent.