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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 12:50AM
#201
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Date Joined:
Oct 19, 2012
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Good stuff good stuff. Really, two of my favorite mythological cultures are all of East Asia and all of Western Europe.
Sampson of biblical fame is basically the same archetype... Lancelot / CuCulaine / Sampson... all exhibit Berserk the first two are also of consumate fighting skill and the best of there era.
Ever done a side-by-side comparison of Herakles and Samson before? Scary stuff. So much so it really makes me wonder if one wasn't inspired by the other.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 6:30AM
#202
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Date Joined:
Jan 15, 2009
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Good stuff good stuff. Really, two of my favorite mythological cultures are all of East Asia and all of Western Europe.
Sampson of biblical fame is basically the same archetype... Lancelot / CuCulaine / Sampson... all exhibit Berserk the first two are also of consumate fighting skill and the best of there era.
Ever done a side-by-side comparison of Herakles and Samson before? Scary stuff. So much so it really makes me wonder if one wasn't inspired by the other.
hmmm I hadnt actually but even at just the personality level neither where what I would call very nice guys..
I have been doing some reading about Gilgamesh recently that is very interesting... ooh look the first fantasy novel with a high friendship is awesome index.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 6:37AM
#203
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Date Joined:
Aug 31, 2008
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Yup. This is the point I was trying to make a while back (at least I think...could have been in another thread). One of the reason 4E uses minions (and elites and solos) is because of the math scaling. You can't take a monster 5 levels higher or lower than the party and expect a good fight. Attack bonuses and defenses will be off by too much. So the system solves this by using monster types. Want the party to fight a monster who is 5 levels too high? Turn it into an elite of the party's level. Want the party to fight a monster who is 5 levels too low? Turn it into a minion of the party's level.
I think D&D Next has a much more elegant solution. The same monster can serve different roles depending on the level of the party.
And Elite/Solo monsters were 4ed's elegant solution to making monsters tough without using monsters of such high level that the party couldn't beat them. I realize that BA's flatter progression changes that dynamic, but I'm sensing a circular pattern in D&D design. 
Oh, certainly, and I'm not saying that 4E didn't have a good system. In fact, I have said often that easy monster design is one of my favoite aspects of 4E (from a DM standpoint), and something that I really want to see carried over to D&D Next.
I don't know if the current monster design will work out in terms of having monsters remain viable at a large range of levels (and having monsters that were very tough become effectively minions to high level PCs), but I think it is something we can test out and work for. In the end, perhaps they will decide that it doesn't work, and bring back the concept of monster types (minion, standard, elite, solo).
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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 1:48PM
#204
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Yup. This is the point I was trying to make a while back (at least I think...could have been in another thread). One of the reason 4E uses minions (and elites and solos) is because of the math scaling. You can't take a monster 5 levels higher or lower than the party and expect a good fight. Attack bonuses and defenses will be off by too much. So the system solves this by using monster types. Want the party to fight a monster who is 5 levels too high? Turn it into an elite of the party's level. Want the party to fight a monster who is 5 levels too low? Turn it into a minion of the party's level.
I think D&D Next has a much more elegant solution. The same monster can serve different roles depending on the level of the party.
And Elite/Solo monsters were 4ed's elegant solution to making monsters tough without using monsters of such high level that the party couldn't beat them. I realize that BA's flatter progression changes that dynamic, but I'm sensing a circular pattern in D&D design.
Roughly speaking, the concept of elite and solo monsters is the prototype of the bounded accuracy system. Like you said, they make the monsters tougher without increasing the target numbers - they increase HP, damage, and breadth of abilities instead. Sound familiar?
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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 4:26PM
#205
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Date Joined:
Jan 28, 2004
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Yup. This is the point I was trying to make a while back (at least I think...could have been in another thread). One of the reason 4E uses minions (and elites and solos) is because of the math scaling. You can't take a monster 5 levels higher or lower than the party and expect a good fight. Attack bonuses and defenses will be off by too much. So the system solves this by using monster types. Want the party to fight a monster who is 5 levels too high? Turn it into an elite of the party's level. Want the party to fight a monster who is 5 levels too low? Turn it into a minion of the party's level.
