D&D (2024) Its till just me or is the 2024 MM heavily infused by more 4e influences?

[Pedantic]

In traditional D&D, Humanoid monsters started out with a base set of stats. Then you'd tack on PC class levels (!) to make them more powerful.

This inherently made the Humanoid monster's upgrade feel like it was part of the world - it was casting spells that the PCs cast and recognize, it was doing moves that PCs did (or could do), etc. A goblin rogue backstabbed like a PC did, a goblin fighter got extra attacks like a PC fighters.

Now, a problem develops in that the "ideal" PC is full of bells and whistles for a single human being to spend time tweaking. The player also tweaks the PC between fights and sessions, and PCs last for a long time. Monsters, on the other hand, are "ideally" often run by the half dozen or more by a DM, and rarely survive an encounter.

This means that the detail level of a PC should be higher, to keep the player entertained, while the detail level of a foe of a PC should be lower.

This became exceedingly clear in 3e, especially with spellcasting foes. Building a single spellcasting foe could take hours or days of a DM's time, and running them was also complex.

In 4e, they reacted to this. The monsters where built as an emulation layer; the idea is that you build what the player experiences and you leave the other details up to the DM. This means your monster abilities and PC abilities no longer pull from similar pools, and indeed could use utterly different mechancis!

I think it's actually possible to have the cake and eat it here, particularly in a world of digital tools. The key is just expressing your NPC/monster archetypes (skirmisher, brute, etc.) in the same mechanical terms that PCs use, adjusted appropriately for level. I imagine the approach would be some combination of prepacked feat selections, templates, maybe even some NPC classes.

You also identified the problem with this approach:

You can bring all this back to the generic "CR 4 spellcaster", but the laziness of "do we haaaavvee tooooo?" kicks in. And you get sub-par cardboard cutout spellcasting monsters who don't feel grounded that cast Arcane Blast with acid damage that is mechanically identical to the cold damage you got last fight.

Doing it honestly is simply a bigger design ask. You can't jump straight to outputs, you have to shoot for targets and then constrain yourself to a specific set of tools, and a lot of effort needs to be put in to making this all easy to use for the GM. That probably looks like publishing lots of sensible sample NPC statblocks to use, creating a digital tools, committing a lot of time/page space to both your NPC/monster creation methodology and then also creating a separate but equally approachable NPC/monster evaluation methodology.

The ultimate call is clearly that this wasn't worth it.

 

[Zardnaar]

Big upset with 4E wasn't the mechanics as such. More the one true way design ethos and class design.

 

[Hussar]

3.5 definitely advanced that aesthetic, but it wasn't even true in 3.5, not entirely. Monster types are not classes, for instance, and don't grant per level abilities for advancing. But that was definitely not true in 3.0. Most monsters had an entirely different method for generating skill ranks, and monsters in general got fewer feats.

5e simply took a unifying approach to monster design that, if anything, most closely followed AD&D 2e. It took some bits and bobs from 4e, and yes, some stuff from 3e. To me, adding lots of powers and unusual actions is a tangent, an little preoccupation of 3.5 and 4e that was much less prominent in AD&D or 3.0 or classic D&D.

What monster design from 2e? That was the entire point of 3e was that we actually finally got any sort of mechanics for designing monsters. In 2e, there simply were no rules for how a monster was designed. It was all just make stuff up.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The question is: do you design starting with modeling a creature and giving it abilities that make sense for it to have, or do you start with a mechanical role in the game and design a creature to fit that role? Is that happening here? You're not going to get concensus on that.

IMO, you should 100% always do the latter.

It is easy, I find almost trivially easy in most cases, to take a well-designed mechanical structure and give it the flavor and character it requires in order to feel grounded and tangible and fitting.

I find it damn near impossible under most circumstances to take a collection of things something "should have" because of its nature/origin/whatever, and ensure that that collection is actually fun and exciting to interact with. That approach far, far too often leads to exactly the problems of many early 5e creatures (and many 3e ones as well): Fat Sack of HP syndrome, Rocket Tag, and a host of other problems.

Naturalistic reasoning is good and useful, cannot be discarded, and is essential for making the game rich and meaningful, rather than being Stats & Spreadsheets. But rigidly requiring that absolutely everything must start from purely naturalistic reasoning? That frequently leads to things that aren't actually fun to play against.

