New Setting: Lies, Mutants, and other offbrand setting eleme

[K]

Ok, I don't want to know.

Seriously, I don't want to know that every Pit Fiend has Fireball. I don't want to know that Caucasian elves all know how to use longswords, and I don't want to know that the secret ruler of Insert Kingdom Here is a mind flayer and his druid pawn is obviously X level because he can turn into a Earth Elemental.

Why?

1. No surprises or drama.
Players don't fear the things they know. Once a player can recall the exact stats of a monster they are fighting, the fear factor of the monster has dropped dramatically. What might have been a dramatic combat now becomes a routine clean-up.

2. Tactical Overspecializtion:
Once players know what monsters can do, they can and will overspecialize. If you know that 90% of the monsters in the MM can't resist a Trip with your stat X, then you will keep specializing in that and ask someone else to come up with a tactic for the other 10%. This means that players rarely have an incentive to generalize.

It also means that encounters that should be challenging just aren't if the players have any time to prepare. "Ok, we are fighting Mind Flayers. Put up the Magic Circle vs Evil, and we need the melee fighters with boosted Will saves and flying and everyone else needs to stay out of the X range of the mind blast. Make sure to cast Dimensional Anchor on the high treasure leader."

Since encounters aren't challenging when you do that, DMs have to throw in inappropriately CRed monsters to compensate, and sometimes TPK the party.

3. Bad bloat without good variety:
To counter the above problems, designers will come up with crap like Blackscale lizard men that take up page space just to get a different kind of lizard man to surprise PCs in one encounter because while everyone has MM1 memorized, knowledge of the later MMs tends to lag. Not only have you bloated the game for the sake of a single encounter, you'll have people believing that you've actually added to the game because you came up with ten variations on a couple of monsters. We pay the price because rather than have ten spots for story-creating cultures, we get ten versions of the same thing("mmm, I need lizard guys for my swamp...let's see...Trogldyte, lizard man, blackscale lizard man, Antropormorphic lizards, yuan-ti, those MMIII antimagic lizards....oh damn.... )

4. Cultural stupidity.
You really can't have different cultures if everything in your setting is set in stone. If you try to have black skinned elves who live in cloud castles you immediately have to have the argument "why are the drow living in clouds castles! They live underground and worship Lolth and can't go out in the sun. WTF!"

5. Overcomplicated design.
So I want stone giants that feel unique because the players are assaulting a keep full of them. Crap, I have to stat out ten class combos and pick feats and items and .....

Combining classes and monsters is really complicated. Really. Design time for your adventure should be 90% story and 10% statting, not the other way around.


---------------------------

The Solution:

1. Flexible monster creation.
Make every monsters some of list A for their type of monster and some of type B for their background.

So, imagine you want to create a Dream Serpent for the mountains near the city your PCs adventure in, and its a giant snake that puts people to sleep. So you take some abilities off of the Snake chart like Construct and Tail Whip and some off the Magical Monster (enchantment) list like Sleep Gaze and Confusing Roar.

If you want a dark dream serpent that sits in graveyards for your adventure that week, you can change the flavor and then pick some stuff off the Snake list and some more off the Magical Monster list but now you pick Sleep Gaze and Fear Roar.

2. Make monster's names into titles:
A Chimera is a mix of several creatures, a Succubus a powerful fiendish seducer, and Elves only share a single ability called Elf that gives you a long life, pointed ears, and something like Bardic Knowledge to represent your long life.

3. Example monsters are cultures.
The Drow are a culture of planehopping demon-dealing elves from Greyhawk that live underground and worship a Spider Queen. They have nothing in common with the blackskinned elves of the desert of the Burning Sands who are peaceful animists who dabble in wind magic.

4. Squad combat:
Small monsters do big things if they work together. Sure, each goblin might have 5 HPS, but when five of them charge a guy they can do a powerful Gobo Grapple attack. Then PCs can cut through a pile of them and still be challenged.

5. Lie:
Sure, make one supplement where you say that the people of Cormyr are rapacious raiders and empiric builders and have another that paints them as world leaders in justice and fair dealing, and yet another where they are warmongering petty city states run by corrupt nobles. The real world has little true knowledge and we have libraries and the internet, why should a fantasy world have more?