I think D&D Next has a much more elegant solution. The same monster can serve different roles depending on the level of the party.
And Elite/Solo monsters were 4ed's elegant solution to making monsters tough without using monsters of such high level that the party couldn't beat them. I realize that BA's flatter progression changes that dynamic, but I'm sensing a circular pattern in D&D design.
Roughly speaking, the concept of elite and solo monsters is the prototype of the bounded accuracy system. Like you said, they make the monsters tougher without increasing the target numbers - they increase HP, damage, and breadth of abilities instead. Sound familiar?
Yeah - actually, one could argue that minions are the same idea.
In fact, the whole bounded accuracy+increasing damage is really just an inversion of level scaling, if you look at it in that light.
4E -- everything improves with level.. raw damage, accuracy, targets defenses etc. But since +hit and +def scales so quickly, even a few levels higher and lower , the monsters don't provide good encounters -- Too high and they're impossible to hit. Too Low and they provide no threat, and yet take too long to kill. The Minion/Standard/Elite/Solo thing is easily a great tool to use to reflect "low/standard/high/higher" monsters if that's what you want to use it for. OTOH, it can feel artificial and cumbersome to people who want "an orc is an orc is an orc".
Bounded Accuracy is just about slowing down part of this scaling (+hit and +defense), so you can have "an orc is an orc is an orc" if you don't want to rebuild your orcs as minions at higher levels. I imagine that's why at least one packet had rapid damage improvements for players in 5e. You can adjust damage to taste a lot easier than stripping out level scaling, I'd imagine. In order to make your orcs into minions faster, give PCs more +damage and +hps as they level. Want them to remain a challenge past 10th ? Less PC damage (or hp, or +monster damage etc).
It has a certain appeal.
OTOH, one thing 4E did was try to make Elites and Solos more challenging by making them more able to affect a whole party with their powers. This is a design choice that is not directly related to "how much tougher a higher level monster is". It doesn't easily project onto the Bounded Accuracy design principle. I think someone already pointed that out higher in the thread. If your "boss" monster in a 1st level dungeon is a solo, you can make him into a Minion by 10th level just to show how tough the PCs have become, if you like.
In a Bounded Accuracy world, you could rebuild him to strip out some of his options (you always have that choice), but you've lost "an orc is an orc" in doing so.
Since the idea of Minion/Standard/Elite/Solo is actually rather useful, I think the BA system could well use some of those ideas for it's monster design. Minions would not work the same as 4e (since lower level monsters become "like minions" automatically in BA/Next), but there ought to be a section on "designing Solo encounters" and "how to make your Solo monsters easier to play when the party out-grows them"
I'd love to see a monster entry for some monsters that might look like :
Orc Chieftain :
... standard monster block entry ...
As a Leader:
Battle Cry (2/day): The Orc Chieftain Calls out . 2 allies within 50 feet get a free move or action. The Chieftains enemies take a -1 to defenses until the end of their next turn.
As a Solo :
Increase the Orc Chieftain's maximum hit points by 150
Vicious Swipe : The Orc Chieftain makes a melee attack against all adjacent enemies.
This gives a modular approach to making some monsters more interesting under certain usages, while working within the Bounded Accuracy Framework
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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 4:39PM
#206
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Date Joined:
Jan 15, 2009
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If you are rebuilding the monsters any way to have appropriate complexity athe gain of usable across wider levels is seriously diminished
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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 6:04PM
#207
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Date Joined:
Jan 28, 2004
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If you are rebuilding the monsters any way to have appropriate complexity athe gain of usable across wider levels is seriously diminished
Not exactly parsing this sentence, but did you mean something like
"If you have to rebuild a monster to get appropriate complexity in order to use it across more levels, then the purported gains of Bounded Accuracy are seriously diminished. " ?
