Drunken Review: 4e DMG 2

[Whipstitch]

Frank, what it's it like being so profoundly wrong? Does it hurt? Is ignorance really bliss. Do tell.

For those of us not in the know, what is Frank wrong about?

If I remember this Krakatoa guy correctly, I wouldn't expect any deep revelations here. His arguments typically start out with "You are totes wrong" and eventually devolve to "It doesn't matter that you're right." For example, he's prone to defending 4E and Skill Challenges by squawking about how you could punt the issue and eyeball individual Skill Checks to create your own resolutions. Which, you know, is true insofar that house rules can do pretty much whatever you want, but it does nothing to excuse the fact that Skill Challenges as printed remain a waste of ink and time.

[talozin]

Mostly, this review is reinforcing my belief that Robin Laws is one of the smarter guys in the gaming world. He managed to get himself a gig that did not require him to write material for the 4th edition rules, did not require that he even learn the 4th edition rules, and instead just got a paycheck to rant for a while about how to be MC.

Probably a pretty good paycheck, too. I mean, by RPG writing standards.

[kzt]

Robin Laws? The moron who couldn't check copyright to find out a vastly popular game existed with the name Hero Quest (copyright Milton Bradley/GW), when he renamed his crappy RPG from Hero Wars, to the existing product name to cause confusion, is supposedly a good writer?

Umm, Trademarks protect names, not copyright.

Anyhow, it was hardly an accident. Greg Stafford had wanted to release a game called Heroquest for a long time, but couldn't make the mechanics work even vaguely right. That's what he hired Robin Laws to do. In the meantime GW published their game.

GW abandoned the trademark on April 5, 1999 and it was eventually noticed by someone and on May 15, 2001 Greg Stafford's Issaries Inc claimed it and the successor still owns it.

[Username17]

Krakatoa is a Something Awful Goonsquadder who periodically invades the Den in order to troll. He makes really really bad arguments because he is a 4rry who spends almost all of his time in the grognards.txt bubble. If you argue with him for a bit, he will eventually be caught in a lie or fallacy so embarrassing that he'll flee back to the warm comfort of his echo chamber of choice. But this is a waste of effort, because he'll leave shortly if you ignore him and in any case he won't have learned anything the next time he arrives.

In the meantime, he will be copypastaing sections of this thread or other threads on the Den and then attributing the contents to me (most of it will be written by me, some of it won't be, Krkatoa can't be fucked to check the by line of posts). The level of mockery he engages in is stuff like "Ha ha! Frank thinks 4 step math functions take more table time than 2 step math functions! What an idiot!" and "Ha ha! Frank thinks it is difficult and time consuming to calculate the odds of having pairs and triples come up in dice pools! And this guy is going to be a doctor!" It's just really weird.

They are so wrapped up in their weird hatred of me personally that when they grab text out of context to make fun of me with, they don't even get text where I said something that was controversial, let alone wrong. Not even things where I said something that sounded wrong, stupid, or vile when bereft of its original context. It's really bizarre, considering that I say controversial things all the time and I speak sarcastically fairly often and you could just cherry pick stuff that could be legitimately disagreed with. Instead, they just grab seemingly random text and spam Something Awful with it. I'd be surprised that they put up with it over there, except of course that it's an echo chamber full of innumerate 4rries who have no fucking idea whether a statement about math is fundamentally indisputably true or not.

Later today: The Customizing Monsters chapter. But please don't let this thread fill up with Something Awful shit heads thread shitting with their stupid non-arguments.

-Username17

[Maxus]

Not a problem there.

I'm out of trollfeed.

[shadzar]

Robin Laws? The moron who couldn't check copyright to find out a vastly popular game existed with the name Hero Quest (copyright Milton Bradley/GW), when he renamed his crappy RPG from Hero Wars, to the existing product name to cause confusion, is supposedly a good writer?

Umm, Trademarks protect names, not copyright.

Anyhow, it was hardly an accident. Greg Stafford had wanted to release a game called Heroquest for a long time, but couldn't make the mechanics work even vaguely right. That's what he hired Robin Laws to do. In the meantime GW published their game.

GW abandoned the trademark on April 5, 1999 and it was eventually noticed by someone and on May 15, 2001 Greg Stafford's Issaries Inc claimed it and the successor still owns it.

Except GW wasnt the only one that was holding rights to it. Milton Bradley was. and they have been owned by HASBRO since 1984, and HASBRO doesnt let rights lapse or go to anyone else.

HASBRO is like DISNEY when it comes to IP. they want theirs and everyone else's for ALL times so keep the trademarks.

so you are saying that because a new product wasnt published for 10 years, the name which forced Sierra to change the name of their unprotected series of video games, just up and dissolved?

