The Gaming Den

In my campaign, we did away with money. PCs are assumed to be able to sustain their chosen lifestyle "off screen" in various ways. They adventure to battle foes of their realm, on orders of their patron god or church superior, for personal glory, or just for the heck of it, and because that is what barbarians do. Magic items are acquired by DM fiat (Player says what he wants, DM checks it, and if ok has it looted, or commissioned, or granted by a church, etc.).

It works well with our group, but is not for everyone.

angelfromanotherpin wrote: Why? What's wrong with having a day job? Why can't an adventure be something you do for a cause? To get the girl, to raise the dead, to overthrow the tyrant.

If money doesn't matter then it could be. But you can't simultaneously have money matter and also allow people to make significant amounts of money at a day job.

"Quantum" wrote: This is easy to enforce - you remove the price tag from the stuff the PCs actually want, which are items that give them super powers. You *can't buy* superpowers with anything resembling the currency you use to buy food and other mundane stuff. High-end items cost *other high-end items* if you get them via transactions at all. This is the idea behind the Tome planar currencies after all - they're high-end items that happen to not give you superpowers just yet.

Inherently the wish economy problem is that while you can't buy those magic items, you can very well have a wizard craft them for you with your infinite gold. So it means that item crafters get infinite scrolls and shit and fighters get hosed. And it's just another reason you have to kneel down and suck wizard cock. Which just sucks.

And then you just have uber gold that you can trade to people to actually buy real magic items, but meanwhile item crafters are using free infinite gold to make items. Which basically means that they can invest time to gain power, yet fighters can't. That sucks.

And it's an economy that just enforces slavery under wizards, because you seriously need a wizard for anything. So it tells the fighter that his day job for gold is totally meaningless, and the wizard can actually produce real magic items by spending his time crafting.

The idea shouldn't be that day jobs give you nothing. The idea should be that they give you nothing significant to your adventuring. So the amount of gp you're gaining working a real job is pretty much nothing compared to what you'd make by adventuring. Similarly, the items you can craft yourself are weak compared to what you'd get adventuring. And that applies to wizards or fighters. Whether you're the king's knight or you've got your own "wall of iron Corp", you're just not making much compared to what you would if you went out killing dragons. And saving up money from your day job to buy excalibur would be like someone saving up their money working at McDonald's to buy a private jet. If you want to undertake the quest for greater wealth, you're going to have to go on daring adventures.

Because the bottom line is that we don't want the game turning into Taverns and Tavernkeepers. It's okay for people to have side jobs, but that's not the focus of the game, and never should become the focus. You have to be able to reasonably balance one PC who has a business versus another PC who plays a reclusive hermit druid. You also don't want the game to give too much incentive for the PCs to say "fuck adventuring, I'm just going to run a weaponshop for 10 years."

RandomCasualty2 wrote:Inherently the wish economy problem is that while you can't buy those magic items, you can very well have a wizard craft them for you with your infinite gold. So it means that item crafters get infinite scrolls and shit and fighters get hosed. And it's just another reason you have to kneel down and suck wizard cock. Which just sucks.

And then you just have uber gold that you can trade to people to actually buy real magic items, but meanwhile item crafters are using free infinite gold to make items. Which basically means that they can invest time to gain power, yet fighters can't. That sucks.

And it's an economy that just enforces slavery under wizards, because you seriously need a wizard for anything. So it tells the fighter that his day job for gold is totally meaningless, and the wizard can actually produce real magic items by spending his time crafting.

Races of War, Fighter class features wrote:Forge Lore: A 7th level Fighter can produce magical weapons and equipment as if he had a Caster Level equal to his ranks in Craft.

Problem solved. The fighter can now make magic items of a higher level (barring orange prism ioun stone cheese) than the spellcasters, assuming he's invested in the Craft skill. And once the spell's been put to wand or staff, UMDers can get together with fighters and slap magic items together, including more wands. You might not even need a person with spell slots if you can find and "convince" a creature which has the right SLAs to help you out.

