Ben Mazur's page

And yeah, if you set the bar to a ludicrous level, you might as well not make it possible at all. On the other hand, what's better, saying that golem-maker dude spent his life (and some feats) learning how to craft these puppies, and the player won't be able to make them without similar focus and dedication (and thus allowing the player who *must* have one, the option to dedicate himself in that area, and giving the DM plenty of time to prepare himself for a player running around with a Golem manservant), or the DM just flatly saying, 'I'm not playing by the rules, chump. The NPCs do whatever the hell I want them to do. Don't bother planning for anything. Don't bother telling me that the evil wizard can't be wearing plate armor, 'cause he's an NPC and can wear a battlemech if I want him to. Don't bother rolling Spellcraft to try and counterspell what he's casting, 'cause I made it up and it's kewler than what you have, and you can't learn it anyway.'

While I admit I'm just blindly guessing here, I strongly suspect that 4th edition will have a book that lets you play the monsters, just as 3rd edition had Savage Species. And haven't we already heard confirmation that there will be an appendix in the Monster Manual that will let you play common monsters as PCs? I know we've heard playtest reports of gnome and warforged PCs already.

And plenty of 3rd edition monsters worked by totally different rules than PCs. How do Planetars cast spells as 17th level clerics with only 14 hit dice (and a CR of 16)? There's a small section of feats in the monster manual meant for monsters only. There's even weird, monster specific combat options. Why can you sunder a hydra's head and not a dragon's? And and far as players taking monster options goes, there's plenty of "just make it up". How do I become a lich exactly?

3rd edition is the edition where a battlemech could be a wizard. Most of the rules leaned towards turning monsters into PCs and few towards turning the PCs into monsters. When they did allow the PCs to acquire monster form, the system collapsed around itself, resulting in a strange and awkward errata campaign targeting shapechanging and polymorph that probably hastened the arrival of 4th edition.

While I like 3rd edition, and I liked how it made monsters play by the same rules as PCs, I've gamed under the system long enough to see its weaknesses. I'm looking forwards to making monsters fit into specific styles of a combat encounter, like "solo monster" or "minion monster". And I've customized enough monsters to see that the whole "monsters have levels, just like PCs" just hides a whole array of fudge factors like natural armor bonus, ability score bonuses, what size a monster is or even how much damage an attack deals.

I agree with the fear that the 4th edition reliance on DM Fiat may encourage bad GMing. But I know it's not going to make me a bad GM. And I've never seen much evidence that the 3rd edition "monsters as PCs" rules created a bunch of good GMs. I guess we'll see.

Moonlion wrote:

The other half is that it brings the game to a halt because it's a complex (needlessly complex) procedure that takes an inordinate amount of time to adjudicate.

If you're doing a group with a guy that has Improved Grapple, aren't you going to be very familiar with the rules and able to execute them quickly? If you're a character with Improved Grapple aren't you going to have notes on the character sheet on how to do it quickly? I'm sorry but I don't really feel your argument holds any water.

True, but what happens when a monster grapples somebody like the cleric, who only gets grappled once in every 10 sessions? He's not going to know the rules, and everybody's going to waste time explaining them to him. If the only people who could be grappled were people who were prepared to grapple, it wouldn't be a problem.

To use kind of a clumsy metaphor, grappling is kind of like saying to a fighter "okay, while this monster is using its special ability on you, you can't fight, or do anything else but use these five wizard spells you've probably never used before." Of course that's going to slow the game to a halt.

You said in your initial post that subsystems like grapple work just fine once you get the hang of it. The problem is that I've been playing 3rd edition since it came out, and some players still don't have the hang of it, or even close. At what point do you just say "this isn't working--it needs to be easier"?