# [High level monsters and powers] What can Graz'zt actually do?



## Mercurius (Jan 1, 2009)

I'm having trouble getting my head around something in the 4ed rules. In the old days--any edition prior to 4ed---high level monsters, especially unique ones like demon lords and arch-devils, had spell-casting levels, so you could always get a sense of what they can "do," and anyone with double-digit caster levels could "do" a lot. I have always assumed that such beings as demon lords are the equivalent of demi-gods or higher, and thus can "do stuff" on par with powerful spellcasters. If I remember correctly, in 1ed and/or 2ed each "tier" of divinity had a host of powers that they could use at-will. Even a warrior demi-god could still detect magic and teleport (or whatever).

But now, when I look at the stat block of Graz'zt in the new Manual of the Planes (as an example), it doesn't look like he can "do" much. He can fight, he can use his nifty sword and dominate people, and he has a few trained skills, but as far as non-combat oriented powers, there isn't a lot (anything, really) there.

Now I admittedly don't know the rules inside and out, so I could just be missing something. Am I, or is this a major hole in the 4ed rules? I hope it is the former, but if it is the latter then I guess I'm going to have to concoct some kind of house rule system and/or DM Fiatize regularly ("The demon prince waves his hand and summons a goblet of elfblood wine"). I just don't see how a major demon prince wouldn't be able to cast a solid array of spells-- not to mention rituals.

On a related note, I find it strange, even disappointing, that when D&D finally has a system that could relatively easily accomodate spontaneous magic (d20 + relevant ability score + 1/2 level + power type bonus vs. power DC, which might be something like 10 + level equivalent), it doesn't do anything with it. Or is that still to come?


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## (Psi)SeveredHead (Jan 1, 2009)

What sort of abilities did Graz'zt have in previous editions?

What do you mean by spontaneous magic? Do you mean make an ability check to see if you can pull off a spell/ability? Isn't that already covered in recharge abilities?


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## Anguirus (Jan 1, 2009)

Graz'zt undoubtedly has rituals out the wazoo.  The stats are just what you use when he's murdering people.


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## ricardo440 (Jan 1, 2009)

I agree. Gratzz out of combat can do anything you as GM think it is appropriate for him to do. If he can't do it presumably he has minions who can anyway.
But it doesn't really matter. Writing all this stuff down is just a waste of ink and fills up the stat blocks with irrelevant information.


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## Ltheb Silverfrond (Jan 1, 2009)

Graz'zat's stats are there purely as his attributes in combat. If you, as a DM, need Graz'zat to open a portal to the Prime Material Plane and flood it with evil outsiders, you can just have him do it. (A ritual no doubt) But when it comes time for the PCs to take the Fight to Graz'zat, he's not going to waste time in combat opening portals when he could be stomping the PCs into the dirt.

Npc/Monster stats are there simply to say what the monster's powers are in combat. Out of combat, they can do anything the DM would expect them to be able to do. Now, in this case, Graz'zat is powerful entity. Being nearly godlike in strength, Graz'zat might have access to even the most powerful rituals, and assuredly has unique ritual magic only he can use. 

In short, he can use any kind of magic the DM wants him to use.It IS hand-waving, but it's written into the rules. (I don't have my books on me, but I believe it is stated in the DMG somewhere)


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## knasser (Jan 1, 2009)

Mercurius said:


> I'm having trouble getting my head around something in the 4ed rules. In the old days--any edition prior to 4ed---high level monsters, especially unique ones like demon lords and arch-devils, had spell-casting levels, so you could always get a sense of what they can "do," and anyone with double-digit caster levels could "do" a lot. I have always assumed that such beings as demon lords are the equivalent of demi-gods or higher, and thus can "do stuff" on par with powerful spellcasters. If I remember correctly, in 1ed and/or 2ed each "tier" of divinity had a host of powers that they could use at-will. Even a warrior demi-god could still detect magic and teleport (or whatever).
> 
> But now, when I look at the stat block of Graz'zt in the new Manual of the Planes (as an example), it doesn't look like he can "do" much. He can fight, he can use his nifty sword and dominate people, and he has a few trained skills, but as far as non-combat oriented powers, there isn't a lot (anything, really) there.
> 
> Now I admittedly don't know the rules inside and out, so I could just be missing something. Am I, or is this a major hole in the 4ed rules? I hope it is the former, but if it is the latter then I guess I'm going to have to concoct some kind of house rule system and/or DM Fiatize regularly ("The demon prince waves his hand and summons a goblet of elfblood wine"). I just don't see how a major demon prince wouldn't be able to cast a solid array of spells-- not to mention rituals.




Firstly, the thing that you are missing is Rituals. Grazzt has a +27 to Arcana check.  A lot of the powers that would have been explicitly listed previously are now rituals which Graz'zt will be scarily good at. That fills in a lot of what you might be concerned about. For some of the other things, you'll need to either adjust things yourself or accept that they are different. There would be nothing wrong with giving Graz'zt the Cantrip power for all his minor effects. Something like Teleport I would not give him because I think it makes him more interesting and individual that he cannot do this. If all Demon Princes had this ability along with others, then they'd all start to play similarly. For the goblet of elf's blood, I'd just make sure that he had some magical servants on hand to serve his every whim. 

*IF* you want Graz'zt to have these sorts of abilities, graft on a few powers. It may sound like the sort of cop-out answer that really annoyed me when 4th Ed came out and every concern was shouted down by some fanboy insisting it wasn't a problem because the DM could change it if he wanted, but I've come to find that whacking the odd minor power onto a monster really is that simple and easy. Don't get me wrong - I still have concerns with the game, but on this occasion "just add what powers you like" really is the right one. 

Hope this helps,

L.


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## DracoSuave (Jan 1, 2009)

Mercurius said:


> "The demon prince waves his hand and summons a goblet of elfblood wine"






> that when D&D finally has a system that could relatively easily accomodate spontaneous magic (d20 + relevant ability score + 1/2 level + power type bonus vs. power DC, which might be something like 10 + level equivalent), it doesn't do anything with it. Or is that still to come?




See, this is the thing.  Why would you want a roll to do something like summon a goblet of wine?  Does it -need- a system?

Does Grazzt -need- a probability chance of failure to summon wine?  Or is that so minor and non-pivotal a detail that as a story teller, you can simply say he does, and move on with your lives?

DMs don't need complex rules systems to cover the background stuff antagonists do that is off camera, and don't even need one for a lot of the stuff they do -on- camera.  Do you need to roll to decide if Grazzt can command his demon legions to be in the dungeon for the players?  Of course not, if you did, you'd have a 35% chance of not having an adventure.

The -exact- same philosophy applies to the other -trivial- stuff.


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## ForbidenMaster (Jan 1, 2009)

DracoSuave said:


> See, this is the thing.  Why would you want a roll to do something like summon a goblet of wine?  Does it -need- a system?
> 
> Does Grazzt -need- a probability chance of failure to summon wine?  Or is that so minor and non-pivotal a detail that as a story teller, you can simply say he does, and move on with your lives?
> 
> ...



"The demon prince waves his hand and.... (d20 roll -fail-) waves his hand..... (d20 roll -fail-) and waves his hand again (*come on you* d20 roll -success-) and summons a goblet of elfblood wine."


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## arscott (Jan 1, 2009)

Also, Isn't the abyss Divinely Mutable?  As long as he's in Azzagrat, Graz'zt can alter the fabric of the plane itself--I think summoning a goblet of wine is probably covered.

To an extent, though, there is a de-powering of the gods going on here.  We're seeing a change from a collection of nigh-omnipotent beings to something more like the norse gods, who need magic items to change shape, for example.  And frankly, that's a change I welcome.


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## Mercurius (Jan 1, 2009)

Cool, thanks for the feedback, all. I feel much better now.  

I generally take the "storyteller approach" DracoSuave mentions--I was just wondering if I was missing something, or if there was intentionality behind not including more spells; while the jury is still out on that one, as Ltheb said, the stat blocks are combat-focused and don't necessarily have to reflect everything a monster can possibly do. As a demon prince I see him (Graz'zt, not Ltheb) as being able to do "uber-cantrips"--at-will minor powers that are basically "trivial", or at least not game-changing. But this is where it is easy to get caught by the rules, rather than just use them as a framework. The DM, of course, doesn't have to play by the rules.


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## Runestar (Jan 2, 2009)

It is not so much of depowering them as much as the designers are streamlining their stat block, IMO. While the 2e and 3e grazzt had tons of SLAs (the norm for high lv foes), the reality was that many of them were flat out worthless in combat. He is not going to bother harrying the PCs with low-powered options such as magic missile or unholy blight. In fact, many of them are just plain inferior to the full attack action, since using them is a standard action, which is mutually exclusive with attacking.

As a contrast, let me compare this with what Asmodeus might look like if he had been exhaustively statted out using 3e rules.

