Please excuse the clickbait. What I mean is, every creature should be playable. This is kind of the way things are going anyway, with every new expansion having a handful of playable monster races. It seems to be what the people want. Please can I play as a gnoll? Please can I play as a sahuagin? Please can I play as a pixie?
At the same time, it will help DMs. Lots of times I want to make a humanoid villain. But if I create an NPC using PC creation rules, I don't have the benefit of a CR to help me balance encounters. Or a certain type of monster fits the theme of an encounter, but it's the wrong CR for the party.
This idea is inspired by this thread: https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/107029-should-pc-damage-vs-toughness-be-adjusted. What I have in mind is merging player creation and monster creation rules. Just as the rules for combat are the same for players and monsters in 5e, so the rules for creation will be unified. Every low-level monster will be a race, and every race will be a low-level monster. High-level monsters will be built by adding levels of monster classes and subclasses to the base monsters.
In order to produce the necessary variety of monsters, there would need to be more flexibility than the typical linear progression for character leveling. So there might be some kind of point-buy system from a bag of abilities. There will still be a monster manual with pre-built monsters, but all could have been constructed according to the monster building rules. If you want to make a really unique monster that doesn't fit within the rules, you could always give it a magic item that explains its extra abilities. Or just bend the rules and do what you want. No one's stopping you. The rules just give you a lot of flexibility to easily build box-standard monsters for day-to-day encounters. If you want to think outside the box for the boss battle, go for it.
Players, in principle, could take levels in monster classes, but it would be up to the DM to decide whether that makes sense from a world-building perspective. The DM, for example, might decide that a certain monster class is always evil, and so couldn't work together with a good party. Or that a certain kind of monster is constructed or not native to this plane, and you can't just level up into it.
Player classes, too, would be designed with more flexible options as you level up. Instead of picking a subclass once, at each level you have a set of abilities to choose from. Or maybe you forgo an advancement to save up for a big one. Maybe if you skip a level two upgrade, you can get a level four upgrade early at level three. It could also solve one of the gripes I have about multiclassing. Two classes of level three is probably weaker than one class of level six. But if you're getting full level six points to spend, you could easily buy a level one ability from another class and an extra level five ability from your own, forgoing a level six ability.
Apologies if this is an old idea that's been discussed before (or maybe even similar to something implemented in an old edition or other RPG ruleset). I'm sure it would be quite a challenge for the designers to flesh out and balance. But if successful, it could be a great game.
[REDACTED] Their needs to be a difference between foes and players for any game built around multiple short conflicts (be they combative,social or otherwise) to function at all.If it does not you either end with bland play or over complicated play (just look at 4e which took this route exactly for the same reasons you mentioned and made everyone want to not exist).Their is little wiggle room here for a reason.However if you shifted the game design to single larger conflicts (something dnd will most likely never do for flavor reasons) it could work.
The flexibility of subclasses you're mentioning is closer to pathfinder in terms of how it builds, but at the same time would make the game stupid complex, both on the player side and the DM side. it's hard to create content when players are walking around with potentially 4 level 3 abilities at level 7, because by themselves they might be fairly linear but combined they could be absurdly broken. I like fairly crunchy games, but I think D&D is in a good place with how it builds.
The things you want with monsters can already be done, within reason. I've given goblins pack tactics, wolves Blood Frenzy, and I've given a white Dragonborn bad guy Cold Aura as a DM to give them something the players wouldn't see coming, but also could rebalance a lower level enemy to use at higher level combats.
The toolbox already exists, you just have to mold it to your whims and fancies.
[REDACTED] Their needs to be a difference between foes and players for any game built around multiple short conflicts (be they combative,social or otherwise) to function at all.If it does not you either end with bland play or over complicated play (just look at 4e which took this route exactly for the same reasons you mentioned and made everyone want to not exist).Their is little wiggle room here for a reason.However if you shifted the game design to single larger conflicts (something dnd will most likely never do for flavor reasons) it could work.
You're right, I don't understand. Why couldn't you have multiple small combats just by selecting weaker monsters?
