De canistro textrinum

[Stubbazubba]

Stubbazubba, worrying about the player's enjoyment of the game instead of the character's isn't metagaming. It's good game design and good DMing practice.

What you worry about has nothing to do with what metagaming is or is not, though. Players can enjoy fighting Vrocks like a pro even if their character should have no clue that the vines growing out of the spores are harmless and eventually fall off, but it is metagaming to do so. If that is more important than letting low-level people fight homebrewed Vrocks to scratch a particular narrative itch, fine, make that argument, but don't say it's not metagaming, because it explicitly relies on metagame knowledge to happen.

All of Kaelik's whining about CR 3 Vrocks boils down to the fact that it invalidates his meta-game assumptions. I'm not saying that's not important, I'm just saying it is the only problem with CR 3 Vrocks. You can totally play D&D with CR 7 gods and CR 3 Vrocks, so long as everyone is on board, and Kaelik even agrees with that. That shows that there are no intrinsic issues with CR 3 Vrocks.

So what is actually good DMing practice is to clarify expectations about the setting up front. Negotiate with your players until you agree to either go by the book (so they can rely on their meta-game knowledge), heavily home-brewed (so they can't and have to rely on in-character sources of information), or somewhere in-between (maybe they can ask if this is a MM monster or a home-brewed version).

[Stubbazubba]

The entire reason we went off on CR 3 Vrocks in the first place is so that low-op or low-level parties can still access a thematic variety of adventures which includes Evil Planes and all the material that would entail.

No fuck you that's not a good reason at all. Low-op parties should either seek out challenges they can defeat or die repeatedly to things that they can't. If they want to punch at their ECL or higher they should stop basketweaving. I've have explained many times how corrosive coddling basketweavers is to the game.

And for some reason, unfathomable to you, I suppose, people keep dismissing you.

Also if you want to have a high level adventure just fucking start the party at high level. Why is this so hard?

People have already brought up legitimate scenarios for this, are you up to date on your reading, Mr. Mistborn?

Again fuck you. Fuck all of you basketweavers. No one ever brought up metagaming stop strawmanning. The word Vrock means something in D&D, Vrocks are the elite vanguard of the hordes of the Abyss. It warps the fucking setting when the legions of the Abyss have been downsized to the point that they are no longer a problem for the village militia.

You must've missed last lecture. The gist of it is there is no setting until the PCs get to it. There's really not. The only thing being warped when Vrocks are introduced to the game earlier and in a different form are your meta-game assumptions. Nothing in-universe has changed, you just didn't know what it was to begin with. You thought you did, but you thought wrong. A pastime of yours, I gather.

Everything you brought up in this post has been addressed in just the last couple pages. Try to come to class prepared to participate meaningfully next, time, k?

[DSMatticus]

Low-op parties should either seek out challenges they can defeat or die repeatedly to things that they can't.

1) LOL NOOBS DON'T DESERVE D&D
2) A CR 3 vrock is something a low-op/low-level party could beat. This statement is meaningless. The discussion is about the ramifications of CR 3 vrocks, and your comment is "PC's should fight things they can defeat," which... doesn't tell us any-fucking-thing about what belongs in a setting or what adding something to a setting does. It's pretty stupid. It's a non-sequitur. It was just another excuse for you to say you think "D&D is a privilege you earn through sweat and blood, not some game you play for fun and enjoyment, disgusting noobs," and yes, that is a reprehensible position.

I've have explained many times how corrosive coddling basketweavers is to the game.

No, you haven't. No, that is not the correct definition of basketweaver. No, basketweaving has basically nothing to do with the direction this conversation has taken. You just really like that word, and you use it like a bludgeon with neither finesse nor accuracy. Like you do with barrels of cocks. Like you do with frozen fast. Like you do with every insult you hurl out.

Also if you want to have a high level adventure just fucking start the party at high level. Why is this so hard?

Because high level D&D implies certain other qualities like access to game-changing high level spells, and it's perfectly conceivable that you would want to take the theme of shit like Balrogs and put it into a low fantasy story. Like in Lord of the Fucking Rings, the original source material for D&D, where Gandalf, the level five fucking wizard (kind of sort of, maybe less), wrestles something that is thematically speaking a fucking Balrog. But nobody in LotR, including the Balrog, ever casts teleport.

It warps the fucking setting when the legions of the Abyss have been downsized to the point that they are no longer a problem for the village militia.

I'm gonna remind you that by core the CR 9 vrock is the typical example of its species (the mode). The lowerbound is unspecified. Introducing a CR 3 vrock really changes nothing about the core setting; claiming that there are more CR 3 vrocks than CR 9 vrocks changes the setting. It is, however, contrary to player expectations, which are really an entirely different question than setting problems.

