I've been dealing with MM1 grimlocks, goblins, low-level orcs, and dragons within each color recently, so understand my cynicism.
Not disputing that some monsters (esp. early ones) suffer from it. Still, I recently used a few monsters from the more recent publishings (some even from MM1) and they do vary greatly on an individual basis.
Some monsters and monster groups suffer from the above-mentioned problem, but it is not something that is strecthed out over all of 4E - it is rather limited in scope, IMX.
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I think people have different ideas about how different assorted kinds of a monster need be to warrant different stats for it, but we still have things like ghosts, zombies, and skeletons. They may all have the same abilities undead-wise, but what about their former life's form? As long as the templates don't require the math conjugation it did in 3e.
True story: One of the DMs in my group (who learned most of his rules in 3e) just mentioned that he had less trouble reading the 1e monster blocks at a glance than the 4e monster blocks at times because 4e expressed most of the monster in walls of numbers and game lingo ("+X vs AC: xdy+r, __, shift 1.") while the 1e entry expressed all features in text with minimal game terms (damage, hit points, save) and seldom mentioned modifiers as they were understood to always equal the HD stated in the statblock.
Personally, 1e monster descriptions are oft wordier than 4e's concise ones, but I see his point. I learned from Basic, and played 1-4e, but when I look back to 3e the more complex or high-level monsters have small lists of feat names and sometimes spells to cross-reference pooled at the bottom of their blocks and several different attack bonuses based on whether they are attacking without moving, moving and attacking, grabbing, ... Don't get me started on dragon table/statblocks.
We can also think about what purpose a monster entry may serve. Apart from the illustrations, 4e uses much of its space for extra statblocks for combat variety and for suggested combat encounter groups, but that's not the only way.
1e had many creatures (like the tween, umblepy, and carbuncle) that focused on party interaction: each had a bizarre motive or general plan of action that could prove ally, pest, or threat at different points depending on how the party reacted, and whether they were exploring, in combat, or trying to communicate to it.
They may also have strange narratives in regard to each other: Spoiler:Show
Gynosphinxes did more than pose riddles and then try to eat you; they traded in knowledge for payment in the form of gold, riddles the players may think up, or the location of one of those androsphinxes they were always chasing.
Androsphinxes for there part resented gynosphinxes because they were known to eat people who didn't pay up and because, for all the androsphinx's virtuous ideal, gynosphinxes were more intelligent on the whole.
Criosphinxes were nasty folks always lusting after gynosphinxes, who thought they were disgusting.
Now we have this amusing little triangle.
Some monsters even had adventure hooks in their descriptions, like the 3e gravecrawler/ancestor worm, a creature that had both combat, role-play, and story potential. (For the curious, a review of this creature lurks at the base of this page.)
I'm personally more attracted to using monster space for this kind of thing, but some monsters may be more suited to other treatments.
This is a very simple problem and I will outline it below. Their are two types of people
Type 1: a lot of people (not all, but a lot) who play see alignment as "I am lawful good thus I must play lawful good"
Type 2: a lot of people (not all, but a lot) who play see alignment as "My previous actions have made people and the gods view me as lawful good.
The difference is subtle but it is the source of the misunderstanding. Alignment does not dictate how you play your character. All it does is tell you, the player, how the rest of the world views you, and your previous actions. Any future actions will be judged by their own merits.
Say you're a baby eating pyromaniac. You are most likely chaotic evil. But one day you decide, "Hey all I really need is love." So you get a wife, have a kid, and get a kitten named Mr. Snook'ems. You become a member of the PTA and help build houses for the homeless. You are no longer chaotic evil. And just because you were once chaotic evil it does not mean that you have to stay chaotic evil.
Alignment never dictates what you can do, it only says what you have done.
Now that is cleared up here is a simple test.
What is the alignment of...
A Police officer:
The average Citizen:
A Vigilante:
The answer is simple. The Police officer is lawful good. He uses the laws of the country and city to arrest people and make them pay their debt to society.