Once the wizard is just the Spell R&D department, I don't care that he's "needed" to get the item-construction business off the ground.

I really need to find my notes for the Manual of Making Things...

RandomCasualty2 wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote: Why? What's wrong with having a day job? Why can't an adventure be something you do for a cause? To get the girl, to raise the dead, to overthrow the tyrant.

If money doesn't matter then it could be. But you can't simultaneously have money matter and also allow people to make significant amounts of money at a day job.

Again, may I ask why not?

Seriously, if there is a giant monster with no money, and it's threatening to burn down your day job... you go out and kill it. That's the third act of Beowulf. And then you're still getting fat paid (by your job) and you've killed a monster, and D&D continues as normal.

Or you have a day job and actual goals that require adventuring to accomplish but pay badly. Like being a freedom fighter.

Seriously. Open your mind a little.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:Yeah, ultimately that's one of the benefits of 4E (and possibly the only benefit) is not having to bother statting up a bunch of stuff like NPC wizards spellbooks.

The ability to create monsters quickly is the strongest argument in favor of 4E. Where in 3E, this is impossible without cutting corners, like not fully doing skills or leaving off the spellbook. Creating monsters fast is very important because slow generation leads to railroading.

See, that's bullshit.

1) You aren't allowed to create a monster in 4e. But if you were, it would take just as much time as making one in 3e, but still suffer from 2.

2) You can make them quickly? Why is that? Oh right, because you just ignore 90% of the stuff that makes them real. Like the fact they stab you with a magical halberd that disintegrates on death, or Wizards don't use spellbooks, because we aren't playing D&D, or just generally because you grabbed a damn name from a hat to set up an encounter instead of constructing one because you know all encounters are just as hard as all other ones because everything is exactly the same.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
Seriously, if there is a giant monster with no money, and it's threatening to burn down your day job... you go out and kill it. That's the third act of Beowulf. And then you're still getting fat paid (by your job) and you've killed a monster, and D&D continues as normal.

Yeah you could do this, but it's just not the conventional D&D set up of going into dungeons and retrieving treasure and for this to work, it requires all the PCs to have day jobs that pay equally.

Kaelik wrote:
1) You aren't allowed to create a monster in 4e. But if you were, it would take just as much time as making one in 3e, but still suffer from 2.

Huh? Why because they aren't made the same as PCs?

2) You can make them quickly? Why is that? Oh right, because you just ignore 90% of the stuff that makes them real. Like the fact they stab you with a magical halberd that disintegrates on death, or Wizards don't use spellbooks, because we aren't playing D&D, or just generally because you grabbed a damn name from a hat to set up an encounter instead of constructing one because you know all encounters are just as hard as all other ones because everything is exactly the same.

It's not a magical halberd, it's a normal halberd that they augment through a power. Just because it seems magical by description doesn't mean it is. Yeah, I've had PCs who killed a duskblade in 3E who wanted his electric sword, when it was really channel spell and shocking grasp through a MW sword. Same difference.

As far as spellbooks, how do we even know that the enemy is necessarily a wizard? Even 3E had a vast number of alternate casters such that we can assume there are tons of disciplines of magic. Dread necromancers, beguilers, sorcerers, spirit shaman, Wu Jen, Clerics, Druids... just because it casts spells doesn't automatically make it a spellbook using wizard.

And regardless, a wizard's spellbook doesn't even do anything in 4E anyway. Because wizards are only allowed a fixed number of extra spells in their books that they already have.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:Huh? Why because they aren't made the same as PCs?

No, because you pick a fully stated out MM bullshit. Which you can do in 3.5, or you can advance HD, add class levels, change ability scores (using rules, yes you can arbitrarily do anything), change spells, change feats, or god forbid use class levels.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:It's not a magical halberd, it's a normal halberd that they augment through a power. Just because it seems magical by description doesn't mean it is. Yeah, I've had PCs who killed a duskblade in 3E who wanted his electric sword, when it was really channel spell and shocking grasp through a MW sword. Same difference.