[sblock]The Overlord of Hell
Medium Outsider (Abomination, Evil, Extraplanar, Lawful)
Divine Rank: 18 (cosmic rank 21 in Hell)
Symbol: A pentagram surrounded by eight “9s” with a final “9” in the center
Portfolio: Damnation, Devils, Tyranny, Power, Oppression, Lost Knowledge, Intrigue
Cleric Alignments: LE, NE
Domains: Destruction, Domination, Evil, Knowledge, Law, Trickery
Favored Weapon: “The Ruby Scepter of Hell” (heavy mace)
Hit Dice: 45d8 (Outsider) + 20d8 (cleric) + 25d4 (wizard) + 990 (1,610 hp)
Initiative: +21 (+13 Dex, +8 Superior Initiative)
Speed: 120 ft., fly 250 ft. (perfect)
Armor Class: 97 (+13 Dex, +18 divine, +34 natural,
+22 deflection), touch 63, flat-footed 84
Base Attack/Grapple: +68/+101
Attack: The Ruby Scepter of Hell +110 melee (1d8+24 plus 3d6 and 1 negative level (axiomatic) plus 3d6 and 1 negative level (unholy) plus Tyrant's Taint/15-20/x4 plus 12d6 and 4 negative levels (axiomatic)
plus 12d6 and 4 negative levels (unholy)); or spell +101 melee touch or +99 ranged touch. 
Full Attack: The Ruby Scepter of Hell +110/+105/+100/+95 melee (1d8+24 plus 3d6 and 1 negative level (axiomatic) plus 3d6 and 1 negative level (unholy) plus Tyrant's Taint/15-20/x4 plus 12d6 and 4 negative
levels (axiomatic) plus 12d6 and 4 negative levels (unholy)); or spell +101 melee touch or +99 ranged touch.
Space/Reach: 5 ft. /5 ft.
Special Attacks: Domain powers, gaze of Hell's depth, rebuke/command undead 25/day, salient divine abilities, spell-like abilities, spells.
Special Qualities: Abomination traits, Avatar, Diabolical Decree, Diabolical Empowerment, Diabolical Prowess, divine aura (18 miles, DC 72), divine immunities, damage reduction 40/anarchic, epic, good, and silver, godly realm, greater teleport at will, Infernal Knowledge, Infernal Majesty, immunity to acid, cold, electricity, and fire, malefircarim traits, plane shift at
will*, regeneration 22, remote communication, resistance to sonic 23, see in darkness, spell resistance 115, telepathy (18 miles), understand, speak, and read all languages and speak directly to all beings within 18 miles.
*As The King of Hell can only send one avatar beyond the confines of Hell at a time, he rarely uses this ability. 
Saves: Fort +75, Ref +77, Will +86.
Abilities: Str 40, Dex 36, Con 32, Int 54, Wis 54, Cha 54.
Skills: Appraise +105 (+113 alchemical items, +113 books, +113 paintings, +113 forged items), Balance +96, Bluff +141, Concentration +122, Craft (alchemy) +110, Craft (blacksmithing) +105, Craft
(bookbinding) +105, Craft (painting) +100, Decipher Script +90, Diplomacy +169 (+175 with evil beings), Disguise +112 (+122 when acting in character), Escape Artist +76, Forgery +110, Gather Information
+139 (+149 in Hell), Heal +115, Hide +119, Intimidate +149 (+155 against evil beings), Knowledge (arcana) +133, Knowledge (architecture and engineering) +85, Knowledge (dungeoneering) +85, Knowledge
(geography) +90, Knowledge (history) +120, Knowledge (local [Hell]) +133, Knowledge (nature) +90, Knowledge (nobility and royalty) +105, Knowledge (the planes) +133, Knowledge (religion) +133, Listen +100, Move Silently +81, Perform (dance) +89, Perform (oratory) +89, Perform (string instruments) +89, Search +115 (+121 to find secret doors),
Sense Motive +133, Sleight of Hand +45, Spellcraft +143, Spot +90, Survival +40 (+46 in aboveground natural environments, +50 on other planes, +48 to find or follow tracks, +46 to keep from getting lost,
+46 while underground), Use Rope +31 (+37 to bind someone).
Feats: Alluring, Brew Potion, Combat Expertise, Combat Reflexes, Corrupt Spell, Corrupt Spell-Like Ability B, Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Craft Rod, Craft Staff, Craft Wand, Craft Wondrous Item, Dark SpeechB, Empower Spell, Eschew Materials, Flyby Attack, Forge Ring, Heighten Spell, Imposter, Improved Combat Expertise, Improved Critical (heavy mace), Improved Flyby Attack, Improved Initiative, Jack-of-all-Trades, Persuasive, Power Attack, Quicken Spell, Reach Spell, Scribe Scroll, Silent Spell, Spell Focus (all)B, Still Spell, Trustworthy, Violate Spell.
Epic Feats: Epic Evil BrandB, Epic Reputation, Epic Spellcasting, Ignore Material Components, Improved Heighten Spell, Intensify Spell, Multispell, Superior Initiative.
Salient Divine Abilities: Alter Form, Arcane Mastery, Aura of Utter Hell*, Control Creatures (devils), Craft Artifact, Create Object, Create Greater Object, Damnation*, Divine Blast (25/day, 18 miles, 480 damage),
Divine Glibness (DC 72), Divine Shield (14/day, absorb 180 points of damage), Divine Spellcasting, Govern the Children (devils), Hand of Death (DC 72), Hell’s Mouth*, Increased Damage Reduction, Increased
Spell Resistance, Know Secrets (DC 72), Life and Death, Overlord, Spontaneous Wizard Spells, The Lord of the Nine*, Overlord of Hell*.
*Unique Salient Divine Abilities; see below for details.
Environment: Malsheem, Nessus, Ninth of the Nine Hell of Perdition
Organization: Solitary (unique); or with bodyguard (Aesmadeva); or with attendees (The Ashmadia and Aesmadeva); or with court (The Ashmadia, Aesmadeva, Martinet, 1d8+1 Dukes of Hell, and 1d3+1 arch-devils); or with Infernal Procession (4d20 + 1 common devils, The Ashmadia, Aesmadeva, Martinet, 1d8+1 Dukes of Hell, and 1d3+1 Arch-Devils).
Challenge Rating: 81
Treasure: The Ruby Scepter of Hell
Alignment: Lawful Evil[/sblock]
and another few pages just to fully flesh out his abilities.
[sblock]Combat
Asmodeus rarely finds it necessary to allow matters to degenerate into fisticuffs, preferring to trick other beings into doing his bidding or to smother their wills. Asmodeus does not personally engage in combat unless it
becomes absolutely necessary, first allowing millions of devils to enter battle in his name. If combat occurs in his direct presence, he may aid favored minions (such as Aesmadeva and the Ashmadia) by countering particularly dangerous spells, disarming foes via telekinesis, or dominating the weaker-minded opponents and ordering them to attack their  comrades. Seated calmly on the Serpent’s Throne, Asmodeus activates his Aura of Utter Hell and employs spell-like abilities or silent and still spells, exerting his will with no outward signs of any effort. Should enemies attempt to engage him directly, he may strike them down instantly if possible (via divine blast, hand of death, or life and death).
Against more powerful foes, rather than taking them apart in combat, Asmodeus may first allow them to wear themselves down on his defenses (employing the Armor of Malsheem and his divine shields), creating a feeling of hopelessness and forcing them to inevitably submit to his will. Though it is virtually unheard of for Asmodeus to enter physical combat, he is quite proficient at it, and with the might of the Ruby Scepter of Hell, Asmodeus
will not hesitate to humble his foes in melee if necessary.
Between his melee abilities, salient divine abilities, special attacks, spell-like abilities, spontaneous spells, and the powers of the Ruby Scepter, Asmodeus has virtually limitless options in combat. His vast knowledge
allows him to select the most appropriate attack form for any foe or situation he may come across. Asmodeus is always prepared to increase the sway of Lawful Evil, and a creature powerful enough to challenge
him may become a useful slave, whether tempted or tricked into his service or dominated outright. Others that challenge The Overlord, however, may find naught but oblivion as he consumes their immortal souls. 