I can understand in regards to a company name like say TSR that is being reused a decade later, but a product name can be as well? legal or not, i say it is at least unethical and purposefully preying on the confused consumer thinking it associates with the previous product as those people who used it are still alive after only a decade.

its sa unethical as 4th edition being called D&D, calling the website database of rules for it "Rules Cyclopedia", and publishing a "red box" with the same art. the only purpose was to prey on the wallets of the consumer with a known name and sucker them into buying something.

How much of a boat can you repair or replace before it is no longer the same boat?

He had Hero Wars, he could have continued using it, if it and he were any good, then the name could not matter. Name gain credit over time via quality.

Makes since this guy worked for HASBRO then since they both practice unethical predatory marketing.

[kzt]

You'll have to take it up with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Do a TESS search for the word heroquest, then write them offended emails about how this can't possibly be correct.

[Username17]

Chapter 4: Customizing Monsters

The 4th edition D&D monster was really defined by something that Mike Mearls called "Exception Based Design". If you're at all familiar with design theory or computer programming, you probably know that exception based design is an actual thing, and 4e didn't do that. Actual exception based design is where you have a list of standing instructions and each thing you design is defined only by the ways in which it differs from those standing instructions. But you don't have to think about that ever again, because what passes for exception based design in the Mearlsverse is something more akin to Exceptionalism: the idea that each and ever monster is a weirdly specific special snow flake that doesn't pay the slightest lip service to standing instructions of any kind and does not fit into any identifiable patterns.

So in 4e, you can play a Halfling. You might be a Rogue or a Sorcerer or whatever. And there's a Halfling Thief in the monster manual who is there in case you have an NPC that is a Halfling and a Rogue, and he has completely different rules from you. You're a Halfling Rogue Player Character, he's a Halfling Rogue Non-Player Character, and never between shall meet. There are totally different rules involved. And there's also a Halfling Slinger, and he doesn't use the same rules as the Halfling Thief, and so on and so forth. Heck, there's a Halfling Prowler in the Monster Manual, and he's an NPC and a Rogue and a Halfling, but he is completely different from the Halfling Thief as well.

What this means is that customizing monsters is actually really fucking hard. Way harder than it has any right to be. If you have a Hill Giant, it is armed with a club and some rocks. But nothing about it is actually derivable from that fact. If you had a Hill Giant who was armed with a bow and a spear instead, there is actually no way to figure out what they should be capable of. The Hill Giant's available club and rock attacks are exceptional, not based on their level, their class, their strength, their skills, their weapons, their type, or anything else. Hill Giants make sweeping greatclub attacks that attack two characters, but that is an exceptional state of affairs. There is no reason you would expect them to specifically do that based on the fact that they are giants, that they have greatclubs, that they are 13th level, or any other fact you care to name about them.

These are 4e Troglodytes. The Troglodyte with a club is a different monster from the Troglodyte with a spear, and they have separate entries in the Monster Manual.

So the DMG2 has a chapter dedicated to customizing monsters, which is something that is desperately needed and extremely difficult to do in this system. And so they set out to do this in three stages: with Themes, with Class Templates, and with new guidelines for making monsters. They need that last one because it turns out the numbers cranked out by the original monster creation rules were a death spiral of stupid and they need massive overhauls. It is historically interesting that these numbers weren't out that long before they came up with an even newer set for the MM3 the very next year.

Themes are the first suggestion for how to go about customizing monsters. Each "Theme" is a short list of powers and you're supposed to hand out one attack and one utility power to a themed monster. But you're also supposed to only use one or two "themed" monster in an encounter, and you aren't supposed to usually pick the same powers off a theme list for any monster. So you may be asking yourself how this is even different from just having a big list of monster powers and letting "important" (or at least, different) monsters pick off the big list. And... hmmm... that's a pretty good point. It's really not. The idea is that the ability lists are actually themed towards one of the available groups of enemies (Demogorgon, Orcus, Devils, Fey, Goblins, Drow, Yuan-Ti, Dragons, and Far Realm), and thus that you'd make a group of enemies where they were a part of a faction and then you'd give one of them abilities from that faction in order to make them "feel" like they were part of the faction. This is actually a perfectly fine idea. In fact, if you'd had something kind of like this, you could have made it be possible for monsters to show up with different weapons (imagine if you had "sword themes" and "spear themes" so that a Hill Giant could trade out their club sweep for some sort of spear impale attack if they were using a spear instead of a club).

The system falls flat of course. Firstly, a lot of the thematic links between the faction and the ability are very tenuous. Some of them are just plain generic. There's one where the monster gets an initiative bonus. There's another one that gives the monster an attack bonus if they target an enemy that is next to one of their allies. These abilities could literally be in any theme, and don't make monsters any more devilish or demonic respectively. Secondly, the attack powers are an absolute joke. Each one is written up to be level agnostic, so it's literally supposed to work at level 1 and at level 30. Even with 4e's bullshit lack of real growth that is stupid and ridiculous. Even relying on a lot of attacks that use the players' attacks against themselves (thereby scaling somewhat to PC level) it doesn't work out well. And we're still no closer to being able to give an NPC a longbow in place of their javelins or vice versa. The themes are a lot of work for something that doesn't actually give us even the most basic ability to throw up a Drow with a battleaxe or a Minotaur with net and trident.