6. Scaled abilities:
If your druid can ever turn into an elemental as part of his class, he can do it at 1st level. Sure, at 1st level its an earthy man-sized guy and at 17th level its a castle crushing behemoth, but its what you do.

[CatharzGodfoot]

That's a great overview, and for the most part I agree with you.

However, I do want to know.
If I run in to a pit fiend, I want to be able to assume that his flaming aura will burn me and the acidic green goo dripping from his fangs is poison. I want to be able to assume that a heavily armored guy will act in a heavily armored fashion. If a pit fiend can't make great balls of fire, there should be a specific reason for this break with the norm.

1201721986[/unixtime]]
6. Scaled abilities:
If your druid can ever turn into an elemental as part of his class, he can do it at 1st level. Sure, at 1st level its an earthy man-sized guy and at 17th level its a castle crushing behemoth, but its what you do.

Why can't somebody gain the ability to turn into an elemental? Why must it be known from birth, or possibly from when they 'come into play'? I mean, yeah, it's good to give superheroes the option of starting out with their signature abilities (Nobody wants to play The Hulk before he can get angry), but at the same time there should be room for gain and loss.

[K]

1201729355[/unixtime]]That's a great overview, and for the most part I agree with you.

However, I do want to know.
If I run in to a pit fiend, I want to be able to assume that his flaming aura will burn me and the acidic green goo dripping from his fangs is poison. I want to be able to assume that a heavily armored guy will act in a heavily armored fashion. If a pit fiend can't make great balls of fire, there should be a specific reason for this break with the norm.

Yeh, I don't want most of that.

A flaming aura should burn, sure, but green goo? Why can't green goo just be green goo? Or acidic slime, and not poison? Or even a symptom of a "goo attack"?

Why balls of fire? I mean, if it has a replacement ability, then why does there even need to be an explanation? Maybe its a Pit Fiend with a magma attack, or a flurry of poison stingers like a manticore, or necromantic blast? Those all all demony things, so I don't see why you should be able to go "eh, a Pit Fiend....we need fire resistance."

1201729355[/unixtime]]

1201721986[/unixtime]]
6. Scaled abilities:
If your druid can ever turn into an elemental as part of his class, he can do it at 1st level. Sure, at 1st level its an earthy man-sized guy and at 17th level its a castle crushing behemoth, but its what you do.

Why can't somebody gain the ability to turn into an elemental? Why must it be known from birth, or possibly from when they 'come into play'? I mean, yeah, it's good to give superheroes the option of starting out with their signature abilities (Nobody wants to play The Hulk before he can get angry), but at the same time there should be room for gain and loss.

Knowing all of a character's abilities and level just by being able to see one ability is bad. There has to be some wiggle room so that one might know generally what a thing might do, but not be able to pin down all of its abilities.

I mean, you should be able to say "hey, its an illusionist...some of this will not be real" but not be able to say "hey, its an illusionist...let's raise our Will saves and ignore this guy."

My idea has been that class gives set power abilities and you get more as you level from your class list, and then on top of that you get all your feats at 1st level and they rise in power as you level. Do you want every druid to be an Earth Elemental? I don't, so I'd make it a feat.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I think K's saying that 'Elemental Shape' should be selectable at 1st level, or indeed at any level, along with any other ability on the list of Druid class features. So there's no minimum level to turn into earth, just as there's no minimum level to cast Goodberry.

At the same time, some effects are just higher-level effects. It doesn't matter if you can only teleport 5 feet to a location you can see, that still negates doors better than picking locks.

[RandomCasualty]

Having a bunch of lists you've got to choose from sounds like a lot of work, similar to picking PrCs for monsters and such.

[K]

1201731219[/unixtime]]Having a bunch of lists you've got to choose from sounds like a lot of work, similar to picking PrCs for monsters and such.

I think all the work is on the design end, but use is easy.

Lets say you have background lists like Desert, Arctic, Mageslave, Soldier.

Creature lists look like Snake, Magical Beast(school), Undead, Elemental (Air), Goblin, Demon.

You can double up on creature lists if you can't find the right background.

I want to make an elemental from the desert (Elemental(Air)/desert).