I suppose you might need a different balance, such as monsters are typically tanks and players are glass cannons, but you could construct a ruleset that allows you to build both. For example, one of the ways to spend your level points is just to buy extra hp, and most monsters spend most of theirs that way.
And actually most of my games have one, maybe two combat encounters per long rest. Combat takes a long time, and I like each session to advance the story in ways that necessarily take days of in-game time and so allow for long rests. It would be nice if the game system was flexible enough to support my style of game as well as endurance dungeons.
Characters are crafted and maintained. NPCs and Monsters are pulled "out of the box", maybe buffed or diluted a bit, variant effects added if desired, and the game is played. I don't mind players possibly having more options to pick in leveling as opposed to being bound to a subclass (though a lot of the present abilities progress on their own in leveled increments), but some of this sounds like there's an effort to establish an equivalency between PC creation and stocking encounters environments with NPCs and Monsters, and I think that just leads to a bunch of burdening on the DM.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The things you want with monsters can already be done, within reason. I've given goblins pack tactics, wolves Blood Frenzy, and I've given a white Dragonborn bad guy Cold Aura as a DM to give them something the players wouldn't see coming, but also could rebalance a lower level enemy to use at higher level combats.
The toolbox already exists, you just have to mold it to your whims and fancies.
Of course you can do this. The problem is that once you do, you no longer know what CR of creature you have. There is an attempt at a formula for working backward to figure it out in the DMG, but it's at the same time too fiddly with all the math you have to do, and too vague about how much of an impact special abilities have.
OOh look who does understand the most basic of game design.Their needs to be a difference between foes and players for any game built around multiple short conflicts (be they combative,social or otherwise) to function at all.If it does not you either end with bland play or over complicated play (just look at 4e which took this route exactly for the same reasons you mentioned and made everyone want to not exist).Their is little wiggle room here for a reason.However if you shifted the game design to single larger conflicts (something dnd will most likely never do for flavor reasons) it could work.
You're right, I don't understand. Why couldn't you have multiple small combats just by selecting weaker monsters?
I suppose you might need a different balance, such as monsters are typically tanks and players are glass cannons, but you could construct a ruleset that allows you to build both. For example, one of the ways to spend your level points is just to buy extra hp, and most monsters spend most of theirs that way.
And actually most of my games have one, maybe two combat encounters per long rest. Combat takes a long time, and I like each session to advance the story in ways that necessarily take days of in-game time and so allow for long rests. It would be nice if the game system was flexible enough to support my style of game as well as endurance dungeons.
So I think this actually gives a lot of insight into why you want what you want. The game wants 6-8 encounters per day, but keep in mind that it doesn't mean combat for all 6-8. Social challenges, traps, etc fall into this category as well.
Endurance dungeons the game already supports, but both the players and the dm have to get into that mindset. If the players first instinct at level 9 is to whip out a level 5 spell for the first encounter they see? Probably going to go through all their go juice fairly quickly when they don't need to. Casters have cantrips, the tank can take the dodge action to hold the line and everyone else can gang up on them. If a player in this situation feels they can't be helpful? Maybe giving that player an item/boon to help in this vein would be appropriate. Same token, if its an endurance dungeon, from the DM side plan accordingly. Don't sit there and whip out monsters who can just take out chunks of the entire groups hitpoints. You also need to impose time limits on actions at the table. Hey, its your turn, player 2 is on deck, you have 20 seconds, what are you doing. Then when it's your turn, you do the same. Lead by example as the DM in that instance.
Will that mean "sub optimal" turns, yeah, but combat isn't about making the perfect selection all the time. It's about the heat of the moment and making what they think is the right choice in that instant.
I do like the concept of leveling up standard monsters, and I think it's a great idea. It just has to be tempered on both sides of the coin.
The things you want with monsters can already be done, within reason. I've given goblins pack tactics, wolves Blood Frenzy, and I've given a white Dragonborn bad guy Cold Aura as a DM to give them something the players wouldn't see coming, but also could rebalance a lower level enemy to use at higher level combats.
The toolbox already exists, you just have to mold it to your whims and fancies.