Yes, nobody in the entire universe except the PCs actually uses magical equipment at all. Oh wait, that's fucking retarded, maybe half of them have inherent power, but to claim all of them do and that no one anywhere ever has used a magic item?

RandomCasualty2 wrote:As far as spellbooks, how do we even know that the enemy is necessarily a wizard? Even 3E had a vast number of alternate casters such that we can assume there are tons of disciplines of magic. Dread necromancers, beguilers, sorcerers, spirit shaman, Wu Jen, Clerics, Druids... just because it casts spells doesn't automatically make it a spellbook using wizard.

Yes, because we all know that no Wizards exist anywhere at all. Or why is it that none of them have spellbooks again? Just because you can come up with another method for them having magic doesn't explain why in 100 campaigns and a billion encounters, no one ever even once encounters a Wizard.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:And regardless, a wizard's spellbook doesn't even do anything in 4E anyway. Because wizards are only allowed a fixed number of extra spells in their books that they already have.

Yes, which is what I was fucking complaining about. The fact that unlike every edition of D&D ever, and every D&D setting ever, now, all of a sudden, spellbooks are fucking worthless, and all Wizards are exactly like Sorcerers with half the spells known. (and only the shitty ones).

Kaelik wrote: No, because you pick a fully stated out MM bullshit.

No, you don't. You pick out stats based on its level and monster type from a table. You don't have to open the MM at all.

Yes, nobody in the entire universe except the PCs actually uses magical equipment at all. Oh wait, that's fucking retarded, maybe half of them have inherent power, but to claim all of them do and that no one anywhere ever has used a magic item?

You can give monsters magic items. 4E has rules for that, in fact it's what that whole enhancement bonus threshold is all about. It's just that if you hand out magical gear to monsters, then you expect to actually hand out magical gear as treasure, and generally those magic items are meaningful. They're not bullshit magic sword #443, but like actual fantasy novels when a bad guy has a magic weapon described, it tends to be significant. They're not just dressed up in countless minor magical trinkets that all provide small bonuses that amount to just shit you sell at market.

And magic items tend to be a PC thing mostly anyway. Even 3E had NPCs get fewer magic item value than PCs do. Why? Because it's obvious NPCs can't use magic items like PCs do, otherwise after PCs kill NPCs they get saturated in magic items. So NPCs needed fewer magic items than PCs. Unfortunately this also meant that same level NPCs sucked compared to PCs (when they were supposedly meant to be an even fight). And it was an impossible concept, NPCs that worked exactly like PCs, and yet were supposed to have fewer magic items yet still be an equal challenge. The entire design goal was just batshit nuts and could never work so long as magic items added power.

4E just finally got smart and said fuck all that. Challenge level and treasure are two separate things. And that's a good thing.

Because as a DM I don't want to go shopping for each NPC so I can fill out his tax code and make him look like a PC. I want to be able to create NPCs on the fly, so I can create dynamic stories. If I can't create NPCs fast, then I am forced into railroading.

So if you want NPCs to be fully tax coded like 3E wants, then basically you're advocating that adventures do not allow for PCs to do unexpected things and that the opposition is entirely static.

Yes, because we all know that no Wizards exist anywhere at all. Or why is it that none of them have spellbooks again? Just because you can come up with another method for them having magic doesn't explain why in 100 campaigns and a billion encounters, no one ever even once encounters a Wizard.

You can encounter wizards in 4E, and they can have spellbooks. But like I said, the spellbook doesn't even do anything. 4E does have rules for creating NPCs with PC classes, they aren't created as PCs, but they are technically an NPC wizard.