[DSMatticus]

@Stubbazubba, K: the metagame actually does matter, if only for the point of proper communication between players and GM. If you don't let PC's know you're playing the LotR version instead of the D&D version, when you drop the description of a Balrog people at your table will flip out, or roll their eyes, or whatever. If you are introducing low CR versions of things, you genuinely need to mention that you are not using standard creatures just to avoid that particular breakdown. Ideally, you would just be your character and know everything they know, but that doesn't actually happen, and there are DM's who drop real Balrogs on CR 3 parties as giant railroady mcfuckyou's, and in the interests of getting players to not immediately think you are that guy, expecting you or the hypothetical DM to warn them ahead of time is fair game.

[Stubbazubba]

Yeah, I tried to make that clear at the end of my reply to ModelCitizen, too. Players have every right to be upset when their metagame expectations are broken, whatever they are. It's just that neither assuming MM or assuming willy-nilly homebrew is intrinsically better than the other for the game. They serve two different play purposes, both of which are legitimate.

[Kaelik]

No, you have explained several times that if you change Vrocks then your metagame assumptions are dashed, like what level gods are, what abilities they have, and barghests and whatever else you've brought up. But the setting being changed is only not metagame if your character had a perfect knowledge of the setting before the change, and since we're talking about a denizen of the Lower Planes, he has no knowledge of it at level 3. Do you have anything besides "changing the setting changes the setting!", because at level 3 the vast majority of setting knowledge is still metagame knowledge.

Are you living in an alternate universe? K is the one who said to make gods CR 7. Gods being CR 7 is an explicit effect of Gods being CR 7.

Now, the point is that when you make a change to some aspect of the setting, it has effects which do in fact trickle down. When you make Gods CR 7 and Vrocks CR 3, then you make Balors CR 6, and Maraliths CR 5, because those are weaker than gods. And whn you take teleport away from the CR 7 gods, because it is too powerful for CR 7, and then you also take it away from all the demons and devils, you changed the fucking setting.

And then when I make a character who at any point tried to send a care package home to his beloved mother far away by paying someone to bind a demon capable of greater teleporting, that character suddenly ceases to make sense.

And no matter what you decide to change, whether it be Mindflayers, Beholders, or Demons, it could have an effect on the setting that causes players actions to not make sense.

Literally half of all backstories I've ever seen feature some variant of "Monster Y killed my family" and sometimes players want monster Y to not suck. If they had wanted their family killed by shitheads, they would have written goblin instead of Mindflayer in that blank.

So if you want to change the setting, you have to inform your players ahead of time.

[tussock]

They're a true demon. Type I.

Using 1st edition Demon classifications to objectively determine power is metagaming. It's not just metagaming, it's grognard metagaming.

You should know they called them "type I" because the CHARACTERS couldn't possibly know anything more about big demons than the chickens are the ones you see most often, the 1st type you'll normally encounter. That thing introduced in 2nd edition where they have life cycles and hierarchies and wars and other internecine conflicts: buying the DM some chips so he'll make the demons a bit more stupid is meta-gaming.

Non sequitur for great justice.

Which is to say, knowing some of the things that your character knows about the world is just "gaming". There's more to it than rolling the d20.

Third edition and later posits a universe where monsters can be individuals with varying abilities.

You should read the Monster Manual some time. It's quite clear how monsters have a baseline version that is by far the most common type, as described in its entry, and only go up from there. Adding CR. 3e explicitly removed baby ogres from the game space (though added much lamer baby dragons).

[DSMatticus]

You should read the Monster Manual some time. It's quite clear how monsters have a baseline version that is by far the most common type, as described in its entry, and only go up from there. Adding CR. 3e explicitly removed baby ogres from the game space (though added much lamer baby dragons).

I quoted it. Within the past few pages. It says "everything tussock just said is wrong" (I may be paraphrasing). It's even in the SRD and therefore googleable. Here it is again.

The monster entry usually describes only the most commonly encountered version of a creature. The advancement line shows how tough a creature can get, in terms of extra Hit Dice. (This is not an absolute limit, but exceptions are extremely rare.) Often, intelligent creatures advance by gaining a level in a character class instead of just gaining a new Hit Die.