Finally, and this is sort of nitpick, but the descriptions of these abilities are out to lunch. There's an elemental resistance ability you can give to Tiamat's chosen that give them Resist 5 to the element of your choice under weird circumstances. And the description says that this allows dragon breath to catch the monster in its AoE without fear. Dragon breath, even in the grotesque mockery of padded sumo fights that is 4th edition, still does more than 5 points of damage fairly often. So I don't actually see how Chromatic Boon allows a monster to "use dragon breath without fear of including their allies in the blast." It just... doesn't actually do that.

Then we have Templates. In 4th edition, a Template converts a monster from "normal" to "Elite". Basically that means that you throw in one templated monster instead of 2 non-templated monsters. That's not a terrible plan, but of course it is marred by the fact that 4e elite monsters are incredibly boring.

Fighting Elites is kind of like this.

But even beyond that, these Templates suffer from the same problem with levels as the Themes did. Fundamentally, powers for 1st level and powers for 27th level just don't look that similar. Or at least, they really shouldn't. A first level monster throwing around an attack that does 3d10+ Con Mod is pretty horrendous. And at 27th level it's an actual joke. The templates don't scale well, and I don't know what level is supposed to be the "sweet spot". I suspect they were never playtested and actually there totally isn't a sweet spot and they don't make any sense at any level.

Most of the templates are there to make things bigger in some vaguely descriptive way. There's "grizzled veterans" and "mad alchemists" and stuff. Actually, the list of things a monster can be are way more interesting than what player characters can be. But of course, none of it actually means anything, because being a "Hellbound Soldier" basically just means that you get a big enough pile of extra hit points that combats involving you are boring slogs involving a lot of spamming of at-will abilities. "Mad Alchemists" don't get any actual alchemical abilities or even any skill points - they just have a small and short range AoE attack flavored as throwing fire bombs and a giant pile of extra hit points.

But there are also templates that make a monster be "kind of like a Character" in that they label the monster as a member of a class that a player character might be a member of. These are basically completely incoherent. You are supposed to apply some of the rules for being a player character and the rules for being a monster at the same time. They don't fit together very well. I genuinely have no idea what is supposed to happen to the Armor Class of a monster that is wearing armor specific to a class, because monster armor classes are totally arbitrary and have absolutely nothing to do with the weapons they are supposedly using. Monsters don't have feats or gain any bonus for using magic weapons, which basically means that their PC attack powers (which require feats and magic weapons for math fixes on their to-hit rolls) won't ever hit. And so on and so forth. These "class templates" are super short and don't appear to have been thought through at all. And the outputs they give are pants on head retarded.

And finally we get to the money of the chapter: making monsters from scratch. You will need to do this constantly, because as previously noted giving a Hill Giant a spear instead of a club involves writing up a new monster from scratch. The advice here is... virtually non-existent. In fact, it's just a page and a half updating the shit useless advice in the DMG1 to reflect their second year errata to minions and solos and such (making minions slightly less useless at higher levels by having them show up in greater numbers, and making solos slightly less annoying by reducing their defenses slightly). That's it. We're still at "make up a thing for a spear using monster to do with their spear and have that signature mechanic you just fucking wrote yourself be the defining detail of the monster you're writing yourself and call it a Hill Giant with a Spear if that makes you happy" territory.

Next Up: Chapter 5: Adventures.

-Username17

[ishy]

Well for what it is worth, creating a monster from scratch is really easy in 4e.
In fact you can just make up the stats as you plop the monster down on the table. Because things like race and size make no difference, you can just guesstimate it's stats. And give it abilities that sounds cool on the spur of the moment, since special attacks are usually not related to the monster at all in the first place. Giving the monsters specials like that also makes the game a lot more fun for the players.

Unlike 3e where once you give it a type it already gains lots of things like a bab progression, saves etc etc. Which takes a lot more time and is almost impossible to do on the fly.

[Whipstitch]

You say that like it's a good idea, but all I'm hearing is that 4E monster creation has no real standards or consistency except that which you create and impose on yourself as a DM. Mind you, I have no doubt that you can actually create a bunch of monsters that are better than what's in the MM that way, but that says more about 4e hitpoint bloat than anything else.

[Red_Rob]

Well for what it is worth, creating a monster from scratch is really easy in 4e.
In fact you can just make up the stats as you plop the monster down on the table. Because things like race and size make no difference, you can just guesstimate it's stats. And give it abilities that sounds cool on the spur of the moment, since special attacks are usually not related to the monster at all in the first place. Giving the monsters specials like that also makes the game a lot more fun for the players.

Unlike 3e where once you give it a type it already gains lots of things like a bab progression, saves etc etc. Which takes a lot more time and is almost impossible to do on the fly.