Alter Reality: Asmodeus can use the wish spell with regard to his portfolio, save for the replication of other spells. This ability costs Asmodeus no XP, and requires a standard action to implement. Asmodeus may also use
alter reality to cast any inflict spell at will as a standard action (applying metamagic feats to the spell requires him to forego using alter reality for 1 round for each spell level the feat would add). As a free action, Asmodeus
can assume any size from Fine (as small as a grain of sand) to Colossal (up to 1,600 feet tall), adjusting his statistics accordingly. He may also change the size of up to 100 pounds of objects he touches.
Aura of Utter Hell (unique salient divine ability): As the ultimate representation of organized evil, Asmodeus exudes an aura that is akin to Hell itself. Asmodeus’ presence is so heinous and overwhelming that it
causes lesser (that is most) beings to cower before him or pay homage to the totality of Lawful Evil he represents. All within 9 miles of Asmodeus must succeed on a Will save (DC 72). Those who succumb to evil of The Overlord of Hell suffer one of the three following effects, as determined by The Lord of the Nine (who can change the effect, or discontinue it, as a free action): 
Cower: Affected beings cower before the might of
Asmodeus. They can defend themselves normally but
take no actions.
Induce Fear: Affected beings become panicked and
suffer a -9 morale penalty on attack rolls, saves, and
checks. The merest glance or gesture from Asmodeus
makes them frightened, and they flee from him as
quickly as possible. A panicked creature has a 50%
chance to drop what it’s holding, chooses its path randomly
(as long as it’s getting away from immediate danger),
and flees any other dangers that confront it. If cornered,
a panicked creature cowers.
Obeisance: Affected beings drop to their knees at the
sound of Asmodeus’ voice, acknowledging The Arch-
Fiend’s sovereignty. While bowing, victims are considered
prone and flatfooted until their next turn. Asmodeus
can use Obeisance in conjunction with any 9th
level or higher spell that requires a verbal component
(this includes spells adjusted by metamagic feats). Doing
so uses up a spell slot as per usual.
Asmodeus’ Aura of Utter Hell supersedes the effects
of his divine aura for those beings within 9 miles of his
presence. Deities and cosmic entities can only be affected
on a successful opposed rank check.
Avatar: Asmodeus is the avatar of The Overlord of
Hell (Lawful Evil overdeity). As the avatar of an overgod,
Asmodeus possesses the powers of a true deity
rather than those of a conventional avatar. Asmodeus
also keeps his malefircarim special abilities, and was
given several unique salient abilities to help facilitate his
rule over Perdition.
The Overlord may generate up to 20 avatars within
Hell at one time and typically has at least nine (including
the “dominant” avatar) available. However, due to the
nature of his imprisonment, The Overlord may only
maintain one avatar outside of Hell at any one time; if
The Overlord sends an avatar beyond Hell, he can neither
generate nor maintain other avatars (already created
avatars go into “stasis” until the avatar returns to Hell).
It takes 90 days for the Overlord to create a new avatar
unless an avatar was destroyed beyond Hell. In such
cases, The Overlord will lose all current avatars save one
and it will take nine months for him to create a new avatar.
It is unknown what would happen if The Overlord
lost access to all his avatars. The Overlord may select
different appearances, ability scores, classes, feats, salient
divine abilities, skills, and so on when creating an
avatar, as was the case with Lucifer and Asmodeus.
Damnation (unique salient divine ability): Many
desperate mortals have made deals with devils over the
centuries, seeking the quick (yet dangerous) road to
knowledge, power, or wealth. Some of the most arrogant
or foolish have attempted to bargain with the King of
Hell himself. Assuming the client signs several contracts
of terrifying complexity, thereby agreeing to repay the
Overlord at some point in the future, Asmodeus will
grant the client whatever his or her heart desires. Using
his ability to alter reality, Asmodeus will generally grant
the client great power (whether personal or political)
and/or the ability to completely dominate or oppress a
person, group of people, or even country of their choosing.
Asmodeus can grant virtually any boon that suits him
and his client’s needs. For instance, Asmodeus might
grant the client a +9 profane bonus to an ability score or
skill (especially Bluff, Diplomacy, or a Knowledge
skill), or the ability to cast a spell like dominate monster
402
or mass charm monster (with a +9 profane bonus to the
save DC) 9 times per day as a spell-like ability. Asmodeus
is quite flexible with the boons he offers those
insane enough to deal with him; so long as their desires
promote organized evil, The Lord of the Nine is likely to
grant them their request, even in the form of a wish.
Furthermore, it is believed that Asmodeus has the ability
to mimic the soul-bargaining powers of any being bearing
a Duke of Hell, arch-devil, or Lord of the Nine template.
To date, this has neither been confirmed nor debunked.
It is known that Asmodeus has the ability to
grant Damnation “boons” through a proxy; such proxies
are typically Nessian pit fiends, extremely powerful (21st
level +) cardinals of Asmodeus, or Dukes of Hell
(particularly Martinet).
Asmodeus can bestow up to nine such benefits per
client, but one such benefit is lost every nine months
unless the client sacrifices the soul of a willing or dominated
subject to Asmodeus before that time. Such sacrifices
must be worth no less than one-third the HD of the
victim and must have noble or royal blood in their veins
(no more than nine generations removed). Such sacrifices
must take place in regal environments and at midnight.
When all of a client's powers have been lost, or
when all nine sacrifices have been made, the client usually
dies (The Devil has been known to let his favored
clients live on for quite some time, often killing them
when they least expect it or right before they assume
their hoped for “destiny”). Short of the direct intervention
of a deity while the client lives, there is no chance of
reprieve from the damnation awaiting this corrupt soul.
Even with the direct intervention of the deity, the victim
must undergo some form of atonement to release his soul
from Asmodeus. The deity may offer atonement and a
quest to the client to not only undue the wrongs he committed,
but to release the souls he consigned to Hell to
gain more power. The quest must be completed within
nine months after which the client’s soul is forfeit and he
immediately dies and descends into the Pit of Darkness
where his oblivion will be endless and complete. To
retrieve such a soul is an epic adventure of almost divine
proportions as it requires that one bargain with Asmodeus
. . .
Divine Immunities: Ability damage, ability drain,
acid, binding, cold, death effects, dimensional anchor,
disease, disintegration, dismissal, electricity, energy
drain, imprisonment, mind-affecting effects, paralysis,
poison, repulsion, sleep, soul bind, stunning, temporal,
stasis, trap the soul, turning or rebuking, transmutation.
Unlike most deities, Asmodeus is subject to banishment
and similar effects. This unique status is due to the nature
of The Overlord, who itself has effectively been
banished from the Cosmos.
Domain Powers: Cast divination, evil, and law spells
at +1 caster level; smite 18/day (+4 to attack, +20 to
damage); treats Bluff, Disguise, and Hide as class skills.
Gaze of Hell’s Depth (Su): Asmodeus’ gaze reveals
the depth of depravity, loss, and wickedness that is Hell.
Those subjected to Asmodeus’ blood red gaze may suffer
one of the following effects, as chosen by Asmodeus
(each is a mind-affecting gaze attack with a range of 60
feet):
Chill: The target creature must make a Fortitude save
(DC 72) or begin to feeling numbingly cold and empty.
If affected, it can take only a single move action or standard
action each turn, but not both (nor may it take fullround
actions). It moves at half its normal speed (round
down to the next 5-foot increment). This effect lasts for
up to 63 rounds and does not stack with other slow effects.
Additionally, the creature takes a –9 penalty on all
attack and damage rolls, saving throws, ability checks,
and skill checks for the next 24 hours.
Fear and Weakness: The target creature must make a Will save (DC 72) or cower before Asmodeus for up to 63 rounds. If the Will save is successful, the creature is instead shaken for 9 rounds. In addition, if Asmodeus wills it, the target may also take 9 points of Strength damage. A Fortitude save (DC 72) halves the effect. A creature cannot drop below Strength 1 in this manner. 
Madness: If the target creature fails a Will saving throw (DC 72), its mind becomes overwhelmed by the sheer power and otherworldliness of Asmodeus. The creature’s Intelligence and Charisma scores each drop to
1. The affected creature is unable to use Intelligence- or Charisma-based skills, cast spells, understand language, or communicate coherently. The subject remains in this state until a heal, limited wish, miracle, or wish spell
(succeeding at a DC 45 caster level check) is used to cancel the effect. If the variant sanity rules are being employed (see Appendix D: Infernal Insanity), the creature instead takes d% points of sanity damage (minimum
9) on a failed save and 3d6 points of sanity damage on a successful save.
Deities and cosmic entities can only be affected on a successful opposed rank check. 
Hell’s Mouth (unique salient divine ability): As the King of Hell, Asmodeus has absolute control over all of the gates and portals that lead to Hell from any location, reality, or plane of existence, as well as those within Hell. Up to 18 times a day, The Lord of the Nine can cause a gate or portal to open and can accomplish different feats with it. First, Asmodeus may use the Hell’s Mouth to interact with beings within his sensory range.
Secondly, Asmodeus may cast spells, use salient divine abilities, spell-like abilities, or any other power through a Hell’s Mouth. Asmodeus may also send devils through the Mouth; such beings are treated as if called rather than summoned. Finally, Asmodeus can cause the Hell’s Mouth to inhale sharply; sucking in those within 90 feet into a location in the Nine Hells of Asmodeus’ choosing if they fail a Will Save (DC 72). In any event, the Mouth remains open for nine rounds.
Asmodeus can only open existing gates to Hell or those that have been opened by spellcasters, magic items, or artifacts within the past nine days at the location the gate was created. Thus, if a wizard casts a gate spell to
Hell in his sanctum, for the next nine days, Asmodeus can create a Hell’s Mouth in that location. Asmodeus cannot use Hell’s Mouth on typical summon monster spells. He is limited in his ability to create Hell's Mouths
on planes apart from Hell and the Prime - he does not have direct access to the Ethereal Plane or the Elemental Planes. He has no access to the plane of Concordant Opposition or to Sigil, though he is able to open a Hell's
Mouth in the gate towns. He may open Hell's Mouths on the Outer Planes, but only 18/year, and only within 18 miles of an existing monument or portal to Hell. Note that these restrictions do not prevent him from opening
standard gates to these locations (save Sigil).
A Hell’s Mouth usually appears as a great, diabolically
evil human male face with jagged, chewing
teeth. Flames burst from the gaping maw as it attempts
to suck in unlucky victims or when Asmodeus uses the
Mouth to communicate. On other occasions, it appears
403
as a particularly sinister-looking portal complete with a
diabolical, enflamed frame. Asmodeus may adjust the
Mouth’s appearance as he desires.
Infernal Knowledge: As the driving force of Lawful
Evil in the cosmos for countless millennia, Asmodeus
possesses untold knowledge. He may use the lore ability
as a 45th level loremaster (+85 to his check).
Infernal Majesty (Ex): Within Perdition, the power
of the King of All Hell is incomparable. On any layer of
Hell, Asmodeus possesses a cosmic rank of 21, ranking
him as an overdeity. This does not alter his statistics and
is applied in addition to his divine rank (the better of the
two, in this case the cosmic rank, is used for rank
checks). Asmodeus may select up to nine locations
within Hell at any one time, which he may affect as a
godly realm. It is unclear if he has any limitations in
terms of range or duration in accomplishing such feats.
Although it is believed that he must succeed in a rank
check to overcome the cosmic or divine defenses of
other Lords or gods, the certainty of this position is unclear.
The Lord of the Nine (unique salient divine ability):
Asmodeus is affected as though by a permanent
nondetection spell (caster level 45th) and can see in perfect
darkness, even that created by deeper darkness
spells. He can communicate with any creature within 18
miles using telepathy. He gains the Damage Reduction,
Infernal Majesty, Regeneration, and bonus feats of the
Lord of the Nine template, and reaps improved versions
of some of their other powers, as follows:
Call Devils (Su): As a move equivalent action, Asmodeus
can demand the respect of any devils. Asmodeus
may call, up to 9 times a day, up to 3 archdevils,
6 Dukes of Hell, 9 pit fiends, or 18 of any lesser
type of devil. Any devil or being with a diabolic template
is vulnerable to being called by Asmodeus, regardless of
location. No devil is brave enough (save Mephistopheles)
or stupid enough (save Moloch) to verbally challenge
Asmodeus in Hell, much less to his face, so all
obey his commands.
Diabolic Supremacy: Akin to (but more potent than)
the diabolic prowess of lesser arch-devils, Asmodeus
receives a +18 profane bonus to the DCs and effective
caster levels of his special attacks, spells, and spell-like
abilities. Asmodeus calculates the save DCs for his divine
aura and salient divine abilities as he does his other
special abilities.
Spell-Like Abilities: Asmodeus may cast all spell-like
abilities available to the Lord of the Nine template at
will. These abilities are included in the list below.
Overlord of Hell (unique salient divine ability): As
the true and undisputed King of the Nine Hells, Asmodeus
has powers that transcend those of the other
Lords of the Nine.
Infernal Potentate (Ex): As the personification of
Lawful Evil, Asmodeus’ mere presence automatically
unhallows an area equal to 9 miles in Hell. Not only can
Asmodeus select any spell from the unhallow list in the
Player’s Handbook, he may also use any of his domain
spells as potential attachments to the effect, can attch up
to nine different spells at once, and can change the associated
spells 9/day as a move equivalent action. While
he can suppress (and reactivate) this ability as a free
action, he rarely does so. Asmodeus can use this ability
through his Hell’s Mouth salient divine ability.
Submission of the Lords (Ex): Once a month, Asmodeus
can force the other eight Lords of the Nine to
submit to him. Asmodeus may call them to his fortress
in Nessus, Malsheem, where they must pay obeisance to
him. This power also allows Asmodeus to terminate any
and all infernal abilities of the Lords or any other devil.
Asmodeus may do so 18 times a day as a moveequivalent
action, the devil (even an arch-devil or Lord)
receiving no saving throw or spell resistance to avoid the
effect. The devil retains its hit dice, class levels, feats,
skills, and ability scores, but loses its Abomination and
Devil traits, supernatural abilities, spell-like abilities, and
any benefits and/or features associated with the Duke of
Hell, arch-devil, and/or Lord of the Nine templates.
Asmodeus may also grant these benefits up to 18 times
per day, again as a move equivalent action. Finally,
Asmodeus can simply transform a devil into another
kind of devil, the devil again receiving no save against
this ability. This power extends beyond Hell through the
use of a Hell’s Mouth, although there are rumors that
Asmodeus can reach beyond Hell without the benefit of
the Mouth. Asmodeus’ power to promote or demote
devils as described here is in addition to the powers of
the Diabolical Decree.
Spell-Like Abilities: Asmodeus uses these abilities
as a 99th level caster, except for divination spells, evil
spells, and law spells, which he uses as a 100th level
caster. The save DCs are 78 + spell level. At will - accursed,
animate dead, baleful polymorph, blasphemy,
blur, calm emotions, change self, charm monster, clairaudience/
clairvoyance, command, confusion, contagion,
create greater undead, create undead, deeper darkness,
delayed blast fireball, desecrate, destruction, detect
chaos, detect good, detect magic, detect secret doors,
detect thoughts, dictum, discern location, disintegrate,
dispel chaos, dispel good, divination, dominate monster,
dominate person, earthquake, enthrall, false vision, find
the path, firestorm, flame strike, foresight, geas/quest,
greater command, greater dispel magic, greater invisibility,
greater restoration, harm, hellball, hold monster,
implosion, inflict critical wounds, inflict light wounds,
invisibility, legend lore, magic circle against chaos,
magic circle against good, mass hold monster, mass
inflict light wounds, mass suggestion, meteor swarm,
mirage arcana, mislead, monstrous thrall, nondetection,
oppress, order's wrath, persistent image, polymorph,
polymorph any object, power word stun, protection from
chaos, produce flame, protection from good, pyrotechnics,
read magic, restoration, resurrection, screen, scrying,
shatter, shield of law, suggestion, summon monster
IX (as evil or law spell only), symbol of pain, time stop,
true domination, true resurrection, true seeing, tyranny,
unhallow, unholy aura, unholy blight, wall of fire, wish.
Spells: Asmodeus may spontaneously cast up to 9
arcane and 9 divine epic spells per day. The forbidden
spells accursed, Asmodeus' heretical infection, the Serpent's
sibilant whisper, and tyranny are all closely associated
with the Lord of the Nine, though he is familiar
with an untold number of spells.
Cleric Spells Per Day: (Levels 0-22)
6/11/11/10/10/10/9/8/8/8/5/4/4/4/4/3/3/3/3/2/2/2/2.
Caster level 71st (72nd for divination, evil, or law spells).
Base DC = 51 + spell level, or 53 + spell level for mindaffecting,
language dependant spells.
Wizard Spells Per Day: (Levels 0-22)
4/10/10/9/9/9/9/8/8/8/5/4/4/4/4/3/3/3/3/2/2/2/2. Caster
level 76th (77th for divination, evil, or law spells). Base
DC = 51 + spell level, or 53 + spell level for mindaffecting,
language dependant spells.
404
The Ruby Scepter of Hell: Asmodeus carries The
Ruby Scepter of Hell. The scepter is carved from pure
ruby, with an onyx pentagram at its head. Of unparalleled
craftsmanship, it glistens with an unimaginable,
unearthly luster. This item would be worth more than
1,000,000 gp in gem value alone, before even considering
its immense magical power.
The Ruby Scepter is a +9 axiomatic power unholy
power heavy mace with a threat range of 18-20 and a x4
critical multiplier. Any creature struck by the Scepter is
affected as by blasphemy and dictum (caster level 45th).
The Ruby Scepter also possesses the following powers.
While Asmodeus may use each of these powers at will,
unless otherwise stated, all others may use each power
no more than three times per day.
• Tyrant’s Taint: On any successful strike, the Ruby
Scepter may confer Tyrant’s Taint. If a victim fails a
Will save DC 72, he suffers from this insidious effect.
Tyrant’s Taint has an incubation period of 9 days and
deals one negative level. The “damage” dealt by Tyrant’s
Taint shifts the victim one alignment step
closer to Lawful Evil. What makes Tyrant’s Taint
particularly dangerous is that a new save must be
made every nine days for the next 81 days. Nine successful
consecutive saves indicate that one has become
free of the disease. Tyrant’s Taint may be
removed by a 31st level, good aligned cleric who must
cast greater restoration and miracle in immediate
succession, succeeding on a DC 45 caster level check
each time; this may be done at any time during the 81
day period. Like the Serpent's sibilant whisper (see
Chapter 2: Forbidden Magic), it is all but impossible
to detect Tyrant’s Taint.
• The Ruby Scepter grants a +9 profane bonus to the
saves of all Lawful Evil creatures within 90 feet (all
wielders save Asmodeus benefit from the bonus).
The wielder may withdraw this effect on an individual
basis should a powerful Lawful Evil creature challenge
his authority. Further, all Lawful Evil creatures
within 900 feet with 45 or fewer combined HD or
class levels may be commanded by the wielder as an
evil cleric commands undead. All other non-Lawful
Evil creatures with fewer than 45 HD may be turned
as a good cleric turns undead.
• Absorption: The Ruby Scepter can be used as a rod of
absorption, capable of absorbing up to 27 spell levels
per day.
• Armor of Malsheem: When this ability is activated (a
full round action), the wielder’s damage reduction,
fast healing, and regeneration are doubled for the next
9 rounds (if the wielder does not possess one or more
of these boons, he receives a DR of 9/ – , fast healing
equal to his Constitution modifier, and regeneration
equal to double his Constitution modifier). When in
Asmodeus’ hands, the Scepter also doubles the hit
points of his divine shields for the duration. While
this power may be used once a day for others, Asmodeus
take on the Armor of Malsheem thrice per
day.
• Bolt of Lightning: 180 foot long, 10 foot wide line;
deals 180 points of corrupted, violated electricity
damage (Reflex DC 72 for half). Failure of the Reflex
knocks a victim prone; furthermore, failure by 10
points or more throws a victim back 10 feet plus 10
more feet for every additional 10 points by which the
save was failed (thus a being that received a result of
40 would be knocked back 30 feet). If this effect
causes the victim to strike a solid object (like a wall),
the victim suffers 1d6 points of damage for every 10
feet they travel before striking. A victim must also
make a Fortitude save DC 72 or become paralyzed for
9 rounds. Whether the victim succeeds or not, he
becomes charged with static electricity for the next 9
rounds and deals 15d6 points of electricity damage
whenever they come within reach of or touch another
being.
• Cone of Frost: 90 foot long cone; deals 180 points of
corrupted, violated cold damage (Reflex DC 72 for
half). Those struck must also make a Fortitude save
DC 72. On a successful save, victims are slowed for 9
rounds. On a failure, victims are stuck in place as
though by hold monster for 9 rounds. If they fail the
Fortitude save by 18 points or more, they are frozen
into ice and rendered helpless for up to 9 days (a
miracle or wish cast by a 31st level caster that succeeds
at a DC 45 caster level check can thaw victims
out). If they take 50 points of damage or more from
any one attack while in this state, victims shatter into
pieces and die.
• Inflict Wounds: On any successful melee attack with
the Ruby Scepter, the wielder may choose to inflict
wounds upon the target of a melee attack (this is done
as part of the melee damage rather than as a separate
action). This effect deals 52 points of corrupted, violated
negative energy damage to the target (Will save
DC 72 for half). Undead are neither harmed by nor
benefit from this power. Thrice per day, Asmodeus
(and Asmodeus only) can increase the effect, dealing
200 points of corrupted, violated negative energy
damage instead (Will save DC 72 for half). In both
cases, Asmodeus heals a number of hit points equal to
half the damage dealt in this fashion (he cannot exceed
his normal maximum hit points in this fashion).
• Jet of Acid: 360 foot long, 5 foot wide line; deals 180
points of corrupted, violated acid damage (Reflex DC
72 for half). Failing the Reflex save requires that a
victim must also make a Fortitude save DC 72 for one
magic item; failure indicates that the item takes the
damage as well (see Items Surviving after a Saving
Throw in the Magic Overview section of the Player’s
Handbook to determine which items are affected
first). At the beginning of each of the next two
rounds, another of their items must save as well. In
addition, the acid eats away at the flesh, dealing 3
points of Constitution damage (Fortitude DC 72 for
half) immediately and an additional 3 points at the
beginning of each of the next two rounds (unless a
heal, miracle, or wish spell from a 31st level caster
that succeeds at a DC 45 caster level check is cast on
the victim).
• Tyrant Triumphant: Activating this ability causes
pulsing, red and black waves to emanate from the
Scepter in a 90 foot radius. The area within 90 feet of
the Scepter is surrounded by a wall of anti-magic.
The wall is razor thin, but prevents spells or supernatural
abilities originating from within the area from
affecting those without and vice versa, similar to the
lesser layers of a prismatic wall. All save the wielder
within the area are affected as if by disjunction, blasphemy,
dictum, and repulsion in that order during the
round that the effect begins (caster level 99th, DC 72
where applicable). A nearly impenetrable shield is
405
erected around the wielder, and remains for 3 rounds.
Each round the barrage of spells repeats within 90
foot radius of the Scepter. The shield surrounding the
wielder is immune to all forms of attack save those
with the good or chaotic descriptor. The shield has
999 hit points. Even from those forms of attack
against which it is vulnerable, the shield ignores the
first 90 points of damage per round. Good or chaotic
aligned spells which do not normally deal damage
deal 1d10 points of damage per spell level to the
shield. During the first round, the Scepter’s wielder is
purged of all unwanted effects, including but not limited
to, disease, poison, enchantments, curses, debilitations,
and death. In the second round, the wielder is
healed to full hit points. By the third round, the
wielder regains spells, spell-like abilities, and any
other limited-use abilities innate to his nature (not
granted by an item) as if he had rested for a day.
While Asmodeus may use this ability thrice a day, all
others benefit from it once a day. Tyrant Triumphant
will automatically activate once per day should its
wielder perish. In either case, once Tyrant Triumphant
is used, the wielder may not call on any of the
Scepter’s other powers save its melee effects
(including axiomatic power, unholy power, blasphemy,
dictum, and Tyrant’s Taint, but excluding
inflict wounds), or the remaining uses of Tyrant Triumphant
(Asmodeus only), for the next 24 hours.
A being that touches or holds the Ruby Scepter
against Asmodeus’ will suffers several dire consequences.
In addition to the saves required by Infernal
Arms, the DCs increase by +1 every nine hours. Even a
being that saves against these effects suffers nine negative
levels when holding the Ruby Scepter.
Any being slain by the Ruby Scepter finds his soul
consigned to Nessus – trapped in the Serpent’s Throne.
No being save Asmodeus himself can restore such a soul
to life. Asmodeus has a price for the release of each one,
assuming someone is willing to travel to his domain in
order to bargain for it.
Some say the Supreme Virtue once traveled into Hell
to liberate her follower, and she was the only one to ever
receive a soul back free of cost. The modron bureaucrats
of Mechanus offer pricey legal advice for discovering
loopholes in a contract offered by Asmodeus...some go
mad after seeing perfect logic so tainted by evil.
Other Divine Powers
The statistics here reflect the powers of the avatar of
the King of Hell, whom most simply call Asmodeus,
although the true name of this being is unknown. As far
as the devils of Hell, most gods, and virtually all lesser
beings know, the avatar is the true Asmodeus.
Although these statistics are for the avatar of the true
King of the Nine Hells (what or whoever that being
might be), it is only through the use of the Hell’s Mouth
salient divine ability that the avatar can interact with (or,
more rarely, enter) the Prime Material Plane.
Senses: Asmodeus can see (using normal vision or
darkvision), hear, touch, and smell at a distance of eighteen
miles. As a standard action, he can perceive anything
within eighteen miles of his worshipers, holy sites,
objects, or any location where one of his titles or name
was spoken in the last hour. He can extend his senses to
up to twenty locations at once. However, his remote
sensing is limited to Hell, or to Prime worlds he has
accessed with a Hell's Mouth. While he can completely
block the sensing power of any god or cosmic entity
attempting to peer into Nessus, he does not have this
ability beyond his layer.
Portfolio Sense: Asmodeus can sense anything that
pertains to Lawful Evil acts (trickery, tyranny, etc.)
eighteen weeks before it happens and retains the sensation
for eighteen weeks after the event occurs. However,
he is limited in his ability to perform this feat beyond
Hell except with the use of a Hell’s Mouth.
Automatic Actions: Asmodeus can use Bluff, any
Knowledge skill, or Sense Motive as a free action if the
DC for the task is 30 or lower. He can perform up to
twenty such free actions each round.
Create Magic Items: Asmodeus can create any
magic item that has lawful or unholy attributes, that
smothers the will, or that otherwise brings the wielder
ever closer to a Lawful Evil alignment.[/sblock]