Of course you can do this. The problem is that once you do, you no longer know what CR of creature you have. There is an attempt at a formula for working backward to figure it out in the DMG, but it's at the same time too fiddly with all the math you have to do, and too vague about how much of an impact special abilities have.
Right, but CR is already an arbitrary number. Every group is going to handle it different. I also think when you're doing that, you're doing it not so much to create a difficult encounter(bosses or end of dungeons excluded), but more to create a unique thing for the party to handle so that combat isn't just tripe.
We're both making similar arguments, with you doing what you want the game would be much harder to balance in general, and with me doing what I want, there is an unknown to how it might affect balance.
Please excuse the clickbait. What I mean is, every creature should be playable. This is kind of the way things are going anyway, with every new expansion having a handful of playable monster races. It seems to be what the people want. Please can I play as a gnoll? Please can I play as a sahuagin? Please can I play as a pixie?
Ish? I mean, they did surveys about this stuff, way back when 5e first came out. So-called "evil games" are a super-sharp minority of games to the point its not worth making any page count for it. And that's as default elf/dwarf/human/etc as evil PCs, and not monsters.
We've gotten a few monsters for Ravenloft, a horror setting, and lots of goblinoids / orcs, some devil variants, but those are more of the exception than the rule.
At the same time, it will help DMs. Lots of times I want to make a humanoid villain. But if I create an NPC using PC creation rules, I don't have the benefit of a CR to help me balance encounters. Or a certain type of monster fits the theme of an encounter, but it's the wrong CR for the party.
Will it really help DMs? CRs are a guessing game already. Its heavily dependent on party composition, player skill and DM tactics. I've played in a group where we fought off a dragon above our CR, while an unintelligent monster equal to our CR beat us down, simply because our tactics and abilities were a poor match.
Meanwhile, your way would generate rather complex monster builds for a GM to run, whereas many GMs tend to prefer simpler stats on their monsters for ease to run during the game.
I've had to run games in Vampire: the Masquerade, where bad guys were fully statted out using PC rules. And it was a pain in the butt whenever I wanted to do something like a mook. Pregenerated mooks using simplified rules are much, much easier on me as a DM instead of having to spend extra time statting them out.
I'm really not a fan of any suggestion that involves more work on the DM. Its hard enough of a job.
At the same time, it will help DMs. Lots of times I want to make a humanoid villain. But if I create an NPC using PC creation rules, I don't have the benefit of a CR to help me balance encounters. Or a certain type of monster fits the theme of an encounter, but it's the wrong CR for the party.
Trying to follow this notion here. How is this supposed to mesh better with CR (or whatever the equivalent of CR would be)?
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Fundamentally, a PC is designed to be rich enough to engage a player with nothing else to think about or keep track of. Saddling a DM with 4-5 creatures at that level of complexity is not going to go well. While I think 5e has leaned a little too hard into simplicity for monsters, I have absolutely no desire to ever run a party of 5 PCs as a DM. And likewise on the other side of the screen, I wouldn't want to give up complexity as a PC for the sake of giving the DM an easier job.
That plus the fact that you may need monsters which can pose a threat singly or in pairs against a party of 4-6 adventurers are the primary reasons why I'd be against this (although to be fair, 5e is just now finally getting around to doing this well with mythical creatures). I think overall having a unified character design template would make DMing far more difficult.
I think it would be really restrictive on monster design too. You couldn't just think up something like an abyssal chicken, spitball the CR and throw it in a book. It would need to be rigorously analyzed as to how its abilities and features interacted with every possible combination of PC and monster features. I think you'd either get a much smaller set of monsters that do much fewer things, or an exploitable system that will need lots of houserules about which combos you can't take because it breaks the game.
I do think it could be interesting to modularize some monster abilities in a way that you could take one as a feat, or something more complicated could be like a class-agnostic subclass. I always found the Final Fantasy blue mages to be really compelling the way they learned from monsters and could use their abilities. But like in those games, the available features would only be a subset of all the things monsters could do.
[REDACTED] Their needs to be a difference between foes and players for any game built around multiple short conflicts (be they combative,social or otherwise) to function at all.If it does not you either end with bland play or over complicated play (just look at 4e which took this route exactly for the same reasons you mentioned and made everyone want to not exist).Their is little wiggle room here for a reason.However if you shifted the game design to single larger conflicts (something dnd will most likely never do for flavor reasons) it could work.
