Mook-only Magic

[nockermensch]

Right, what's exactly keeping us from writing something like:
When you damage something that's 6 Challenge Ratings lower than you, you can instakill them / deal N times more damage.

So that Ogres become mooks when the PCs are at lvl 8 characters, fire giants become mooks for a lvl 16 party, etc.

[ishy]

Why not just rely on a spell like say fireball to be a mook clearer?
It does damage based on your level, does damage to all the mooks and mooks presumably have less hit points (because they are lower level)

[GreatGreyShrike]

Right, what's exactly keeping us from writing something like:
When you damage something that's 6 Challenge Ratings lower than you, you can instakill them / deal N times more damage.

That doesn't seem unreasonable in a hypothetical create game from scratch scenario - one where you've eliminated or rewritten the obviously abusable things that in d&d as it exists presently, namely ways to gain boosts to your CR without boosts to your actual character's power and without requiring gaining actual levels, such as lycanthropy or similar effects. If players can get their fireballs doing N times more damage fairly often by being bitten by a werewolf or vampire, but then not gain another level for a huge number of game sessions, that's just really not a good idea.

Edit: Because spells like fireball scale at 1d6 per level, and monsters tend to get more than 3.5 hp per level. You'd have to rejigger all the scaling from d20's default assumptions a lot to make fireballs an almost certain instant kill against mooks at both level 5 and level 10 and level 15. If they are merely cost efficient such that a pair of fireballs kills 90% of mooks on average, that involves keeping track of all mook HP totals and the damage dealt to each of them, which is the sort of annoyance mook rules are supposed to be guarding against.

[ishy]

Edit: Because spells like fireball scale at 1d6 per level, and monsters tend to get more than 3.5 hp per level. You'd have to rejigger all the scaling from d20's default assumptions a lot to make fireballs an almost certain instant kill against mooks at both level 5 and level 10 and level 15. If they are merely cost efficient such that a pair of fireballs kills 90% of mooks on average, that involves keeping track of all mook HP totals and the damage dealt to each of them, which is the sort of annoyance mook rules are supposed to be guarding against.

Fireball is a third level spell and I'm okay with it if you have to switch out to Flamestrike and Firestorm to kill higher level mooks.

The fact that blasts suck in D&D and higher level spells tend to not really improve upon fireball is something you need to change anyway.

[GreatGreyShrike]

The only problem that I could see is that at present there is a huge overlap between the HP totals of low-level meatshield mooks that you want to clear out with one spell without tracking how injured they each get, and high-level monsters who are supposed to be relevant who are supposed to be spellcasters. A CR 3 might be a mook to a level 9 character and roll around with 45 HP without standing out much (e.g. dire wolf) while a level appropriate challenge, at CR 9, might be a Night Hag (68 hp), and a major encounter for your entire party to have a 50% chance of beating might be a CR 13 Ghaele with 65 hp. There's not really a lot of room to work within there for where to place damaging spells at so they regularly clear out mooks without also instantly killing some boss monsters, and the problem gets worse with levels - when the CR 13s are a mook, at level 19, your mooks encompass Gelugons (147 hp) and level appropriate enemies include Chronotyryn at 178 hp.

What can be done is you can use abilities like SR and energy resistances on the higher level characters (as indeed occurs for the specific examples I gave). However when you get to higher levels, you presumably want to be blowing away Night Hags without caring at level 20, and their having SR that you have to roll for each of them, and the possiblity they might save for half, etc. will only impede that design goal.

There's pretty much an infinite space of possible solutions, you could scale things so that meat shields of low CR don't have as much or more HP than the spellcasters of medium CR, and the same for high CR - though you might end up with HPs hitting four figures for the party-threats after you scale up a few times. Or you could introduce scaling defenses that show up every 4-5 levels and regularly get completely overcome without requiring die rolls by later versions of the "do area damage" abilties (SR on level appropriate enemies that is then beaten by SR-NO spells that high-level opposition resists with ULTRA-SR which is then beaten by NO-ULTRA-SR spells, which however are impeded by SUPER-DUPER-ULTRA-SR, etc. (only with less retarded names) so that you don't have to do complicated accountting for or roll for every mook. There's lots of ways to make evocations the way to kill mooks consistently through multiple levels without having HP totals scale into four figures. But it's almost all a lot of work and has to be figured in at the beginning if you want it to be a major part of your design goals.

However, whatever approach you choose should be something done at the start before writing monsters and spells up, and whatever comes out the other end would not likely be especially compatible with D&D 3.5E.

Finally, as someone who likes the idea of ever playing characters outside the Wizard/Cleric/Druid/Sorcerer types, I would hope anyone considering this advice for creating rules would design in some equivalents to those evocations for the warrior and rogue and etc. archetypes. However, if you want to argue about whether or not warriors should have nice things, I strongly suggest just noting your disagreement and moving on, because threads discussing what abilities martially-oriented characters can be allowed almost never seem particularly productive of anything on this board or any other.

[Username17]

Ideally, attacks bonuses and damage would scale against hit points, defense classes, and damage reduction such that enemies of your level would go down in the right number of rounds and enemies of considerably lower level would also go down in the right number of combat rounds (which might well be a single round or less). There are in fact ways to fit those progressions together in such a way as that actually works out. There are in fact an infinite number of such progressions for any given number of rounds that you've decided is "right" for whatever level of play you are at.

What's important to know is that while such a thing is mathematically possible, none of the editions of D&D have made much of an attempt to get that to happen. AD&D numbers are totally ad hoc and pretty fucking random. 3e made only a passing attempt to weed out the outliers. And when Andy Collins looked at the problem going into 4th edition he flat out said that solving the math with that many variables was "too hard" and that they were going to a simpler model with invariant attack and defenses and no DR. Really. He said that in public. The reason why "the math" fails to "just work" in 4th edition is that apparently no one working on it could handle a five variable polynomial even when it could be solved numerically and only had to go up to an X of 30. Mike Mearls spent an entire year plonking away at his automatic success subsystem before giving up on it, despite the fact that people pointed out that it was so divergent that a character with a stat of 28 needed a natural 20 to pass the easiest test they didn't automatically succeed on within five minutes of his first announcement*. So there's basically no hope on that front.

*: Full disclosure: When the "automatic success thresholds" idea was first floated, I assumed it meant that they were going to a 1/1 stat to bonus system and critiqued it accordingly. I made this assumption out of charity because it seemed too absurd that they would actually make a system where you had a greater than 50% chance of failing any die roll you were called upon to make. But I was wrong. Mike Mearls is actually worse at math than my unflattering characterizations of him can be imagined to be.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

4e has the bloodied condition that activates at 1/2 level. Could do something like "If you are 5 levels above your target your attack automatically bloodies them, then does damage"

So if you're doing 6d6 and the mook has 30 hitpoints, they first take 15, then 6d6 damage.

In addition to this (or instead of it) you could also have "Mooks take maximized damage" so when you're clearing a room full of goblins with your 6d6 fireball they just all take 36 damage. Saves some time with die rolling.