One more time to pay for all.

[alexandraerin]

It's 3:30 and I'm awake and not writing... but I have noticed something. The person who'd been messaging me about D&D did it again and this time I recognized them as being an old troll who knows how to push my buttons, who probably isn't even a member of the forum he keeps sending me links to... he must have just gotten the address from when it came up months ago and decided to set me off again.

I'm not proud of having buttons that are so big and obvious and easy to push, but I think I've got more reasons to be proud than the person who pushes them for fun. :P

So, I'm going to make one last venty, ranty post about 4E bashing and then I'm done. Not done talking about D&D, but I'm going to keep it positive after this post. The rest of this post might just seem like more of the same grousing, but it's helpful to me in getting the fuck over it to take a look at and identify the sheer ridiculousness of it all. If you don't want to read it, you don't have to. I'm making it for my own benefit.



Okay, so just to get this all out of my head where it's bouncing around, I'm going to detail and refute some of the most nonsensical non sequitur arguments that I've seen popping up on these forum threads:

1. The fact that 4E's limited economy rules effectively disallow players from stripping every corpse and picking up everything that's not nailed down so they can sell it for book value is a symptom of the game designers not wanting to allow anything that breaks the cycle of kill/loot.

Budawhuhuh? Removing the incentive to loot perpetuates looting? Getting the players in my group to realize that there was no reason for them to obsessively pick up all the stuff that would be "Vendor Trash" in an MMO... their characters had no in-universe motivation for wanting fifteen kobold spears, nobody would pay them for them, etc., was a bit of an uphill battle in places, but I consider it to be one of the better parts of this system. One of the points of the treasure parcel system is to encourage DMs to move away from looting and put treasure into a scenario organically.

This is the first edition of D&D since its inception where player characters don't routinely end a battle by pulling out their Items of Infinite Inventory (portable hole, bag of holding, handy haversack) and stuff everything their dead enemies were wearing or carrying so they can sell it at the Magical Shop Where Everything You Drag In Is Somehow A Fungible Commodity Now... and this change makes it less realistic and immersive and more video gamey?

Of course, someone piped up on the forum to point out that the rules don't stop players from strip-mining encounters, they just make it more of a headache to sell the stuff and thus waste more time. Not at my table. If someone really wants to take the armor off seventeen dead kobolds, I'll ask them if their character is insane. And if they say yes, I'll let them do it. And then when they get back to town and say they're looking for a buyer, I'll tell them, "Good luck with that." and ask what everyone else is doing.

Bottom line: immersion doesn't require rules that support any merchant in the first town you come to buying the makeshift leather tunics that seventeen kobolds died in. That isn't realism. That isn't verisimilitude. It's a bunch of straight up video game bullshit that's got no place in a consistent, living world. No one wants your dead kobold leather. Seriously.

2. The fact that there is no value listed for a small golden idol means that you can't say the PCs found a small golden idol, and so the options for treasures are limited.

This one's easy. How much do you want the small golden idol to be worth? I don't need a book to tell me that a small golden idol worth 200 GP is worth 200 GP, or that one worth 50 GP is worth 50 GP. There are absolutely guidelines for how much "art objects" are worth... or rather there are guidelines telling you how much the art objects found at each level should be worth, to be level appropriate. Though there's nothing that stops you from having a whole chess set's worth of smaller, cheaper statuettes at a higher level, or combining the monetary value of five of the first level treasure parcels to represent the fabulous treasure of Sumded Ghai.

The crux of this complaint, though, is that gold itself as a precious metal is not given a value and this is a crippling oversight in the system... if we say that the statue's worth 200 GP, they want to know how much gold that is, by weight. Well, if it's important: how much do 200 gold coins weigh? That's how much gold is worth 200 GP. It's precious metal, not fiat money. This isn't even hard.

Though if this complaint were really about realism and immersion and not about "WE'RE USED TO PLAYING D&D LIKE IT'S A GAME AND NOT AN ACTUAL FANTASY WORLD SO WHY CAN'T WE KEEP DOING THAT?", they wouldn't be looking for the precise value of the idol's metal. They'd be complaining about the lack of rules for finding an art collector.