You're right, I don't understand. Why couldn't you have multiple small combats just by selecting weaker monsters?
I suppose you might need a different balance, such as monsters are typically tanks and players are glass cannons, but you could construct a ruleset that allows you to build both. For example, one of the ways to spend your level points is just to buy extra hp, and most monsters spend most of theirs that way.
And actually most of my games have one, maybe two combat encounters per long rest. Combat takes a long time, and I like each session to advance the story in ways that necessarily take days of in-game time and so allow for long rests. It would be nice if the game system was flexible enough to support my style of game as well as endurance dungeons.
read the thread
read anything wotc has published about 5e balance
Yes but that's not what the game is built for,Which was very clearly what i was referring too.
The things you want with monsters can already be done, within reason. I've given goblins pack tactics, wolves Blood Frenzy, and I've given a white Dragonborn bad guy Cold Aura as a DM to give them something the players wouldn't see coming, but also could rebalance a lower level enemy to use at higher level combats.
The toolbox already exists, you just have to mold it to your whims and fancies.
Of course you can do this. The problem is that once you do, you no longer know what CR of creature you have. There is an attempt at a formula for working backward to figure it out in the DMG, but it's at the same time too fiddly with all the math you have to do, and too vague about how much of an impact special abilities have.
Right, but CR is already an arbitrary number. Every group is going to handle it different. I also think when you're doing that, you're doing it not so much to create a difficult encounter(bosses or end of dungeons excluded), but more to create a unique thing for the party to handle so that combat isn't just tripe.
We're both making similar arguments, with you doing what you want the game would be much harder to balance in general, and with me doing what I want, there is an unknown to how it might affect balance.
Yeah, many times I might modify a monster to make it more interesting. But I might also like to know how difficult it is so I don't accidentally TPK the party. Yes, CR is already unreliable. I would like to see a system that works better.
Please excuse the clickbait. What I mean is, every creature should be playable. This is kind of the way things are going anyway, with every new expansion having a handful of playable monster races. It seems to be what the people want. Please can I play as a gnoll? Please can I play as a sahuagin? Please can I play as a pixie?
Ish? I mean, they did surveys about this stuff, way back when 5e first came out. So-called "evil games" are a super-sharp minority of games to the point its not worth making any page count for it. And that's as default elf/dwarf/human/etc as evil PCs, and not monsters.
We've gotten a few monsters for Ravenloft, a horror setting, and lots of goblinoids / orcs, some devil variants, but those are more of the exception than the rule.
At the same time, it will help DMs. Lots of times I want to make a humanoid villain. But if I create an NPC using PC creation rules, I don't have the benefit of a CR to help me balance encounters. Or a certain type of monster fits the theme of an encounter, but it's the wrong CR for the party.
Will it really help DMs? CRs are a guessing game already. Its heavily dependent on party composition, player skill and DM tactics. I've played in a group where we fought off a dragon above our CR, while an unintelligent monster equal to our CR beat us down, simply because our tactics and abilities were a poor match.
Meanwhile, your way would generate rather complex monster builds for a GM to run, whereas many GMs tend to prefer simpler stats on their monsters for ease to run during the game.
I've had to run games in Vampire: the Masquerade, where bad guys were fully statted out using PC rules. And it was a pain in the butt whenever I wanted to do something like a mook. Pregenerated mooks using simplified rules are much, much easier on me as a DM instead of having to spend extra time statting them out.
I'm really not a fan of any suggestion that involves more work on the DM. Its hard enough of a job.
I don't think most people who want to play monstrous characters want to play an evil character. They want to play a good gnoll. Or there are good-aligned monsters that have been made playable like centaur.
Like I said, there would still be a monster manual with pre-built monsters, so if you just want to look up a quick monster to build an encounter with, no problem.
The things you want with monsters can already be done, within reason. I've given goblins pack tactics, wolves Blood Frenzy, and I've given a white Dragonborn bad guy Cold Aura as a DM to give them something the players wouldn't see coming, but also could rebalance a lower level enemy to use at higher level combats.