When you say "only go up from there," that part you are pulling out of your ass. The MM specifies two things: 1) what the most common variety is (a mode), and 2) a loose upperbound on how much higher than that they can go. There is a separate section that builds on this one, and it shows you how to create creatures inside that loose upperbound. How far beneath the mode any given creature ranges is totally unspecified, and there are no clear rules for building creatures beneath the mode, but at no point does the MM ever, ever say that creatures weaker than the provided statblock (a mode) don't exist. To infer that from anything in the MM that I am aware of is to infer that a mode is always also a min, to which I respond 1,2,2.

But all in all, this is a relatively minor point. I mean, it interferes with the people arguing from the perspective of "PRESERVE THE D&D SETTING! IT IS SACRED!" but that part of this argument is stupid as fuck to begin with because nobody's D&D setting is core as written because nobody plays D&D with chainbinding. Well, okay, some people do, and they're kind of crazy, and let's ignore that. But pretty much everyone is already tweaking and removing elements of the game to create settings they prefer over the setting as described by core.

[Mistborn]

When you say "only go up from there," that part you are pulling out of your ass. The MM specifies two things: 1) what the most common variety is (a mode), and 2) a loose upperbound on how much higher than that they can go.

Stop being such a retard. there are rules for adding class leves and hit dice but nothing even remotely like guidelines for lowering monster CR. Thus the monster statblock is not only the "standard" it's the weakest because there are not fucking rules for lower CR versions.

Because high level D&D implies certain other qualities like access to game-changing high level spells, and it's perfectly conceivable that you would want to take the theme of shit like Balrogs and put it into a low fantasy story. Like in Lord of the Fucking Rings, the original source material for D&D, where Gandalf, the level five fucking wizard (kind of sort of, maybe less), wrestles something that is thematically speaking a fucking Balrog. But nobody in LotR, including the Balrog, ever casts teleport.

If you're playing LotR you're already not playing D&D, Hopefully you cleared that with your players from the start. Regardless of that fuck off this is a tread about D&D.

[Mistborn]

You must've missed last lecture. The gist of it is there is no setting until the PCs get to it

You know what fuck this too. That's 4e talk and you know it. The setting totally exists even when the PC aren't around it need to at least make a show of it else you don't fucking have a setting. If Vrocks are CR 3 only when the DM wants the party to fight one and CR 9 otherwise (or worse statless) that's retarded.

Why oh why is this forum suddenly full of fucking 4rries.

[ModelCitizen]

You must've missed last lecture. The gist of it is there is no setting until the PCs get to it.

Yeah, I tried to make that clear at the end of my reply to ModelCitizen, too. Players have every right to be upset when their metagame expectations are broken, whatever they are. It's just that neither assuming MM or assuming willy-nilly homebrew is intrinsically better than the other for the game. They serve two different play purposes, both of which are legitimate.

These two points are incompatible. If I as a player have metagame assumptions about the setting and I can reasonably object when the DM violates them, then there is a setting beyond what my character knows.

[virgil]

When you say "only go up from there," that part you are pulling out of your ass. The MM specifies two things: 1) what the most common variety is (a mode), and 2) a loose upperbound on how much higher than that they can go.

Stop being such a retard. there are rules for adding class leves and hit dice but nothing even remotely like guidelines for lowering monster CR. Thus the monster statblock is not only the "standard" it's the weakest because there are not fucking rules for lower CR versions.

And therefore all ogres give birth to 8' tall CR 3 monsters; are you really that retarded? Because the MM doesn't give you stats for it, it cannot exist? You & Tussock are the ones going Calvinball on the rules, deciding that "most commonly encountered version" = "weakest state", as opposed to the proper reading, where the MM gives statistics for common/typical adventuring concerns.

If you're playing LotR you're already not playing D&D, Hopefully you cleared that with your players from the start. Regardless of that fuck off this is a tread about D&D.

He did, quite clearly and explicitly. So, is your campaign largely empty of life except for rolling waves of shadows and smatterings of other undead? No? Then you're changing core elements of the setting and not playing D&D because you decided to basketweave away emergent gameplay.

Nobody even suggested that the same vrocks would be CR 9 or statless when roaming the Abyss for AWOLs and act like CR 3 when they encountered the players, you scarecrow fvcker. No more than a CR 9 vrock would digivolve into a CR 15 version as soon as the doors are closed.

[Korwin]

Spores are killed by bless, a level 1 spell. Align weapon is a level 2 spell - a few scrolls of those are not really that hard to get to the party. SR and the resistances don't prevent it from being hacked to death by aligned weapons. Mirror image is not really a spell that's unsuited for level 3, being a second level spell.

So, yeah, I can make the encounter level 3.

You fucking Metagamer... Sorry I apparently channeled K ...