No ishy, you can just make up a 3e monsters stats when you place it if you want. Noone is going to jump out and burn your rulebooks if you do. Hell, I've done it, true fact, no lie. It's just that if you want to make sure that there is any kind of consistency from monster to monster so your players can get a feeling that theres some kind of logic behind things and maybe make accurate judgements about the monsters based on things they've seen before there is also a system for doing this.

Saying that a system lacks one of these options is not an endorsement of that system or any kind of revolutionary step forward. It's a sad indictment of the fact the designers couldn't be arsed to come up with anything better.

[infected slut princess]

Hello Frank:

I dont want to derail your thread and I enjoy thsi review. I wanted to ask tho' because of that dumb Krakatoa guy, why do the tards at Something Awful hate you so much? Is it because you are a strong critic of 4e? Or is it another reason. If you have any theories, anyway.

[Mistborn]

Hello Frank:

I dont want to derail your thread and I enjoy thsi review. I wanted to ask tho' because of that dumb Krakatoa guy, why do the tards at Something Awful hate you so much? Is it because you are a strong critic of 4e? Or is it another reason. If you have any theories, anyway.

Something Awful for some reason became full of 4rries and goons are genrally terrible regardless. Do they need a reason?

(actually I have no idea is there really a story about this?)

[rasmuswagner]

You say that like it's a good idea, but all I'm hearing is that 4E monster creation has no real standards or consistency except that which you create and impose on yourself as a DM. Mind you, I have no doubt that you can actually create a bunch of monsters that are better than what's in the MM that way, but that says more about 4e hitpoint bloat than anything else.

4E monster creation does have standards. At the end of the design cycle - from MM3 onwards - they were even reasonable. The "X hit dice of type Y gives you Z" approach of 3rd is fucking terrible.

[Koumei]

That was one of the things 4E did right (when it eventually did it), it makes more sense for "Is a Dragon" or "Is an Aberration" to just be a little tag that affects which rangers track them well and hit them extra hard, and have "Lurks in shadows and leaps out to get a good assassin strike then fuck off" and "Sits behind minions/allies, hurling ranged area effects at you" determine crap like HP, Saves and so on.

But I would do it in the sense of that determining actual hit dice that are modified by ability scores as normal (ability scores that creatures actually have), so you go "A level ten FaceSmasher has +10 BAB, +10 Natural Armour, +7 Fort and Ref, +3 Will, 13 ranks in Stealth and Attention (if it has a good Int, add Intimidate, Sense Motive or Acrobatics) and 45 HP plus Con*10". Then you pick a level-appropriate statline off a list, a size, and choose some Feats, Abilities-From-Lists and some Equipment and have it all make some degree of sense.

[ScottS]

You have a mini-game which is popular in abstract, but which is currently written up as an unplayable mess that can only stagger forward after being patched together with mind caulk at each table. I leave it as an exercise for the reader what a company or a game designer should do in such a circumstance, but what they actually did was to throw a bunch of garbage at the wall and hope something sticks(...)
It's twenty four pages long and presents literally dozens of wholly incompatible suggestions for how you might want to run skill challenges. It gives examples of play right next to descriptions of possible rules variants that don't match up in the slightest. It throws out toggles of changing skill inputs, group skill checks, sectioned challenges, and all kinds of other crap that doesn't address the fundamental issues(...)
The core issue that tracking group failures inherently means that contributing less than the most contributing player means that you are contributing negatively to the group if you do anything at all. This is an unforgivable, and extremely easy to fix piece of bullshit. And they don't do a fucking thing about it.

I don't know how seriously they ever took the mechanical complaints (which is perhaps stating the obvious). They messed with the DCs and used some other forum suggestions (like making the difference between hard/medium etc. greater than +5), but that might only have been because they were already in "desperation mode". Also, revising the table multiple times let them do more of that awesome 4e thing, where they'd patch a TTRPG as though they were Blizzard hot-fixing their WOW servers. And the rules patches would totally show up in DDI!... but not so much in people's hardbacks (unless they printed out errata sheets and physically cut-and-pasted into their books, because, you know, it's the XXI Century and everything). And the customers weren't supposed to get butthurt or confused.

The whole DCs-are-too-high-for-untrained problem of the original chart technically wasn't a problem, if you took them at their word. The instructions in the DMG1 were that the DM should be a pushover and let the players talk him into letting them use pretty much any skills they wanted. We're supposed to be "encouraging creativity" here, and clearly, letting people BS their way into using tricked-out Acro during social encounters is the best way of doing that. So barring weird LFR exceptions like "Intimidate is always bad", no one was really rolling anything but their highest skill mods and everything was pretty easy. (Which meant that things got even easier when they started lowering DCs, but whatever.)