The toolbox already exists, you just have to mold it to your whims and fancies.
Of course you can do this. The problem is that once you do, you no longer know what CR of creature you have. There is an attempt at a formula for working backward to figure it out in the DMG, but it's at the same time too fiddly with all the math you have to do, and too vague about how much of an impact special abilities have.
Right, but CR is already an arbitrary number. Every group is going to handle it different. I also think when you're doing that, you're doing it not so much to create a difficult encounter(bosses or end of dungeons excluded), but more to create a unique thing for the party to handle so that combat isn't just tripe.
We're both making similar arguments, with you doing what you want the game would be much harder to balance in general, and with me doing what I want, there is an unknown to how it might affect balance.
Yeah, many times I might modify a monster to make it more interesting. But I might also like to know how difficult it is so I don't accidentally TPK the party. Yes, CR is already unreliable. I would like to see a system that works better.
Ah except,for reasons anyone who has ever researched game balance before would know,this is psychically impossible.
At the same time, it will help DMs. Lots of times I want to make a humanoid villain. But if I create an NPC using PC creation rules, I don't have the benefit of a CR to help me balance encounters. Or a certain type of monster fits the theme of an encounter, but it's the wrong CR for the party.
Trying to follow this notion here. How is this supposed to mesh better with CR (or whatever the equivalent of CR would be)?
CR would just be replaced with level, actually. Like maybe a Salamander is a lizardfolk with 5 levels of fire elemental. It should be equivalent in difficulty to an Otyugh which is an aberration with 4 levels of tentacle monster and 1 level of disease monster or something.
EDIT: Actually the level 5 Otyugh would maybe be able to buy 3 levels each of tentacle and disease, as level 1-3 abilities are cheaper than levels 4 and 5.
Then there would be encounter difficulty rules based on level and number of both sides. Presumably a battle between equal numbers of equal level should be deadly by definition.
3e used to basically let you do this. Just tack a couple fighter or wizard levels onto the goblins or really to any type of monster. As others mentioned, it was a pain. You do all this work putting together what is basically a PC, then they, by design, die in the first fight. So to make it simpler, you design 3-4 stock versions and use them over and over. And at that point, you’re back to where we started with just a monster manual. Oh, and players threw fits. When monsters use the same rules characters do, the players end up knowing exactly how the powers work (because they have the same ones), so there were constant arguments about the way things were supposed to work. And they’d metagame everything.
Fundamentally, a PC is designed to be rich enough to engage a player with nothing else to think about or keep track of. Saddling a DM with 4-5 creatures at that level of complexity is not going to go well. While I think 5e has leaned a little too hard into simplicity for monsters, I have absolutely no desire to ever run a party of 5 PCs as a DM. And likewise on the other side of the screen, I wouldn't want to give up complexity as a PC for the sake of giving the DM an easier job.
The system should be flexible enough to allow you to create simple or complex players / monsters. You can buy up a lot of low-level abilities or a few high-level ones. DMs will usually create / select monsters with a few simple options. But sometimes they might want to create an intricate tactical combat. Probably they'll never want as many capabilities as a PC, but they can adjust up or down as the encounter requires.
Flexible complexity would be a nice feature for PCs, too. Maybe you want to create a very simplified character sheet for a newbie or casual player, which looks a lot like a monster stat block. Such characters could also be used for followers.
Ideally the point system would be balanced so that a very simple character or monster would hit slightly harder just by spamming its most powerful ability, but not much. Buying extra options at the same level would be at a discounted cost, because they don't make you overall more powerful, just more flexible, which is a little bit powerful in the right situation.
Fundamentally, a PC is designed to be rich enough to engage a player with nothing else to think about or keep track of. Saddling a DM with 4-5 creatures at that level of complexity is not going to go well. While I think 5e has leaned a little too hard into simplicity for monsters, I have absolutely no desire to ever run a party of 5 PCs as a DM. And likewise on the other side of the screen, I wouldn't want to give up complexity as a PC for the sake of giving the DM an easier job.