[Mistborn]

And therefore all ogres give birth to 8' tall CR 3 monsters; are you really that retarded? Because the MM doesn't give you stats for it, it cannot exist? You & Tussock are the ones going Calvinball on the rules, deciding that "most commonly encountered version" = "weakest state", as opposed to the proper reading, where the MM gives statistics for common/typical adventuring concerns.

If there are supposed to be lower than CR 9 Vrocks then why didn't the MM give rules for creating them. You can flail and argue semantics all you want you can't get around the fact that the MM has rules for advancing monsters but not for reducing them. Clearly this means that it was never in the spirit of the rules to reduce monsters and K should shut up about SS it's a dumb book that no one uses that was cheerfully forgotten by everyone here until he dredged it up.

He did, quite clearly and explicitly. So, is your campaign largely empty of life except for rolling waves of shadows and smatterings of other undead? No? Then you're changing core elements of the setting and not playing D&D because you decided to basketweave away emergent gameplay.

There is a differences between making sure the setting exists long enough to have a game and what K and nocker are arguing for. I don't believe that anyone can be dumb enough to think that's a good argument and still be able to read. Please stop being such an intellectually dishonest douchebag virgil.

[Slade]

Are you living in an alternate universe? K is the one who said to make gods CR 7. Gods being CR 7 is an explicit effect of Gods being CR 7.

Now, the point is that when you make a change to some aspect of the setting, it has effects which do in fact trickle down. When you make Gods CR 7 and Vrocks CR 3, then you make Balors CR 6, and Maraliths CR 5, because those are weaker than gods.

Doesn't follow...
That is not a logical progression please try again.

And whn you take teleport away from the CR 7 gods, because it is too powerful for CR 7, and then you also take it away from all the demons and devils, you changed the fucking setting.

Again, no where is it stated gods must be lower CR than Demons. You are puling this out of your ass.

And then when I make a character who at any point tried to send a care package home to his beloved mother far away by paying someone to bind a demon capable of greater teleporting, that character suddenly ceases to make sense.

Can't you just bind a Demon with Dimension door, it is at will, he will get there eventually. Are you that impatient?

[Fuchs]

Spores are killed by bless, a level 1 spell. Align weapon is a level 2 spell - a few scrolls of those are not really that hard to get to the party. SR and the resistances don't prevent it from being hacked to death by aligned weapons. Mirror image is not really a spell that's unsuited for level 3, being a second level spell.

So, yeah, I can make the encounter level 3.

You fucking Metagamer... Sorry I apparently channeled K ...

Well, that's how you place the vrock in an encounter for a level 3 party without making a cr3 vrock. In other words, a pure metagaming exercise.

In actual play where one doesn't have to worry about the sort of MM-waving fanatics you usually only see in parody-comics (and which are usually metagaming with the worst of them), you would simply scale down the vrock properly.

[Fuchs]

And then when I make a character who at any point tried to send a care package home to his beloved mother far away by paying someone to bind a demon capable of greater teleporting, that character suddenly ceases to make sense.

The lack of mental flexibility this shows is astonishing. Any sane player would simply alter the line into "and then my character paid a courier to transport a care package to his mother" and everything would be fine. I pity your GM when apparently even minimal changes to your character's background history are enough to cause the character to stop making sense.

[Fuchs]

There is a differences between making sure the setting exists long enough to have a game and what K and nocker are arguing for. I don't believe that anyone can be dumb enough to think that's a good argument and still be able to read. Please stop being such an intellectually dishonest douchebag virgil.

The argument "Vrocks need to be cr9" is based on the idea that the game rules and MM write ups cannot be changed without breaking the setting. If you can change stuff like Shadows (or even have to, to keep the game setting working) then there's no reason why other aspects have to be set into stone.

[Mistborn]

The argument "Vrocks need to be cr9" is based on the idea that the game rules and MM write ups cannot be changed without breaking the setting. If you can change stuff like Shadows (or even have to, to keep the game setting working) then there's no reason why other aspects have to be set into stone.

Changing they way create spawn works has the effect of ensuring that everyone in the setting isn't already dead before the campagin starts. Making Vrocks CR 3 has the effect of making them die to the local militia. Those are two diffident things one leads too still having a setting the other leads the the most boring demonic invasions ever.

It's clear that this clusterfuck isn't getting anywhere and I have no interest in continuing it. This is yet another dumb tangent that the local basketweavers are on so they don't have to defend their idiocy. If people want to keep flailing at eachother start a new therad, this one has been off topic for more than 10 pages already.

"In D&D you can only defeat the opponent you are able to defeat."

If anyone can figure out what that means themselves they're a step closer to understanding why victory by MTP is meaningless.