And I gave up on editing it halfway...

While the latter undoubtably exhaustively delineates the boundaries of Asmodeus' capabilities, in reality, more than 99% of his statblock is not going to get used.

Which would you rather prefer?


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## (Psi)SeveredHead (Jan 2, 2009)

Still, I think WotC should have given him a list of rituals and perhaps gone into a bit more detail about what kinds of things he can do out of combat.

I don't think such things would be needed in his stat block, though.


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## Rechan (Jan 2, 2009)

All stat blocks should come with this:

*Plot Power* (Free, At Will) * The monster does whatever you need it to do for the story.


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## Mercurius (Jan 2, 2009)

Runestar said:


> MAJOR SNIPPAGE
> 
> And I gave up on editing it halfway...
> 
> ...




ACK! Point made, and quite illustratively, I might add!


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## James McMurray (Jan 2, 2009)

(Psi)SeveredHead said:


> Still, I think WotC should have given him a list of rituals and perhaps gone into a bit more detail about what kinds of things he can do out of combat.
> 
> I don't think such things would be needed in his stat block, though.




If they give a rundown of what he can do outside of combat they both ruin his usefulness beyond what they think he should do and open the door for a wave of demands for the out of battle capabilities for every other major monster.


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## Nail (Jan 2, 2009)

Runestar said:


> And I gave up on editing it halfway...



Holy &#%^@@!  Where in the 9 Hells did that come from, Runestar?  


Why, by all that is unholy, would you need to know that Asmodeus' "Use Rope" skill was +31?


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## Regicide (Jan 2, 2009)

They could have given a general sense of his abilities outside of combat, a summary of the long writeups from previous editions but they don't.  It's not because it's "storyteller", unless thats another word for lazy.  The reason they don't mention anything outside of combat is because he doesn't exist outside of combat.

Worlds and Monsters pg 66:  "The goal of 4E is to encourage the use of boss monsters, make them part of the core DnD experience, and wrap thrilling adventures around them so that years from now, players can regale each other with tales of heroism and woe and count on their fingers and toes the number of demon lord heads mounted on castle walls."

"Whats new about demon lords in 4E is that they're playable monsters, high-level to be sure, but not so complicated that you need an expert dungeon master to run them."

  So the reason they don't have much more on them than other monsters?  Because they aren't supposed to be all that different from other monsthers.  Other than being the final baddy in the dungeon, they're just meant to be trophy kills you wrack up and mount, in large numbers.


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## DracoSuave (Jan 2, 2009)

Regicide said:


> They could have given a general sense of his abilities outside of combat, a summary of the long writeups from previous editions but they don't.  It's not because it's "storyteller", unless thats another word for lazy.  The reason they don't mention anything outside of combat is because he doesn't exist outside of combat.
> 
> Worlds and Monsters pg 66:  "The goal of 4E is to encourage the use of boss monsters, make them part of the core DnD experience, and wrap thrilling adventures around them so that years from now, players can regale each other with tales of heroism and woe and count on their fingers and toes the number of demon lord heads mounted on castle walls."
> 
> ...




The thing is, looking at what was done above, that +31 to Use Rope isn't memorable.  Players -just don't care-.  It's -not important.-

You don't need a million abilities to make a boss memorable.  A handful of powerful and synergistic abilities will be -far more- memorable.

Look at it this way.... how does 'Cast spells as an 16th level sorcerer' differentiate that monster from the next monster that 'casts spells as a 17th level sorcerer'?

Strangely, you usually end up doing the exact same stuff with them.  Use the best spells against the party, and the party goes 'Oh, he's a sorcerer.'  But, if instead, you give a bunch of abilities that -only that monster has-, they're going to remember it.

If the players never see it, it's not going to be memorable.  If the players see it, and handwave it as the same crap they've seen the last big bad use, or worse, the same stuff as on their wizard or cleric's character sheet, they're not going to remember.

Grazzt is memorable because he does things ONLY Grazzt can do in combat.  Tiamat is memorable because she does things ONLY Tiamat can do.

'Xth level caster' is neither memorable nor even special.


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## dammitbiscuit (Jan 2, 2009)

I, for one, welcome our new concise-stat-block overlords.

I really, really, really can't be arsed to care how many 3.5 fey can use ghost sound and dancing lights. It's safe to assume that they all can do so, but that never stopped the blasted spells from showing up in every monster entry, taking up page space and lengthening the time required for the DM to skim the entry and get an overall idea of what the little monster's all about.

My NPCs can do things that are thematic, within appropriate boundaries for their type, class, and level, but they only do it when it's worth mentioning. When the action could possibly have an effect on the players, page 42 of the DMG has everything I need.


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## Runestar (Jan 2, 2009)

> Holy &#%^@@!  Where in the 9 Hells did that come from, Runestar?
> 
> Why, by all that is unholy, would you need to know that Asmodeus' "Use Rope" skill was +31?




Dicefreaks' "The Gates of Hell" publication, an article put up for free download on their forum some time back (not sure if it is available now though), which details (really an understatement here) the 9 layers of hell (heck, they statted out paragon pit fiend advanced to 54HD, and even had their own custom ability progression). Their emphasis has mainly been on epic (as in really epic) gameplay. You really have to see it to believe it - words cannot do it justice, IMO.

I will try to rapidshare it in a while.