The system should be flexible enough to allow you to create simple or complex players / monsters. You can buy up a lot of low-level abilities or a few high-level ones. DMs will usually create / select monsters with a few simple options. But sometimes they might want to create an intricate tactical combat. Probably they'll never want as many capabilities as a PC, but they can adjust up or down as the encounter requires.
Flexible complexity would be a nice feature for PCs, too. Maybe you want to create a very simplified character sheet for a newbie or casual player, which looks a lot like a monster stat block. Such characters could also be used for followers.
Ideally the point system would be balanced so that a very simple character or monster would hit slightly harder just by spamming its most powerful ability, but not much. Buying extra options at the same level would be at a discounted cost, because they don't make you overall more powerful, just more flexible, which is a little bit powerful in the right situation.
Well know we have 4e which almost nobody likes or at any point liked
Please excuse the clickbait. What I mean is, every creature should be playable. This is kind of the way things are going anyway, with every new expansion having a handful of playable monster races. It seems to be what the people want. Please can I play as a gnoll? Please can I play as a sahuagin? Please can I play as a pixie?
At the same time, it will help DMs. Lots of times I want to make a humanoid villain. But if I create an NPC using PC creation rules, I don't have the benefit of a CR to help me balance encounters. Or a certain type of monster fits the theme of an encounter, but it's the wrong CR for the party.
This idea is inspired by this thread: https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/107029-should-pc-damage-vs-toughness-be-adjusted. What I have in mind is merging player creation and monster creation rules. Just as the rules for combat are the same for players and monsters in 5e, so the rules for creation will be unified. Every low-level monster will be a race, and every race will be a low-level monster. High-level monsters will be built by adding levels of monster classes and subclasses to the base monsters.
In order to produce the necessary variety of monsters, there would need to be more flexibility than the typical linear progression for character leveling. So there might be some kind of point-buy system from a bag of abilities. There will still be a monster manual with pre-built monsters, but all could have been constructed according to the monster building rules. If you want to make a really unique monster that doesn't fit within the rules, you could always give it a magic item that explains its extra abilities. Or just bend the rules and do what you want. No one's stopping you. The rules just give you a lot of flexibility to easily build box-standard monsters for day-to-day encounters. If you want to think outside the box for the boss battle, go for it.
Players, in principle, could take levels in monster classes, but it would be up to the DM to decide whether that makes sense from a world-building perspective. The DM, for example, might decide that a certain monster class is always evil, and so couldn't work together with a good party. Or that a certain kind of monster is constructed or not native to this plane, and you can't just level up into it.
Player classes, too, would be designed with more flexible options as you level up. Instead of picking a subclass once, at each level you have a set of abilities to choose from. Or maybe you forgo an advancement to save up for a big one. Maybe if you skip a level two upgrade, you can get a level four upgrade early at level three. It could also solve one of the gripes I have about multiclassing. Two classes of level three is probably weaker than one class of level six. But if you're getting full level six points to spend, you could easily buy a level one ability from another class and an extra level five ability from your own, forgoing a level six ability.
Apologies if this is an old idea that's been discussed before (or maybe even similar to something implemented in an old edition or other RPG ruleset). I'm sure it would be quite a challenge for the designers to flesh out and balance. But if successful, it could be a great game.
[REDACTED] Their needs to be a difference between foes and players for any game built around multiple short conflicts (be they combative,social or otherwise) to function at all.If it does not you either end with bland play or over complicated play (just look at 4e which took this route exactly for the same reasons you mentioned and made everyone want to not exist).Their is little wiggle room here for a reason.However if you shifted the game design to single larger conflicts (something dnd will most likely never do for flavor reasons) it could work.
Check out my homebrew subclasses spells magic items feats monsters races
i am a sauce priest
help create a world here
The things you want with monsters can already be done, within reason. I've given goblins pack tactics, wolves Blood Frenzy, and I've given a white Dragonborn bad guy Cold Aura as a DM to give them something the players wouldn't see coming, but also could rebalance a lower level enemy to use at higher level combats.
The toolbox already exists, you just have to mold it to your whims and fancies.