I mean, why would you want to melt an sculpture down and sell it for its value in metal is beyond me, unless there's a gold shortage and the art market is saturated? It's logically more valuable as a finished product than as a base material.

If players want to roleplay finding a buyer for the golden idol, yippee! And if I judge they do another encounter's worth of stuff trying to find the collector who'll pay for it, I'll up the value they get for it by one encounter's worth of gold. If they're not that interested in playing it out, though, I'll give them the value I've predetermined for it... that's not the price tag stamped on the bottom, it's not the idol's value as a bizarre form of religious icon-based currency, it's the price an interested buyer would give for it. The rulebook doesn't say that's what the value of an art object actually represents, but as a great philosopher said: ARE YOU DENSE? Do we really need to use up a line in the rulebook explaining that "one art object" is not actually an oddly-shaped denomination of coin?

3. You aren't allowed to make monsters in 4E. [when confronted with the guidelines for monster generation] The rules for making monsters in 4E are so bad that clearly they don't want you to do it. [when it's illustrated how easy it is] The monster you end up with is no different from any other except by its stats, name, description, and flavor text so therefore no new monster has been generated

Do I really need to address this one? There's a Monster Generator tool on the 4E website.

4. But monsters are so poorly balanced in 4E that the monster you generate will probably kill the entire party.

These complaints are coming from people who think paladins are literally worthless except in an entire party of paladins, from people who can't figure out a better tactic than picking the power that gives the most obvious and straightforward advantage and attacking over and over again with it. I'm honestly not surprised to read again and again that they get Total Party Kills from level-appropriate monsters.

5. The fact that monsters/NPCs aren't fully statted out like PCs robs me of options except using them in combat... I can't have them surrender or be captured after combat or have the players interact with them in any way except killing them!

Huzzzzzzuh? I really can't follow this argument at all. I used to play Tunnels & Trolls. PCs had full OD&D style stats. Monsters had one stat: Monster Rating. I also play quite a bit of GURPS, in which there is no difference between NPC stats and PC stats. I don't really recall either paradigm affecting my options when it came to non-combat interactions.

My 4E combats tend to involve some dialogue at the beginning and near the end, and possibly in the middle, if there's a common language. Some of the losers get away, if they can. The "boss" of one fight was taken alive and kept prisoner for a time. And then there's gamingdragon's creative repurposing of an NPC succubus, which I've detailed elsewhere.

Actual legitimate consequences of 4E monsters not being statted like PCs: Wizards can't get bonus spells by stealing their spellbooks. That's yet one more supremely video gamey D&D trope I'm happy to see fall by the wayside. What work of non-D&D fantasy has experienced wizards rifling through the backpacks of their defeated foes to see if they can find written instructions to do something neat?

Man, I wasn't planning on any particular theme for these, just picking out the most nonsensical, but it seems they keep coming back to the same complaint: that "looting" itself, in the terms of the familiar game mechanic, has been diminished in importance. And this somehow makes D&D more like a console video game or MMOs.

They can keep harping on how much "verisimilitude" is missing when the book doesn't detail the value of the nails they pulled out of the door when obviously those nails are made of something and that something is worth money, but... gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. One of my favorite characters to roleplay as is absolutely greedy to her very heart. She's not appraising the value of random dungeon fixtures and dead orc wear, though, because there would be nothing realistic about that. That's "RPG Reality", not actual reality.

6. "The rules force you to have either all melee or all ranged, and paladins are useless unless you have a whole party of paladins. And fifty eight orbizards can kill fifty eight Orcuses. And giving a flying character a bow wrecks combat."

Man, I'd have to see how the hell these people are playing the game to understand how they come up with these bizarre ideas. I mean, I do kind of get it from the way they reduce the classes to raw straighforward calculations of damage dealt/avoided and how they assume that DMs are going to play monsters the same way... I don't get why they do that and then complain about "boring tactic-poor grinds" when it seems like that's the way they prefer to play.

I have yet to play in or DM for a party that wasn't a mix of missile and melee. I've played in a group that had one single paladin.

7. "Some of the monsters are terribly unbalanced. Like, succubus is listed as a level 9 monster, but if you have a party of five level nine characters facing five succubi you're pretty much screwed."

Really? Even if they're five orbizards? :P

This is funny, though.