Yes, which is what I was fucking complaining about. The fact that unlike every edition of D&D ever, and every D&D setting ever, now, all of a sudden, spellbooks are fucking worthless, and all Wizards are exactly like Sorcerers with half the spells known. (and only the shitty ones).

That's a meaningful complaint, but it has little to do with monster creation in 4E, but instead with how the wizard class is designed.

There are plenty of problems with 4E classes being boring.

The monster generation system is however pretty good as far as being a quick way to make opponents for the PCs.

Personally, I think monsters should be created similarly to PCs, and I think that there should be a guide for creating monsters on the fly--pick what you want the monster to do, and here are stats for it. I know that Pathfinder has a rough guide, listing things like approximate AC by CR.

Look, here are the strengths of monsters in 4E:

You can tell what the monster supposed to do and what they can do generally in less than a minute of reading.

The CR for 4E monsters are usually, though not always, appropriate for a party. There are some major exceptions and I plan to talk about them because they pretty much destroy the strengths of the system, but if you know what's going on you can have a handle on encounters.

The advantages of this should be pretty obvious. You can throw down monsters on the fly (meaning more spontaneity) and novice DMs don't need to get that much experience in order to get into the swing of things. TPKs are still distressingly common in 4E, especially at low levels, though not to the extent in 3rd Edition.

Now, the above system works for what the game designers wanted. Other aspects of the game like magic items and spellbooks are frankly flaws of some other set of the rules, not monster creation.


The biggest flaw I can find in the monster manual that isn't due to something else is that there are no guidelines for monster abilities. There are low-level monsters that can stunlock as a minor action or free action, monsters that get 4 or more attacks, and also monsters who cause group blindness. There are no guidelines for any of these abilities and that fucking blows rocks. They didn't exist for 3E either, but the whole point of monster standardization was to prevent TPKs from giant crabs--and the people who designed 4E forgot to standard the most important part of monster design!!

Lago wrote:The biggest flaw I can find in the monster manual that isn't due to something else is that there are no guidelines for monster abilities. There are low-level monsters that can stunlock as a minor action or free action, monsters that get 4 or more attacks, and also monsters who cause group blindness. There are no guidelines for any of these abilities and that fucking blows rocks. They didn't exist for 3E either, but the whole point of monster standardization was to prevent TPKs from giant crabs--and the people who designed 4E forgot to standard the most important part of monster design!!

The lack of standards is actually two problems. The lack of standards for what powers do is a big one. But the other problem no less important is a lack of standard for what things are called. The fact that the different flavors of Cyclopses have five or six different abilities that are all called "Evil Eye" and are not remotely similar really screws system mastery. While you can figure out how any monster works in less than fie minutes, you actually have to spend that nearly fie minutes for eery single one. Since the powers are unstandardized, you will never learn what they do.

Which means that advanced players actually take longer to work up encounters than advanced players of 3e. It's not a long time, but the time minimum is actually more than I currently spend when throwing together a D&D encounter for any previous edition.

-Username17

Kaelik wrote:You aren't allowed to create a monster in 4e.

The 4e DMG has guidelines for creating your own monsters, in a variety of ways, so it is obviously allowed. 4e has enough problems with it, including in monster creation, that you shouldn't need to invent stuff that isn't true.

Flaws in 4e monster creation:
* Templates are a good idea, but Elites and Solos are terrible, so Templates are near useless.
* There are no rules or guidelines for changing the race of a monster.
* There are no rules or guidelines for small changes, such as taking an existing monster and adding insubstantial or regeneration or swarm.
* There are no rules or guidelines for converting regular monsters to minions, or converting minions to regular monsters.
* As Lago/Frank said: no guidelines on monster powers - it's all random.
* Various monsters in the Monster Manual are overpowered or underpowered for their level, so monsters created based on them are likewise overpowered or underpowered.

No, I agree with Kaelik.