You're right, I don't understand. Why couldn't you have multiple small combats just by selecting weaker monsters?
I suppose you might need a different balance, such as monsters are typically tanks and players are glass cannons, but you could construct a ruleset that allows you to build both. For example, one of the ways to spend your level points is just to buy extra hp, and most monsters spend most of theirs that way.
And actually most of my games have one, maybe two combat encounters per long rest. Combat takes a long time, and I like each session to advance the story in ways that necessarily take days of in-game time and so allow for long rests. It would be nice if the game system was flexible enough to support my style of game as well as endurance dungeons.
Characters are crafted and maintained. NPCs and Monsters are pulled "out of the box", maybe buffed or diluted a bit, variant effects added if desired, and the game is played. I don't mind players possibly having more options to pick in leveling as opposed to being bound to a subclass (though a lot of the present abilities progress on their own in leveled increments), but some of this sounds like there's an effort to establish an equivalency between PC creation and stocking encounters environments with NPCs and Monsters, and I think that just leads to a bunch of burdening on the DM.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Of course you can do this. The problem is that once you do, you no longer know what CR of creature you have. There is an attempt at a formula for working backward to figure it out in the DMG, but it's at the same time too fiddly with all the math you have to do, and too vague about how much of an impact special abilities have.
So I think this actually gives a lot of insight into why you want what you want. The game wants 6-8 encounters per day, but keep in mind that it doesn't mean combat for all 6-8. Social challenges, traps, etc fall into this category as well.
Endurance dungeons the game already supports, but both the players and the dm have to get into that mindset. If the players first instinct at level 9 is to whip out a level 5 spell for the first encounter they see? Probably going to go through all their go juice fairly quickly when they don't need to. Casters have cantrips, the tank can take the dodge action to hold the line and everyone else can gang up on them. If a player in this situation feels they can't be helpful? Maybe giving that player an item/boon to help in this vein would be appropriate. Same token, if its an endurance dungeon, from the DM side plan accordingly. Don't sit there and whip out monsters who can just take out chunks of the entire groups hitpoints. You also need to impose time limits on actions at the table. Hey, its your turn, player 2 is on deck, you have 20 seconds, what are you doing. Then when it's your turn, you do the same. Lead by example as the DM in that instance.
Will that mean "sub optimal" turns, yeah, but combat isn't about making the perfect selection all the time. It's about the heat of the moment and making what they think is the right choice in that instant.
I do like the concept of leveling up standard monsters, and I think it's a great idea. It just has to be tempered on both sides of the coin.
Right, but CR is already an arbitrary number. Every group is going to handle it different. I also think when you're doing that, you're doing it not so much to create a difficult encounter(bosses or end of dungeons excluded), but more to create a unique thing for the party to handle so that combat isn't just tripe.
We're both making similar arguments, with you doing what you want the game would be much harder to balance in general, and with me doing what I want, there is an unknown to how it might affect balance.
Ish? I mean, they did surveys about this stuff, way back when 5e first came out. So-called "evil games" are a super-sharp minority of games to the point its not worth making any page count for it. And that's as default elf/dwarf/human/etc as evil PCs, and not monsters.
We've gotten a few monsters for Ravenloft, a horror setting, and lots of goblinoids / orcs, some devil variants, but those are more of the exception than the rule.
Will it really help DMs? CRs are a guessing game already. Its heavily dependent on party composition, player skill and DM tactics. I've played in a group where we fought off a dragon above our CR, while an unintelligent monster equal to our CR beat us down, simply because our tactics and abilities were a poor match.
Meanwhile, your way would generate rather complex monster builds for a GM to run, whereas many GMs tend to prefer simpler stats on their monsters for ease to run during the game.
I've had to run games in Vampire: the Masquerade, where bad guys were fully statted out using PC rules. And it was a pain in the butt whenever I wanted to do something like a mook. Pregenerated mooks using simplified rules are much, much easier on me as a DM instead of having to spend extra time statting them out.
I'm really not a fan of any suggestion that involves more work on the DM. Its hard enough of a job.
Trying to follow this notion here. How is this supposed to mesh better with CR (or whatever the equivalent of CR would be)?
