D&D 5th Edition X: Where's the Craft (RPG System) skill?

[1337 b4k4]

This doesn't really seem to me (or my group) to even be the framework for a complete game, much less a complete, good playable game. But then maybe we have a wee bit high standards.

Now this is just silly. I can certainly buy that you don't think what they've done is good or high quality, but I don't see how you can say that what they have isn't a framework for a complete game. What do you think is missing?

[jindra34]

Now this is just silly. I can certainly buy that you don't think what they've done is good or high quality, but I don't see how you can say that what they have isn't a framework for a complete game. What do you think is missing?

Not really sure, its just how the format and materials feel. It might be do to the fact that they are including things well past the point where the rules suggest tapering off the game, and leaving them mostly empty.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

It occurs to me that 5e's skill system is basically a hybrid of 3e/4e skills and 2e proficiencies, and all of the problems people have with it (no background skills, bad opposed check math, etc.) stem from the clash between the 3e/4e part and bounded accuracy; also, the fluffy abilities in backgrounds (which resemble 2e proficiencies) seem to be popular and fighters need more Nice Things. Why not just go with proficiencies all the way?

Here's my proposal:

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You have weapon proficiencies which cover equipment (Swords, Heavy Armor) and fighting styles (Wrestling, Two-Weapon Fighting), and nonweapon proficiencies which cover professions (Blacksmith, Sailor) and general activities (Burglary, Investigation, etc.), standard 2e so far. They come in three grades, Training, Focus, and Specialization (and a fourth untrained grade, of course). Each grade gives a cumulative +2 bonus on relevant checks (and damage rolls, for weapon proficiencies), some sort of cool and useful ability that you don't need to roll for (like how the Healer specialty just lets you make X potions, no check required), gives you advantage on opposed checks with opponents with one grade less proficiency, and imposes disadvantage on your opponent if they have two grades less proficiency than you do.

To use the Conan vs. Tiny Tim example, assuming everyone involved has the same Str modifier, a character with Specialized Wrestling has a ~96% chance of success arm-wrestling a character with untrained Wrestling (1d20+Str+6 with advantage vs. 1d20+Str with disadvantage), a ~92% chace against a character with Trained Wrestling (1d20+Str+6 with advantage vs. 1d20+Str+2 with disadvantage), a ~74% chance of success against a character with Focused Wrestling (1d20+Str+6 with advantage vs. 1d20+Str+4), and a ~50% chance of success against another character with Specialized Wrestling (1d20+Str+6 vs. 1d20+Str+6). This ensures that a character highly trained in something rarely loses to an amateur without making a single rank of proficiency give a character a massive advantage over an untrained character, and it formalizes the vague "the DM should grant advantage and/or apply disadvantage when opponents are much weaker" guidelines. You can fiddle with the math to give +3/+2/+1 if you want a single rank to have more impact or give +3/+3/+3 if you want bigger bonuses or whatever, but that's the general idea.

Regarding the abilities at each rank, this is where the background skills and maneuvers come into play. If you want to be able to craft things, you might make the following nonweapon proficiency:

Crafting
Requirement: Choose a type of crafting, such as smithing, carpentry, or sculpture. This proficiency applies to crafting of the chosen sort.
Trained: As long as you have access to appropriate tools, materials, and facilities, you may craft items appropriate to your profession. You require one week and half the price in raw materials to craft a Medium-size object (one between 4 and 8 feet wide in its largest dimension) of moderate complexity. Double this time for each doubling in size, if the item is particularly intricate or complicated, and if the item is particularly dense or bulky; halve the time for each halving in size, if the item is particularly plain or simple, and if the item is particularly light or streamlined. Repairing items takes one-half the normal construction time and one-quarter the item's price in raw materials.
Focused: You no longer require access to the appropriate tools, materials, and facilities. As long as you have access to two of the three, you may improvise and/or scrounge up the missing component with 1d6*10 minutes' work as long as you have access to reasonable substitutes. At the DM's discretion, particularly complex resources (a working forge, a complete loom, rare metals) may take longer or might be impossible to create or procure. If you do have access to all three, your total crafting time is halved.
Specialized: You may craft items of superior workmanship. [Insert rules for working with whatever masterwork system 5e might have here.]

If you want to give martial characters more options, you might make the following weapon proficiency:

Mauls
Requirement: You must be wielding a heavy, blunt weapon to use this proficiency.
Trained: Your attacks deal double their base weapon damage (and damage from combat expertise or sneak attack, if applicable) to objects and constructs.
Focused: When you attack a single opponent on your turn, if you deal damage your opponent must make a Str save or fall prone. When you attack multiple opponents on your turn, each opponent must make a Str save or be pushed back 5 feet.
Specialized: When you successfully damage a construct or knock down or push a creature with the Focused ability of this proficiency, your target must make a Con save or be slowed for 1 round.