If you suggest a house rule or handwave to answer any of these people's objections, they'll say that if you can't play the game as it's written then it's a problem. But they've got no problem postulating a combination of monsters not supported by the encounter-building guidelines in the DMG.

Yeah, you could very easily wipe out most heroic-tier parties if you fill an encounter with succubi, flying creatures that can make themselves immune to one person's attacks and Dominate with an at-will attack. You could also very easily wipe out most heroic-tier parties by saying "Rocks fall, everybody dies." or "Floor drops out, you fall 100 feet into an acid pit." Each of those scenarios involves the DM arbitrarily creating a condition that's not going to exist if you're playing the game as written. The descriptions of monster controllers (which succubi are) in the DMG recommends limiting them to 1 or 2 per encounter. None of the encounter templates later in the book consists of wall-to-wall controllers.

No, there's no rule that explicitly says "You can't make an encounter that's all controllers", but the 4E bashers jump on anyone who points out there's no rule that says you can't do something. All available guidelines on setting up encounters limit controllers to two at most, the sample encounter for succubi has one succubus plus other, non-controller helpers... the response these arguments get is inevitably "But they said it's no hassle to balance encounters in 4E! Obviously that was bullshit!"

It is no hassle. The tools are right there. You're ignoring them and putting five succubi in an encounter. If your DM fiat results in a total party kill, that's an instance of Rocks Fall; Everybody Dies, not evidence of a mechanical problem.

8. "All you have to do to break the combat system is give a flying creature a bow."

And a flying creature with ranged attacks is unbalanced? Yeah, no duh. That's your verisimilitude. You're complaining about reality. Can you imagine how individual human flight with hover capabilities would have changed pre-mechanized warfare? What would a Spartan phalanx have done against flying archers? If boxing matches had one person on the ground, throwing punches, and one person flying above them dropping sandbags, who would win?

The fact that flight offers a clear advantage isn't a mechanical problem.

This "balance problem with reality" was a much bigger problem in 3E. 4E's designers recognized it and made sure nobody can fly freely and reliably (without shifting into a non-attacking form) before about level 16, and only certain builds can do that.

And like any other gamebreaker, the strategic advantage of flight is situational. There's no way to "nerf" the power of flight itself beyond what they did: heavily restricting it until you reach a level where your opposition is likely to have options, but there's an easy to negate the advantage: ceilings. Don't quite a lot of Dungeons & Dragons adventures take place in "dungeons"? Evil fortresses, evil caves, evil catacombs? The big climactic fight against the big climactic bad guy... who maybe can fly, too, or has really good ranged attacks... can happen in a big climactic room, but who cares what your hover flight speed is when you're fighting in hallways and rooms with an eight foot ceiling?

Again, you can say "If the system wasn't broken then the DM wouldn't need to come up with situations that block it.", but... flight. Flying. What's the systemic fix?

7. But since PCs can't really fly much before level paragon tier, you can kill the entire party by throwing a bunch of flying heroic tier monsters with ranged attacks at them.

Yeah. Here we come to a reason why parties consisting entirely of melee or entirely of ranged attackers is not a great idea. Though honestly, "Finding combinations of monsters that can wipe out the PCs" is an odd pasttime for a DM, especially when this edition makes it so easy to make up balanced encounters that provide genuine challenge but are still winnable.

8. But fighting on horseback gives you such tremendous advantages that it breaks everything, forever.

Situational advantage. Like the orbizard as gamebreaker theory, like the flying deathmonkey as gamebreaker theory, like all the other "game breakers", this assumes that the entire game experience is going to conform to a narrow set of circumstances. If fighting on horseback beats everything, what about flying? :P What about places that are inhospitable to horses? I'm sure the answer to this would be "There's no rule that says I can't take my horse into the mines/swamp/desert/Elemental Chaos!" Yeah? What about your verisimilitude? A consistent and logical world says you can't.

9. "Those dumbfucks at Wizards of the Coast didn't realize that if a conjuration effects everything in adjacent squares then you can conjure it in midair above a square and now all nine squares beneath it are adjacent. Too bad they're stuck thinking two dimensionally or they'd realize that they overpowered some level one attacks!"

