I’m Not One for Edition Wars, but…

… and I happily played 3e for years, but anyone who wants to know why I’m a full-fledged 4e-phile need only look at this entry for Paizo’s RPG Superstar. That statblock is absurd and, for any given adventure, 90% useless. And yet, as Clark Peterson says downthread:

This kind of mind-numbing number crunching is one of the things that make [sic] me look to 4E for simplicity. But 3E/Pathfinder is complex for a reason–because it really works well. So being able to put this together is something an RPG Superstar needs to be able to do.

I’ll keep my shiny new epic-level-dragon-statblock-in-seven-column-inches ruleset, thank you very much.

1. rob, February 13, 2009:

   This kind of delights me. It is not to my taste, but it’s really cool to me that the option to do something like this exists for folks that want it to look this way. There’s some serious craftsmanship going on there, and it’s nice that it has an outlet (and specifically, an outlet where it can be acknowledged).

   -Rob D.

2. rob, February 13, 2009:

   Hmm. Though this _has_ illustrated an interesting point to me. 4e statblocks are more useful to me in a fight, but one of the reasons that 3e statblocks get so noisy (especially for a guy like this) is that they’re dual purpose. They need to provide the information necessary for combat, yes (and it can be cumbersome) but the statblock also incorporates the broader capabilities of the creature, including several that may simply never come up in combat. This is important because it provides the markers for what plots the creature is capable of creating for the GM. An ability like Charm Person, for example, is reasonably useful in a fight but is monumentally useful in setting up a scenario – the creature has used charm person to move itself into a position of trust or importance or whatnot. That explicit marker is a cool and useful thing.

   Now, 4e partly dodges this. On one hand, the simple addition of Ritual Magic removes a lot of the necessity of doing this since it’s created an array of villain-friendly powers, but outside of that a creatures out-of-combat abilities tend to be very hand-wavey. That’s definitely a bug-or-feature sort of thing, since it either means the game give you more freedom or that the game is useless for such things, depending on your perspective. I think the reality comes down somewhere in between – it’s nice to have freedom and flexibility, but at the same time it can be a lot easier to come up with a cunning plan when you have a sense of what the villain can (and perhaps more importantly *can’t*) do.

   I think 4e could learn a lot from this, and there may be some space for incorporating it. For comparison, look at combat abilities. In the purely combat arena, 3/P uses building as a way to give a monster certain powers or combos. If you want an ogre who can teleport, then you need to find a combination of classes or templates that make that work. Applying class abilities to monsters is a great exercise, and being able to throw things like an Ogre Master of Chains at your party is fun to build and fun to play. However, it has the downside that you tend to get a lot of other abilities along the way. Sometimes that’s fruitful, but mostly it means you get a lot of noise and extra material you won’t use in your pursuit of a specific end.

   In contrast, 4e makes this less fun to build, but easier to use. Reskin a monster, or just slap an ability on one, and you’re good to go. You jump right to the end and the goal you were looking to accomplish.

   I think that “plot” abilities could be handled similarly in 4e, without any real hassle. If I need this devil to be able to magically make friends, it may not express as a combat ability, but it’s something I might want to note somewhere. So the question is, what is the best way to express such material?

   -Rob D.

3. Chris Kümmel, February 13, 2009:

   Thanks for linking that NPC. It made for a good laugh.

4. justin, February 13, 2009:

   4e seems to work this sort of thing into the Lore entires. See the DC30 Lore entry for medusae as an example. As for specific NPCs, you could add a little more flavor without any fiddliness by adding a “Non-Combat Qualities” line at the very bottom, no?

5. Cam, February 13, 2009:

   On some level it should be possible to simply say “I want the monster to do X, because I say so.” That’s why 4E appeals. On the other hand, 3E made me feel like I was finally capable of programming code after writing up around a thousand or so stat blocks.

6. fred, February 13, 2009:

   I admit I do miss getting access to some “noncombat crunch” that feels palpable in 4e. But then, I don’t really have any trouble on-the-fly-ing that sort of thing.

7. Max, February 13, 2009:

   The addition of non-combat abilities is nice, but what I do not miss is the need for the massive, detailed accounting behind each statistic.

8. cam, February 14, 2009:

   John Cooper practically made his name through pointing out the mechanical errors of stat blocks in WotC’s books. I think they had that very much in the forefront of their mind when working on 4E.

9. Charles Tan, February 16, 2009:

   Rob: I also want to add that partially why such stat blocks are complicated is because they’re the equivalent of “solos” in 4E. If I had such a creature in 4E, I can’t imagine running four other creatures in the game. What I came to realize is that while some monsters tend to be too vanilla, they’re just the right amount of complexity when you throw in his other playmates.

   What I really disliked about 3E, and this is coming from the guy who min-maxes, is what Wolfgang Baur pointed out. Through some combination of the rules, you might end up with a foe that’s either nigh-invincible or sub-par depending on the optimization skills of the players. What’s worse is that it’s rules legal.

   I like the examples in Draconomicon where you can trade-in an special ability instead of using templates. I think part of the fun of GMing in 3E was the use of templates (but this leads to lots of re-calculation).