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I have been noticing a lot of reflavored monsters in adventures lately. Bugbears and bullywugs masquerading as humans, etc. Perhaps more concerning, there appears to be an attitude spreading among LFR authors that doing such is the best way to achieve their desired difficulty level for fights. In the Drag-1-7 comments thread on the LFR adventures sub-board, Lord_Kavos wrote:

Unfortunately, I ended up being a bit pressed for time when it came to meeting the deadline - a miscommunication with my writing director resulted in me writing the bulk of the adventure in 8 or 9 days to get it submitted in time.  As a result I was a bit pressed, and the combats could have been more challenging if I had more time available to tailor the combatants involved (i.e. using other creature stat blocks & renaming them).

While in this case, Lord_Kavos may well be correct and he might well have improved the particular mod in question by reflavoring, in general this is a concerning development in LFR writing for several reasons.

1. Diversity of play experience. As those who played the 1-1 adventures can testify, a goblin hexer, crossbow turret, guard drake, or clay scout by another name is still a goblin hexer/crossbow turret/guard drake/clay scout. It still does the same things in combat. It still fights the same way. While we may well have had our fill of human guards for a while, replacing them with the monster du-jour and calling it a "human guard" will not make our play experiences any less repetitive. Rather, if reflavorings are being done for difficulty rather than for flavor, we are likely to see a new batch of bugbear stranglers and needlefang drake swarms (well, maybe not needlefang drake swarms now that they are errata'ed) impersonating everything under the sun. If authors consistently use the more difficult monsters in the level bands to impersonate the average or underpowered monsters, we are likely to end up with even more repetitive battles than we had in the 1-1 series of adventures.

2. Loss of flavor. Sometimes reflavoring is done well and the creature feels like its new flavor. (I saw this once with Shadar-Kai reflavored to drow). Sometimes it is done poorly and the mechanics make no sense for either the creature or the context. (Bullywugs reflavored to humans fits in this category). But, there is usually some loss. The problem is that flavor is not just contained in the description of the monsters. Flavor is also mechanical. Elves get their re-rolls and have been generally designed as mobile, agile opponents. Goblins are shifty. Gnolls swarm over you and beat your party down one at a time (otherwise, they don't get good use out of their pack attack ability). All this is supposed to go together and make fighting orcs a different experience from fighting goblins which is different from fighting wolves, gnolls, or shadowhunter bats. And, to a large degree, the 4th edition designers succeeded in this goal--battles against different kinds of opponents really do feel different. But if we consistently reflavor for difficulty, this will be lost. Humans aren't tough enough? Use bugbears instead. But now, it won't feel any different when you fight bugbears rather than humans.

3. Reflavoring for difficulty is more problematic than generic reflavoring in both of these regards. If you are trying to make a combat more difficult by reflavoring monsters, it implies that there are monsters that fit the story already--the author simply does not like them for some reason. (Probably because they are underpowered when the author wants average difficulty or average powered when the author is searching for the super-hard broken "but the rules let me do it" difficulty). This is the time when reflavoring is most likely to fall into the two pitfalls. It is likely to fall into the first pitfall of repetitive monsters and a loss of diversity because by reflavoring for difficulty the author is deliberately avoiding appropriate monsters in order to choose from a smaller list of unusually difficult monsters. It is likely to fall into the second trap as well because the author is deliberately avoiding appropriately flavored (and named) monsters in search of something more difficult. Whatever the author ends up with, it is less likely to be appropriately flavored than if he simply used the initial monsters, and it is also less likely to be appropriately flavored than if the author were simply looking for a monster with appropriately flavored abilities. If it is being reflavored for difficulty, flavor is necessarily a secondary (or perhaps even tertiary or non-existant) concern.

Part of the design philosophy of 4e was to embed the flavor of monsters in their combat stats. If reflavoring monsters for difficulty is a standard component of adventure design, we risk losing that.

a comparison of 3e and 3.5 writing and monster construction Show

Jan 25, 2010 -- 10:57PM, gomeztoo wrote:

Reflavoring is done to have some variety of monsters for encounters. There are a lot of monsters, but they are spread over various races or creature types. If you need humans, it sometimes pays to use another creature and reflavor it, so not every human you meet is a human bandit.

Gomez

That's understandable, but that is reflavoring for variety rather than reflavoring to increase the difficulty. And it still runs the same risks to a lesser degree.

It should also be less necessary as more and more resources are available to writers. My one update behind copy of Monster Builder lists 47 monsters of level 1-4 with the human keyword. A number of them are duplicates (human bandit and human ruffian, for instance are identical level 2 skirmishers except that the ruffian's basic attack is three points higher). On the other hand, it also excludes a number of human monsters that don't include (human) among their keywords. (All of the Zhents from Spec 1-1, for instance are probably meant to be human but lack the human keyword). So, it's not as though we should be condemned to an endless stream of human ruffians if authors pulled back on reflavoring. Even now, there is quite a bit of variety.

Still, it is a shame that NPCs created using the DMG's NPC creation rules appear to be treated as unique monsters subject to the WotC approval process. Those rules are really nice for creating unique and interesting monsters that have capabilities that players rarely if ever see deployed against them.

Jan 26, 2010 -- 2:26PM, bgibbons wrote:

Jan 26, 2010 -- 12:18AM, Elder_basilisk wrote:

Still, it is a shame that NPCs created using the DMG's NPC creation rules appear to be treated as unique monsters subject to the WotC approval process. Those rules are really nice for creating unique and interesting monsters that have capabilities that players rarely if ever see deployed against them.

Since this also means that 1st level PCs rarely have to deal with creatures casting Dazzling Ray at them for 6d6+6 damage, I think I can live with the restrictions.

While 4e gives a lot of options to DMs, they all come with a "Use at your own risk; you're the one responsible for ensuring that your tweaks and combinations are still fun and balanced" warning.  I'm not sure that all LFR writers have quite moved beyond the "Hey, if the rules let me create it, it must be balanced" mindset of 3e, so I'm happy with some added checks and balances.

Now that you mention it, I'm pretty happy not to see level 1-4 monsters with 6d6+6 brutal 1 lasting threats or 8d6 reliable blood of the mightys' too.

On the other hand, I don't think "the rules allow it, therefore it is balanced" actually worked that well in the previous edition either. There were lots of things the rules let you create that weren't balanced and more than a few the designers created that weren't balanced either. (Arrow demons, for instance). While restricting the use of NPC creation rules, may mitigate some of that, it hardly eliminates it (as the errata to crossbow turrets, needlefang drake swarms, etc demonstrates). Nor does restricting the use of NPC creation rules seem to have prevented 1st level characters from facing 6d6+6 dazzling rays. Since that particular NPC with his dazzling ray intact is now on the list of monsters that can be used without going through WotC R&D, I don't think the restriction on the NPC creation rules serves that purpose any longer.

Jan 27, 2010 -- 5:56AM, dkay807 wrote:

Jan 26, 2010 -- 2:26PM, bgibbons wrote:

Since this also means that 1st level PCs rarely have to deal with creatures casting Dazzling Ray at them for 6d6+6 damage, I think I can live with the restrictions.

PC class templates have always been legal for authors to use in LFR. A monster could easily be given a sorcerer class template and have Dazzling Ray as a daily power. I think that PC class templates should be used carefully at lower tiers, however.

He and I were talking about the NPC creation rules for creating standard monster NPCs rather than the class templates for giving an existing monster some PC class abilities.