Y'all keep getting ahead of me. Forgive my small repeats of what others have said before in this thread, I'm writing these in rather short efforts through the day.
On we go, woohoo.
Hag had the decency to cover the shame of not being able to make the extensive classic hag powers happen at all, by changing their names. They did in past times represent quite a depth of legend, but these have, you know, 1d6+3 and push 3 squares. There's also a Rend one and a Vampiric Touch one, but eh.
The
Night Hag is still here, and their haunting of your nightmares from afar is now just a thing where they sleep you after a hit and failed save, and then hit to vanish from combat and just do automatic damage until you die, because you are unconscious (no save). Changed in errata to unconscious (save ends), otherwise ... um, it never ends and you just die.
Because durations are all 2 rounds or infinity, except when they wrote "until the end of the encounter", it's just not all the authors seem to know that was allowed. This whole thing, just so bad on so many levels, because that doesn't work as a (save ends) either.
Halfling remains in the PHB, and these ones are better than the Elfs. The book notes they're tougher than they look, but what? Stuff in 4e is just random arbitrary levels, Drow are L13, they look just like L2 Elfs, who look just like the L26 Eladrin, tough isn't a "look" in 4e, it's just an arbitrary number that raises all your attacks, defences, and hit points.
Harpy is pull 3 squares and immobilise (save ends), sustain minor, but they have to explicitly note that the save also stops it being sustained, and that's awful. They sort of do what they used to, it's just rubbish and won't work, when it used to work and be a serious problem. There's a 5+ recharge stun, but mostly the PCs are happy you immobilised them in melee range, and that's not how Harpies work.
It's just, again, these fucking powers are all arbitrary and anything goes, they're perfect tools for describing classic harpies pulling classic harpy bullshit, and they just scrupulously eliminated everything like that, and the result is all garbage.
Did they read all those memes about how save-or-die sucks (in an environment where people often needed like 13+ to save at high level), and think to themselves; hey, instead of letting saving throws work, let's try having nothing interesting or difficult ever happen in the game, ever, that'll be fun; hmm?
Because there is a lot of shit in this book where things that used to be dangerous instead just slide you 3 squares and do piddly shit damage and then you walk up and hit the monster again like that didn't even happen, because sliding things 3 squares is not an actual problem!
Helmed Horror enters the mainline Monster Manual for the first time, and ... come on. They're not interesting other than their stuff that this one doesn't have. And they didn't use the Battle Horror for the bigger one and it would've been better here than what they did, it has two spells, that's normal for a 4e Elite.
This format these could've been good for it, knock it's limbs off and have it's allies put them back on to heal it, you can just do that in 4th edition, healed by magic missiles and just call lots of basic wizard-monster and PC attacks "magic missile". The fact it was a walking detect lies machine also, I know, useless in 4e because 4e is just little skirmishes and nothing else.
Homunculus were a little piece of the caster who did odd jobs, bad at fighting because they hurt their creator when they die. Here they just fight you. Fighty McFightfight.
Included is the
Iron Cobra makes it in from the Fiend Folio, already crapped on in 3rd edition with the poison nerfs, here it is even more useless with no reason to exist.
Hook Horror in from Basic, rightly so.
Should've really been a Brute, for some reason has a Claw/Claw/Bite routine when all the traditional Claw/Claw/Bite monsters don't (look how easy it was, this fucking book, and they mostly haven't bothered), but you know, this works in 4e, and they actually wrapped the art around the text a bit (by having a space in the art for a large block of column text to fit). The 6+ recharge thing even, well, makes you charge it again, which is an actual high point for this awful book.
I'm biased for Hook Horrors and this format doesn't ruin them. Are you sick of the little brown stat blocks yet?
BECAUSE I AM.
Horse can be ridden. Warhorse gives you a damage bonus on charges.
Hound does not include regular hounds, which, like, dog armour is an option for surviving low level D&D, where this you survive because very few of these pillows have bricks in them. Hell Hounds, Shadow
Mastiffs Hounds, and Wild Hunt Hounds, the last of which hang out with that Bralani from earlier because he wouldn't want to be confused with a traditional Bralani for too long.
Human have some quite racist entries in monster manuals in olden days. In this they are a shattered empire who have grand plans for restoring imperial domination and bringing about cultural annihilation of all others. Fair enough, but, I don't know, maybe have someone worth fighting for? No, this is the monster book, everything here is for fighting against.
rargh
Hyrda woo! So easy to do in 4e and instead it's not here. AGAIN. There's three of them because their bland nothing is sometimes acid and sometimes acid and fire. The Hook Horror is more mechanically unique than these, that is insane. Fuck this book.
Hyena are only cool because they run with Gnolls, and Gnolls aren't cool in this, so neither are Hyena. Simple, innit.