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Fundamentally, a PC is designed to be rich enough to engage a player with nothing else to think about or keep track of. Saddling a DM with 4-5 creatures at that level of complexity is not going to go well. While I think 5e has leaned a little too hard into simplicity for monsters, I have absolutely no desire to ever run a party of 5 PCs as a DM. And likewise on the other side of the screen, I wouldn't want to give up complexity as a PC for the sake of giving the DM an easier job.
That plus the fact that you may need monsters which can pose a threat singly or in pairs against a party of 4-6 adventurers are the primary reasons why I'd be against this (although to be fair, 5e is just now finally getting around to doing this well with mythical creatures). I think overall having a unified character design template would make DMing far more difficult.
I think it would be really restrictive on monster design too. You couldn't just think up something like an abyssal chicken, spitball the CR and throw it in a book. It would need to be rigorously analyzed as to how its abilities and features interacted with every possible combination of PC and monster features. I think you'd either get a much smaller set of monsters that do much fewer things, or an exploitable system that will need lots of houserules about which combos you can't take because it breaks the game.
I do think it could be interesting to modularize some monster abilities in a way that you could take one as a feat, or something more complicated could be like a class-agnostic subclass. I always found the Final Fantasy blue mages to be really compelling the way they learned from monsters and could use their abilities. But like in those games, the available features would only be a subset of all the things monsters could do.
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(Warlock) The Swarm
I am all for a bit of added complexity, but this sounds like complexity that wouldn't really add to the game beyond making DMing a nightmarish chore.
Hard Pass
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read the thread
read anything wotc has published about 5e balance
Yes but that's not what the game is built for,Which was very clearly what i was referring too.
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Yeah, many times I might modify a monster to make it more interesting. But I might also like to know how difficult it is so I don't accidentally TPK the party. Yes, CR is already unreliable. I would like to see a system that works better.
I don't think most people who want to play monstrous characters want to play an evil character. They want to play a good gnoll. Or there are good-aligned monsters that have been made playable like centaur.
Like I said, there would still be a monster manual with pre-built monsters, so if you just want to look up a quick monster to build an encounter with, no problem.
Ah except,for reasons anyone who has ever researched game balance before would know,this is psychically impossible.
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CR would just be replaced with level, actually. Like maybe a Salamander is a lizardfolk with 5 levels of fire elemental. It should be equivalent in difficulty to an Otyugh which is an aberration with 4 levels of tentacle monster and 1 level of disease monster or something.
EDIT: Actually the level 5 Otyugh would maybe be able to buy 3 levels each of tentacle and disease, as level 1-3 abilities are cheaper than levels 4 and 5.
Then there would be encounter difficulty rules based on level and number of both sides. Presumably a battle between equal numbers of equal level should be deadly by definition.
3e used to basically let you do this. Just tack a couple fighter or wizard levels onto the goblins or really to any type of monster. As others mentioned, it was a pain. You do all this work putting together what is basically a PC, then they, by design, die in the first fight. So to make it simpler, you design 3-4 stock versions and use them over and over. And at that point, you’re back to where we started with just a monster manual.
Oh, and players threw fits. When monsters use the same rules characters do, the players end up knowing exactly how the powers work (because they have the same ones), so there were constant arguments about the way things were supposed to work. And they’d metagame everything.
The system should be flexible enough to allow you to create simple or complex players / monsters. You can buy up a lot of low-level abilities or a few high-level ones. DMs will usually create / select monsters with a few simple options. But sometimes they might want to create an intricate tactical combat. Probably they'll never want as many capabilities as a PC, but they can adjust up or down as the encounter requires.
Flexible complexity would be a nice feature for PCs, too. Maybe you want to create a very simplified character sheet for a newbie or casual player, which looks a lot like a monster stat block. Such characters could also be used for followers.
Ideally the point system would be balanced so that a very simple character or monster would hit slightly harder just by spamming its most powerful ability, but not much. Buying extra options at the same level would be at a discounted cost, because they don't make you overall more powerful, just more flexible, which is a little bit powerful in the right situation.
Well know we have 4e which almost nobody likes or at any point liked
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