A Demon Haunted World

[OgreBattle]

How about the reverse, can my human rogue also take levels in Medusa (lurker) and gain petrification vision? Can my human rogue pick up "very large flaming humanoid" levels?

Considering this setting has demon blood as the norm that sounds like something a PC can do.

So this game is going to use multiple 'class tracks' for characters right? How many tracks makes up a single character and are all tracks of equal value? Or are some tracks slower, matter less?

Is "Rogue" a single track, or is it multiple tracks that if you take all of them you are a traditional D&D Rogue? Is being a Fighter/Mage/Thief also a thing I can do with class tracks?

[Koumei]

That undead that's a huge larva with skeletons and swarms

Sounds like the Ulgurstasta (Fiend Folio), but that doesn't have swarms, it has a sort of tendril spray attack (which gives it Immunity: your entire army of low level non-magical archers) and crazy amounts of Con damage it can vomit up.

On a similar note (and possibly sort of merged together, memory-wise), the Brood Keeper (a giant bug that has larva swarms fly off it to attack you) fits pretty well there if you want to acknowledge the existence of MM3. I understand if you don't, though the book also has stuff like SIEGE CRABS MOTHERFUCKER and Charnel Hounds and Living Spells and so on. At least conceptually it has some good stuff for the Prestige tier.

[nockermensch]

That undead that's a huge larva with skeletons and swarms

Sounds like the Ulgurstasta (Fiend Folio), but that doesn't have swarms, it has a sort of tendril spray attack (which gives it Immunity: your entire army of low level non-magical archers) and crazy amounts of Con damage it can vomit up.

On a similar note (and possibly sort of merged together, memory-wise), the Brood Keeper (a giant bug that has larva swarms fly off it to attack you) fits pretty well there if you want to acknowledge the existence of MM3. I understand if you don't, though the book also has stuff like SIEGE CRABS MOTHERFUCKER and Charnel Hounds and Living Spells and so on. At least conceptually it has some good stuff for the Prestige tier.

Heh, I was actually mashing the Hullathoin (also from the Fiend Folio) and the Ulgurstasta in my mind. And actually both of these (and also the Brood Keeper) seem to be pretty sweet as prestige monsters: Huge critters that bring a big bag of FUN™ with them, helping to ensue memorable battles.

[Koumei]

Oh right, the Hullathoin.

So next time someone complains that the problem with 3.X is there's too much stuff and it all merges together, I'm just going to stay quiet.

[Username17]

How about the reverse, can my human rogue also take levels in Medusa (lurker) and gain petrification vision? Can my human rogue pick up "very large flaming humanoid" levels?

If you want to play Sir Kay and just get bigger and stronger as you go up in levels, there's no specific reason why you couldn't multiclass into Brute. At higher levels you can catch fire or whatever. Similarly, if your character concept is that you're a Z-Warrior, you can just take levels in Harrier and have mobility powers "just because."

The issue is only that if you're getting a second power set that your primary power set has to be less powerful than it would be if it was your sole source of power. If you are being a Berserker and you also get Brute powers, you have to get less Brute powers. That's just a given. But while you have to get less powers or weaker powers from the main class, it's not acceptable to get lower level powers. Some abilities are like Cleave or Firebolt, where getting them at the wrong level is just a math problem. But factually so abilities are like Sleep that has a level based sunset clause or Water Breathing where it is itself a level-based gatekey for a level-based gatekeeper challenges. And the firmer your tiers are, the more of the latter kind of abilities you have.

Something I've proposed before and not gotten any feedback from Frank on is slicing tiers into 1-3/4-9/10-15/16-21.

As DrP noted, you can fit an arbitrary number of levels into a single kind of challenge and an arbitrary number of challenges into a single level. The number of levels you want to set into a tier has to do with how much level-based advancement you want to do. Any tier could potentially be "all" of a campaign, either because the game doesn't last long enough to go to the next one or because people just like that tier and want to E6 it and stay there. And that's fine.

So to me the big driver of how many levels you need in a tier is actually how many levels you don't need. That is, how much space for non-leveled advancement can you envisage for that tier? I would say that for the Prestige and Epic tiers there is essentially limitless non-leveled advancement on the table. A Witch Queen can own a County, a Duchy, a Kingdom, or an Empire without gaining a level or being personally able to cast better battlefield curses. Her army of Orcs could be one hundred guys with makeshift weaponry or it could be ten thousand trained soldiers with matching livery and blightsteel weapons. As such, I think it's pretty much a waste to put more than a few levels into the Prestige or Epic tiers. Conversely, levels where the characters are solving most of their problems with their own sword arm are ones where you care more about advancement in the character's personal abilities, and there deserve to be more levels.