I want a demon snake (Snake/demon).

I want a bound demon servant(demon/mageslave).

I want mummies like The Mummy.(Desert/Undead)

I want a Goblin army commander(Goblin/soldier).

Then you pick a number of abilities. Stats are based entirely on level.

I don't see it taking more than a few minutes. The total number of abilities should be 4+level off of set lists.

[Orion]

1201721986[/unixtime]]Ok, I don't want to know.

I couldn't agree less.

Seriously, I don't want to know that every Pit Fiend has Fireball. I don't want to know that Caucasian elves all know how to use longswords, and I don't want to know that the secret ruler of Insert Kingdom Here is a mind flayer and his druid pawn is obviously X level because he can turn into a Earth Elemental.

Pit fiends are big old fire devils. Thy shoot fire. If they don't, they aren't pit fiends. I have no objection to the introduction of new high-end devils, bt in what sense is it a pit fiend if it's not firey?

Elves using longswords is a cultural feature -- you know, flavor, the thing that makes us care about having races at all. You could certainly have woodsman elves who all carry axes in your campaign, but whatever the signature weapon of elves is, it has to be known to the players. That way, when they find a magic axe, the bard player can say "probably elf-made."

As for the druid example, high-level people should obviously be high level, and they should obviously be high level because they do dramatic, scary, awesome things that low-level people do not.

1. No surprises or drama.
Players don't fear the things they know. Once a player can recall the exact stats of a monster they are fighting, the fear factor of the monster has dropped dramatically. What might have been a dramatic combat now becomes a routine clean-up.

This is a somewhat valid objection. But there are already plenty of ways to inject surprises. Traps, bizarre equipment, hidden reinforcements, advanced monsters, and of course NPCs.

Also, combining different monsters to present threats the PCs have never had to deal with before. Maybe they know to stay out of mindblast range. So pair the mind flayers with some archers. That'll scare the PCs and make them think, but at least they'll have the relevant iformation to do the thinking.

2. Tactical Overspecializtion:
Once players know what monsters can do, they can and will overspecialize. If you know that 90% of the monsters in the MM can't resist a Trip with your stat X, then you will keep specializing in that and ask someone else to come up with a tactic for the other 10%. This means that players rarely have an incentive to generalize.

degrees of generalization and specialization are a genre issue, and fixable directly by making it more or less expensive to have a secondary shtick. That said, knowledge directly encourages generalization. having three different attacks only helpes if you know when to use each one. Otherwise, you're better off maxing out one and using it all the time.

It also means that encounters that should be challenging just aren't if the players have any time to prepare. "Ok, we are fighting Mind Flayers. Put up the Magic Circle vs Evil, and we need the melee fighters with boosted Will saves and flying and everyone else needs to stay out of the X range of the mind blast. Make sure to cast Dimensional Anchor on the high treasure leader."

Then don't give them time to prepare, or make the enemies prepared for *them.*

Seriously though, your example is exactly what SHOULD happen. the mid flayers show up, you have a moment of "oh, shit," then you take confident, decisive action to stop them.

I want my heroes to be trained professionals, which emans they respond quickly and approrpiately to threats. you seem to want them to lucky kids, with the system rigged so that the PCs win even if they dick around and try random shit without a plan.

I want the PCs to win on purpose, and you want them to win by accident.

3. Bad bloat without good variety:
To counter the above problems, designers will come up with crap like Blackscale lizard men that take up page space just to get a different kind of lizard man to surprise PCs in one encounter because while everyone has MM1 memorized, knowledge of the later MMs tends to lag. Not only have you bloated the game for the sake of a single encounter, you'll have people believing that you've actually added to the game because you came up with ten variations on a couple of monsters.

You're atually advocating the same solution -- making up mroe monsters. Only instead of simply having mroe different monsters than you cna keep track of, the number of monsters in your system is litereally infinite.

That said, unpredictability has its place. Humanoids are flexible and you don't know what spells a wizard knows by looking at him. Templates or just mutations can add superpowers to a monster -- but it should be one dramatic and unexpected power on a familiar chassis.

6. Scaled abilities:
If your druid can ever turn into an elemental as part of his class, he can do it at 1st level. Sure, at 1st level its an earthy man-sized guy and at 17th level its a castle crushing behemoth, but its what you do.