Or something like that, you get the idea.

For role-protection purposes, Specialization in nonweapon proficiencies might be limited to skillmonkey classes and Specialization in weapon proficiencies might be limited to martial classes (or limit Specialization to the rogue and fighter and Focused to skillmonkey and martial classes, depending on how much one wants to make them "the skills class" and "the weapons class" and how much role-crossing casters should be able to do). Then the exact system of gaining proficiencies, the level at which new ranks can be gained, and so forth can be tweaked as desired.


With nonweapon proficiencies taking the place of skills and weapon proficiencies basically taking the place of feats and some maneuvers, feats can be reserved for PrCs or themes or whatever they end up being called, so a character never has to choose between "get marginally better at swording things" and "take a prestige class." It also more clearly delineates the difference between feats (class-specific mostly-vertical advancement) and proficiencies (class-agnostic mostly-horizontal advancement) the way 4e clearly differentiated between powers (active, limited abilities) and feats (passive, constant abilities) instead of jumbling everything together like 3e did, with Power Attack, Skill Focus, and Quicken Spell drawing from the same resource pool.

Thoughts?

[Seerow]

POD: That actually looks remarkably like a skill system I've been working on, except I use 7 ranks instead of 3, and didn't roll everything ever into it (just using for non-combat skills).

[Icewraith]

Only downside to the weapon/nonweapon proficiency idea is bloat. With all the various things that people will come up for fighters to do with a sword, the nonweapon proficiency system will put the fighter back where he was in 3-3.5 with an ever-expanding list of feats to fill his limited feat slots, a certain percentage of which are too good not to take.

On the non-combat side at least, if the skill analogues are well chosen and cover most of the things a player would want to use them for, I can see bloat not being a problem. I wouldn't mind seeing most "generic" skills (not spellcraft, but certainly the perception/spot analogue) available to all classes up to one level of whatever the maximum will be, with the maximum level being restricted to fighting, skillmonkey, or spellcaster archetypal classes when appropriate. This solves a good chunk of the "well did you put any cross-class ranks in search?" problem that 3.5 had as long as there are enough available points/ranks/whatever to get players more than the minimum number of proficiencies to operate.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

POD: That actually looks remarkably like a skill system I've been working on, except I use 7 ranks instead of 3, and didn't roll everything ever into it (just using for non-combat skills).

Only downside to the weapon/nonweapon proficiency idea is bloat. With all the various things that people will come up for fighters to do with a sword, the nonweapon proficiency system will put the fighter back where he was in 3-3.5 with an ever-expanding list of feats to fill his limited feat slots, a certain percentage of which are too good not to take.

The combining-everything-ever part is there mostly because current 5e feats are crap, so being able to spend X points each level on weapon proficiencies gives people more Nice Things than spending a feat every other level or getting a maneuver every 3-4 levels, it's not integral to the concept.

[Falling]

All we can hope for is that there will be Craft(Underwater Basket Weaving).

But really, I HOPE Next will do good, I really do, I just don't think it will. Seems to be dividing fans more than uniting them, to me. Wonder if we'll get a bunch of 5e players banding together, like how 4e players split from the 3.5 players. One of these days I'm going to have to investigate tabletop gamer psychology...

[Conundrum]

And then there's always the whole issue of Asmodeus, Lord of the Nine Hells, being convinced by the village idiot to drop the whole "conquer the Material Plane and turn it into the tenth layer of Baator" idea.

This should be prevented by the Interaction rules in the latest L&L article, I think.

The key to this approach is to avoid derived stats. This is not about 3E-versus-4E; there is no particular reason why a Fireball's save DC would have to depend on its spell level and its caster's intelligence. Indeed, in 2E it didn't: everything derives only from level (and that is the same in 4E, where you would have to look up the appropriate damage for a monster of such-and-such level).

There's no indication that 5E will have PC spells scaling with only level, though. Which means that if you want the NPCs to play by the same rules, you need their stats to be derived from the same semi-complex interactions.

Personally I think having derived stats on PCs is fairly important (in D&D, anyway). If you made all PCs scale equally with level, that'd be very dull. And as soon as you introduce class-specific scaling, that DM overhead is back for monsters.