It's also worth noting that nockermensch and virgil both suggested some Prestige Antagonists, and there was a lot of overlap and some of them weren't really tier appropriate, and all of those suggestions together still don't match the length of one level of Heroic Tier monsters.

I would say, the defining element of the heroic-tier vs. the adventurer tier is that: 1) you have a base to maintain and potentially defend while you are away, and 2) you are expected (as a party) to be able to fly to cloud castles and adventure on the bottom of the sea and shit, so people have options for character concept palettes that fill those roles. It's the lock-picker character concept that expires at level 5, not the barbarian.

That's a good point. While there are definitely "Rogue" concepts that continue to be viable when you are having seafloor and cloud castle adventures, the basic street smarts non-magic Rogue character concept doesn't cut it. I think I'm sold on the tier jump at level 6, even though the monsters you are facing have significant overlap and everything is on the same scale.

-Username17

[Username17]

On Minotaurs having 6 hit dice. Yes, monster level inflation has been a big problem in DnD over lots of editions. Some of that has been straight hit die inflation where monsters get a shot tonne of hit dice in place of getting meaningful abilities. Brute monsters are the worst for this generally, with specific issues like the 3e melee undead needing ridiculous hit die numbers to make up for a lack of Con bonus and shit attack bonus progression. But also just inflation of threat levels - lots of monsters are gifted with hallenge ratings way higher than their concept justifies. We get fiends that are conceptually demonic foot soldiers that show up at 9th level with random spell-likes to match.

Part of this of course is that DnD is actively hurting for high level monsters because it insists on having a range of monsters covering all the levels. Which of course does not gel well with most source material since obviously in most stories monsters are fought and defeated by heroes in the first few adventures. But this need for higher level versions of monsters is basically bullshit. We genuinely do not need 14th level brutes because people can pretty much ignore brutes at 14th level. There's mass battles going on, and individual giants can be dropped down into holes.

A lot of monsters should be downshifted quite a lot. There's no reason we cannot have CR demon enemies. No reason we cannot face proper giants at 4th level.

As for prestige levels and opposition, that brings up an interesting point: the Prestige Mook. Sure there's shit like the Orcwort and the Megapede that actually fight whole armies, but there's also shit like Siege Crabs and shit that belong on the mass battles landscape but are not able to qualify as main contributors in any meaningful sense.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

Would it make sense to just have Deity/Pretender scale creatures to fill out the higher tiers?

Norse god Thor is ~10, maybe 15 at most; since they face Ice/Fire giants and slay them; but can't singlehandedly invade Muspelheim or Nifelheim. So to Horus, Susanoo, Toutias, Quetzelcoatl, Rainbow Serpent, the White/Red/Black Bull; the head of Zardoz; and other "god tier" creatures?

Or, in the case of the Demon Haunted World, arch-devils, demon lords, &etc.? Llolth is a CR 16-20 scale encounter b/c she can lay province-scale webs, turn normal spiders into horse-size ones, and mutate weak mortals into Ettercaps; so the PCs need to have Hex-scale powers to counter hers?

[Username17]

Would it make sense to just have Deity/Pretender scale creatures to fill out the higher tiers?

Basically yes. The Epic Tiers are basically all Dominions. The Xixecal is a region of eternal winter, and you fight it by making it become spring. There's a boss battle at the end where a glacier gets up and you fight a literal moving mountain, but until you make flowers grow from the frozen ground that battle isn't even unlocked. You have to have your own Dominion and push it into the frozen wastes before taking it on directly is even an option.


Then you have an Epic setpiece battle where the boss keeps spawning dragons off his shoulders.

So the Epic monsters can be pretty much named individuals that dominate huge chunks of the planet and aren't even directly interacted with except by Paragon or Epic characters. You don't need an entry for "Epic Goblin" because there are no epic goblins. Your epic opponent is Mamon or Yeenoghu, and you have to confront them on more than the basis of burning some temples down or killing a bunch of Duergar or Gnolls. You gotta do stuff to reduce agregate Greed or agregate Desolation in order to make them care. And then of course there's a boss battle at the end where Mammon floods the battlefield with molten gold or Yeenoghu has an army of Hill Giants spew out of his mouth.

A much more difficult issue is what to do with Giants who are bigger an tougher than Cloud Giants? I mean, obviously they exist with stuff like Storm Giants and Mountain Giants being on the table. But equally obviously, such things aren't exactly relevant in any part of the game. A Mountain Giant is too big to be part of a 10th level combat, but it isn't really big enough to take on an entire army by itself. A Mountain Giant sits in a funky in-between place where there isn't ever really a character of any level for whom the Mountain Giant is a regular opponent. It's always a boss monster or a line item in the enemy army. Same with Siege Golems and the upper end of Dragons.