> Strangely, you usually end up doing the exact same stuff with them. Use the best spells against the party, and the party goes 'Oh, he's a sorcerer.' But, if instead, you give a bunch of abilities that -only that monster has-, they're going to remember it.




Bingo. 

If you had pitted your party against a balor or pit fiend in 3e, that is exactly the impression your players will likely acquire - powerful spellcasters with more hp than the norm. There was nothing about pelting the PCs with high lv spells such as meteor swarm, power word stun, mass hold monster or implosion that sufficiently differentiates a powerful denizon of the abyss from say, a lv17 wizard or cleric. Sure, the balor came equipped with a vorpal longsword and a flaming whip, but it was severely underpowered in melee, and so to make it worth anywhere near the cr20 its stat block lists it as, you are forced to shun melee altogether and assume the role of artillery - hit and run using its high fly speed and myriad of SLAs. 

In 4e, the balor returns to its LoTR roots by whacking the PCs with its lightning sword and flaming whip. Now that is memorable, simple because no other monster even comes close to replicating its capabilities in this aspect.


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## Runestar (Jan 2, 2009)

Ah, found it. Google is a godsend.

Dicefreaks d20 Community • View topic - The Gates of Hell

All 9 chapters available for your perusal. 

Edit: I am not sure if this is on topic, so don't hesitate to report and have this removed/shifted to an appropriate section.


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## DracoSuave (Jan 2, 2009)

Here's a perfect example of how to make a fight memorable.

Safer (Seraph) Sephiroth.

What do you remember?  The fact he could use Shadow Flare, Flare, and a couple -aga spells?  Stuff you had available on Materia?

No.  That's not what you remember, what made that fight memorable.

What made it memorable was the O Fortuna-homage theme in the background, chanting latin, the epic music of the fight....


....And the fact he summoned the destruction of the entire solar system just to hurt you.

You don't remember the minor mundane stuff... you remember the epic and unique stuff, and -that- is what sold the Seraph Sephiroth fight to everyone.


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## TheLordWinter (Jan 2, 2009)

Regicide said:


> They could have given a general sense of his abilities outside of combat, a summary of the long writeups from previous editions but they don't.  It's not because it's "storyteller", unless thats another word for lazy.  The reason they don't mention anything outside of combat is because he doesn't exist outside of combat.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> So the reason they don't have much more on them than other monsters?  Because they aren't supposed to be all that different from other monsthers.  Other than being the final baddy in the dungeon, they're just meant to be trophy kills you wrack up and mount, in large numbers.




This is how I felt about the 4th edition stat blocks when I first saw them - where did all my stuff go!? How can you cut out EVERYTHING a monster can do? I must admit, I've gotten more used to things now. Outside of combat? Yeah, Graz'zt, Orcus and Asmodeus can do ANYTHING. I think what I was initially missing (and if I might be so bold, you're missing as well) is that when the PCs aren't around, monsters don't use stats or make checks. Things just happen for the sake of the story.

If Graz'zt wants to seduce the local priestess and begin corrupting the local faith from the inside out, will you roll his charisma check versus her insight check in 3rd edition, or will you just say that she's fallen under his charms? Now if the PCs arrive in town and find the local psalms are being said very differently, will you have Graz'zt make a bluff check to maintain his innocence? Of course. Same in 3rd as in 4th. The difference is, if you want to have Graz'zt looking like a harmless peasant, he doesn't need to rely on his "Disguise Self as a 16th level Caster" spell-like ability. Once more, it just happens. It won't make any difference to the players if Graz'zt has an unperceivable illusion cast on him or if he has a "Disguise Self" spell-like ability which cannot be pierced by true-seeing - it amounts to the same thing.


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## James McMurray (Jan 2, 2009)

Regicide said:


> The reason they don't mention anything outside of combat is because he doesn't exist outside of combat.




There's an awful lot of information on him, his realm, and his goals if he's not meant to exist outside of combat. Just because he's lacking noncombat stats doesn't mean he only exists to fight and die. It means the designers wised up and realized that enemies don't need numbers except when they matter (i.e. when they oppose someone else's numbers).



> Worlds and Monsters pg 66:  "The goal of 4E is to encourage the use of boss monsters, make them part of the core DnD experience, and wrap thrilling adventures around them so that years from now, players can regale each other with tales of heroism and woe and count on their fingers and toes the number of demon lord heads mounted on castle walls."
> 
> "Whats new about demon lords in 4E is that they're playable monsters, high-level to be sure, but not so complicated that you need an expert dungeon master to run them."
> 
> So the reason they don't have much more on them than other monsters?  Because they aren't supposed to be all that different from other monsthers.  Other than being the final baddy in the dungeon, they're just meant to be trophy kills you wrack up and mount, in large numbers.




Sounds like you've got some prejudices coloring your perceptions here. "No noncombat stats" != "doesn't exist outside of combat." If that's the case, then no monsters are meant to exist outside of combat. One need only read the adventures being released and the advice in the DMG to know that's not the case.


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## Dracorat (Jan 2, 2009)

DracoSuave said:


> Here's a perfect example of how to make a fight memorable.
> 
> Safer (Seraph) Sephiroth.
> 
> ...




For the record, the moment anyone says "Sephiroth" I immediately think of "LIMIT BREAK ==> Ominslash!" - as in what you do when you've finally defeated him.

It's Jenovah that I associate all the rest with. Sephiroth was only a tool.


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## Nail (Jan 2, 2009)

Runestar said:


> Dicefreaks' "The Gates of Hell" publication, ...



Got it!  Thanks.    (...I think, )



Runestar said:


> In 4e, the balor returns to its LoTR roots by whacking the PCs with its lightning sword and flaming whip. Now that is memorable, simple because no other monster even comes close to replicating its capabilities in this aspect.



Agreed.


Still, one of the strengths of the 3.xe system was that the players knew the monsters were playing under the same rules the PCs were.  That made it feel more gritty and real, methinks.  The fact that 4e so blatantly does away with that (_Graz'zt can conjure a glass of elf-blood wine, while you'll never be able to_) is what's so jarring to long-time gamers.

It's not bad; just different.


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## Rechan (Jan 2, 2009)

Nail said:


> Still, one of the strengths of the 3.xe system was that the players knew the monsters were playing under the same rules the PCs were.  That made it feel more gritty and real, methinks.  The fact that 4e so blatantly does away with that (_Graz'zt can conjure a glass of elf-blood wine, while you'll never be able to_) is what's so jarring to long-time gamers..



1) Graz'zt is also a quasi-god. I expect him to be able to do things that PCs just _can't_. Especially in his own domain. 

2) Long term gamers compared to what? 2e monsters weren't treated the same as PCs. I fully expect the same was for 1e too.


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## Nail (Jan 2, 2009)

Rechan said:


> Long term gamers compared to what? 2e monsters weren't treated the same as PCs. I fully expect the same was for 1e too.



1e was like that, true.  Of course, us 1e DMs just made stuff up all the time, rules or no.  

But 3.xe has been around for over EIGHT years.  That's a lot of game time.  How many "internet years" is that?


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## knasser (Jan 2, 2009)

Don't forget all of us who play non-DnD games! I primarily play Shadowrun and the idea of the DM just making up arbitrary powers for creatures can easily seem to players like "cheating." It's an odd notion that the rules do *not* actually reflect the reality of the game world, but that the physics of the world are based around what will challenge the players.


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## DracoSuave (Jan 3, 2009)

Shadowrun uses the same rules for antagonists?  I'll remember -that- next time I'm hacking ice.

Shadowrun has elegant blocks for its antagonists tho, Shadowrun monsters aren't exactly complicated, compared to D&D Monsters.


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## IanArgent (Jan 3, 2009)

knasser said:


> Don't forget all of us who play non-DnD games! I primarily play Shadowrun and the idea of the DM just making up arbitrary powers for creatures can easily seem to players like "cheating." It's an odd notion that the rules do *not* actually reflect the reality of the game world, but that the physics of the world are based around what will challenge the players.




Bad example - most of the critters in SR have arbitrary powers that the PCs can't have; and there's a goodly number of by-the-book unavailable-to-PCs powers kicking around.

I always found one of the strengths of SR was that NPCs didn't have to follow the same rules for PCs outside of combat (and even inside you were strongly advised to fudge it - see how SR3 and 4 treat NPC dice pools by default). NPCs for my games were a description and a certain (somewhat indeterminate) number of dice that I judged would give the PCs the level of threat I wanted.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Jan 3, 2009)

IanArgent said:


> Bad example - most of the critters in SR have arbitrary powers that the PCs can't have; and there's a goodly number of by-the-book unavailable-to-PCs powers kicking around.



Well, monsters in 3E did have that, too. Just derived numbers were according to similar rule as PC. But monsters sure don't follow 25 or 32 point buy when creating their stats. 



> I always found one of the strengths of SR was that NPCs didn't have to follow the same rules for PCs outside of combat (and even inside you were strongly advised to fudge it - see how SR3 and 4 treat NPC dice pools by default). NPCs for my games were a description and a certain (somewhat indeterminate) number of dice that I judged would give the PCs the level of threat I wanted.



Balancing SR is not exactly easy, I think, but knowing the dice pool ranges of the PCs will get you a long way. Now you just don't have to underestimate - or overestimate spells, equipment and numbers.


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## IanArgent (Jan 3, 2009)

Mustrum_Ridcully said:


> Well, monsters in 3E did have that, too. Just derived numbers were according to similar rule as PC. But monsters sure don't follow 25 or 32 point buy when creating their stats.
> 
> 
> Balancing SR is not exactly easy, I think, but knowing the dice pool ranges of the PCs will get you a long way. Now you just don't have to underestimate - or overestimate spells, equipment and numbers.




Well, the other strength of SR that I found was that given a GM screen, it was trivial to adjust the numbers of the opposition on the fly without anyone but me knowing. (there were some cases involving magic where the target # was the target's stat, and everyone knows what the damage code of a particular gun is) but when rolling, the number of dice could change from roll to roll legitimately. I used this as a safety net, I must admit.

But the goals of a game of SR for my group were not the same as the goals of the same players when playing D&D. They spent up to 3/4 of the session designing the plan. Up to 12 people (a number I wouldn't want to run D&D for) sitting around a conference table hammering out a plan that they would then see how long they could get to survive enemy contact, (Not very long, typically) and then whether their contingency plans were any good. The goal was to get in and out with nobody the wiser and no rounds expended.

In D&D they want to kill things and loot their stuff. There's plenty of RP, don't get me wrong; and I've run a couple of successful mysteries/investigations successfully. (In 3E they were more successful than the majority of my dungeon crawls, to be honest; due to the difficulty I had with the mechanics of that system).

To bring this back on track; in the only system that I've run recently, did the mechanical expressions of non-combat abilities matter, and that was 3E D&D. In SR, it didn't matter because the system was so loose and because of the way PCs interacted with the NPCs. 4e brings a lot of that to D&D IMHO without having to bend the rules; and shows you what the numbers should be at every level to avoid having to fudge. (Something SR didn't do as well as it could, but running 4-12 hr sessions with a large number of college-trained engineers all of whom have a paperback-a-day habit and like the genre as reading and movie material will teach you quick). 3E always seemed too constrained to me, with way too much prep time involved. It didn't help that once you leave college, your free time to game drops drastically, so I didn't have the time to prep. But I never had to prep for SR - I could take a briefcase, a Johnson, and an antagonist's name (15 minute prep tops) and spin a night's fun out of that without cracking a rulebook. I still haven't achieved that in D&D, and I doubt I ever will totally because D&D opponents are more than a collection of numbers interacting with known and generic values for gear. (I could come close if I wanted to run only PC-race antagonists using p42 DMG and the class templates, I suppose). But I don't need to know the rules for what Graz'zt can do out of combat - he can do anything that the plot calls for and his background allows, even if it involves the PCs. If he ties a rope around the PCs I don't roll his dice, I look up how well (more or less) he should tie up a PC on the table on p42. If I want a degree of randomness I'll roll a small die (d4 to d8) to adjust the value; and use that as the DC for the escape test. There should be multiple ways for a PC to succeed or fail to advance, but they need to advance to continue telling the story. Advancing the story can involve failing at a task

Call that gamey if you like, but I've always been more interested in telling a story than running the PCs through the maze of life.