Your skeleton from earlier: what AC, saves, etc does he get from being Fighter 5? Suddenly I need to look up the Fighter table to derive all his stats, even if I do remember exactly how Fireball, etc work.

[neonchameleon]

and it's really annoying when opponents have 5x to 10x as many hit points as PCs for no very discernable reason.

If there's no discernable reason for the monster being there or behaving the way it does, one thing is clear. Either the DM or the module writer has screwed up. But if more skilled is a justification for a lot more hit points (as it has always been in D&D), that some people are very skilled and thus have a lot more hit points than lower level PCs isn't inherently a problem. At least not unless you want to throw away the entire hit point model of every D&D edition.

If that was a dig at 4e as I suspect, a quick search of Adventure Tools shows me that 4e there were, I believe, four solos published that were of PC-ish races from levels 1-10 (not counting Dragons or Undead - but Sir Keegan from Keep on the Shadowfell should be shot alongside everything else in the keep. Those were Krayd the Butcher, a level 1 orc solo who is obviously level adjusted as monster manual orcs start at level 3 or 4 (because orcs are tougher than humans), and he has fewer HP than an orc chieftain (level 8 elite brute) or an orc bloodrager (level 7 elite brute), Sinruth the Hobgoblin from Dungeon 156 who is just bad, High Shaman Sancossug from the Forgotten Realms guide, who appears to be a clinic in how not to design monsters of any sort, Dajani the Tiefling Darkblade from Dragon 155 who I agree doesn't live up to the billing of a solo, and Thorn from Dragon 160. Which means that this is a dig against a total of four bad monsters and one with a 4e-specific approach (levelling down to make sure he could be hit and occasionally missed, then turning into a solo to keep the threat constant). Of the four genuinely bad ones, three of which were published in Dungeon magazine and one was in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

[Moreb Benhk]

I don't know about campaign specifics and exact stats, but my experiences of solo-fights in 4E usually revolved around blowing dailies/encounters pretty quickly followed by a fairly tedious grind of at-wills, with the solo only really becoming a threat by also slowly wearing us down with low damage abilities (and normally dragging the fight out longer with various status effects). Some of these solos were from official campaign materials (dunno the names of the campaigns).

Suffice to say, from my own experience, and what I've read on the boards, 4E 'solo monster method' does have a strong tendency towards decidedly un-epic bloat-HP battles.

Having said that, one thing I really enjoyed about solo monsters was their ability to act several times in a round. This is a great way (I think) to make solo monsters more credible, without pumping them full of HPjuice, and a way of allowing them to feel threatening without needing abilities that seriously risk 1-shotting adventurers (which also tend to be anti-climactic).

[Excession]

I don't know about campaign specifics and exact stats, but my experiences of solo-fights in 4E usually revolved around blowing dailies/encounters pretty quickly followed by a fairly tedious grind of at-wills, with the solo only really becoming a threat by also slowly wearing us down with low damage abilities (and normally dragging the fight out longer with various status effects). Some of these solos were from official campaign materials (dunno the names of the campaigns).

Suffice to say, from my own experience, and what I've read on the boards, 4E 'solo monster method' does have a strong tendency towards decidedly un-epic bloat-HP battles.

Having said that, one thing I really enjoyed about solo monsters was their ability to act several times in a round. This is a great way (I think) to make solo monsters more credible, without pumping them full of HPjuice, and a way of allowing them to feel threatening without needing abilities that seriously risk 1-shotting adventurers (which also tend to be anti-climactic).

The solos in MM3, and especially Monster Vault and Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale haven't turned into bags on hit points for me. They have the right damage to threaten the party, and not so many hp that they become a grind. A fight with a White Dragon from MV for example had half the party unconscious, the the other half living by about 10 feet as the desperately spammed slow effects just managed to keep it out of the ranger's face.

Threats to the Nentir Vale takes it up another notch, by including enemies like Calastryx, a three headed adult red dragon. Three turns per round, three separate breath weapons, for when you need your PCs extra crispy. And when he hits bloodied, he sprouts a fourth head.

Great art too:

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Damn Kobolds, looting during the fight again.

I feel it's a pity that 4e had to die just as they'd really gotten good at monster design, and I personally hope they can keep it up in Next. The playtest monsters are just placeholders, right? Right?!

[SiuiS]

That is key, though. As far as I can tell, the people arguing for "monsters should use PC rules" aren't suggesting that monsters should follow the elaborate and overly long character creation process from 3E.