Of course, I think it's pretty instructive how few monsters D&D actually has in the higher levels. Go through the Monster Manuals and find how many things there are at CR 17 that aren't just "this is a Demon that we leveled up until it was CR 17" or "this is a Dragon that we did the same for." Going to a 1-10 scale for normal enemies is obviously the right move. For one thing it lets you compress a lot of the cool monsters that no one ever gets to see because they were stretched into the levels no one ever plays. Mariliths, for example, can obviously just go in as a 10th level monster and then people could actually fight them sometime.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

The level ranges are arbitrary - so, if you want 12 flavors of giant, that's a reason to go:
1-6 Adventurer
7-12 Heroic
13-16 Lord
17-20 Epic
or something like that.

Under such a setup, players can't be level 13 without taking a level of Witch King, Hierophant, or Gryphon General, but an NPC certainly can. Just make some monster classes which go up past 11 but don't live in lord-tier concepts for the extra dice.

This isn't to encourage hit dice inflation, but if you want a Cloud Giant lieutenant who is bigger than the other cloud giants but is not - conceptually speaking - different from a regular cloud giant, you're going to need the flexibility to give him levels of "Giant (plus)".

You're also going to want a Minotaur Emperor who is conceptually a conqueror of hexes with his minotaur army, and if you challenge him to personal combat during the battle and lose or flee, he gets to trigger his lord-level class ability to make his entire army of minotaurs blood surge or ignore flank penalties or whatever.

[nockermensch]

D&D traditionally sucks at conceptualizing "Epic". This is legitimately an aspect where 3E totally dropped the ball with the Epic Level Handbook (is this the Joke Book I or II?) and no edition so far came at least close to addressing it. They simply assume that "bigger numbers = epic", which is already insulting when you're playing NWN 2 and, uh, very insulting when you're playing the RPG, specially because a part of the fanbase simply believes their hype: See, people who to this day think that the Tarrasque as depicted is an epic fight.

As for those "high end, but not epic monsters", 4E is terrible, but there's the conceptual space for "epic mooks": This doesn't mean a Lvl 37 monster with 1hp, that's just wrong on several levels, but that Erythnul needs some goons on his side when he decides to take physical shape and throw down, and these goons need attacks that epic characters can't simply ignore. This is where monsters like Mariliths (teleport, project image and blade barrier at will) or mountain giants can shine. A marilith can kill entire armies by herself and kind of require the focus of a mid level party to go down. But a bunch of mariliths look like something the god of slaughter or a demon lord would want by his side.

[Chamomile]

I'm disappointed in the execution of the Tarrasque. As a concept, it deserves its prestige. "Godzilla comes to town" is an epic level adventure. Lord level armies showing up to try and fail to slow him down is even a staple of actual Godzilla movies.

[nockermensch]

You're also going to want a Minotaur Emperor who is conceptually a conqueror of hexes with his minotaur army, and if you challenge him to personal combat during the battle and lose or flee, he gets to trigger his lord-level class ability to make his entire army of minotaurs blood surge or ignore flank penalties or whatever.

This is a good question, anyway: Frank said that there's not epic goblins, but if the DM makes a Goblin with levels in an epic PC class what happens?

[erik]

This is a good question, anyway: Frank said that there's not epic goblins, but if the DM makes a Goblin with levels in an epic PC class what happens?

He meant that there aren't epic "goblin levels". They have to get their epicness out of something more than their paternity.

That goblin is important as a named character. That they started as a goblin is only a footnote in their wikipedia entry. Maybe she is a god of goblins and still cares about her people, but functionally epic characters are a bunch of steves and an epic goblin is as likely to have as much mechanically in common with an epic human or epic medusa as it is with another epic goblin.

Each time you go up a tier, the previous tier becomes mostly just nuance. Dr Manhattan may have been a gifted physicist, but now he's an invincible god with absolute control over matter. If he started as a Navy Seal or a Hot Dog Vendor, it doesn't really matter anymore. The granularity is a bit finer between class tiers (so 5 adventurer vs 5 adventurer/1 conqueror isn't impossible), but I think that's the general notion.

[maglag]

I keep seeing a lot of mentions of armies this and armies that, and also that this is D&D, but last time I checked D&D is still lacking a proper army combat resolution system. There were even some threads about that here and as far as I can read there was no clear conclusion.