Well it looks like everyone in this thread has failed to understand what I was saying.

Perhaps a better way of saying it would have been "In D&D you can only defeat the opponent you have been made able to defeat". That koan is supposed to encourage people to think about how they are gaining the ability to defeat what is in front of them and to remind them that regardless of playstyle if you've won an RPG fight you probably went in knowing you were going to win.

Now when you fight Orcus (as an example) and win you can win for a number of reasons. It could be because your party are badasses who are capable of killing Orcus. Or it could be because the warm motherlike DM is handing out artifacts like candy. Or nocker could be your DM and the gods themselves descend from the heavens to help you defeat Orcus. (in this thread nocker seriously suggested pulling literal deus ex machina as a DM so apparently he's as bad at storytelling as he is at D&D)

Now one of those is not like the other. In one of those example the party is winning solely because of their own actions and decisions. In the others not so much. Once you start relying on the DM for victories then you have in a major way forfeited your agency as player characters. It means that the DM is responsible for both setting the challenges and giving the PC the ability to defeat them thus those challenges are only cleared when and how the DM want them too be. And that's terrible.

This attitude is creates 90% of the problem players I've had to deal with and 100% of the problem DMs I've suffered under. If the DM is responsible for your success then he's also responsible your their failure. I've had more than one player throw tantrums at the table, rage quit or accuse me of being out to get them all because I didn't hand them victory. The reason bad DMs rage when people come to them with character prepared to not suck is they don't have the DMs permission to not suck. That's 70% of what went wrong in the Expeditious Retreat campaign I did not have the DMs permission to be awesome and yet I was still more awesome than his favorite player.

When the default is that the part sucks until the DM fiats them into not sucking the DMs start to think that the PCs need his permission to not suck. This is the ultimate cause of 90% of all bad DM stories.

These are points that no one has addressed. How about all of you stop sucking cocks and address them.

[Foxwarrior]

I do believe Nockermensch's suggestion was a Deus Intra Machina, actually. Winning a fight partially because of actions you took at other points in the campaign is not a horrible tragedy.

Also, how the DM defines Orcus's lair and whether the DM is a master tactician are also relevant to the players' success.

Starcraft is at least as objective a game as D&D on Hard Mode, right? Well, I've beaten three human players at once before.

[Foxwarrior]

Okay, I give in. I like keeping Vrocks how they are for entirely metagame reasons, because my character does of course not have any idea that Vrocks should be scary. But then, my character doesn't really appreciate monsters at all; if it were up to them, monsters would not exist, and everybody would live forever in perfect harmony as his Social Combated mindslaves or something.

I, however, can appreciate when the DM uses monsters in clever ways, or converts monsters from one context to another in a way that feels true to their essential attributes. If you adapt Daleks into D&D well, I will be amused. If you try to adapt Vrocks into D&D, every change brings them further away from their original definition, because they're defined in D&D.

In order to appreciate a monster used in a clever way, I have to have sufficient metagame knowledge about it to understand how clever the DM was. If the monster was made up by the DM, I can't really shake the feeling that they made up the monster because of the clever way they had for using it, so the DM was no longer cleverly working within constraints.

[Fuchs]

I, however, can appreciate when the DM uses monsters in clever ways, or converts monsters from one context to another in a way that feels true to their essential attributes. If you adapt Daleks into D&D well, I will be amused. If you try to adapt Vrocks into D&D, every change brings them further away from their original definition, because they're defined in D&D.

And that's an entirely subjective view, a matter of personal preference.

[Foxwarrior]

No it isn't, Fuchs. Everything that Vrocks can do and how well they do it in relation to other D&D characters is defined as perfectly as a D&D character can be defined.

That said, you could port a 2e Vrock to 3e or something, and then you would have some leeway.

[shadzar]

@Lord Mistborn:

any monster is CR whatever the DM feels like whenever s/he feels like it.

[quote="3.5 MM, pg 8]In most cases, a monster entry describes a typical individual of the kind in question, which is the most common version encountered by characters on adventures. The DM can modify these entries, create advanced or weaker versions, or alter any statistics to play a monster against type and surprise the characters.[/quote]

[Fuchs]

No it isn't, Fuchs. Everything that Vrocks can do and how well they do it in relation to other D&D characters is defined as perfectly as a D&D character can be defined.

That said, you could port a 2e Vrock to 3e or something, and then you would have some leeway.

I contest that anything in the MM is perfectly, or that any change to that is bad. See Shadow for a reason why. I honestly don't get where this "adding cr3 vrocks is ruining the perfection of the vrock" idea stems from - in other araas people don't actually consider D&D to be perfect.