[/quote]

HELL no. This is why MMOs are sosatisfying. you go up a level, you don't actually change, you just get higher numbers. But! your enemies have higher numbers too. So you're actually not any better.

The onyl way advancement feels like advancement is if you go from a a guy with a sword to a flying guy with a flaming sword, spirit minions, and healing hands. Otherwise you're just treading water.

[virgil]

I largely avoid some of those monster concerns already with D&D in my games. I use templates in a sane fashion, and I change flavour text at the drop of a hat.

The party is in the plane of air, & I want to throw a CR 2 flying creature that's the size of a cat, but I don't want it to be an imp? So I take the stats of an imp, make it an outsider (air), switch out its poison with a Fort save or take 3d4 while describing it as a belker's claws, make it have DR 5/magic or cold iron, fire resistance dropped for electricity resistance, drop its spell-like abilities except for the invisibility, and give it the ability to enlarge itself at will to a small creature (removing alternate form).

The effort & thought took long enough to type the above without having to pause, and mechanically it should remain CR 2 against a party.

The stone giant keep is an easy fix, because I can change the color of frost & fire giants and describe them as tougher stone giants with no work at all; spellcasting stone giants can be made with a slightly tweaked night/green hag (or even an ogre mage) where we add an innate/non-magical enlarge person to their stats.

I can continue this ad nauseum. The gist of it is that even with just the monster manual and judicious use of templates, my players rarely have the ability to understand their enemy beyond the obvious (don't sneak attack the corpses, don't grapple the elephant-sized monsters, basic creature type properties, etc).

Of course, #2 remains a problem, simply because of patterns of the game. Virtually nothing has Balance and falls to grease, bipedals lose at trip unless they're bruisers (and that style is still easy to infer), touch attacks automatically hit, etc.

[Crissa]

This is why I play Nethack.

While the basic numbers stay the same - their combination with other effects changes with each time you sit down and play. Admittedly, that healing potions are blue and poison is pink in one game and reversed in another isn't a big deal on pen and paper... The fact that some rings are iron in one game (and can be dissolved) and different rings are bone or gem (and cannot be dissolved) changes the tactics you can use.

Honestly, while the genre may be tied to the rules... The setting itself need not be. I want a rules system that encourages DMs to pick a setting off a shelf or make one of their own, and maybe Pit fiends in one world have fire, maybe others have darkness, ice, or are merely brutes. I don't care. That's the blue and pink of the pen and paper.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1201732175[/unixtime]]
Then you pick a number of abilities. Stats are based entirely on level.

I don't see it taking more than a few minutes. The total number of abilities should be 4+level off of set lists.

Well, I see the problem being that your abilities are going to need to be level specific, also not all abilities are evenly balanced. A medusa's petrifying gaze is much more valuable than a gargoyle's ability to mimic a stone statue. I mean somehow you're going to have to balance and measure these abilities so that they're somewhat even. This is going to be done through either paying multiple ability slots for good stuff, or just removing minor abilities altogether. In practice it's going to be hard to write out the tables so they actually mean anything, to the point that it may be easier to just have people assign whatever abilities they want without having tables.

The thing is that you can't just assign abilities haphazardly and call it balanced. You've got to actually look at what the creature really does in a given combat and if it's actually a reasonable threat. Just picking abilities off a table won't do that for you.

[K]

1201736888[/unixtime]]

1201732175[/unixtime]]
Then you pick a number of abilities. Stats are based entirely on level.

I don't see it taking more than a few minutes. The total number of abilities should be 4+level off of set lists.

Well, I see the problem being that your abilities are going to need to be level specific, also not all abilities are evenly balanced. A medusa's petrifying gaze is much more valuable than a gargoyle's ability to mimic a stone statue. I mean somehow you're going to have to balance and measure these abilities so that they're somewhat even. This is going to be done through either paying multiple ability slots for good stuff, or just removing minor abilities altogether. In practice it's going to be hard to write out the tables so they actually mean anything, to the point that it may be easier to just have people assign whatever abilities they want without having tables.