Monster creation does not exist in 4E. There aren't any rules how to create a monster from scratch. 3E's rules are poor, but hey, at least there are rules. The methods for raising the stats of monsters in this game are complete bullshit. Since monster attack and defense barely correlate with any other stat aside from level, raising their power means increasing the monster's hit points and defense score and attack bonus without any correlation to anything. Thus, if you want to make your level 5 hobgoblin shock trooper a level 10 baddy, those are the only things that change! Do they get any new equipment? Do they get any new powers? Hell, do they even get a feat? Who knows!

The closest thing we have are templates and even these suck shit through a straw.

The templates only work in the same way that any monster can benefit from a +1 power bonus to attack item. Which is to say, templates don't create new monsters so much as add fixed expansion packs to them. You know, like magical items. That dumbass Death Knight template creates a monster little more than giving a bugbear a sword that gives them an aura of hate and rage, gives them a new power, and a couple of stat bonuses. That's it.

Since the monster creation rules are so weak and arbitrary, they didn't want you to create monsters in this edition. Simple as that.

I think my favorite build in 4E is the Baloo Hat Ranger, though. Even more than the Vacuum Hurricane Kick fighter.

It is simple yet awesome in its elegance.

Psychic Robot wrote:Personally, I think monsters should be created similarly to PCs, and I think that there should be a guide for creating monsters on the fly--pick what you want the monster to do, and here are stats for it. I know that Pathfinder has a rough guide, listing things like approximate AC by CR.

If by rough guide, you mean lowballing everything hard (even worse than the optimization by the numbers thread) you're right. Otherwise, they fail.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:There aren't any rules how to create a monster from scratch.

Right - but there are various guidelines, and they work well enough. The homebrew 4e monsters I've made have turned out well enough, and didn't require too much work (though still more than I'd want to do on the fly).

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Since the monster creation rules are so weak and arbitrary, they didn't want you to create monsters in this edition.

I don't buy that. The monster creation rules and guidelines are better than those for Rituals and Skill Challenges, for example. I'm inclined to think that the rules are flawed because the designers aren't very good, and because making a flexible generic monster creation system that gave accurate results is really hard.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Monster creation does not exist in 4E. There aren't any rules how to create a monster from scratch. 3E's rules are poor, but hey, at least there are rules.

Not really. The 3E system has a lot of tax code you have to follow, but it doesn't have rules that even generate a monster of a given CR, only monsters of a given hit dice (what fucking good is that?)

When it comes to figuring out CR, which is the most important stat a monster has, in 3E you have to eyeball it, there are no CR rules. At all.

4E lets you start with CR first. And it has pretty good guidelins for determining defenses, attack bonus and damage by level. The only real place it doesn't help you is generating abilities. But that alone is way more than 3E gave us, where pretty much everything was tied to hit dice instead of CR, which was a totally meaningless stat, yet required you to go through a bunch of bullshit to generate a monster's numbers. And monsters still had SLAs, racial abiltiies and all that other bullshit handed out arbitrarily anyway. Just like in 4E, you could have a monster with a single bite attack or an octopus with 8 attacks.

Only unlike 4E, you had to waste way more time doing tax codes and juggling meaningless sub stats to get to that point.

3E monster/NPC generation was atrocious. It was by far the worst part of the system.

4E lets you start with CR first. And it has pretty good guidelins for determining defenses, attack bonus and damage by level. The only real place it doesn't help you is generating abilities. But that alone is way more than 3E gave us, where pretty much everything was tied to hit dice instead of CR, which was a totally meaningless stat, yet required you to go through a bunch of bullshit to generate a monster's numbers. And monsters still had SLAs, racial abiltiies and all that other bullshit handed out arbitrarily anyway. Just like in 4E, you could have a monster with a single bite attack or an octopus with 8 attacks.

A difference between your old monster and your 'new' monster of a few hp and an attack and defense bonus does not make a new monster. That's space filler. That's no different from me handing a monster a +3 Yogi Hat. See, some numbers are different, therefore I have a new monster now. Uh, no?