(not wanting to put words in your mouth)
I would agree with that if it were required for a significant portion of monsters, yes. But just as in 4E, you're not going to have a Solo or Elite version of every monster. There are only 11 Elite/Solo Goblins, for example, out of 52 creatures with the "goblin" type (in 4e's compendium) Probably you'll just use one of the non-solo's in the higher levels so as to avoid unnecessary complexity.
More likely, though, is that you'll get specific Solo-style monsters (if any at all) and be left in the dark when to use them. I sincerely hope there are guidelines that suggest only using complex monsters when they're near the PCs level, and in very small numbers , and when adding low-level hordes to threaten the party, choose monsters with only a few actions available to them -- it might seem bleedingly obvious to anyone with experience, but to new DMs this can't be stressed enough.
On that note : In 4E, this secondary classification system is useful as a telegraph to the DM to say "HEY! This guy is tough for his level!" It gives a very useful bit of metadata about the monster and how you could use it in a combat. When my players dash off in a direction I have nothing prepared for, I can use that metadata to exclude excessively powerful or complex monsters if I need to come up with an impromptu combat STAT. Or, if I'm reading an adventure, and I see "solo" or "leader" , I will spend excess time reading through it's powers so I can properly run it as a threat to the whole party , or interacting with it's minions.
If 5E drops that classification system, that's useful data gone.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 6:17PM
#208
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Date Joined:
May 23, 2012
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Thanks for the discussion. This is exactly what I wanted to read.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 14, 2012 - 7:12PM
#209
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Date Joined:
Jan 15, 2009
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If you are rebuilding the monsters any way to have appropriate complexity athe gain of usable across wider levels is seriously diminished
Not exactly parsing this sentence, but did you mean something like
"If you have to rebuild a monster to get appropriate complexity in order to use it across more levels, then the purported gains of Bounded Accuracy are seriously diminished. " ?
(not wanting to put words in your mouth)
I would agree with that if it were required for a significant portion of monsters, yes. But just as in 4E, you're not going to have a Solo or Elite version of every monster. There are only 11 Elite/Solo Goblins, for example, out of 52 creatures with the "goblin" type (in 4e's compendium) Probably you'll just use one of the non-solo's in the higher levels so as to avoid unnecessary complexity.
More likely, though, is that you'll get specific Solo-style monsters (if any at all) and be left in the dark when to use them. I sincerely hope there are guidelines that suggest only using complex monsters when they're near the PCs level, and in very small numbers , and when adding low-level hordes to threaten the party, choose monsters with only a few actions available to them -- it might seem bleedingly obvious to anyone with experience, but to new DMs this can't be stressed enough.
On that note : In 4E, this secondary classification system is useful as a telegraph to the DM to say "HEY! This guy is tough for his level!" It gives a very useful bit of metadata about the monster and how you could use it in a combat. When my players dash off in a direction I have nothing prepared for, I can use that metadata to exclude excessively powerful or complex monsters if I need to come up with an impromptu combat STAT. Or, if I'm reading an adventure, and I see "solo" or "leader" , I will spend excess time reading through it's powers so I can properly run it as a threat to the whole party , or interacting with it's minions.
If 5E drops that classification system, that's useful data gone.
Yup you grokked it... and even if the how to use creatures are obvious now, it wasnt when I was 15 and my friend picked up this blue covered book with a dragon on the cover, I find myself channelling my earlier self a lot in reaction to these rules, and just going ... no dont make that happen again. I want hoards that play like a team entitiy at times not a super ton of cumbersome dice rolling even huge amounts of minions is not practical so its not just turning complex monsters simple its turning fairly simple groups in to something even more manageable aka Swarms/Hoardes or whatever.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 17, 2012 - 2:28PM
#210
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Date Joined:
Jan 28, 2004
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If you are rebuilding the monsters any way to have appropriate complexity athe gain of usable across wider levels is seriously diminished
Not exactly parsing this sentence, but did you mean something like
"If you have to rebuild a monster to get appropriate complexity in order to use it across more levels, then the purported gains of Bounded Accuracy are seriously diminished. " ?