The Citizen is Neutral good. He wants to live is a place that is Good and follows moral and ethical principle, but he sometimes finds the laws impedes him, and he wonders why we spend so much on poor people.
The Vigilante is Chaotic Good. He wants to uphold the morals and ethics of society but finds that the bad guys often slip through the cracks in the law. He takes it upon himself to protect the people from these criminals.
That is the basic breakdown of the good alignment axis. What needs to be remembered is that any one of these people can change alignments, easily. The Police officer could be bought off by a local gang, and suddenly he drops to lawful neutral. The average citizen might find that his neighbors dog is annoying, barking at night and keeping him up. So he poisons its food, now he is no longer good, he is stepping towards true neutral. Maybe the citizen really goes crazy also kills the neighbor, hello neutral evil. It is possible that the Vigilante realizes that the cops are actually doing a pretty good job and decides to become an officer himself, leaving his masked crime fighting days behind him. Now he is Lawful good.
Your alignment is not carved in stone, it is malleable and will change to reflect your actions.
Monte: Instead of the fighter getting a better and better attack bonus, he instead gets more options to do stuff as he goes up in level, and his attack bonus goes up at a very modest rate. I think it offers a better play experience that the orc/ogre can remain in the campaign, and people can know how the monster would work from a previous experience, but they remain a challenge for longer. Jeremy: The Monsters are in the design teams hands now and we'll be moving to development in the next few weeks. What I can say about this goal that Monte is talking about is that we're working ot provide the DM with really good world building tools. And it's important to provide information about the orcs place in D&D while making sure that a Monster remains relevant as the characters level up. They're might be an orc shaman, an orc champion or whatever for higher levels, but we also want the basic orc to be relevant at higher levels. We want it to be really easy for the DM to open the Monster Manual and drop an orc or iconic monsters into the game.
One of the things we're exploring in the game is what we refer to as a bounded accuracy system. Effectively, we're looking into whether or not we can strip out the assumption of accuracy and defense scaling by level, and let progression rest largely within the scaling damage, hit points, and capabilities of both characters and monsters. When you have this, any monster whose hit points are less than the damage you deal is, effectively, a minion. Thus, we might not need a specific minion rule, because we would simply design monsters with hit points that rest below average damage for certain levels and let that take care of it (in other words, we do want monsters in the game that do what minions do for us). At the same time, since as the player characters gain levels their damage numbers are going up, monsters that previously were not "minions" become "minions" by virtue of player damage outstripping their hit points. Since AC and attack bonuses aren't automatically scaling up, the orc that you fight at 1st level that took three hits to kill may only take 1 hit to kill at 6th level, making it a "minion" for heroes of that level.
This will be.... interesting. So far for most editions the main progression of the warrior classes was to increase to hit, increase damage, or increase armor. Since to hit and armor are now, more or less, fixed, that means we will see a lot more focus on battle axes and less focus on daggers, and a lot more focus on increasing damage and HP so that you can stay in the fight longer while dealing more damage per turn. I can see all sorts of problems arising from this...
Im sorry but ADEU is a French word for goodbye, not a combat system.
You say, "Encounter Power" and I stop listening to you.
This is a very simple problem and I will outline it below. Their are two types of people
Type 1: a lot of people (not all, but a lot) who play see alignment as "I am lawful good thus I must play lawful good"
Type 2: a lot of people (not all, but a lot) who play see alignment as "My previous actions have made people and the gods view me as lawful good.
The difference is subtle but it is the source of the misunderstanding. Alignment does not dictate how you play your character. All it does is tell you, the player, how the rest of the world views you, and your previous actions. Any future actions will be judged by their own merits.
Say you're a baby eating pyromaniac. You are most likely chaotic evil. But one day you decide, "Hey all I really need is love." So you get a wife, have a kid, and get a kitten named Mr. Snook'ems. You become a member of the PTA and help build houses for the homeless. You are no longer chaotic evil. And just because you were once chaotic evil it does not mean that you have to stay chaotic evil.