Rather, they are suggesting e.g. that a monster with a longsword should do the same damage as a PC with a longsword (1d8 + 2-6 points of strength mod), that a monster's hit points are on the same scale as a PC's (clearly not the case in 4E), and that a monster using a ranged flame attack simply uses the PCs' fireball spell (1d6 per level, save for half). This is because they find it more convenient, both for players and DMs, to just memorize one fireball ability instead of writing a different-but-similar range flame attack for every monster that needs one.

For instance, in 2E I would design custom monsters simply like this "Blazing Skeleton: fighter 5, daggers 1d4+3/1d4+3, fireball 1/d, gaseous form 1/d, half damage from slash/pierce". That's all, and I'll bet that it would anyone familiar with that system only seconds to figure out exactly what this critter does. That I find very convenient.

Skeleton needs hit dice and AC, but yeah. Complete monster.
Heck. Don't even need those two values, it just leaves assignment up to fiat

With bounded accuracy, I don't really have a problem with this.

That said I wouldn't necessarily marry my system to it. It's one thing if the game is just longswords and fireballs; it's another if you expect there to be a dozen weapons and hundreds of spells. Most players aren't going to care if you're rolling a d8 instead of a d6 with a shortsword against their character, as long as the attack hits AC and does an amount of damage that's reasonably matched to their level.

Until the PC loots the sword and suddenly they are doing much less damage than the original wielder. That's always the problem, I find. The balor tried by detonation. But it IS a problem people have tried to solve.

Don't forget that 4e also removed some overhead by removing the core stats (str, dex, etc.) from to hit and damage, and not tying defenses to armour, which I think was really smart. People talk about the powers, but there was a lot more going on that made them easy to design for.

Really? I thought armor was still a thing, and you definitely added an attribute to attack and damage. At least in the beginning.

Your first and second paragraphs seem to be at odds with each other. See, if a monster's damage and similar effects are determined in that manner then you're practicing exactly the sort of lengthy chargen process that PCs have. You may not be selecting feats or such, but you're still setting up a collection of derived stats - and this in and of itself is where a lot of complication comes from!

Not really. If you need a monster to deal 1d8+10 damage, just don't give them a short sword. Done.

You don't need to go through any rigamarole at all. Having the same components doesn't mean the same process. Not even with skills. Especially since you don't need to point buy or roll attributes. That +10 damage? You could look at damage, attack, and balance a clear strength score from there, without the supposed figuring strength then proficiency then class then... Etc.

And that's only if you need strength.

Similarly, noting that a monster has certain spells or effects usable every so often is as much "reinventing the wheel" as cooking up your own special ability. All it allows you to do is to hide the work, since you still have to cross-reference the effect every time it comes up (memorization is non-trivial!) and determine various derived stats like duration and save DC. If you were cooking it up in the 4E manner you'd just be figuring those out up front rather than on the back end.

Poppycock. You may as well say you need to rewrite what an attack bonus or armor class is! Fewer options means easier memorization. Especially if they are iconic, such as attack bonus, or armor class, or, I dunno, a fireball?

(As a side note, I hate seeing monster abilities that function as spells, considering what it implies about casters vs. mundanes.)

This I agree with though.

The solos in MM3, and especially Monster Vault and Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale haven't turned into bags on hit points for me. They have the right damage to threaten the party, and not so many hp that they become a grind. A fight with a White Dragon from MV for example had half the party unconscious, the the other half living by about 10 feet as the desperately spammed slow effects just managed to keep it out of the ranger's face.

Threats to the Nentir Vale takes it up another notch, by including enemies like Calastryx, a three headed adult red dragon. Three turns per round, three separate breath weapons, for when you need your PCs extra crispy. And when he hits bloodied, he sprouts a fourth head.

Great art too:

Spoiler

Show

Damn Kobolds, looting during the fight again.

I feel it's a pity that 4e had to die just as they'd really gotten good at monster design, and I personally hope they can keep it up in Next. The playtest monsters are just placeholders, right? Right?!

Aye. 4e dying is unfortunate... But heck, killing at its prime seems to be what WotC is good for.

[NoldorForce]

Not really. If you need a monster to deal 1d8+10 damage, just don't give them a short sword. Done.

You don't need to go through any rigamarole at all. Having the same components doesn't mean the same process. Not even with skills. Especially since you don't need to point buy or roll attributes. That +10 damage? You could look at damage, attack, and balance a clear strength score from there, without the supposed figuring strength then proficiency then class then... Etc.

And that's only if you need strength.

You're still constructing derived stats, just in reverse.

Poppycock. You may as well say you need to rewrite what an attack bonus or armor class is! Fewer options means easier memorization. Especially if they are iconic, such as attack bonus, or armor class, or, I dunno, a fireball?