(not wanting to put words in your mouth)
I would agree with that if it were required for a significant portion of monsters, yes. But just as in 4E, you're not going to have a Solo or Elite version of every monster.
--- snip ---
There are only 11 Elite/Solo Goblins, for example, out of 52 creatures with the "goblin" type (in 4e's compendium) Probably you'll just use one of the non-solo's in the higher levels so as to avoid unnecessary complexity.
More likely, though, is that you'll get specific Solo-style monsters (if any at all) and be left in the dark when to use them. I sincerely hope there are guidelines that suggest only using complex monsters when they're near the PCs level, and in very small numbers , and when adding low-level hordes to threaten the party, choose monsters with only a few actions available to them -- it might seem bleedingly obvious to anyone with experience, but to new DMs this can't be stressed enough.
On that note : In 4E, this secondary classification system is useful as a telegraph to the DM to say "HEY! This guy is tough for his level!" It gives a very useful bit of metadata about the monster and how you could use it in a combat.
---snip --
If 5E drops that classification system, that's useful data gone.
Yup you grokked it... and even if the how to use creatures are obvious now, it wasnt when I was 15 and my friend picked up this blue covered book with a dragon on the cover, I find myself channelling my earlier self a lot in reaction to these rules, and just going ... no dont make that happen again. I want hoards that play like a team entitiy at times not a super ton of cumbersome dice rolling even huge amounts of minions is not practical so its not just turning complex monsters simple its turning fairly simple groups in to something even more manageable aka Swarms/Hoardes or whatever.
Indeed. I think there's a module here somewhere :D Mass Combat for Small Parties. As an aside, when I chimed in here earlier about "34 round combats" as a rather silly thing to use on any side of a discussion, the distinction I was making is not that the combat was "too long" (although, if I were running 4e with my group, 34 rounds would take _days_ to finish), but that it was an excercise in statistics instead of drama. What was being discussed was 34 rounds of boredom, not 34 rounds of Epic Massed Combat. It was 34 rounds of "I cannot miss, so 3 are dead" / "some of them rolled crits, you take some damage". And that was if the fighter could hit 3 a turn, and if all the Orcs could get a shot on him. If the fighter has to move to get to the next group instead of standing on a growing mound of orc-flesh, then this is going to take a lot more than 34 rounds. When the response is "Some people like Epic Massed Combat" I have to shake my head. Because I'm one of those people. But that's not Epic Massed Combat. It's statistics. And it takes a seriously long time after which, there are 100 dead Orcs and the fighter quaffs a potion or two and moves on. This is not a criticism of BA, or any particular system, except insofar that if the answer to the questions
"How do you make a Mass Combat ?"
"How do I use low level creatures to threaten my party?"
"Can I use this XPBudget any way I like?"
is answered wth an encounter like that one -- that's not a system that I care for. If we're doing Epic Mass Battles, the last thing we need is to track and resolve 100 die rolls per DM's turn. That's not epic, it's tedious. And frankly, if each Orc gets one full action and move separately on each of their turns, such a battle is too cumbersome to play. Abstraction techniques are absolutely required. I don't know of a single Mass Combat system that doesn't include such things. And if we're talking about abstraction, then that inevitably leads to treating squads or even battalions as one game entity in order to be playable. As far as RPGs go, I hear two kinds of advice for Large combats :
If the PCs are grunts, it's best to play out their individual contributions in the smaller scale of things. Encourage skirmishes on the side-lines, taking out the enemy scouts or raiding parties. Even in a grand melee, you can have them facing off on a smaller number of opponents since everyone is tied up with someone. That can be a great scene, with the idea that a huge combat is playing out around them. You even see that kind of idea used in the movies too.
If the PCs are commanders, you can give them squads to lead, or whole armies, and play it out with some mature Mass Combat Rules. That's fine too.
But the key is limiting the scope of the enemy, either to abstracted squad-level enemies or to "encounter within the battle". Rolling out 100+ enemies and saying "there you go, have at them!" doesn't work in the game. It's just a mathematics exercise.
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