Alignment never dictates what you can do, it only says what you have done.
Now that is cleared up here is a simple test.
What is the alignment of...
A Police officer:
The average Citizen:
A Vigilante:
The answer is simple. The Police officer is lawful good. He uses the laws of the country and city to arrest people and make them pay their debt to society.
The Citizen is Neutral good. He wants to live is a place that is Good and follows moral and ethical principle, but he sometimes finds the laws impedes him, and he wonders why we spend so much on poor people.
The Vigilante is Chaotic Good. He wants to uphold the morals and ethics of society but finds that the bad guys often slip through the cracks in the law. He takes it upon himself to protect the people from these criminals.
That is the basic breakdown of the good alignment axis. What needs to be remembered is that any one of these people can change alignments, easily. The Police officer could be bought off by a local gang, and suddenly he drops to lawful neutral. The average citizen might find that his neighbors dog is annoying, barking at night and keeping him up. So he poisons its food, now he is no longer good, he is stepping towards true neutral. Maybe the citizen really goes crazy also kills the neighbor, hello neutral evil. It is possible that the Vigilante realizes that the cops are actually doing a pretty good job and decides to become an officer himself, leaving his masked crime fighting days behind him. Now he is Lawful good.
Your alignment is not carved in stone, it is malleable and will change to reflect your actions.
In the next monster manual, I'd like to see a line or two describing the monster in words. The stench, the red glowing eyes, the yellowed underbite-tusk... what have you. I prefer my game to be filled with adjectives, not nouns - especially the first time the party meets a critter. Of course any DM can describe any monster for himself, but if flavour-text is absent and all that is present is combat tactics (and a couple of knowledge check results) it's easier for newer DMs to say, "You see a ghoul." instead of describing it with words that summon an horrorific vision more terrifying than the miniature.
I truly remember encountering my first rust monster back in 1985 and only because the description of the creature was truly bizarre. That my armor and sword began to rust when it's tentacles hit me was terrifying; I didn't know what else could it do. Now it may be near to impossible to reclaim some of the mystery, but I like it when my players don't know off the bat exactly what kind of creature they are facing. To remove the meta-game from the table, so to speak. And for that to happen, a descriptive line or two on the monster's presence, smell, aura would be a great help.
As to the argument about how many stat blocks of the same creature we need. I'd like to see fewer stat blocks in the book, with universal rules for adding levels to monsters that make its challenge scalable. I've never liked classes for monsters, just too much work. If there are true variants of that creature, Orc is a good example: as it may be a warrior (grunt), a champion (leader role) or a shaman (magic wielding), to provide them where necessary as they have different abilities, but to not provide them where the variancy is artificial, like for instance, a minotaur that doesn't really benefit from having 3 types.
The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules. -Gary Gygax
meh, no thanks. What I want is the ease of use mechanically of 4E, and the fluff of 2nd edition/pathfinder. 4E has by far the tightest and easiest stat blocks of any edition for your average critter (outside of creatures with no special abilities... which are pretty dull to run anyways)
What I absoloutely dont want to see is the nausea inducing 3E/PF breakdown of how you arrived that the monster that needed a +12 to hit obtained said +12 to hit. Awesome, so he has weapon focus, weapon specialization, drank a potion of accuracy, ate a THAC0 TAC0 and rubbed Bane's lucky merkin before he went out on guard patrol. I care this much about a dude whose life expetency is 3 rounds why?
Oh, and have a bunch of abilities/spells that require me to go to another source to resolve. This is the real bloat of pre-4E stat blocks...
In 5e, level bonuses to attack and defense are thankfully gone,
I have yet to hear this fact confirmed, I did hear a lot of speculation, but nothing official.
Given the rules are only 10% done as of PAX, I think most everything is up in the air at this point. At least I hope so, because their current solution of "massive HP countered by massive damage" isnt particularly appealing...