Kobold can shift one square as a minor action and, yeah, that's less annoying than Goblins by a long way because it happens on their own turn. There's 6 of them on three pages and you fight them a lot in H1, and them being shifty doesn't ever really amount to anything. They do not include a Sorcerer, which is a bad choice.
Kruthik are from 3e's Miniatures Handbook, which means they're from the 3e Miniatures game, which means they exist because it was an cheap mini to paint. Their leader doubles the damage of the Brutes they are surrounded by, which hurts.
Indeed,
double damage and half hit points on all the monsters at all times was a general solution to the numeric scale problems of this 4th edition Monster Manual (cheers, Yesterday's Hero), often noted by its greatest supporters. "Grindy? Not really," they'd say "just half all their hit points and double their damage." Like it was a small thing.
Which is extraordinary really. That's a long way to miss by. It brings all the encounter and daily powers from the players into being a big deal, monsters that change when bloodied suddenly change really quick so they feel like a response to what you did instead of just something that eventually happened. The vaguely mean stuff on the monsters gets much nastier.
It makes some monster tricks weaker, because the game expects them to throw a lot of those attacks where you have to be hit and then fail two saves for something to happen, but most of them have damage attached that gets better so it uses up the healing surges, and that's all 4th edition combat is anyway.
Hell, the game's still more playable than the default if you cut monsters back to quarter hit points and use twice as many of them, and you can run dynamic fights with growing numbers and rapid reinforcements and full action mounts and summons and allies and all sorts of shit the game used to support. Daily powers can often one-shot things, even bosses go down to focus fire satisfyingly fast, and the Minions aren't so wildly different to the rest. That's dynamic fights, things happening, changes. Just have to select the monsters very carefully because some of them are awful to keep track of if there's even one.
Kuo-Toa have a Whip and Monitor but again they're wrong, the Monitor does not look anything like a Monk, and the Whips should not be the ones with the Lightning. The guy with the Harpoon should the highest level and an Elite Soldier. Blergh.
There's whole books dedicated to the traditional Kuo-Toa hierarchy and their how their roles and powers work well to break down party cohesion and they just sort of didn't bother, when this is the whole goal of the edition. They consider the name itself one of their precious IP (used here for the purpose of review, etc) and they just kinda ignored it and mixed it all up for no reason. Almost like someone else was making a Kuo-Toa rip off and wanted to just change everything enough to avoid a charge of stealing the IP.
Lamia are an old puzzle monster, not really anyone's favourite because illusions into wisdom drain into being eaten is hard to play fair against rather than just meta-game and not do that. 4e would seem like the sort of place you could make that work in a way, because illusions that pull and immobilise and a slow acting domination up close that needs reset all the time, all on a highly mobile base, it's just what 4e does.
Instead this is a completely new type of monster, which is bugs in the shape of a woman who stunlocks you and breaks into bugs to eat you. Which is another thing you can just do with 4th edition. No one was terribly sad to lose the old Lamia, and people liked the new imagery here, it's creepy, but fucking pick a new name and make the old Lamia better later.
Wanted to fill books and then sometimes just this instead. Inconsistent, they are. Like the Succubus, the Archons, so random.
Larva Mage for instance, a pile of worms that are a Lich. Just like that, new thing.
Lich actually reform from their phylactery 1d10 days later, if killed in combat, which it notes in their combat-only stat block, so apparently
all those other non-combat things could just be in here too if people had cared to include them. Instead of this book being almost entirely grind.
One of the liches has one spell. One. 5+ recharge. That's dead lazy. There's obviously space underneath for another spell. There's also a Ritual that's in the book with them to turn PCs into Liches too, template in the DMG, though that makes them nothing like these monsters at all. I mean. It's just. All so bad.
Lizardfolk in 3e's MM III got Blackscale and Poison Dusk versions, like the Warhammer Saurus and Skink. Which I don't mind, because appropriating everything is a proper D&Dism, including stealing back shit that was stolen from you in the first place. But there are variant Lizardmen in the game's history everywhere so they could've also used Gurrash and Cayma instead, especially here.
Anyway, including a Blackscale gives them license to call the regular ones Greenscale, which they do. There's one with a spear, one with a club and blowgun, and one casts Entangle and Stinking Cloud and then also uses a spear, only that takes a page and a half to say in 4th edition. That bit Frank said about filling space, yes it is.
Lycanthrope are only two, and they got rid of the curse of Lycanthropy, so they're really just a rat man and a wolf man who lose half their powers by changing shape either way. It's elegantly simple and so completely tragic that they just skipped the only bit that matters.
Magma Beast are two pages that would've easily fit the rest of the Lycanthropes.
Manticore are more accurate when someone is riding them. Terrible kite monster design with infinite tail spikes. Not having ranged strikers sometimes hurts a lot.
Marut are no longer Lawful mystical oath enforcers, Lawful isn't even a thing here. Just leave them out, really, they left out so much, and then didn't leave out things they don't support any more.