Definition of adjacent square, from player's handbook: squares are adjacent if their sides or corners are touching. If we project a three-dimensional grid of the squares that flying creatures move through, you will note that the sides and corners of the squares at altitude one do not touch the sides or corners of squares at altitude zero. If we extend those squares up into cubes, then we can see that the cubes are adjacent.

To put it simply, it does not require a house rule to say that "adjacent squares" only applies in the horizontal plane. It works just fine exactly as written.

Is this WotC being "stuck thinking two dimensionally"? Well, the unbalancing exploit you thought you saw doesn't work because the system they designed works two-dimensionally instead of three. The hilarous thing is that the call the designers "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight".

10. This one was jogged loose from my memory by that last aside comment: "I came up with this great infinite gold loop exploit that involves making gold armor for a tiny creature, using the enchantment rituals to resize it for a gargantuan creature, and then selling the gold. But it doesn't work because the system provides no way for me to make money off! This is terrible game design and horrible mechanics and poor verisimilitude!"

I always thought "verisimilitude" meant something like "the quality of seeming true to life". Apparently I was mistaken and it means "letting me have more pretend money because I WANT IT, I WANT IT, I WANT IT!"

You want verisimilitude, here it is: there is no combination of rituals that mortals can perform that allows them to create vast amounts of wealth for far less investment of time and capital than any other pursuit allows. That's versimilitude. That's how you pretend like the game that you're playing is representing a real world that's consistent and persistent and has a purpose beyond providing you with entertainment.

Pretending like there are magic words people could learn to say that give you infinite money but yet the world plods on more or less unchanged?

Not realistic.

Not consistent.

Which brings me to number 11, which is going to be where I wrap this up and move on with my brainspace.

11. "Infinite gold loops and other wealth exploits that we found in 3E that 4E made impossible aren't actually unrealistic because all that would happen if someone did it is that there would be hyperinflation and so they'd pick some other currency and the world would move on and there wouldn't be any real effect on the game."

Somebody actually made this assertion. That is all.

Seriously.

Comments

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

I think the treasure part is amusing because of the fact I've never used it as a hard line. I'm fairly certain it mentions that you can play around with it so long as you get something that matches up with the same amount of treasure. Which, yes, means that someone who's memorized the treasure tables will know exactly how much something will be worth, and how much treasure is left in the adventure. But it's not really all that much different than someone who pulls out the Monster Manual when you start describing the monster.

Which seems to illustrate the key factor here. There's two ideas for how to play being offered up. The first is the argument that the rules are too restrictive, and don't allow you to get away with things you could in the old versions. The second is the argument that the rules aren't restrictive enough, because you can get away with things you couldn't do before and/or shouldn't be able to do.

This strikes me as a situation where what people are after is not a fourth edition, but a 3.75. Which would be Pathfinder, Paizo's OGL thing. They want everything to be the same as it was last time, or the remain the 'same' based on some value of sameness that's nonexistent outside their own ideas for such.

That's not unique to D&D; I've watched it go on with the Warmachine MkII stuff. Lots of complaints about the old edition, but when the new edition addressed a lot of those big, repetitive complaints, nobody was happy with that either. Why? Because their old exploits don't work, and someone found new exploits first.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, their reaction to Pathfinder is that Paizo lied and the game is bullshit. Which I take to mean, "When I actually play it, I can't make what I say should happen magically happen because the DM says no/the players won't go for it."

The funny thing is that this forum derides people who are resolving actions without recourse to a book-written system as "playing Magical Tea Party", because when little kids have make-believe time they just say what happens and because there are no rules, it does.

To me it seems like they're trading "Magical Tea Party" in for "Bible Study", where you spend your time scrutinizing the Good Book to find the one obscure passage that forgives what you're doing while condemning what others are... or, if you can't find that, to prove that it doesn't condemn what you're doing and it doesn't excuse what others are doing.

And since they'll take whichever interpretation supports what they want to do in the first place, they're still playing "Magical Tea Party".

Though I prefer the more accurate name of "Pretendy Fun Time"... only their way doesn't seem to be much fun even for them.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Eh- bitching can be fun. Even habit-forming.

But with regards to habit forming and 4th edition and so on, would you prefer I email you with various character ideas (which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with stats, mind) or save those up until a later point?