That section of the DMG2 was probably meant to address the "WTF is this horseshit?" complaint about skill challenges, i.e. the fact that the players were supposed to be happy with a "roll a bunch of d20s and make stuff up" solution to everything non-combat. I'm not going to get into an argument about story rules and MTP (which I think is another thread anyway), but just sayin' that they put the somewhat... "minimalist" Skill Challenge rules in the same book as the D&D combat section, and they expected people somehow wouldn't want or miss the same level of detail in the former, and thus wouldn't feel ripped off. Since that didn't happen, I guess the most immediate thing they could do to "fix" the situation, was to give you a bunch of examples of all the inventive details you were really supposed to be adding yourself, every time you ran an SC. I don't think all of those SC templates were particularly bad, but I was kind of mystified that even at that rules juncture, they were still expecting people to "be creative" with their SC nothingburger and to stop complaining.

[Username17]

Hello Frank:

I dont want to derail your thread and I enjoy thsi review. I wanted to ask tho' because of that dumb Krakatoa guy, why do the tards at Something Awful hate you so much? Is it because you are a strong critic of 4e? Or is it another reason. If you have any theories, anyway.

That's a really good question, and one I don't actually have the answer to. I think it is because I am outspoken and also don't like 4e. But that seems like a really thin reason. The grognards.txt people spend a shockingly large amount of time discussing things I designed in order to make fun of them, but their level of discourse and analysis is so low that I can't actually derive any benefit from reading through their criticisms. So I don't.

The only time I bother to read or respond to anymore from those schmucks is when they make new trolling accounts and I am temporarily unsure that they aren't just a random person off the internets with some dumb ideas. Once I can identify them as being part of the Something Awful groupthink, they go on ignore, because they aren't here to argue honestly (see Titanium Dragon's "hundreds of thousands" or Darwinism's anything he ever said), and there's nothing to learn from them.

To put out a couple of solid examples: one Something Awful Goon came over here to rant about the Bane Guard (a 4e class I wrote in 24 hours as a joke), and his big point was that it was unbalanced because you had the choice of two mino action powers where one of them was a small damaging attack and the other gave combat advantage to you and all your friends. And his point was that the attack did more damage and was therefore always better. At that point I was actually bothering to respond to these idiots, and pointed out several scenarios and party compositions in which the actual expected damage per round of the combat advantage was higher than the attack, and thus it was totally situational which was the superior choice. And then he just left. There was another guy (or maybe the same guy with a different handle, I can't be fucked to check) who came in on a tear about After Sundown, and his big point was that the writing style was bad because it was too self referential (that is, used the words "After Sundown" too much). I pointed out that by simple word count, the DMG actually used the words "Dungeons & Dragons" considerably more, and thus After Sundown was by definition less self referential than the industry standard. Again, he just vanished back to the warm safety of groupthink.

There's never any apology or admission of fault on their part. They bring up "reasons" to hate me and things I've written that don't make any sense on any level, and they all circle jerk each other and pat each other on the back on Something Awful. I don't pretend to understand it. I could say the sky was blue and they'd chortle and guffaw about what an idiot I was for thinking the sky is blue. There doesn't seem to be any logic or reason, and the analysis is so bad that I can't even gain anything by sorting through the criticism to find mistakes I've made. Because they are seemingly unable to find the difference between a mistake and a declarative statement about a mathematical tautology.

That was one of the things 4E did right (when it eventually did it), it makes more sense for "Is a Dragon" or "Is an Aberration" to just be a little tag that affects which rangers track them well and hit them extra hard, and have "Lurks in shadows and leaps out to get a good assassin strike then fuck off" and "Sits behind minions/allies, hurling ranged area effects at you" determine crap like HP, Saves and so on.

I wouldn't say it did it "right". I mean, while "Is a Dragon" is a pretty terrible character class for monsters, at least all the Green Dragons have it. In 4e, the Young Green Dragon is a Skirmisher and the Adult Green Dragon is a controller. It's fucked. While you could have made something useful out of the monster classes, 4e really did not do that.

And while the numbers got better with each iteration, they were still objectively terrible each time.

-Username17

[rasmuswagner]

I wouldn't say it did it "right". I mean, while "Is a Dragon" is a pretty terrible character class for monsters, at least all the Green Dragons have it. In 4e, the Young Green Dragon is a Skirmisher and the Adult Green Dragon is a controller. It's fucked. While you could have made something useful out of the monster classes, 4e really did not do that.

And while the numbers got better with each iteration, they were still objectively terrible each time.

-Username17

But the "is a dragon" class gives you sweet fuck-all abilities that are specifically relevant to "being a dragon". You could take out all the dragon "levels" and replace them with outsider "levels", and nobody would fucking notice. All the bits that make this creature "a green dragon" is 100% fiat design anyway.

The HD system just forces you to jump through bullshit hoops to get the attack bonus and Hp you want, and then randomly assigns saves and skill ranks. "But consistency!", you might say. Bullshit. Look at the Con scores and natural armor bonuses of CR 8+ beef-slab monsters. It's pretty fucking obvious that a lot of those numbers were ass-pulled to get the final stats the designers felt like, making the entire system a pointless waste of time; if you're going to just decide what the finished numbers need to be, just fucking set them at those values and stop pretending the intermediate steps matter.