And, separately, turning a set of numbers into a naturalistic story is actually an awful lot of fun for me, personally. Like, let's take the example given upthread, the Ancient Green Dragon's "Corrosive Miasma". This action occurs as a retaliation, either due to using Legendary Resistance or taking an attack at range, so that conditions part of the story, perhaps absorbing, reflecting, or redirecting an attack. I think I like redirecting better, as that fits best with it being triggered upon being hit by a ranged attack. It's a "miasma", an effluvium, something just barely visible but clearly noxious and unpleasant. Why not pockets of acidic, toxic swamp gas? That ties it into the lair concept. A Green Dragon has no care whether there are pockets of acidic gas just below the surface, in fact they like having them there. If the pockets are distributed around more or less at random, or fed from underground fermentation or the like, then it's reasonable that you could even have the same spot belch multiple things, or two nearby spots back to back, as the gases under the ground achieve a new dynamic equilibrium. If you want to be really fancy, you might add the option for players to be able to set off the gases as well...but I don't think that would help them against a Green Dragon. Given the nature of "lair actions," it might even be the case that these gas pockets are sustained or amplified by the dragon's magic, hence the connection to Legendary Resistance.

So, there's our naturalistic explanation: Because this Ancient Green Dragon has laired long in this land, it has infused some of its acidic, toxic essence into the land. It can call on this effect, whether by absorbing the power of a spell or by redirecting a physical attack to set it off. Without the dragon, the gas pockets aren't volatile enough to achieve this end, and if the dragon were driven off or killed, the land would pretty quickly cease to be such an acidic cesspit.

As for the "separate Bite and Claw attacks" vs "Rend", I just...I don't get that criticism. I really don't. I cannot grasp why that matters. It would be like saying that because Monks just have "Flurry of Blows" without having specific punch/kick/elbow/knee/etc. attacks, Monks cannot be naturalistically understood. Of course they can! We're just simplifying the abstraction (since "bite" and "claw" were already abstracted anyway) in a way that saves a great deal of space.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Big upset with 4E wasn't the mechanics as such. More the one true way design ethos and class design.

Because 5e has never, ever committed "one true way" design. Nope, not at all! Now if you'll excuse me, my eyes have rolled into the back of my head, I'll have to retrieve them before I can read further posts.

 

[Zardnaar]

Because 5e has never, ever committed "one true way" design. Nope, not at all! Now if you'll excuse me, my eyes have rolled into the back of my head, I'll have to retrieve them before I can read further posts.

How? Various arches of various complexity and then reason build how you like.

4E your fighters a defender no ifs or buts with 2 options. PHB. Not much in the way of multiclassing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

How? Various arches of various complexity and then reason build how you like.

Only if you believe the 3e model was not "one true way."

It is. It puts hyper-naturalism and "choice" ahead of actually making those choices meaningful or impactful, other than by screwing you over because you failed to reach X prerequisite 10 levels ago. And, beyond that? 5.0 went absolutely hardcore for the One True Way of "eh, you're the DM, you figure it out."

Turns out, that approach has some pretty serious flaws, and 5.5e is an attempt to address those flaws.

4E your fighters a defender no ifs or buts with 2 options.

I mean, as long as you ignore Slayer, sure. Or all the various ways of building that turn you into an absolute beast at damage-dealing. Which was a thing--Fighters so good at kicking arse, monsters would fear not targeting them.

Saying "your fighters a defender" is like saying that 100% of clerics are healbots because their spell list includes cure wounds. Yes, every Fighter had the basic defender features. So what? You don't have to use them if you don't want to. Just as how you can build a Cleric in 5e that never once provides healing to anyone, even though their spell list is cluttered with options that provide healing.

PHB. Not much in the way of multiclassing.

Yeah, y'know, the first or second most complained-about thing in 5e.

 

[Zardnaar]

Only if you believe the 3e model was not "one true way."

It is. It puts hyper-naturalism and "choice" ahead of actually making those choices meaningful or impactful, other than by screwing you over because you failed to reach X prerequisite 10 levels ago. And, beyond that? 5.0 went absolutely hardcore for the One True Way of "eh, you're the DM, you figure it out."

Turns out, that approach has some pretty serious flaws, and 5.5e is an attempt to address those flaws.


I mean, as long as you ignore Slayer, sure. Or all the various ways of building that turn you into an absolute beast at damage-dealing. Which was a thing--Fighters so good at kicking arse, monsters would fear not targeting them.

Saying "your fighters a defender" is like saying that 100% of clerics are healbots because their spell list includes cure wounds. Yes, every Fighter had the basic defender features. So what? You don't have to use them if you don't want to. Just as how you can build a Cleric in 5e that never once provides healing to anyone, even though their spell list is cluttered with options that provide healing.


Yeah, y'know, the first or second most complained-about thing in 5e.

You're spouting playstyle preferences.
There's no slayer in the 4E phb.

4E phb/dmg/mm only is almost unplayable. Each class essentially is forced into 2 paths and there's 4 options and 2 of them are basically for each path.

5E has 12 classes, around 38 archetypes iirc and all of the 3.5 races and the 4E ones.

And you're not pigeonholed as much. Weapon styles alone let you build a tank or striker fighter for example. You can also opt of of the complexity with basic classes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

4E phb/dmg/mm only is almost unplayable.

Now you're straight up spouting nonsense. We're done here.

 

[Zardnaar]

Well they redid the MM and PHB objectively is missing basic options vs 3.5 and 5E.