That's an invalid comparison. An attack bonus or an Armor Class is a general statistic, while a Fireball is a specific effect that happens to contain multiple statistics.

[Moreb Benhk]

For those of you advocating fairly complete dissociation between monster stuff and PC stuff, how would you suggest Next should handle a situation like:

Baddie has sweet magic sword, with glowy coolness and firey capabilities demonstrated in combat (to pick a simple example). PC's slay baddie and get sword, and are desirous to weild it for it's glowy coolness and firey capabilities (as demosntrated by baddie)...

[Ashdate]

Until the PC loots the sword and suddenly they are doing much less damage than the original wielder. That's always the problem, I find. The balor tried by detonation. But it IS a problem people have tried to solve.

Really? I thought armor was still a thing, and you definitely added an attribute to attack and damage. At least in the beginning.

Well in 4e, you'd generally never want an enemy's weapon because they were non-magical. But unless you roll all the dice in the open (and maybe even if you do), your players are not going to notice.

Enemies can have "armour" but it doesn't really affect their defenses. An enemy's base defenses are determined by their level and their role. From there, you can play with them as you see fit (perhaps you give an arcane controller mob +2 to its will defense, but -2 to their fortitude for example). Damage is similarly calculated. You can use PHB weapons and add whatever ability score you decide to give them in order to create powers, but without the inherent scaling that PCs get from magic weapons and feats, the damage of such attacks will generally be too low. 4e PCs are more accurate at hitting with their powers than monsters, so they need to compensate by dealing more damage generally.

Thus you say, "I want this creature to do about 20 damage with this attack" (there's a table of suggested damage values in the DMG, but stealing from other monsters can work too), and then maybe you make the attack 2d10+9 or 2d6+13 (or whatever). Depending on what you're trying to go for, you might modify the attack. For example, if you're going for a chain-fighting monster that has an encounter ability to tie up their enemies with their chains, you add a rider that the attack restrains the target (save ends).

The point isn't to laser-precision a power out, it's to create a cool monster that does what you describe it to do.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from scouring the 4e Compendium for a PC power that does the effect you want it to. Sometimes I do that for inspiration! But inevitably, I have to modify the power because the damage, effect, and complexity are built on PC expectations (and I think it's easier to balance Player vs Monster than Player vs "Player"). Unless this is a monster I have plans for beyond the next 30 minutes, sweating the details is not something I'm entirely interested in doing.

[Ashdate]

For those of you advocating fairly complete dissociation between monster stuff and PC stuff, how would you suggest Next should handle a situation like:

Baddie has sweet magic sword, with glowy coolness and firey capabilities demonstrated in combat (to pick a simple example). PC's slay baddie and get sword, and are desirous to weild it for it's glowy coolness and firey capabilities (as demosntrated by baddie)...

If it was a specific magic item (say, a flaming longsword +2), then I'd probably take the time to have the monster's stat block reflect something like a flaming longsword, in that it uses a d8 dice and deals fire damage. I would leave the +hit and +damage up to normal values for a monster of its type/level however. Perhaps give (or replace) a power that shows off the glowy coolness and firey capabilities as a sneak peak (modeled after whatever the weapon does).

This is would be a specific instance where you would want to model the weapon generally off PC expectations. But the point isn't that all monsters should be built this way, just the special ones... unless in your campaign, every monster is walking around with magic loot the PCs want I suppose.

[Excession]

For those of you advocating fairly complete dissociation between monster stuff and PC stuff, how would you suggest Next should handle a situation like:

Baddie has sweet magic sword, with glowy coolness and firey capabilities demonstrated in combat (to pick a simple example). PC's slay baddie and get sword, and are desirous to weild it for it's glowy coolness and firey capabilities (as demosntrated by baddie)...

The sword is mundane, but the monster is a swordmage/wizard/barbarian/demon/devil/elemental and could just have easily hit you with a flaming metal pipe. Or, the sword was always going to be loot and now it is. Seeing it in action just makes the loot better.

[theNater]

Really? I thought armor was still a thing, and you definitely added an attribute to attack and damage. At least in the beginning.

PCs have armor and add a stat to their rolls, but NPCs don't. This is done so that NPCs(which a DM will usually need to build a large number of over the course of the campaign) are easier to build than PCs(which a player will usually not need to build very many of over the course of the campaign).

Not really. If you need a monster to deal 1d8+10 damage, just don't give them a short sword. Done.