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## Anguirus (Jan 3, 2009)

> Something like Teleport I would not give him because I think it makes him more interesting and individual that he cannot do this.




Hate to break it to you, but Graz'zt does have a teleport speed.


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## Felon (Jan 3, 2009)

DracoSuave said:


> Here's a perfect example of how to make a fight memorable.
> 
> Safer (Seraph) Sephiroth.
> 
> ...



The most interesting thing about this post is the blithely confident assumption that we all know what or who a "Safer (Seraph) Sephiroth" is, thus obviating the need for citation. 

For those who don't know and were wondering, it's a bad guy from Final Fantasy XII. It's actually the final boss that many people never got around to facing.


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## stonegod (Jan 3, 2009)

Felon said:


> For those who don't know and were wondering, it's a bad guy from Final Fantasy XII. It's actually the final boss that many people never got around to facing.



Well, second to final boss, but no one ever counts that last battle w/ old Sephi anyway (as its mostly scripted)...


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## DracoSuave (Jan 3, 2009)

Felon said:


> The most interesting thing about this post is the blithely confident assumption that we all know what or who a "Safer (Seraph) Sephiroth" is, thus obviating the need for citation.
> 
> For those who don't know and were wondering, it's a bad guy from Final Fantasy XII. It's actually the final boss that many people never got around to facing.




If you played Final Fantasy XII long enough to have beaten it, you knew what Safer Sepheroth was.  If you didn't, telling you it was from Final Fantasy XII would have made the example meaningless anyways.

Why Grazz't is cool:  He can control two party members, use them to flank the other party members, and NO ONE ELSE CAN.

Who -cares- if he can meteor swarm, he can do something NO ONE ELSE CAN IN THE GAME.

That's why he's memorable.  Grazz't+Fighter with good encounter powers=OH GOD THE PAIN!

EDIT:  Disregard that, dazed creatures don't get IAs


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## evilbob (Jan 5, 2009)

To reply to the OP:

A lot of people in this thread (and others) have said that the "extended stat blocks" aren't necessary because you can just have the monsters "do" whatever it is you need them to "do" and not worry about it.  I don't disagree with this.

However, this is never really mentioned - or implied, I think - anywhere in the core books.  I think a lot of people are thinking like the good DMs they are, and they understand that just because a devil god doesn't have some specific "open a portal to another plane" power listed in his stat block, that doesn't mean he can't do it.  But this is never really stated or said anywhere in any of the books for anyone who isn't already an experienced DM, which I think is a little troublesome.  It also leads to the type of question you posed.

And frankly, one of the things I liked about the extended-stat system was that it did two handy things:
- it gave you cool ideas about what these monsters could or would do, and
- it gave them limits.
Maybe you don't need the first if you're very creative, but the second one was really a nice thing to have because it made these monster super-capable... but also fallible.  If "the devil-king can open a portal to another plane" is something the DM just made up, then how does it work?  How can you stop it?  Sure, maybe the DM can just create an in-game reason or way to stop it as well, but really the biggest danger of all is how does that stop the DM from abusing the power to railroad the characters?  Is it fair?

Having a set rule means that the characters can work to bend or break that rule - but at least the whole situation isn't just arbitrary.  Half the fun of Castle Ravenloft in 3.5 was working with/around/against all the crazy vampire rules that took half a page to stat out.  Now, vampires have a couple powers that do damage and that's really it.  If you want those extra rules you can always add them, but then they're more arbitrary and possibly less fair.

Personally, I feel like 4.0 sort of forces you to become either a really good DM who comes up with lots of extra rules, or a really average DM who works only with what's written.  I highly encourage you to be the former.


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## DracoSuave (Jan 5, 2009)

Well, first of all, villains have access to the same rituals players do as a default.  DMG, p27.

Secondly, you seem to think that D&D is a competition between DMs and Players, where the DM must follow set rules in order for the players to have a shot at defeating him.

In reality, it is a collaboration between the players and the DM, where they tell a story together.  The players are in charge of the protagonists, and the DM is in charge of the conflicts that give the story life.  As a narrative tool, the entirety of what can and cannot be done cannot be contained within statblocks, as possibilities are literally endless.

Furthermore:  Monsters are not rules-systems that players exploit for the victory.  The game is called 'Dungeons and Dragons' and it is not called 'Lawyers and Loopholes.'  

Which brings this up:  What business does a player have with a monster's stat block anyways?  Players should be keeping their nosy noses out of their antagonists' abilities and traits.  That isn't their job.  They're job is to quest and solve puzzles, not look at the cheatcodes for it.  The players don't need the DMG to play, or the MM.


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## Lizard (Jan 5, 2009)

Nail said:


> Holy &#%^@@!  Where in the 9 Hells did that come from, Runestar?
> 
> 
> Why, by all that is unholy, would you need to know that Asmodeus' "Use Rope" skill was +31?




Well, if one of the PCs Polymorphed themselves into an Erinyes, and she and Asmo' were "gettin' down", and Asmodeus had a taste for the kinky, it might be good to know her Escape Artist check DC if it came up...


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## evilbob (Jan 5, 2009)

DracoSuave said:


> Well, first of all, villains have access to the same rituals players do as a default.  DMG, p27.



Yes, you're right.



DracoSuave said:


> Secondly, you seem to think that D&D is a competition between DMs and Players, where the DM must follow set rules in order for the players to have a shot at defeating him.



No, you're wrong.


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## DracoSuave (Jan 5, 2009)

evilbob said:


> No, you're wrong.




No, if it were an actual competition, to be fair, the PCs would be assumed to have a 50 percent chance of total loss every time.  50 percent chance of Total Party Wipeout.

The game actually operates under the assumption that players win the majority of all their battles.  Hardly a competition, is it?


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## evilbob (Jan 5, 2009)

Look, I'm not sure why you feel the need to be personal, but you have completely misinterpreted what I said.  I am, as a matter of fact, completely opposed to GMs who treat D&D like a competition.  I really hate that.  I never play that way.

Whatever you believe I said, you are wrong.  I stopped paying attention to whatever else you said in that same post because you're so off-base in whatever response you had that it didn't seem worthwhile.


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## DracoSuave (Jan 5, 2009)

Well, one, vampires have tons of abilities, some of which are from their vampireness, and some are from their class.  It being a template and all.

But for me, here's the reason why less is more.

Look at kobolds.

In 3e they can in one variety, add a class if you like, but a lot didn't bother, because it was work.  

Compare that to 4e kobolds.  GOLLY DAMN they have a -society- of kobolds in there, each with a purpose and skillset that make kobold with spear different then kobold with sling.  Kobolds have an identity, and yet have varience.  Pages of material that would be wasted on 'use Rope' and 'This guy has the spell contact other plan' are instead used to flesh out monster races and make them into -actual races-.

You might be upset that the vampire's not got a million things that never occur in battle, but I'll trade that in for the fact that he's got multiple types of minions for different purposes.


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## Elder-Basilisk (Jan 5, 2009)

Nail said:


> Got it!  Thanks.    (...I think, )
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> ...




One thing that is important to note is that the paradigm shift to _only_ having rules for what monsters can do in combat and minimal rules for what they can do outside of combat makes it much more difficult to run certain kinds of games. (And, BTW, if anyone thinks for one moment that even 10% of DMs will be satisfied with their bad guys using only the information reasonably available from the crappy and overcosted PHB divination rituals, I have some subprime mortgage backed securities to sell them).

If you are running a scripted/dungeon crawl game where the DM is entirely responsible for the plot then it is enough to know what Orcus can do in combat when the PCs confront him at the end of the module. On the other hand, the more responsibility the players take for the story, the more important it is to have rules for what NPCs can do outside of an immediate combat. If the players are expected to make preparations to defeat Orcus' plans in ways that do not involve direct physical confrontation between them and Orcus, then, while it may not matter whether or not Orcus can summon a glass of elf-blood wine, it certainly will matter how many balors he can gate to the prime material plane in a single day. A game like that described in Sepulchrave's story hour requires information on the non-combat abilities of NPCs.


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## Daniel D. Fox (Jan 5, 2009)

1E and even 2E encouraged DMs to "shoot from the hip" for the sake of the story and fun.

3E spoiled a lot of players, because it was so damn insistent on rules governing both players and foes alike. 4E is a return to the 1E/2E design process, and indicating this to your group (players abide by different rules than foes) is extremely important, especially if they're 3E vets.


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## evilbob (Jan 5, 2009)

Elder-Basilisk said:


> One thing that is important to note is that the paradigm shift to _only_ having rules for what monsters can do in combat and minimal rules for what they can do outside of combat makes it much more difficult to run certain kinds of games. (And, BTW, if anyone thinks for one moment that even 10% of DMs will be satisfied with their bad guys using only the information reasonably available from the crappy and overcosted PHB divination rituals, I have some subprime mortgage backed securities to sell them).
> 
> If you are running a scripted/dungeon crawl game where the DM is entirely responsible for the plot then it is enough to know what Orcus can do in combat when the PCs confront him at the end of the module. On the other hand, the more responsibility the players take for the story, the more important it is to have rules for what NPCs can do outside of an immediate combat. If the players are expected to make preparations to defeat Orcus' plans in ways that do not involve direct physical confrontation between them and Orcus, then, while it may not matter whether or not Orcus can summon a glass of elf-blood wine, it certainly will matter how many balors he can gate to the prime material plane in a single day. A game like that described in Sepulchrave's story hour requires information on the non-combat abilities of NPCs.



Thank you - this is what I was trying to say, only better.


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## TheLordWinter (Jan 5, 2009)

Elder-Basilisk said:


> If you are running a scripted/dungeon crawl game where the DM is entirely responsible for the plot then it is enough to know what Orcus can do in combat when the PCs confront him at the end of the module. On the other hand, the more responsibility the players take for the story, the more important it is to have rules for what NPCs can do outside of an immediate combat. If the players are expected to make preparations to defeat Orcus' plans in ways that do not involve direct physical confrontation between them and Orcus, then, while it may not matter whether or not Orcus can summon a glass of elf-blood wine, it certainly will matter how many balors he can gate to the prime material plane in a single day. A game like that described in Sepulchrave's story hour requires information on the non-combat abilities of NPCs.




This doesn't necessarily have to be the same kind of information for everyone though, does it? Isn't it up to the DM how many Balors Orcus can send in, if any at all? Why have this be one exact given value, and not malleable and something different for each group? It just seems to me that it's not necessary to say "Orcus may teleport three, and no more, Balors to Waterdeep today." I think that, particularly in 4th edition, what the monsters can do outside of combat falls into the purview of what makes a good story - and the DM and Players need to roll off of one another for how to respond. If you have a plot about destroying the magical seals which prevent Orcus from reaching the Prime Material Plane, does it matter if he can gate a dozen Balors in to stop you? From my perspective, only if the story demands the party needs to fight those Balors and it'd be interesting. If they reach a level where Balors can't even touch them, then isn't the entire question of gating in Balors kind of moot? Equally, if that is the plot you want to do, and your PCs are at such a level that Balors would trounce the characters, couldn't you just safely ignore that ability of Orcus, for the purposes of telling the interesting story?


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## Nail (Jan 5, 2009)

Elder-Basilisk said:


> .... the more responsibility the players take for the story, the more important it is to have rules for what NPCs can do outside of an immediate combat.



Right.

I think you can do some of this in 4e: rituals, ability & skill checks, and simply adding-in non combat utility powers.   

But the question that this "ad hoc" treatment could give rise to will be _"Is the DM jus' making this up on the fly, or is this planned and intentional?"  _As a player I'd feel much better knowing that my PC's plans worked (or didn't) on their merit, not because the DM had a bad burrito for lunch.


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## Tale (Jan 5, 2009)

Nail said:


> Right.
> 
> I think you can do some of this in 4e: rituals, ability & skill checks, and simply adding-in non combat utility powers.
> 
> But the question that this "ad hoc" treatment could give rise to will be _"Is the DM jus' making this up on the fly, or is this planned and intentional?" _As a player I'd feel much better knowing that my PC's plans worked (or didn't) on their merit, not because the DM had a bad burrito for lunch.



That sounds more like a desire for published adventures, not more extensive stat blocks.

Needing to make up plans of that nature to defeat a bad guy isn't the bad guy per se, but the entire adventure that surrounds him.