When you stick to the HD system, you get "gems" like the fucking Desmodu (MMII - large man-bats). With 12 HD each for no other reason than "level 10 characters should give a fuck", and a flurry of attacks you're supposed to roll for, doing as little as 1d6+2 or 2d6+2 on a CR 9 monster. Because creatures with lots of humanoid HD are fucking padded sumo in 3.5

[Username17]

I'm not saying that 3e's hit dice were a good idea. They were not. But the 4e generic piles of hit points and attack bonuses aren't any better. They are just arbitrary numbers that don't make any sense and don't actually tell you very much about how tough a monster actually is.

Everything that actually matters is their abilities, and there aren't any guidelines for their creation or assignment. The advantages of the 4e system is that they assign numbers instead of piles of equations and that monster classes are by combat role instead of by phylum. Those are both positive improvements and great ideas, but then they walk it right the fuck back and ruin those advantages by having the output numbers be shit and by having the same monsters show up repeatedly while getting assigned different classes and not having anything inherent about the classes that actually makes them good at any particular role.

-Username17

[Winnah]

Your argument falls flat in one major area.

Namely that there are few, if any guidelines for designing monster powers in 4e.

Sure, you know that a Brute Monster is supposed to deal X damage with it's basic attacks at a certain level, regardless of what that attack actually represents, but when designing appropriate powers and abilities for a leader, skirmisher, lurker or controller, it's a fucking crapshoot.

There are no guidelines for special movement modes, resistances or any other appropriate details that are required for fleshing a monster.

The only distinct advantage over the HD system of 3e is that damage is explicitly laid out for monster level and role.

There is no distinct advantage over the HD system of AD&D. In that system, there was a whole chart detailing how various special abilities increased the effective HD of a monster for XP purposes.

[Username17]

Chapter 5: Adventures

I went out and got a couple more bottles of mead on sale, so let us continue with another chapter of the DMG2.

One of the things that people complain about with regards to 4e is how shallow it is. NPCs only have stats if they are enemies, and all the villagers are just green dots. Monsters are depicted as having glowing poison bows while you are fighting them, but you can't actually pick up and use those bows after the monsters have been defeated. It's like a computer game, where most of the stuff in the world is just a sprite or even just a detail painted into the background - not an actual thing in the world you could interact with. Partly because of the amazing failure of every attempt to make a working skill challenge system, the 4e suggested adventures are basically "make some shit up for a while, then have a combat encounter, then hand out treasure and XPs", repeat ad nauseum. This chapter advertises itself as something that will help us create "exciting, immersive stories", which is something that the original core rules basically held in contempt.

The first mini-chapter in this is called "Alternative Rewards", and it is not off to a strong start when it has an opening that is a series of italicized in media res vignettes about characters getting powerups. Taking a few sips of golden honey booze I feel like this chapter is going to be about giving people things that are exactly like magic items, and then give them slightly different flavor text and call it good.

These rewards occupy the same mechanical space as magic items. They balance on the same power curve and aim at the same place within the body of a character's abilities.

OK, I'm going to need more booze.

It turns out that these are more conservative than I even imagined. You complete an adventure and then instead of getting a magic ring that gives you a bullshit bonus, you get a divine boon or grandmaster training or something that does literally exactly what you would have gotten for having a magic ring. And because this is 4th edition, the bonus actually fades away after you've gained five levels, requiring you to go get a bigger, more level appropriate divine boon to replace it with. Exactly how the game thinks you're supposed to replace all your gear every five levels with newer, shinier, higher level gear.

It's difficult to overstate how boring and shitty 4e magic items are. The designers decided that the important part of D&D wasn't the thing where you explore strange locations and find fabulous treasure you remember forever, it was the part where you find a +2 shortsword and then you toss your +1 shortsword because the +2 version is 1 point better. So they made sure that everyone was forced to get newer wands, newer swords, newer pairs of pants, newer everything. And that every time you got a newer thing, it was just +1 bigger than the last pants or shoes you had. And since you're supposed to upgrade all your stuff every five levels, and the party is five people who are all doing that, that's basically all the "rewards" you get for your whole adventuring career. All the "rewards" are just you finding the incremental upgrades you're supposed to have to be the level you now are. And now the "alternate rewards" turn out to just be various colored marks on your forehead that are exactly the same as the upgradable pants and shoes. And now my glass of mead is empty. Again.

Just in case you missed how transparent this entire stunt was, they point out that you can use a "non item reward" to simply upgrade an item directly to being the higher level version of it. Also they give some sample divine boons that have actual honest to fuckness gold piece price equivalents in case it wasn't obvious enough how exactly the same as purchasable magic items this was. These fucking things even give "item bonuses", I'm embarrassed for these people.

We're 17th level now, so Yes.