You don't need to go through any rigamarole at all. Having the same components doesn't mean the same process. Not even with skills. Especially since you don't need to point buy or roll attributes. That +10 damage? You could look at damage, attack, and balance a clear strength score from there, without the supposed figuring strength then proficiency then class then... Etc.

And that's only if you need strength.

Assuming it's a humanoid monster, you can't just give it no weapon and say 1d8+10. You have to know(or look up) which weapons do 1d8, and give it one of those, which takes time. And as NoldorForce points out, determining the damage bonus and deriving strength from it isn't a significant time-saver compared to determining strength and deriving damage from it. Not giving NPCs derived stats does save time, because you can just declare the two stats independently.

Poppycock. You may as well say you need to rewrite what an attack bonus or armor class is! Fewer options means easier memorization. Especially if they are iconic, such as attack bonus, or armor class, or, I dunno, a fireball?

Fireball has come up a few times as an example of an iconic spell that everybody knows. And indeed, we all know it's 1d6 per level fire damage, with half damage on a successful save. But I'm a little curious as to how many people actually know the whole spell. In particular, how many of us can give its range in our own favored edition(without looking it up)? I can't do better than an educated guess in mine, frankly.

[NoldorForce]

Fireball has come up a few times as an example of an iconic spell that everybody knows. And indeed, we all know it's 1d6 per level fire damage, with half damage on a successful save. But I'm a little curious as to how many people actually know the whole spell. In particular, how many of us can give its range in our own favored edition(without looking it up)? I can't do better than an educated guess in mine, frankly.

Long (400' + 40'/CL) with a 20'-spread, at least in 3.x.

At this point I feel like a Cthulhu Mythos protagonist about 3.x; there is so much that I know that I cannot forget. And yet I wish to forget.

[Saph]

If that was a dig at 4e as I suspect

General rule: if I want to specifically talk about an edition, I'll say its name. Given that I got bored with the edition wars a long time ago, you can safely assume that if I'm not name-checking 3.5 or 4e then that's not what I'm referring to.

Fireball has come up a few times as an example of an iconic spell that everybody knows. And indeed, we all know it's 1d6 per level fire damage, with half damage on a successful save. But I'm a little curious as to how many people actually know the whole spell. In particular, how many of us can give its range in our own favored edition(without looking it up)?

In PF (which is my current system), Long range (400' + 40/CL), 1d6 fire damage per level to a maximum of 10d6, 20' radius. (Though I admit I had to check the spell description to remember whether it was burst or spread – eh, doesn't make much difference )

[DeltaEmil]

In PF (which is my current system), Long range (400' + 40/CL), 1d6 fire damage per level to a maximum of 10d6, 20' radius. (Though I admit I had to check the spell description to remember whether it was burst or spread – eh, doesn't make much difference )

So you had to look it up.

[Saph]

So you had to look it up.

Chose to rather than had to. Burst/spread is an almost-completely-irrelevant detail – I just happen to like trivia.

[Kurald Galain]

Your skeleton from earlier: what AC, saves, etc does he get from being Fighter 5? Suddenly I need to look up the Fighter table to derive all his stats, even if I do remember exactly how Fireball, etc work.

That's on the DM screen, of course.

[Conundrum]

That's on the DM screen, of course.

What, you've got the full progression of saves/AC/BAB/class features for every class on the DM screen, along with everything else that needs to be on there?

[Kurald Galain]

What, you've got the full progression of saves/AC/BAB/class features for every class on the DM screen, along with everything else that needs to be on there?

Perhaps you should try it before repeatedly asserting that this can never work. It has only been the biggest and most popular RPG for eleven years, you know.

[Tehnar]

Yeah its not that hard to memorize.

Good, medium, poor BaB; Good and Poor Saves; Skills

You need to know like 4 linear functions and the fact that you round down, and what goes for each class)

Example:
Fighter (Good BaB, good fortitude, d10, martial/heavy/tower, extra feats)
Wizard (poor BaB, good will, d4, simple/-/-, arcane spellcasting (Good))


I can generate simple NPCs in a matter of moments, once you get used to it you can do it on the fly.

It all depends on how much effort you want to put in. Even a lvl 15+ fully detailed NPC spellcaster doesn't take more then half an hour if you know what your are doing.

If you don't have time, a fully functional NPC can be created in under a minute, two tops.

[Rhynn]

That's on the DM screen, of course.

Who needs a screen? Monster THAC0 is 19 at 1 HD, 17 at 3 HD, and so on (improves by 2 every odd level). PCs start at 20, fighter THAC0 improves by 1 per 1, priest by 2 per 3, rogue by 1 per 2, and wizard by 1 per 3.