3E monster creation rules were completely lame to the lame power. You have correctly identified many of the problems. But hey, at least you could add class levels and feats. That by itself puts 3E ahead of 4E.

You can't even give 4E monsters named magic weapons without breaking the game. Doing so causes at least three problems off of the top of my head.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: A difference between your old monster and your 'new' monster of a few hp and an attack and defense bonus does not make a new monster. That's space filler. That's no different from me handing a monster a +3 Yogi Hat. See, some numbers are different, therefore I have a new monster now. Uh, no?

Honestly, a lot of the time, that's what adding class levels did in 3E. Giving a storm giant a couple fighter levels wasn't going to dramatically change what it can do. It's +2 BaB, +2 hit dice, and a couple feats. Seriously, that's it. Even adding two wizard levels was bullshit because while it got a lot of low level spells, none of those were actually remotely useful in battle.

3E monster creation rules were completely lame to the lame power. You have correctly identified many of the problems. But hey, at least you could add class levels and feats. That by itself puts 3E ahead of 4E.

But I really don't want to do that. I don't want to go dumpster diving to min/max monsters. If I have to look through a bunch of splats to try to min/max my monster, then that monster generation is made of fail.

Not to mention in 3E, there was again, no way of getting CR through the system. So I could add class levels, but their effects on CR were pretty much unknown. And that point, the entire system is useless, because while I can do all these systematic transforms to a monster, there's no standardization as to what it does to the actual challenge of the monster. And at that point, I'm just following rules for the sake of having rules, and not because the rules actually do anything useful that I care about.

The only reason I want monster creation rules is so that you dont' end up with giant TPK crabs. That's it. If the rules don't work towards that end, then they might as well not exist.

At least 4E begins with the right starting point: "What is the monster's difficulty?"

3E was just a fucking mess where the most important stat, the CR, was determined completely arbitrarily.

I mean, yeah 3E had a lot of rules, but they weren't rules that did anything remotely useful. They were just bullshit red tape. So not only did the rules not do anything useful, they were also clunky and slow. Really there was not a single good thing to be said about the 3E creation method. At all.

The 4E system at the very least has speed on its side.

'Fail faster' is not a positive.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:Giving a storm giant a couple fighter levels wasn't going to dramatically change what it can do. It's +2 BaB, +2 hit dice, and a couple feats. Seriously, that's it.

Yeah, two feats can't change how a creature engages you at all.

oh wait i'm wrong

Roy wrote:'Fail faster' is not a positive.

Yeah it is. If you can fail after a couple minutes or fail after a half hour of wasted effort, I'd rather fail faster.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:

Roy wrote:'Fail faster' is not a positive.

Yeah it is. If you can fail after a couple minutes or fail after a half hour of wasted effort, I'd rather fail faster.

Enjoy your higher concentration of Fail then.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:A difference between your old monster and your 'new' monster of a few hp and an attack and defense bonus does not make a new monster.

If there is an existing stat block that accurately models a new monster, the existing stat block is fine. If there is an existing stat block that models a new monster, but it needs some levels added or removed, the stat block with added or removed levels is fine. Crunch does not equal fluff. You don't need a Swashbuckler class to make a swashbuckler, and you don't need a Winged Eejit stat block to include the race of winged eejits in your game.

If those options are not enough, then you need to use one of the other options in the 4e DMG, whether that be a template, stealing abilities/powers from other monsters or classes, adjusting numbers on an ad-hoc basis, making abilities/powers up from scratch, or using the Trap or NPC rules.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:You can't even give 4E monsters named magic weapons without breaking the game. Doing so causes at least three problems off of the top of my head.

It's worked fine every time I've done it. What problems have you had?

Roy wrote:Enjoy your higher concentration of Fail then.

The point of failing faster is not to do it more times, but rather to do it once or twice, then go out and get laid.