Next up we have a section called "Item Components". This is where you hand out normal magic items, but you cut them up into three pieces. So you hand out more "treasure parcels", but the treasure parcels contain only legos that assemble into items rather than the items themselves. Maybe this makes people feel like they are making more progress, but it's so obviously not actually different from having completed items fall out of monsters less often that I can't even take this seriously. I mean, this is fucking 4th edition, where there is a total disconnect between the quests you undertake or monsters you defeat and the treasure that falls out. So since you can already punch a swarm of bees and have chain mail fall out Diablo-style, there's inherently nothing special you have to do to get the next segment of the multipart chainmail you're working on instead. It's stupid.

Artifacts are the book's big concession to something other than treadmill non-advancement. These are magic items or creatures that level up in weird ways when the PCs complete quests and then fuck off when they run out of higher level abilities to get. Fundamentally, they use up a lot of text for what is basically a minor temporary powerup in the form of an intelligent item. Fourteen and a half pages covers seven artifacts. The creeping shittiness of 4e items still permeates this. For fuck's sake, the Rod of Seven Parts does 2d10+5 damage after you assemble all 7 parts. That is a ratfucking daily power. I've really already wasted more text on this non-section than it warrants.

Organizations make up the first part of the "adventures" chapter that isn't basically "alternate flavor text for 4e magic items". The purpose of organizations is, according to this book, to "connect the dots" between combat encounters. That is, the game is still defined as a series of battle set pieces, but here they acknowledge that you might want something resembling a plot or at least an identifiable reason that you are engaging in this series of battles.

This subchapter has headings labeled "Politics" and "Rivalries", and you might think that it could touch upon actually doing something other than finding groups of 5-10 enemies and stabbing them in the belly. You'd be wrong. The groups presented are just small cells of Bane worshippers and the like: groups that have an excuse to field 5-10 dudes who attack the PCs and get gut stabbed, and then field another cell of 5-10 dudes who attack the PCs and get gut stabbed later on. That's story continuity, motherfuckers! Really, I can't help feeling disappointed by these organizations. Even the section on politics and the section on rivalries is just excuses to split organizations up into combat-encounter-sized chunks so that the player characters can gut stab them. There's no rules on actually doing politics or even really any suggestion that players should concern themselves with such things as actually having any effect on the world. It's still just coming up with potential excuses for enemies to show up in family size fun packs without showing up in actual armies or even platoons (as that would show how small scale everything in 4th edition actually is).


Also, there are fights.

The final section of the chapter is the "Campaign Arcs". This is where they detail their vision of what it "really means" to have a campaign that goes from Heroic to Paragon to Epic. Allow me to say that I am an avowed supporter of the concept of campaigns actually doing that. The book provides four suggested campaigns, which are kind of sketched out in a manner similar to the stuff K and I did for High Adventure in the Lower Planes, with a segment about low, medium, and high level and discussions about how to structure the campaign around these changes in venue. All in all, I feel that a sub chapter like this has every right to appear in a DMG, and probably should have been in the DMG1. This section is pretty much the money shot of the entire book, because it is the part where they talk about what an actual campaign of D&D actually is and should be. So I'll go ahead and review all four.

The first campaign arc is really pretty stupid. It starts with the characters being humble villagers and then magic rays from an an exploding planar breach turn them into player character adventurers wearing heavy armor and reading from spell books and shit. It's totally D&D Cartoon crap, and that shit was embarrassing in the 80s. Second, while being very sketchy it nonetheless suggests extreme railroadiness. The final paragon tier showdown happens after the players lose a race to a thingy against a rival adventuring party of jerks. Maybe it's just me, but I actually would feel pretty jerked around by a campaign arc that scheduled me losing a race for a plot device 19 levels in the future. And finally, while this campaign is epic in scope (you travel to other planes of existence and put a stop to a threat that is unraveling reality), it's not terribly epic in action. The player characters pretty much walk from plot point to plot point and handle all problems by killing small groups of enemies in skirmish combat. You start fighting planar themed kobolds and you end fighting demon lords, but it's the same "walk over to that point and stab whatever is there" structure all the way up. It would be one thing if the players got access to planar travel of their own at some point and their available options increased when they could go to numerous worlds and try different strategies - but it's all portals and railroads taking you through those portals the whole way. Not happy with the first offered campaign arc.

The second offering isn't epic in scope at all (the characters are from a collection of allied kingdoms, those kingdoms get attacked, the "epic" version is that you go to another plane and do it again), but it's actually much better about providing for growth of character ability and responsibility. You start out getting sent to fight brigands and stuff, then you also do court intrigue and such, then you become a king and start inventing your own missions to do, then you have wars to fight, and so on. There's a clear vision of what characters could be doing in Paragon Tier that is genuinely different from what they were doing in Heroic Tier. Unfortunately, 4th edition D&D just isn't up to the task. 4e doesn't have a kingdom management minigame or a mass combat minigame or any of that shit! The book lamely suggests maybe using skill challenges or something to handle these things, but as discussed in Chapter 3, that sure isn't happening. So while I'm actually fairly happy with the proposed 2nd campaign arc, it's painfully obviously that 4th edition D&D can't actually handle a campaign that interesting. And that's a shame. It makes me want to play D&D. 3rd edition D&D.