What, you've got the full progression of saves/AC/BAB/class features for every class on the DM screen, along with everything else that needs to be on there?

Yup. You can fit all armor stats, all saves, and all THAC0s on one A4 page. I have a 7-page "DM Screen" (PDF) I made myself that has every table from AD&D 2E that I could need. (In a poorly space-optimized format at that - huge whitespaces between tables.) That includes ability score tables, overland speed by terrain, cost of NPC spellcasting, and reaction roll tables. And this is a relatively complicated version of D&D.

[Conundrum]

Perhaps you should try it before repeatedly asserting that this can never work. It has only been the biggest and most popular RPG for eleven years, you know.

If you assert that you have all that information on the DM screen, then I'm going to challenge you on it. No DM screen I've ever seen has that stuff. It's a list of common DCs for all the other things that 3.5 deems necessary to have prescriptive rules for.

I'm not saying it doesn't work, I'm saying it's a lot more effort than it needs to be. I have DMed 3.5 - not as extensively as some others here, but I'm also hardly the only one making these comments.

And, just because it's been big and successful does not mean it can't be improved.

Now, I'll thank you not to be quite so dismissive.

Yeah its not that hard to memorize.

Good, medium, poor BaB; Good and Poor Saves; Skills

You need to know like 4 linear functions and the fact that you round down, and what goes for each class)

Example:
Fighter (Good BaB, good fortitude, d10, martial/heavy/tower, extra feats)
Wizard (poor BaB, good will, d4, simple/-/-, arcane spellcasting (Good))

That's still quite a lot of information to memorise for what I (and others) feel is no mechanical benefit. And again, what happens if you want to do something that doesn't fit into that framework?

Yup. You can fit all armor stats, all saves, and all THAC0s on one A4 page. I have a 7-page "DM Screen" (PDF) I made myself that has every table from AD&D 2E that I could need. (In a poorly space-optimized format at that - huge whitespaces between tables.) That includes ability score tables, overland speed by terrain, cost of NPC spellcasting, and reaction roll tables. And this is a relatively complicated version of D&D.

I'm not sure if you're positing this as a serious response, but I was talking only about 3.x. I don't have any DMing experience with older editions and so don't feel comfortable talking as to how difficult/easy it was to create NPCs in 2E. Having said that, my understanding is that there aren't feats in 2E - which is one system that adds a lot of complexity to creating NPCs in 3.5.

[SiuiS]

You're still constructing derived stats, just in reverse.

No, I have the ability to if I need it. It really is as simple as "I want this guy to hit for 1d8+10. Lets give him whichever weapon from memory happens to do 1d8 damage." And the strength i only if you want to unify it all. He does way more damage than he has attack bonus? "Maybe he isn't proficient."

That's an invalid comparison. An attack bonus or an Armor Class is a general statistic, while a Fireball is a specific effect that happens to contain multiple statistics.

No it is not an invalid comparison. Remember, this is about making fireball equally homogenous through the system; fireball is THE go to in game fire effect. In which case d6/level, save half, fire damage is all you need.

Red dragon, 12 HD; "Fireball, 15 squares range. Explodes in 3 square radius, lights all targets on fire. Reflex."
Blazing skeleton 3HD; Fireball, ranged touch attack +6, no save."
PC wizard; "Fireball, range 25+CL, damage = CL, 4 square radius. Reflex."
Balor, 18 HD; "fireball on death, 0 range 20 square radius. Objects in range use Fortitude or are destroyed. Reflex."

Well in 4e, you'd generally never want an enemy's weapon because they were non-magical. But unless you roll all the dice in the open (and maybe even if you do), your players are not going to notice.

No? There's a section in either MM or DMG that says monsters do have magical equipment passed a certain point, and it's taken into account as a given. I believe they wanted the level to be lower than anything the PCs have so it wasn't worth looting them, but they went so far as to spell it out for us. That means they wanted monsters using magical gear to some extent; if a 4hd ogre was counted as having a +1 club, and his treasure was a +3 club, then you were, indeed, supposed to increase his attack and damage by 2.

Or was this changed in MM 17 or DMG 9 or something~?

Assuming it's a humanoid monster, you can't just give it no weapon and say 1d8+10. You have to know(or look up) which weapons do 1d8, and give it one of those, which takes time. And as NoldorForce points out, determining the damage bonus and deriving strength from it isn't a significant time-saver compared to determining strength and deriving damage from it. Not giving NPCs derived stats does save time, because you can just declare the two stats independently.