The thing is that you can't just assign abilities haphazardly and call it balanced. You've got to actually look at what the creature really does in a given combat and if it's actually a reasonable threat. Just picking abilities off a table won't do that for you.

Abilities have to be level-specific, and I think that goes without saying.

And things have to be balanced. I mean, a gargoyle that is set to a medusa level needs a Stone Chameleon power thats not just camo, but something as powerful as a SoD. Maybe at that level is makes you invulnerable, but you can't take actions. I'd have to work out the details in design.

[Username17]

I think there should be monster lists which present the ability for a range of abilities. And then there should also be a sample mid point critter that can be used right out of the box.

Basilisks, for example, have an attack power. It could be death breath, or stoning gaze, or paralytic touch, or whatever. But the sample Basilisk happens to have stoning gaze and bramble running.

-Username17

[Aycarus]

I completely agree with the idea. I would claim that one needs to find some sort of middle ground between being completely predictable and being completely unpredictable. Certain aspects of a creature should be maintained for consistency reasons (ie. a stone golem should be vulnerable to stone-related attacks), but changing the flavor can make things more interesting. I.e. instead of stone golems all pounding on creatures with their fists, why not make one of their arms into a giant hammer or lead pipe?

If specialized to a single critter, I could see it working very simply, as in the following example:

iDemon Classic
- monster statistics
- regular attacks
- special attacks (throw fireballs)
- special abilities (vocal aura of unspeakable evil, fire resistance)
etc.

All modifications listed below are as iDemon Classic except where noted:

iDemon Green
- replace "throw fireballs" with "shoot lightning"

iDemon Blue
- replace "fire resistance" with "cold resistance"
- change "fire damage" to "cold damage"

iDemon Red
As iDemon Classic,
- replace "vocal aura of unspeakable evil" with "Bono's aura of charitable donation"

--

In this case, it's completely unnecessary to waste page space describing an entirely new type of monster when you're only making minor changes like above. Now, in addition to having a list of creature-specific mods, you can also have a [desert] list, a [soldier] list, a [cheese] list, etc. that adds to the difficulty of the creature and adds fancy new abilities in a balanced manner.

[Orion]

But even if you rejigger the abilitiesw to generate custom powers for the demons in your campaign, it's extremely important that the players *know what those powers are*

[CatharzGodfoot]

1201747598[/unixtime]]But even if you rejigger the abilitiesw to generate custom powers for the demons in your campaign, it's extremely important that the players *know what those powers are*

Maybe. If iRed K'zidtho secretly knows 'five pointed palm exploding heart', it should probably be possible for the PCs to discover that fact. By no means should it be easy.

On the other hand, it should probably be possible to determine with a simple 'assess' check that she's probably a martial artist.

[JonSetanta]

I like the ideas in OP, K.

[Username17]

1201747598[/unixtime]]But even if you rejigger the abilitiesw to generate custom powers for the demons in your campaign, it's extremely important that the players *know what those powers are*

Yes and no. Let's look at the Basilisk again. You have various nodes in various locations which are creating monsters, and so you have Basilisks who live in bogs, or in deserts, or brambliscious thickets, or whatever. So its mobility powers and resistances are going to vary somewhat one to the other. Some of them should be capable of chicken flight. Some of them should resist fire. And it has a range of death attacks, which trigger off of touches, breath weapons, gazes, miasma, whatever.

So what you as a player know is how bramblecrawl works (the creature can move and fight through heavy foliage without penalty), and how chicken flight works (the creature can take to the air for short periods of time by enhancing jumps), and how Cloud of Death works (the critter has a persistant area around it full of fail and leaves a Diablo style trail behind it that lasts for one round). And they get to know that those powers are available to the Basilisk. And through observation and rumor gathering, you can probably deduce which setup a specific basilisk is running with (most poor flyers amongst the Basilisks will have wings for example, the death cloud is somewhat more obvious than the touch of death).

It has access to persistant, reactive attacks. That's a big deal. And the players know to expect that. But which reactive death effect should be potentially new each time.

-Username17

[virgil]

So you group equivalent powers (death touch = death body odour = death gaze), and then design monsters with the knowledge that you can switch out powers within their respective 'family'? Or do you create a monster and design a set of abilities that are interchangeable?