The third campaign is pretty similar to the 2nd, save that it actually has an epic proposal. The characters start doing small scale military operations with regional militias, then progress to the leaders of mighty armies conducting multi-front wars against armies increasingly getting aid from evil gods. The epic tier involves leading armies into the lands of those evil gods, pacifying the lands and murderstabbing the gods themselves while conducting nation building in a literal hellscape. That is a campaign arc. Unfortunately again, I really have no idea how you could do that in 4th edition D&D. There are no funcitonal mechanics for army generalship or nation building. So even though I am fully in favor of this sort of campaign being done, and it is written in a way that makes me want to play it, the millstone of 4th edition D&D keeps reminding me of its presence every time I try to think of how you would actually represent any of this under 4th edition rules.

The fourth one really brings the Paragon jump. The characters start doing fetch quests, but stresses the idea that the fetch quests themselves should have multiple possible resolutions. In Paragon, you get a fucking time machine and get to go forward and backward in time, picking and choosing your own missions. That's pretty awesome, and would be pretty awesome even under 4e rules. Unfortunately, the epic shenanigans are hamhanded and silly (the PCs turn into the gods of the campaign world, disassemble the time machine, and send dreams to their younger selves to go hunt for the parts, because cliche). I've done closed loop time travel in D&D games before, and it can be very effective. But this particular closed loop was kind of forced and lame. In any case, the campaign arc loses steam after the initial time travel sand box portion, because the way it tries to get the story "back on track" are lame. Still, I would totally play the shit out of the first half of this campaign and it works decently well within the harsh limits of 4th edition D&D's scope.

The mini-chapter and the chapter as a whole ends with a reprint of a web article by James Wyatt about Campaign Arcs. It actually references books from 3.5 because it's a fucking reprint from a web blog article and has no place in a 4th edition book. Because James Wyatt is lazy as fuck and can't even be fucked to adjust his recycled work to talk about the edition he is currently shilling. Pathetic.

-Username17

[virgil]

So while I'm actually fairly happy with the proposed 2nd campaign arc, it's painfully obviously that 4th edition D&D can't actually handle a campaign that interesting. And that's a shame. It makes me want to play D&D. 3rd edition D&D.

What's 3rd edition's answer to the kingdom management and mass combat minigame issue?

[LR]

What's 3rd edition's answer to the kingdom management and mass combat minigame issue?

Stronghold Builder's Guide, the Business section of the 3.5 DMG2, and Heroes of Battle. The SBG is cool and has some good ideas like giving the PCs a separate account for castle expenses, but the actual math is kind of crazy, it being based on WBL and magic items. The DMG2 was also crazy, but kind of works if you squint or if you only want to run the Kirisame Magic Shop. I don't know if anyone cares enough about HoB to give it an in depth review.

[TarkisFlux]

What's 3rd edition's answer to the kingdom management and mass combat minigame issue?

Stronghold Builder's Guide, the Business section of the 3.5 DMG2, and Heroes of Battle. The SBG is cool and has some good ideas like giving the PCs a separate account for castle expenses, but the actual math is kind of crazy, it being based on WBL and magic items. The DMG2 was also crazy, but kind of works if you squint or if you only want to run the Kirisame Magic Shop. I don't know if anyone cares enough about HoB to give it an in depth review.

The HoB solution to the mass combat minigame is to "not fucking do it". I'm not even kidding. They have a section in the first chapter titled "Think Big, Play Small" where they tell you that running a battle isn't roleplaying, it's wargaming. And that charting the course of a war is a largely political thing, and not a great DnD experience unless your group really really likes the MTP politics thing.

Their solution is to have a bunch of encounter set pieces that better fit the dramatic experience of fighting a war and then pretending (or deciding in advance maybe) that the success of the players in those set pieces changes the course of the war. They even show you a sample flowchart to get the idea across and show you how you could do it in a game. And while I'm down with flowcharting success/fail mission results for an adventure or a series of them, influencing the course of a war is not the same thing as actually running it. They never really rise above the "Saving Private Ryan" level of detail (and actually refer to it by name), and that's a let down.

[rasmuswagner]

There's basically three ways to handle mass combat.

One, MTP. Like Heroes of Battle.

Two, an actual fucking wargame. Which is non-trivial to design, especially as a game that's really, actually for more than 2 players. It also takes a long time to play. It's also, usually, a lot of working to integrate armies created in D&D into a different system. IIRC, someone did an OSSR of Battlesystem.

Three, assign numbers to units and roll on a table. Like the old BECMI companion box, like the current GURPs mass combat.

If you have 5 players and MC at the table, at least two people are going to hate whatever solution you come up with.