I'm also wanting to talk to you about my idea for that goliath warlord/paladin, just because I'm trying to find the best way to do it but can't find any ways to do it that fit better than the above. Although it may just be that I need to skip the hybridization and use the multiclassing feats. I haven't looked at those of yet.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I'd rather not have a private conversation about D&D when a public conversation may give me stuff I can point other people to later to save time.

Later on today I'm going to be a making "Seriously, you guys, let's hear what races/classes you want to play as, and anybody who says 'I'll play as whatever the party needs' is playing as a sparkly fairy princess, unless they want to play as a sparkly fairy princess, in which case they're playing as a longtooth shifter princess." post that would probably be the best place for it.

[matt_doyle]

Speaking as a vaguely-hardline 3E-er... Paqthfinder is an amazing campaign setting. If people are complaining about both Pathfinder and 4E, they are insane.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

In two sentences, you managed to concisely sum up what I've been grappling with for over 24 hours.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I like your gaming style definitions: "Magical Tea Party" and "Bible Study". To me, D&D of any variety has always been on the "Bible Study" end of the scale, because, well, what on earth are all those pages and pages of detail FOR if not for bible study? This isn't what I want to do. That doesn't make it a bad system, just not one that's ever going to interest me. I'll stick to HeroQuest and similar things. Our "magical tea-party" is regulated by us all being adults and having some basic common sense.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Our "magical tea-party" is regulated by us all being adults and having some basic common sense.

Ha! I was thinking the exact same thing when I registered a domain for my gaming stuff: GrownUpGameTable.com The tag line is going to be "Welcome to the tea party."

To me, D&D of any variety has always been on the "Bible Study" end of the scale, because, well, what on earth are all those pages and pages of detail FOR if not for bible study?

Yeah, the people who are actually proponents of it call it "dumpster diving"... going through twenty different books to find the exact optimal combination of stuff that they're convinced will make them invincible/break the game.

And in 3rd Edition D&D, if you were playing it as written, DMs had to do the same thing as players because monsters had the same stat/skill/feat/spell/class/level systems as PCs.

I'll admit that 4E doesn't look much different, especially since its marketing model is built on increasing the number of options.

I like it because it combines "Bible Study" for the combat mechanics with "Magical Tea Party" for everything else... where pretendy fun time games are most likely to break down is when one person says they hit the other, so they have the most rules for that... and in my opinion, they manage to make combats interesting by allowing them to unfold like a story instead of "I hit. I miss. I hit. I hit."

And by putting it all online and giving a point-and-click menu for making characters from it all they make it possible for a casual gamer to see all the choices without "dumpster diving".

Wait wait wait...

[rhakash.livejournal.com]

Wait!
So, that last one... did somebody just defeat their own argument totally on his own, with no additional outside help? As a non-native speaker (didn't grow up in an english-speaking country, only grew up with english-speaking father), I sometimes have a hard time following such... "eloquency", and therefore am forced to ask:
Did that guy seriously say "well, technically, somebody could've already tried that money-trick, but the rest of the world didn't care for that amount of the currency he used, and therefore switched to another currency", and forgot to add that his entire point is moot, because, hey, the wizard's got lots of money now, such a shame he can't use any of it?

Really, some people...

Re: Wait wait wait...

[rhakash.livejournal.com]

P.S.: Although, now that I think of it, it'd be a great way to ruin the economic systems of whole nations just by using that trick... Heh, that'd be nice :D

Re: Wait wait wait...

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much it. It doesn't make a lot more sense in English, either. Apparently these same people consider it a viable (if not necessary) "fix" to the game economy to have it be based on some kind of planar soul currency or something they cobbled together that can't be replicated by magic. They think it's "more fun" or "better" or "realistic" to play in a fantasy world where gold is worthless because of magic but everybody uses something from another dimension for money, I guess. I didn't look at it too deeply.

Me, I just say, "No, you can't make infinite gold." and move on.

Re: Wait wait wait...

[sage-blackthorn.livejournal.com]

Ok, workin' in Retail Sales for that last 15 years or so demands that I point something out here: No merchant ever buys stock for the retail sales price that is listed. They usually pay between 5% to 50% of what the item will sell for in order to make a profit. An item's "cost" is usually far less than it's "price", and the mark-up on cost has to take into consideration all the costs of running the business as well as adding in a reasonable amount of profit so you can expand and improve said business.