Medusa have a Gaze which people who are blind have immunity to! Technically in the DMG blindness always makes you immune to gaze, but it only says that for the Medusa Gaze, so I don't know which one is which. This is the thing with every power being written separately to the others, random little changes that get a bit confusing.
Thus far, other than randomly high damage here and there, Petrifying Gaze is about as mean as the game gets.
Medusa Shroud of Zehir (female) wrote:Close blast 5; blind creatures are immune; +21 vs Fortitude; the target is slowed (save ends); First Failed Save: The target is immobilised instead of slowed (save ends); Second Failed Save: The target is pertrified (no save).
And what the fuck happens if I open my eyes at the start of my turn, and close them again at the end of my turn, because that attack is a standard action, and the nastiest attack in the game is not even a thing. I mean ... can someone tell me?
Mind Flayer exploded all over my monster manual.
That is what happens with monsters who do anything interesting, it just goes everywhere and gets super hard to work out what's even going on, let alone use at the table. 4e is very, very busy for GMs when this stuff turns up. Let's see.
- Basic attack is a Grab, so that's move action A-skill vs Fort to escape.
- Thrall making works vs Grabs/Stuns, but has to reduce you to 0 hp first.
- Mind Blast is sad, area dazed is very nice but it's not area stunned. At some point in development this must have been a stun, because the brain burrow works on stuns.
- Enslave is tempting to not use it because honestly, who wants to track that shit.
- Illusion is too good to pass up but why is it here, there's enough here.
- Cradle is an escape, though it's the usual 4e small scale skirmish non-escape sort of escape.
- And it has an interrupt, because that's just what we need at this point.
So that's four recharge dice going and packs of per-round saves and escape checks going, conditions with stacks of modifiers to everything. People ended up using, can I find an image ...
yes, all sorts of custom shit to try and keep track of not just monsters like this, but also the ridiculous number of picky player created conditions, that ... I'll get there, it's really much worse for what the PCs can put out at modest levels. Heh, even programmers just writing their own custom stuff to handle all the tracking.
Anyway, compare! 2nd edition Monstrous Manual; Mind Flayer
Combat: A mind flayer's preferred method of attack is the mind blast, projected in a cone 60 feet long. 5 feet wide at the mind flayer, and 20 feet wide at the opposite end. All within the cone must make a saving throw vs. wands or be stunned and unable to act for 3d4 rounds. The illithid tries to grab one or two stunned victims (requiring normal attack rolls if others try to prevent this) and escape with them.
The illithid keeps some victims as slaves and feeds on the brains of the others. When devouring the brain of a stunned victim, it inserts its tentacles into the victim's skull and draws out its brain, killing the victim in one round. A mind flayer can also use its tentacles in combat; it does so only when surprised or when attacking a single, unarmed victim. A tentacle which hits causes 2 hp damage and holds the victim. A tentacle does no damage while holding, and can be removed with a successful bend bars/lift gates roll. Once all four tentacles have attached to the victim, the mind flayer has found a path to the brain and kills the victim in one round. If preferred, the DM can simply roll 1d4 for the number of rounds required to kill a struggling victim.
A mind flayer can also use the following arcane powers, one per round, as a 7th-level mage: suggestion, charm person, charm monster, ESP, levitate, astral projection, and planeshift. All saving throws against these powers are made at a -4 due to the creature's mental prowess.
If an encounter is going against a mind flayer, it will immediately flee, seeking to save itself regardless of its treasure or its fellows.
Traditional monsters can do a lot more, and it's all massively simpler to run. They have mean powers but use them to capture people and charm spam them for enslaving so you get a chance to escape as they eat the henchmen. And they have like 40 hp, instead of 324 hp, so making them run away isn't hard.
This game should feel very bad to be compared poorly to 2nd edition.
Minotaur are much simpler monsters and thus work fine in 4e, they added a thing to them and two bigger ones and it's all fine.
Mummy has Mummy Rot, using the 4e disease mechanics, but this is long enough so I'll deal with them elsewhere. It's a template for NPCs as well as some bashers, they get a free autosave vs one (save ends) a PC drops on them, so that's nice, but all those poor Solos that don't have it.
This horrible edition. The monsters have to be so simple in concept or they explode in a cascading hail of (save ends) with 5+ refresh, there's random new nonsense everywhere (rather than the old familiar bullshit), nothing works like anything else for no reason, and so much of it is so very disappointing.
It could have worked better even within their crazy constraints. The humanoids for instance can be quite good, and then also quite awful with that little power they attached across each type. That's not a bad concept but you usually fight a lot of fucking humanoids of the same type really early in the game and if it doesn't work well it's just a bad experience.
Then that Mind Flayer is so many dice, that is crazy stuff, it's only an Elite, there's other monsters too, and what the PCs are dropping are adding more to that, but at least it's not a set of fucking 5+ refresh dice you're rolling on top of it all. These (save ends) duration and condition modifying things are just the most awful mechanic. It's so bad.