It's the age old question.  Did I step in that hidden pit trap because the DM pre-planned for it to be there?  Or did the DM make it up because he knows I'm twinking his girlfriend.


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## Lizard (Jan 6, 2009)

DracoSuave said:


> But for me, here's the reason why less is more.
> 
> Look at kobolds.
> 
> ...




See, I have the exact opposite reaction.

In 3.5, I had a kobold race, and I could easily create kobold wizards, kobold fighters, kobold rogue/barbarians, kobold whatevers, give them whatever items they needed, give them the skills that made them seem "real". The kobold chief had a high charisma, diplomacy, and bluff, because he needed them to be a leader. It's what a leader would logically have.

In 4e, I don't feel there's a kobold race. There's a kobold hive with kobold being born into castes from birth -- he's a slinger, he's a dragonshield. They feel as if they exist only for the fight; there is no society, no culture, no baby kobolds and old kobolds. There's just kobolds who spawn into the encounter and despawn when the encounter ends. 

Now, this can be mitigated. The rules make it easy enough to build kobold NPCs. You, the DM, can tinker with trained skills and modify equipment and attributes -- give the Dragonshield more charisma and make him Trained in Bluff if you want him to seem more leaderly, etc. But the rules as written do not actively encourage this. Instead of a kobold race, you have a box of miniatures. Pick the ones you want for the fight, and get on with it. Fights over, put them back in the box.

4e CAN be used to create a world as deep and believable as any 3e world, but it requires a lot more effort, as you're fighting the encounter-centric design paradigm all the way. (Even your kobold NPCs will lack feats and have a much smaller selection of powers)

Maybe it's because I always used programs like PCgen and Herolab, but all of my humanoids are classed, which meant I could use them across all levels pretty easily, and they never felt boring of 'same old', because any kobold (or orc or hobgoblin or whatever) could have any of the abilities a PC could -- magic, psionics, incarnum, whatever. You couldn't say, "Oh, it's a kobold, it has X". You could have kobold merchants who were shrewd bargainers, kobold sages with kick-ass knowledge skills, and so on. With 4e, for most monsters, you quickly learn its "shtick", then you optimize to deal with it. "OK, this one does X if you get within Y. That other one has a one-shot burst power, once it's used it, it's harmless." Again, this can be avoided by making NPCs or "reskinning" monsters, but that's not the presumed default behavior.

4e is not nearly as bad as I feared it would be, and I am even contemplating switching my current campaign over to it once PHB2 comes out (as it will add in the classes my current PCs are using), but it really lacks a lot in detail and creating the feel of a "real" world. The "Gaminess" of it is constantly in your face and requires constant effort to overcome -- it's more work to describe game effects in dramatic terms, or to design interesting non-combat NPCs. 

Someone else commented that the 4e system for monsters is great because they're more unique in that they have custom abilities, not spells -- but then goes on to say that, off stage, monsters can do "whatever the DM wants" -- which means they all have the SAME powers. I'd like to see Grazzt have very different "plot powers" than Orcus -- he should be forced, by his nature, to use different means to further his aims. Reading those massive stat blocks full of non-combat powers often inspired plot ideas in me. The current crop of demons, devils, and what-not, as described, can't do basic domination/control type plots, because those abilities in 4e only really work in combat and are very limited. There's no (official) long-term domination rituals, no way other than handwaving to say "The demon has total control over the king". (And if your argument is "Well, handwave it, then! Who cares?" the problem is that without any mechanics, you're left to be completely arbitrary when determining how the control can be BROKEN, and if such methods succeed or fail. Players do not like to feel their actions are limited by the DMs whims. They want know "OK, we do THIS, and then we roll THAT, and then we see if we break the control." It might be a skill challenge (research the ritual, perform the ritual, keep the demons agents from disturbing the ritual), it might be an attack, it could be anything -- but it should be quantified BEFORE the players try it.)


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## Nail (Jan 6, 2009)

Tale said:


> That sounds more like a desire for published adventures, ....



<shudder> No thanks.  I prefer plots in my adventures. 



Tale said:


> It's the age old question.



<chuckle> Ain't it th' truth.


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## Elder-Basilisk (Jan 6, 2009)

Tale said:


> That sounds more like a desire for published adventures, not more extensive stat blocks.
> 
> Needing to make up plans of that nature to defeat a bad guy isn't the bad guy per se, but the entire adventure that surrounds him.
> 
> It's the age old question.  Did I step in that hidden pit trap because the DM pre-planned for it to be there?  Or did the DM make it up because he knows I'm twinking his girlfriend.




For my part, at least, this is most definitely NOT a desire for published adventures. It is a desire for information about the non-combat abilities of various monsters.

Published adventures work fairly well but they have a definite play style. You go to room A2, listen at the door, kick it open, and find the evil NPC in the middle of a ritual. It is all there, all written down, and the story is entirely the responsibility of the DM. What is the ritual? What can be done to stop it? What happens if the PCs fail? Etc.

On the other hand, some players prefer a freer style of play. Rather than being handed a mission by an NPC that says "Orcus is gating in balors; go to dungeon A and retrieve Mcguffin B to stop his fiendish plot", they would rather conduct their own investigations and come up with their own plan. And they want to be responsible for warding their plans from the bad guys too. Is Orcus going to have his minions scry on them to determine their plans? Ward their base against scrying. (And then counterattack, kill the minions and take worthwhile scrying rituals off their corpses so that they are no longer stuck with the crap that was in the PHB). In this style of play, the contest between the PCs and the NPCs explicitly includes much more than is present in the individual combat encounter--their divinations, wards, plans, and what they can do if left unchecked. You cannot play that kind of a game without information on a creature's non-combat abilities. Published modules can be used for this style of play, but they are for shortening the prep time when the PCs plans call on them to go in a particular direction rather than for determining the story itself.


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## Runestar (Jan 6, 2009)

For 3e at least, I felt that boundaries were still fairly important to an extent.

For example, protection from evil prevents someone from exercising mental control over the creature (including enchantment (charm) effects and enchantment (compulsion) effects that grant the caster ongoing control over the subject. 

Seems straightforward enough. Until the time comes when you need to determine just what spells "involve ongoing control" and which don't. If you go with the 3.0 FAQ, spells such as suggestion, irresistible dance and insanity evidently don't, and thus are not blocked by PfE. So depending on how you rule, mindflayers are either neutered completely or can still pose a decent challenge (since it can still fall back on suggestion instead of charm monster). I feel that players are entitled to know just how well or badly their abilities interact with the world around them, before the actual scenario comes up, all the better to make informed decisions.

Phantasmal horror kills its target on a failed save (well, 2 actually), but is not a death effect because it lacks the death descriptor, and thus ignores death ward. It however, has the fear descriptor, and hence cannot affect a paladin, or anyone under the effects of a Hero's Feast spell.

Blasphemy and wail of the banshee have the sonic descriptor, and so can be negated by the silence spell. 

The limitations needed to be spelled out precisely so that the players know just how effective their own abilities are when interacting with them. For example, my fighter may have silence cast on himself based on the assumption that it would ward against the pit fiend's blasphemy SLA (and by RAW, he would be right), and I would be very annoyed if my DM just bypassed this without first informing me of this change.

And if you are thinking of accusing him of metagaming, bear in mind that what SLAs a pit fiend has can be readily discerned with a DC35 knowledge: planes check. So it is really no secret.

In 4e, this seems less important, since the various descriptors seem to have minimal mechanical impacts on the game.


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## Regicide (Jan 6, 2009)

Lizard said:


> 4e CAN be used to create a world as deep and believable as any 3e world, but it requires a lot more effort, as you're fighting the encounter-centric design paradigm all the way. (Even your kobold NPCs will lack feats and have a much smaller selection of powers)




  To further what you said, 4E lacks the ability to say "why" which to me kills a lot of the role-playing.  A party has some members die, some corpses require 500 gold pieces sprinkled over the bodies, some require 5000 gold pieces.  The characters ask themselves *why* and the only answer is "because some are 8-9th level and some are 10-11th level, but what is this level thing anyway?"

  Likewise when Grazz't foils the player's cunning plan by knowing about it ahead of time by spying on them and the player's say "we want to be able to do that too" and you as a DM so "no, you can't" and the player's ask "why" your answer is... because despite being demi-gods, you just can't.  All your powers are in-combat powers, if you want to beat Grazz't, you need to use in-combat powers.


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## evilbob (Jan 6, 2009)

Re:  Nail's response, and

Re:  everything Lizard said, especially the last paragraph:

Yes, yes, yes!  I completely agree.  3.5 monsters may have had too much information, but that extra information lead to a real personality - a feel for the monster that you could get to know as you learned more about it and what it could do.  There was real creativity and design ideas built into those stat blocks - even if they were generally unnecessary half the time and took up lots of room and made battles take an hour (like fighting Orcus wouldn't take an hour anyway).  4.0 pits you against various bags of hit points.  Sure, this one can do X and that one can do Y, but you could reskin the thing and no one would ever know.  Yes, you gain modularity, ease of use, and speed of play - and all of those are good - but you lose so much flavor, that they all taste the same.


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## Lizard (Jan 6, 2009)

Regicide said:


> To further what you said, 4E lacks the ability to say "why" which to me kills a lot of the role-playing.  A party has some members die, some corpses require 500 gold pieces sprinkled over the bodies, some require 5000 gold pieces.  The characters ask themselves *why* and the only answer is "because some are 8-9th level and some are 10-11th level, but what is this level thing anyway?"
> 
> Likewise when Grazz't foils the player's cunning plan by knowing about it ahead of time by spying on them and the player's say "we want to be able to do that too" and you as a DM so "no, you can't" and the player's ask "why" your answer is... because despite being demi-gods, you just can't.  All your powers are in-combat powers, if you want to beat Grazz't, you need to use in-combat powers.




Well, to be fair...

Level-based costs were in 3e as well -- magic items, etc. There was, however, nothing I can think of which cost more per character level: It cost as much to Raise a 1st level Commoner as an Epic level Wizard. I can accept, though, that The Powers That Be value the souls of the powerful more than the lowly, and need more bribes to let them go back.

For the second case, the answer to both is "Rituals". I don't mind saying, "Graz'zt has a ritual you haven't learned". I do object to the idea I don't need to work out the ritual's level, limits, cost, and so on, so I can be fair about it, and, more importantly, give the players the chance to FIND those limits and overcome them. Saying, "It's a demon ritual, you can't cast it nyeah" is borderline acceptable, if handled right. Saying, "It can do anything I want it to, screw you!" is not. Rather, it should go like this.

Player: How does he keep knowing where to send his cultists?
DM: Good question. Why don't you try to find the answer!
Player: Arcana check 35!
DM: Well, you're not sure, but you know who is.. the old Sage so-and-so, who lives in the Tower Of Certain Doom.
Players: We're off!
(Much later)
DM: OK, the sage tells you of the ritual Graz'zt uses. It can be blocked only be walls made with mortar mixed with ground dragonbone... from a freshly killed dragon. Fortunately, there's one a few miles down the road...
Players: We're off! Again!

And so, finally, they've built a spy-prood citadel. Or at least proof against Graz'zts ritual, and probably all those of other Devils, just to be fair. Demons, though... 

"He can 'cause he can, OK?" is just poor storytelling in my opinion. No matter the game, no matter the version, the world must have rules which the players can identify and use.


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## Kordeth (Jan 6, 2009)

Regicide said:


> To further what you said, 4E lacks the ability to say "why" which to me kills a lot of the role-playing.  A party has some members die, some corpses require 500 gold pieces sprinkled over the bodies, some require 5000 gold pieces.  The characters ask themselves *why* and the only answer is "because some are 8-9th level and some are 10-11th level, but what is this level thing anyway?"




"The gods are selfish masters, and when a soul that burns as bright as that of the greatest heroes comes to their halls, they don't want to let them go. The grander a hero's destiny, the harder the gods will fight to keep them in the afterlife, and thus the more potent the ritual required to bribe the gods into sending them back."

"The mortal realm has been steadily drifting away from the realms where the dead go for a while now--it has nothing to do with you, kid, it's just the inevitable progression of things. Hey, you look like a hero, maybe you oughta do something about that."

"The Raven Queen hates letting souls pass through her realm, and she sets her shadowy hounds to range across the Shadowfell, seeking to devour those who would try to cheat her. The brighter-burning the soul, the easier time the hounds have finding them on those gray and blasted plains. The offerings of the resurrection ritual act as a sort of mystical smokescreen, hiding the soul on its journey."