What this means is that realisticly, even if they have small golden idol work 200GP, no self-respecting merchant (be they art dealer or pawn shop owner) is gonna pay the full 200GP for it, they are gonna haggle you down to 100GP or less so they can turn around and sell it for the full 200GP and make a profit.

I hope these kids don't think like this when they goto work. They are bound to be sorely disappointed.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

[sage-blackthorn.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can remember complaints of a similar flavor from 25-30 years ago. Not exactly the same situations or examples, mind you, but the same whiney, rule-quoting, "It's not fair, it's not fair!" quality to them is there. Again, I will say "Garbage In, Garbage Out". If a person is a poor, un-imaginative, un-inventive, un-innovative player, their only recourse seems to be to whine about unfair the game is.

I think if my party ran into 9 succubi, and we made our rolls to see if they noticed us or not, the first thing we'd do is fade and hide after judging ourselves over-matched. No one says you HAVE to fight every fricken monster you come accross and you not allowed to RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. It ain't glorious, it might not even be considered honorable, but it's realistic. "Oh crap, I stumbled into a demon convention. I'd better get the hell out of here if I don't want to end up on a spit as the main course!" "Good choice, they'd have killed you. Discretion IS the better part of valor, after all. I award you 10 out of 10 exp. for good decision making." "What would you have done if I'd charged in and attacked?" "Dying isn't a bad enough penalty for poor judgement for you? Ok, not only would you likely have died, but I'd have to take away several 1000 exp. for bad judgement." (That's a reference to the old Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy BBC mini-series, for those of you who've never seen it.)

I mean seriously, where do these people come from? If they think they can do it so much better, let them make their own game with their own rules. But of course that would open them up to other bitching about how un-realistic and unfair THEIR rules are.

It's never the fault of the game, responsebility always rests with the people playing it. Really reminds me of all the times I heard "That game you are playing is horrible and evil! It was invented by the Devil! You're going to burn in hell if you keep playing it!" I'd always tell them the game could be whatever the players want it to be. The rules provide a basic framework, an outline, for creating settings (or worlds) for the game. Within that frame work, the players choices make the game good or bad. Bottom line, players who whine about how poorly written, or how unfair the rules are, or how unrealistic the game is, are poor players. Doesn't matter what edition or what game they play, it's only a bit of ink on a page in a book. If it doesn't work for ya, try something else. If it works, keep it. Kinda like life.

People are dumb

[roadtoad.livejournal.com]

Ignore them and have fun! :)

Re: People are dumb

[ego-sideways.livejournal.com]

Oh, if only 'twere possible. If only. But it's like a scab, or to more appropriately insult the perpetrators, a really painful infected pimple: It bugs you and bugs you and bugs you until you finally painfully squeeze it until you bruise yourself, and sometimes you pop it and sometimes you don't, and no matter what you just make it last longer, so you'll inevitably come back to it again.

Re: People are dumb

[amber-indikaze.livejournal.com]

I second this.

[mazzon.livejournal.com]

"Flying. What's the systemic fix?"
Easy: No flying. At all. For anyone. Nothing's actually forcing there to be flying monsters and/or magics that enable people to fly, it's just that game designers are unwilling to cut them out since people have grown to expect them and will whine if there aren't any.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

That is actually a true fact. And getting rid of flying (or only having the "overland flying" mechanic, where you get no actions except flying because that's all you're doing) or "fly for one movement action's worth of movement" versions that you get at lower levels would actually be consistent with the rest of what the designers did, in terms of getting rid of stuff that was gamebreakers: teleporting is now only short range with unbroken line of sight or a big complicated ritual between fixed locations, you can't turn yourself invulnerable for more than one round or even a single attack, invisibility that lasts longer than a few actions is hard to come by.

Getting rid of the ability to turn invisible/become invulnerable/teleport/fly is the way to fix the problems of people turning invisible/becoming invulnerable/teleporting/flying... but the same people who are railing that the system is broken are also complaining about the loss of the "high fantasy" feel they expect, as embodied by the ability to turn invisible, become invulnerable, teleport, and fly.

