Hilarious 4e Anti-Immersion

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jul 17, 2009 12:47 pm

Monsters have been steadily shrinking. This is a 3rd Edition issue, too, but it's really intolerable in 4th.

Gargantuan monsters have no fixed scale, especially the larger ones. The tarrasque should seriously be 10 x 10 at the very least, but the game suggests they should be more like 4 x 4 squares, especially at the speed they move.

Also, the more legendary a monster is, the harder it is to know things about it? Whah?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Jul 17, 2009 1:04 pm

Bah, bears are harder to find information about. Check out Bear Lore (which should totally be its own skill) and compare the info-by-DC with that of the Manticore. Something like 25 tells you manticores have several rows of teeth and enjoy taunting you. For Bear Lore a 20 gives you "Cave bears live in caves." and a 25 gives you "Bears attack with their natural weapons" (if you fail by 10 or more you assume they have assault rifles).

MartinHarper · Post by **MartinHarper** » Fri Jul 17, 2009 1:53 pm

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I'd just like to point out that my PC is so cool! He's a necromancer! Sure his skeleton has the same stats as a bear, but it's not a bear! It's an undead!
The use of bows is a COMPLETE COINCIDENCE. This isn't a ranger, it's a necromancer! You can tell, because I erased 'ranger' from the sheet and put 'necromancer!'
The above is an actual 4.Fail suggestion I saw on the WoTC boards.

Personally I'd go with a golem rather than a skeleton, for the Diablo reference, but I don't see the problem with the necro/archer described. It'd work in 3e too (though you'd want to use the druid as a chassis because rangers suck).

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 4:43 am

MartinHarper wrote: Personally I'd go with a golem rather than a skeleton, for the Diablo reference, but I don't see the problem with the necro/archer described. It'd work in 3e too (though you'd want to use the druid as a chassis because rangers suck).

Thing is though, most necromancers aren't marked by being shoehorned into a bow or twf as primary attacks: I'd rather use some hideous soul-stealing spell. A necromancer archer could be fun, but making a regular necro shoehorned into archer sucks.

shirak · Post by **shirak** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 9:21 am

I would like to bring to your attention this thread on 3.5

Some of the highlights:

By a strict reading of the rules, you must wait until your next action to cry out in pain after being hit in combat.

Dire Elephants have a +23 skill bonus to Climb, and are listed as having a Climb speed of 10. Which explains their preferred hunting method of leaping out of trees onto unsuspecting prey below.

A special attack of the Spawn of Kyuss (MM2) involves a brain-eating worm, which reduces the Intelligence of the target. However, this is ability damage, which means that you can have your brain almost eaten, be cured of the worm, and with nothing more than rest, will be back up to full brainpower in a few days. Conversely, vampires inflict Constitution drain with their bite--so if you have your blood drained by a vampire, you can never recover naturally.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 3:39 pm

shirak wrote: Some of the highlights:
A special attack of the Spawn of Kyuss (MM2)

Fucking Spawn of Kyuss.

CR 5. Touch attack to sic a brain burrowing worm upon you. If you don't have Remove Disease ready (and why would you during a battle, you're only level 5, most diseases don't kill you in the span of a combat!), then you had better hope to gosh you know ahead of time that you are fucked and you need someone to do a heal check DC 20 pronto in the middle of battle.

I recall a lovely battle where I was the cleric in the party, level 4 so we had no access to remove disease, we didn't have anyone with a decent heal check either as I was our low int battle cleric. The DM hadn't actually bothered to understand how nasty those things were. His MM2 was hot off the presses so we had no metagame knowledge of our own either. It was just "oh, zombies who throw barely damaging worms."

We usually cake walked encounters even slightly above our CR so we got to fight 3 of those with our level 5 party (we had some level 4-6 characters). Only the guy who ran away thanks to the fear aura survived.

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 10:03 pm

Wow, this arrived in the wrong thread and I just now realized. Edited out.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 11:10 pm

Lago, how would you suggest solving the battleboard issue that would arise from that having gigantic monsters? Just not use one?

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Mon Jul 20, 2009 7:49 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Monsters have been steadily shrinking. This is a 3rd Edition issue, too, but it's really intolerable in 4th.

I don't really have a problem with this. Massively sized monsters have always strained believability for me anyway, and they're generally hard to fit on a battlemap adequately. Larger melee monsters become really easy to fight because they're so fat. A giant that takes up a 3x3 space pretty much sucks solely because of that fact. Groups of large monsters just get in each other's way, making the large size a pretty big drawback.

If you get bigger than 3x3, the monsters really become mostly unplayable except as a solo battle.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jul 20, 2009 7:57 am

Psychic Robot wrote:Lago, how would you suggest solving the battleboard issue that would arise from that having gigantic monsters? Just not use one?

Yes.

Any monster you have to fight larger than an ancient red dragon should either be abstracted or have the battlefield zoomed out.

Unfortunately, due to the way squares work, it would lead to a battlemap where players could only move one square a round. But I do think that it would feel sufficiently epic and threatening if we could see a zoomed-out map of a city with a terrasque outside of the gates and then see it move 6 squares every round... completely ripping through the slums and outer wall as it charges mindlessly.

TavishArtair · Post by **TavishArtair** » Mon Jul 20, 2009 11:12 am

RandomCasualty2 wrote:If you get bigger than 3x3, the monsters really become mostly unplayable except as a solo battle.

Monsters that are intended as a solo battle, however, should be that fucking huge.

Dragons, I'm looking at you!

User · Post by **User** » Mon Jul 20, 2009 11:40 am

If it's bigger than 3x3 I want to be climbing up and down that motherfucker like it's Shadow of the Colossus to kill it, not smacking its ankles. So far that's something that D&D hasn't offered.

I.e. not this:

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Mon Jul 20, 2009 12:20 pm

If it's bigger than 3x3 I want to be climbing up and down that motherfucker like it's Shadow of the Colossus to kill it, not smacking its ankles. So far that's something that D&D hasn't offered.

Can I just say, thank you for that idea? As someone who's planning on running a 5-headed hydra as 5 separate 2v2 heads, I now know how I'll be handling some monsters in the future...

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Mon Jul 20, 2009 5:53 pm

Hell yeah. I'm always a fan of such a battle tactic, but the feats to do so are so situational and annoying.

I wants something like GoW, sorta.