So how exactly do you plan to resolve things when "Yeenoghu has an army of Hill Giants spew out of his mouth"?

[DrPraetor]

if the DM makes a Goblin with levels in an epic PC class what happens?

I'm confident I can field this one. "Whatever it says on the tin for the epic PC class."

Epic antagonists need rules, and the players need actions to take against those epic antagonists (inputs), and you need to use the rules, with whatever element of chance, to adjudicate what happens (outputs.)

So if there is a Lord of Nightmares epic class, and it lets you enter the nightmares of children around the world (or all of them in your malign dominion or whatever) and they wake up with horrormarks causing them to later be hunted by sadistic lovecraft monsters - that's an epic power that you can certainly have stacked on top of "race: goblin." But that is not 17HD of goblin, it's a conceptual jump into an Epic antagonist which could have been templated onto a bugbear or a quasit.

I posit the same is true, in fact, for a lordly-level antagonist minotaur. The Minotaur Emperor is a minotaur, but he isn't just a 13HD pile of minotaur, because you defeat him by vanquishing his armies not just (or maybe at all?) by stabbing him in the face. So he's a conceptually different type of challenge/antagonist than any number of minotaurs who might charge at you with axes, and he's promoted to this higher-tier-concept by giving him some rules that can interact with the hex conquest subgame. He can send slaver raids and cut off vital trade routes and stuff.

At the high levels of each tier, you will want antagonists who are in the next tier up. For the heroic-lordly transition it is practically required that you overthrow an evil kingdom because, after all, that's the best way to get some hexes to rule. A party of max-level-lords is going up against a manifested demigod, and so forth.

EDIT:

So how exactly do you plan to resolve things when "Yeenoghu has an army of Hill Giants spew out of his mouth"?

Frank would presumably be using the rules from his D&D hex combat game. That said, I'd say to get the demon-haunted-world content working well one tier at a time, before building the next tier.

[OgreBattle]

So the item monster power chakra system, is there a robust definition of what’s kind of power must take up a chakra and what kind can just be a class feature.

Like do all flyin monsters have a chakra slot filled to fly, do all giants have a chakra filled for being giant and does that mean an elephant also has their chakra filled

I’m guessing chakra abilities are like the Tome of blue incarnum totemist where wan you level up you get more powerful moves to slot in

[Mord]

Someone please let me know if I have this straight: Frank's two basic concepts here are 1) you have mandatory tier-based multiclassing, and 2) monsters are represented by a small handful of special classes that are treated like any other class, just with a weird race stapled on.

Example #1, you have Duane the Elf Rogue, who hits Lv6 and starts taking levels in Lurker (maybe because he was transformed into a Drider or something? How does a PC-race person get to start taking monster class levels?). He will continue to take levels in Lurker until he hits Lv11, at which point he will multiclass again into Witch King.

Example #2, you have Barry the Fire Giant who begins life as a Lv9 Brute (no less!), and he must gain a 10th Brute level through XP before he can multiclass into Divine Oni or Great Forest Spirit for his 11th-15th levels.

Example #3, you have Sheila the Medusa who begins life as a Lv5 Lurker and if she gains another level she may either choose a new Prestige-level class of some kind, maybe Witch King Queen, or continue as a Lurker for another 5 levels (since the Lurker class, like all monster classes, is 10 levels long).

Do I have that right, and if I do, where does all this business about subclassing come in?

[DenizenKane]

#1 Duane would start as a Rogue Lurker and pick up Drider abilities built into the Lurker class somehow. But, the catch is, he gets the Multiclass version of the Rogue and the Lurker. Which are written to be "half" the class while still providing level appropriate abilities.

Each class will have a Full Version, and Multiclass Version.

So, when Duane hits 6, He takes his first prestige class, and is now Rogue Lurker 5/Witch King 1, until 11, where he takes a higher tier class.

It's possible there could be voltron prestige classes too, that way you could be Lurker Rogue 5/Lurker Witch King 5.

Fire Giant in this theoretical situation can't get it's signature fire giant ability until level 9 (probably a giant fire meteor or something), so until then, you pick up other level appropriate things that are giant-like until you hit 9.

[Omegonthesane]

I thought the other idea was that monster classes would only exist as a multiclass version, so that monster shock troops only got boring numbers and inadequate abilities to compete with players of the same "level" while named monsters got to both be an adventurer of their level and have their signature abilities.

[DenizenKane]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Username17]

I thought the other idea was that monster classes would only exist as a multiclass version, so that monster shock troops only got boring numbers and inadequate abilities to compete with players of the same "level" while named monsters got to both be an adventurer of their level and have their signature abilities.