[sage-blackthorn.livejournal.com]

You mean you don't see the amusement of having a flying character or monster trying to dodge chandeliers or stalagtites while being peppered with arrows from a squad of elven archers or some diabolical gnomish fragmentation contraption, maybe even in the dark when someone with some sort of night vision ability gets the bright idea to douse the torches, turn out the lanterns or otherwise bring darkness into play?

Reminds me of the first time I saw Batty Koda in Ferngully..... "SMACK! Red Light! SMACK! Red Light Again!" Oh no, there are much more fun ways of dealing with flying/levitating. ;D

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Of course, that assumes that you've got some archers... if we accept it as given that a working party can only be ALL MELEE FIGHTERS or ALL DISTANCE ATTACKERS, there's a 50/50 chance that scenario won't work.

...

Which just leaves us with the question of why we'd want to assume that.

[hnmic.livejournal.com]

I managed to fix the "dark vision" game break in my world... it was simple when I thought about it because you see...

it is pitch black, you may be eaten by a grue.

[reynai.livejournal.com]

On the flying issue: I've actually been mulling over this a bit since the idea of 'flying as a gamebreaker' was first introduced as an issue on one of these posts, and I've thought of some possible methods of making it less game-breaky to have longer-term magical flight. Assuming intelligent players and DMs, of course.

The problem with flight stems from the fact that it tends, at least as far as I can tell, to be assumed that all flying will be of the free-will-to-move-as-your-mind-directs type. Why should that be the default? Why should that even be available in more than the one-move-action variety to anyone less than heroic/mid-epic level? Especially when that sort of flight -doesn't actually exist in the real world-. Helicopters can't even truly manage it, and they're about as close as you get to perfect manueverability.

Forget 'flight'. Try 'sprout magical wings'? You can lift off just fine from the ground...but since you weigh more than a couple dozen pounds, you'll need a running start to get airborne, which means space. And once you're up there... you have to keep moving. You can, perhaps, 'stall' for one round...but one round's it. Keep stalling and you....stall. And crash. Otherwise, you have to -fly around-. Which isn't particularly handy in combat, necessarily. Especially if you're trying to fight. Limited manueverability will also be an issue.

And giving something with wings a bow? There's a reason that you need a feat for mounted archery (or at least did, in 3.5, to my knowledge). You'll doubly need it for winged flight, since you also have to keep your arms from knocking your wings askew. And finding a way to draw arrows that won't knock your wings askew. And avoiding dropping anything.

On the other hand, it can also introduce new tactics. There's archers up on that ridge? Aerial charge/bullrush from a barbarian! Clifftop/Mountainy/Hilly battle? Have your ranged striker swoop from sniper point to sniper point.

...And now I'm thinking it would be a lot of fun to run/play a game where all of the PCs were winged.

[amber-indikaze.livejournal.com]

Are there rules for tacking on flight to a monster and how that affects the CR? It does seem like a difficult issue with a lot of different factors.

[amber-indikaze.livejournal.com]

(Sorry for my ignorance; I've only read the Player's Guide for 4E)

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Well to begin with there's no CR. Encounters are set up via xp. A given monster is worth XXX experience points. A first level encounter is 400xp, and a standard 1st level monster is 100xp. Minions are 25xp, Elites are 200, and Solo monsters are 500xp. Of course, you could toss in, say, a 2nd level monster (125xp), or 3rd (150xp) all the way up to 9th (400xp), but the monster's level is proportionate to their AC, to-hit, and damage- so a 9th level monster, while at an xp total viable for a 1st level encounter, is probably going to wipe the floor with the group.

The DMG's guide has two real sections for monsters- creation and modification. The former's more in line with what you're after, as the latter deals with templates and altering a monster's level, or handing it treasure.

Creation is fairly fast and loose, offering some basic information on monsters based on level- ability scores, hit points, AC, damage, and so on. Once you have all of those it mostly comes down to referencing the Monster Manual and looking at comparable abilities of monsters of equivalent level. So if you're looking to, say, make a Greenscale Hunter (level 4 Skirmisher) with wings, you might compare it to the Rotwing Zombie (level 4 Skirmisher) to see how their relative abilities shake out.

From there it seems fairly straightforward, relying as much on the DM having a brain as anything else.