Assuming 3.5, yes you can. The benefits of a glutted system is that there are so many options available that you can indeed pull off bull as nobody will call you on it. Maybe he took that feat that boosts his unarmed damage? Maybe he's a monk? Maybe he's under a temporary enchantment? Maybe he has loadstones in his hands, concealed? Maybe he has a discipline maneuver?

It's also trivial, literally, to remember the single most iconic weapon in the game. A long sword does 1d8 damage. If you don't remember that then I'm sorry, but you're not educated about the topic enough to be worth listening to. Remembering a basic, groundwork fact about the and is not 'nontrivial memorization', and is not a valid argument against breaking the game down to nothing but nontrivial memorization.

Fireball has come up a few times as an example of an iconic spell that everybody knows. And indeed, we all know it's 1d6 per level fire damage, with half damage on a successful save. But I'm a little curious as to how many people actually know the whole spell. In particular, how many of us can give its range in our own favored edition(without looking it up)? I can't do better than an educated guess in mine, frankly.

One, this doesn't matter. These details aren't the important part of fireball. It's obfuscation. See my fireball thing, above.

Two, 400+(40/level) in 3.5, and in 1/2e had a clause which instructed for miss chances at extreme ranges, or precision tasks such as detonating a fireball through an arrow slit in a castle wall. It also specifically calls out as detonating on one of two conditions; either when the specified distance set by the caster is reached OR when it hits something. Enemy trolls who marched with armies often had caster backup, including charmed or dominated pixies who were given bottle of peppermint schnapps and told they were potions of fire immunity. So the wizard's precision bombing strike was usually interrupted by an invisible bodyguard.

They also had a chance of straight detonating on YOU, if you were hit while casting the spell. Not sure which book that's from.

Burning hands used to be a sheet of flame, fan shaped,which spread from your hand, not a cone. Lightning bolts would reflect off of walls unless they destroyed the wall, and you could use math to really mess some folks up. And winter wolves breathed a cone of blistering cold out to 6", and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how that was useful because I read the monster manual effort the PHB.

[obryn]

Baddie has sweet magic sword, with glowy coolness and firey capabilities demonstrated in combat (to pick a simple example). PC's slay baddie and get sword, and are desirous to weild it for it's glowy coolness and firey capabilities (as demosntrated by baddie)...

If it was a specific magic item (say, a flaming longsword +2), then I'd probably take the time to have the monster's stat block reflect something like a flaming longsword, in that it uses a d8 dice and deals fire damage. I would leave the +hit and +damage up to normal values for a monster of its type/level however. Perhaps give (or replace) a power that shows off the glowy coolness and firey capabilities as a sneak peak (modeled after whatever the weapon does).

I just want to say that Ashdate nailed it.

There was, in the original 4e DMG, some weird bits about how monsters'/NPCs' magic items might make a difference in attack and damage past a certain threshold ... but it, like the class templates, is really best ignored.

If a bad guy has a glowing longsword which does fire damage and has an Encounter attack which explodes for fire damage, I'd change some keywords on his main attack. Possibly I'd add some extra damage if it's thematically appropriate, but that part's optional (and likely invisible to the players, so it's not like I'm doing it to make a point). And I'd give him a fiery explosion encounter attack, making it clear it's the sword's magic. Done.

Edit:

No? There's a section in either MM or DMG that says monsters do have magical equipment passed a certain point, and it's taken into account as a given. I believe they wanted the level to be lower than anything the PCs have so it wasn't worth looting them, but they went so far as to spell it out for us. That means they wanted monsters using magical gear to some extent; if a 4hd ogre was counted as having a +1 club, and his treasure was a +3 club, then you were, indeed, supposed to increase his attack and damage by 2.

Or was this changed in MM 17 or DMG 9 or something~?

There's nothing that says they automatically have magic items past a certain point.

There is a weird, funny little table you can use to adjust an NPC's or monster's attack/damage rolls upwards, if they have magic weapons or implements above a certain threshold. (So it's not assuming an L17 Human Blade Noble has a +3 sword; it's saying that Noble gets no math benefit from a sword of +3 or less.)

It's one of many bad ideas re: monster design found in the DMG1 that have been phased out. (Another being, as I mentioned above, the "class templates" idea which turns a monster into an Elite, messes with their math, and doesn't help their action economy in exchange for a few underpowered class abilities.) In the early days of 4e, there were random nods towards 3e-style monster simulation here and there that stick out like sore thumbs. Like, (iirc) making a monster's Constitution and Dexterity matter for their HP and initiative.

-O