Yes. Also DrP successfully argued that there should be a level breakpoint at 6th where you get Advanced Classes as well as 11th where you get Prestige Classes.
So in our examples:

• Duane is a (Multiclass Rogue) / Lurker 5 until and when he levels he become a Shadowdancer or a (Multiclass Shadowdancer) / Lurker.
• Barry is a Brute 9, which entitles him to a full set of 5 levels of Multiclass something. And then he is also entitled to 4 levels of some Multiclassed version of an Advanced Class. For his next level, he'll take the capstone of his Advanced Class multiclassed with Brute, and then at 11th level he'll become a Divine Oni or Great Forest Spirit. But at 9th level he is a Brute 9 / Berserker 5 / Ravager 4.
• Sheila is in essentially the same position as Duane, because Drider and Medusa are both level 5 Lurker monsters.

-Username17

[Grek]

I think that you need to work on your terminology a bit. Right now, we have:

• Foo Classes, which go from levels 1 to 10. Requires no levels in another Foo, Bar or Qux class.
• Bar Classes, which go from levels 1 to 6. Requires no levels in another Foo, Bar or Qux class.
• Baz Classes, which go from levels 7 to 10. Requires a completed Bar class.
• Quux Elements, which are weaksauce versions of Foo (or Bar?) classes that go from 1 to 10.
• Quuz Elements, which are weaksauce monster classes that go from 1 to 10.
• Qux Multiclasses, which are created by combining any two Quux or Quuz into a new class. Requires no levels in another Foo, Bar or Qux class.
• Corge Classes, which go from 11 to 15 and do stuff involving castles and armies. Requires a completed Foo, Baz or Qux class.
• Xyzzy Classes, which go from 16 to 20 and do stuff involving pretender gods. Requires a completed Corge class.

Please substitute in a memorable, descriptive, unambiguous name for each metasyntactic variable.

[DSMatticus]

Anything that goes from 1 to X obviously requires no levels in any other class, because it starts at 1. And this hypothetical system doesn't have open multiclassing or level adjustments or anything like that, so nothing 'requires' a completed class of the previous tier because you can't possibly not have completed a class of the previous tier.

The breakpoints are 1-5, 6-10, 11+, and whatever's going on with epic I haven't paid any attention to.

If it goes from 1-10, it's just a (base) class.

If it goes from 1-5, it's still just a (base) class.

If it goes from 6-10, it's an advanced class. If you're coming off a class that goes 1-5, you need an advanced class. If you're halfway through a class that goes 1-10, you don't need an advanced class but you can take one instead of finishing your base class.

For 11+, it's a prestige class. None of the classes you've already taken go past 10, so once you hit 11 you have to take your first level in a prestige class. This is supposed to be a hard tier change.

Multiclassing is basically gestalting. I have been unclear on the specifics of that. The two questions I have not been able to figure out are:
1) Is multiclassing symmetrical, i.e., Shaman (Berserker) = Berserker (Shaman) = Shaman/Berserker? Or is it asymmetrical, with a primary class that trades away some of its features for the features of a secondary class?
2) Are single class characters supposed to exist at all?
3) Actually, while I'm thinking about unknowns, here's a third; can you multiclass in the prestige tier? I'm not sure that would be at all helpful
4) And a fourth; if your base class goes from 1-10, can you switch from a multiclass character on 1-5 to a single class character on 6-10? I.e. Wizard/Controller 1-5, Wizard 6-10. What about in the other direction, i.e. Wizard 1-5, Wizard/Shadowdancer 6-10?

Either way, every class has a variant you use for multiclassing. Monster classes are weaker than regular classes, and are already valid multiclasses.

I will say that the break at 5/6 makes the system seem much more reasonable. 'Giant' really isn't worth 10 levels, and filling out the 10 levels of brute you'd have to take as part of being a 'giant' by taking random monster abilities off the brute class list would leave your character looking less like a giant and more like Frankenstein's Chimera. I wanted to sacrifice abilities off the character's class in blocks of 3. This sacrifices abilities off the character's class in blocks of 5. That is probably large enough to be a bit silly - a monster that can be duplicated by 3 monster levels will still be 40% shit the PC thought was cool, but that's better than the 70% it would be if they were forced to take 10 levels instead of 5. And it's not like 3 perfectly the solves the problem, either, it's just a yet slightly smaller unit of representation.

[Grek]

Having classes that go from 1-5 and other classes that go from 1 to 10 is fucking stupid and you should never do that.

[Chamomile]

Second. My first thought on reading Grek's post was "why do we have Foo classes when we already have Bar and Baz classes?"