> Likewise when Grazz't foils the player's cunning plan by knowing about it ahead of time by spying on them and the player's say "we want to be able to do that too" and you as a DM so "no, you can't" and the player's ask "why" your answer is... because despite being demi-gods, you just can't.  All your powers are in-combat powers, if you want to beat Grazz't, you need to use in-combat powers.




"Well, you could have had you spent your gold on the scrying rituals available in the PHB instead of buying _raise dead_ and spending the whole session pestering me about why it costs more." 

Seriously, nothing in 4E prevents you from asking or answering the question of "why." There are game-y elements that might require a little bit more creative thinking to explain them "in-world," but it's no worse than any other edition's game-rules peculiarities.


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## Elder-Basilisk (Jan 6, 2009)

Kordeth said:


> "Well, you could have had you spent your gold on the scrying rituals available in the PHB instead of buying _raise dead_ and spending the whole session pestering me about why it costs more."




Heh. PHB scrying rituals are barely any cheaper than raise dead and all have such ridiculously short durations that you are highly unlikely to learn anything worthwhile anyway. Seriously. They are utter and complete garbage and the only use they have is sucking resources out of any players who are stupid enough to put them in their ritual books. NPCplotdevicescryingrituals, now that's more like it. I haven't run into any of them yet, but sooner or later an NPC will want to be able to get useful information from scrying and may actually come up with a worthwhile ritual.



> Seriously, nothing in 4E prevents you from asking or answering the question of "why." There are game-y elements that might require a little bit more creative thinking to explain them "in-world," but it's no worse than any other edition's game-rules peculiarities.




There is also very very little in the game or the rules that helps you answer the question, "why?" In fact, the designers very nearly said that "why?" is a bad question, that the answer to it is never fun and that anyone who thinks it is an important question is not their target audience and should go to hell. (In short, the design philosophy of 4e is, "it's just a game, there is no why. Now roll your d20 and do d6+stat mod+enhancement." At least that's what I thought the whole point of their "the rules are not the physics of the game world" design philosophy was.


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## FireLance (Jan 6, 2009)

Regicide said:


> To further what you said, 4E lacks the ability to say "why" which to me kills a lot of the role-playing.  A party has some members die, some corpses require 500 gold pieces sprinkled over the bodies, some require 5000 gold pieces.  The characters ask themselves *why* and the only answer is "because some are 8-9th level and some are 10-11th level, but what is this level thing anyway?"



Slight tangent, but this bugs me too, and I am considering house-ruling _raise dead_ to cost 500 gp the first time it is used on a character, 5,000 gp the second time it is used on a character, and 50,000 gp thereafter. The theory being, the more times a character has died, the more difficult it's going to be to retrieve him from death (to a point).


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## ricardo440 (Jan 6, 2009)

How many Balors can the Demon Prince summon into Warterdeep and how often?
Well enough to make a fun memorable encounter and often enough that the PCs need to get off their behinds and sort out your plot.

I think a few people have missed the plot a bit the rules governing monsters.

Those green boxes are for a monster in combat. You can put all of them on a single page, nice an easy for the GM. 
Most monsters (99%) will be met in an encounter and die or never be seen again after it.

But what you want is the 1% that is left. The vampire lord who runs the Castle, the Necromancer who is raising the undead army... and you want to know what he can do out of combat.

Well I see no conflict here. but its place is now in the ADVENTURE not in the Monster description. By defining they rate at which the necromancer can Raise dead you are essentially defining the plot of the Adventure. The same with his other abilities. They are all valid things for you to flesh out IF YOU NEED TO. but most of the time you will not. On the few occasions when you DO need to flesh out the monster for the Adventure itself then there is nothing stopping you.

You can write Necromancer of Death knows all rituals up to level 12 and these rituals of level 13-20 and also these 2 special Plot rituals.
He has spies in city X
He has zombie and skeleton minions. He can send these encounter groups out to fight people...

But all of this stuff belongs in the adventure and not in the green box. The green box is for when the PCs have fought past his legions, entered his sanctum and it is time for the final showdown (preferably a rooftop one).


This is not really different to Previous editions either to be fair. In the MM there were rules for Vampires. In Expedition to Castle Ravensloft there are Strahd's combat abilities and then details of what he can and can't do in his realm. There is no reason why 4th ed adventures can't have the same.


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## TheLordWinter (Jan 6, 2009)

Elder-Basilisk said:


> There is also very very little in the game or the rules that helps you answer the question, "why?" In fact, the designers very nearly said that "why?" is a bad question, that the answer to it is never fun and that anyone who thinks it is an important question is not their target audience and should go to hell. (In short, the design philosophy of 4e is, "it's just a game, there is no why. Now roll your d20 and do d6+stat mod+enhancement." At least that's what I thought the whole point of their "the rules are not the physics of the game world" design philosophy was.




I'm really curious to hear what you think specifically points towards not answering player questions in the game. Also, there seems to be a growing theme throughout this thread that as the DM, it is your responsibility to say "No, there aren't rules for it, so not for you." From super-powerful scrying rituals to ancient sages to learning about a unique creature's abilities outside of combat, the general mood seems to be that "If it isn't written, you'll never know."

Where on Earth is that coming from? Cause seriously, I've got the new Dungeon Master's Guide open, in front of me, and it ain't what I'm seeing. It's on page 28, right there: "As often as possible, take what the players give you and build on it. If they do something unexpected, run with it. Take it and weave it back into your story without railroading them into a fixed plotline." (DMG, 28)

So let's take the whimsical example we've had already, and Orcus is gating 1,000 Balors into Waterdeep (a number which is whimsically unnecessary, but for the sake of the example let's roll with it). Your adventure is about the PCs traveling to Thanatos and fighting Orcus in revenge for destroying the city. However instead, the PCs wanna stop his ability to gate in Balors. Totally different direction. How could they do so when you haven't come up with the very mechanics of his ability to gate? Improvise. Perhaps they need to recover a special magical relic or destroy an avatar or sacrifice a goat. Whatever it is, doesn't it fall, more importantly, to your creativity rather than what the Rules As Written demand he can and cannot do? If you say "Yes, there is a way to stop Orcus from gating Balors/Scrying on You/Being Quite to Unpleasantly Ugly" then take it and run with it. It's the direction your players want to go, so find the adventure where they're looking.

If I might toss out one last quote, from Chaosium's brilliant Call of Cthulhu d100 roleplaying game: 
"Introducing higher and higher potency materials reduces the chance for roleplaying. The effect of more powerful weapons or deadlier magics is progressively to isolate the owners from the events of the adventures and the ordinary challenges of play, and paradoxically to limit the range of responses players... feel safe in contemplating." (CoC, 121) 
This applies to DMs too - if Orcus can gate 1d20 Balors anywhere, why would he ever simply hit anything with his wand? Why send Doresain and his ghouls to collect information about the PCs when he has "See everything the characters do Ritual" right in his stat block? By removing these things, it opens up new possibilities, particularly in how DMs and Players alike approach this. It's new - Orcus in some games can scry on characters from afar through his bubbling cauldron of Doom, while in others he must send his ghoul agents to scour the land for any trance of the characters, while in another he simply is so proud and malicious that he presumes no lowly mortals could ever interfere with his schemes. It's up to you, the DM, on what their capabilities are, and so long as you stick with the same capacities each time. It falls to the players, and how they choose to try and deal with this threat, and to he DM to respond and roll with the punches of each new and unexpected twist the players throw into his story. 

Much like 2nd edition, 4th doesn't give you everything. It doesn't care whether Orcus can tie a very fine knot or whether Asmodeus has skill focus (bluff), these aren't important details. The players will never know that these skills are there, they'll simply see the *effect* in the game, not the pure numbers behind the screen. What this edition, from what I've seen, is trying to do is strip away the unnecessary - if the players will never know that Asmodeus has skill focus (bluff) and gets a +20 divine bonus to bluff, even if the net result is that his bluff check is 40 higher than they can reasonably sense motive through, why give him those things and not simply say he's got a total bluff check of everything combined and not worry about the sources?

Just my two cents, and I hope this didn't come off as too much of a rant.


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## James McMurray (Jan 6, 2009)

evilbob said:


> Maybe you don't need the first if you're very creative, but the second one was really a nice thing to have because it made these monster super-capable... but also fallible.  If "the devil-king can open a portal to another plane" is something the DM just made up, then how does it work?  How can you stop it?  Sure, maybe the DM can just create an in-game reason or way to stop it as well, but really the biggest danger of all is how does that stop the DM from abusing the power to railroad the characters?




Impossible. The only way to stop a DM from railroading your character is to not be at the table. No amount of rules for what Graz'zt (or any monster) can do out of combat will stop a DM intent on making sure his story gets told. 

If that's your problem, you need to find a new DM or switch to a game system where the DM is truly just a rules referee and not the all powerful man behind the curtain.


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## evilbob (Jan 6, 2009)

TheLordWinter said:


> I'm really curious to hear what you think specifically points towards not answering player questions in the game. Also, there seems to be a growing theme throughout this thread that as the DM, it is your responsibility to say "No, there aren't rules for it, so not for you."



No:  this isn't what I am saying, and I do not believe it's what others are saying.

I am not advocating that just because something doesn't exist, it can't, or that you can't answer player questions, or any of that weird stuff that some folks seem to be reading into these responses.  I'm not sure why it's getting folks thrown off, but honestly, we're really coming from the same perspective here:  that not having an answer or telling someone "you can't because I said so" is doing a bad job of DMing.  We all agree with that, yes?

My point - and others have said it better, so sorry to just rehash - is NOT that you can only say "no" if there are no rules.  It's that when there were more rules, it was easier to say yes.  It was easier, because there was already a base to build off of - as opposed to having to build from scratch every time.  And when the players knew the world they existed in had set rules that were not arbitrary, it was better for them -and- the story.  (It's easier to trust a DM when you know they are also following the same rules you are.)

In 4.0 you are MUCH more responsible for creating those "world rules" now.  (And my own enigma:  why they never mention this in the core books.)  This is good for creativity and lack of boundaries, but bad for being completely on your own to decide balance, flavor, mechanics, etc.  Which is why 4.0 is so weird, since the "how combat works" rules are SO detailed and SO restrictive - exactly the opposite of the "how the world works" rules, which basically don't exist.

Does that make more sense?


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## evilbob (Jan 6, 2009)

James McMurray said:


> Impossible. The only way to stop a DM from railroading your character is to not be at the table.



This is such a weird argument I'm just not going to touch it.    Suffice to say, we probably disagree, but secretly we probably still agree on most aspects of this argument.


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## Nail (Jan 6, 2009)

FireLance said:


> Slight tangent, but this bugs me too, and I am considering house-ruling _raise dead_ to cost 500 gp the first time it is used on a character, 5,000 gp the second time it is used on a character, and 50,000 gp thereafter. The theory being, the more times a character has died, the more difficult it's going to be to retrieve him from death (to a point).



That's cool.


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## Nail (Jan 6, 2009)

James McMurray said:


> The only way to stop a DM from railroading your character is to not be at the table.



Hmmm.  FWIW, I don't think we're talking about "PC Railroading".  I think we're talking about "players knowing the DM is using the same rules they are".


<shrug>

Anyway:  How 'bout a follow-up question?  

*"How many (and what type) of non-combat powers would be appropriate to put in the BBEG's stat block?  Should they be of the At-Will/Daily variety, or more like rituals, or ...?"*

The idea here is to get at what the "out-of-combat" limits of a BBEG should be (since 4e RAW doesn't have such limits).


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## James McMurray (Jan 6, 2009)

evilbob said:


> This is such a weird argument I'm just not going to touch it.    Suffice to say, we probably disagree, but secretly we probably still agree on most aspects of this argument.




To clarify, I'm not saying that all GMs will railroad. Just that if the GM wants to, it's not going to matter what out of combat rules exist for the BBEG in your campaign. A GM has infinite resources at his disposal. if he's determined that your character is going to (for example) turn left, he can 


put an army of ancient dragons to the right if he's blatant
put a damsel in distress to the left if he's slightly more subtle (and your alignment fits), or 
just not put a right turn at all.

The same holds true for all other "choices" a railroading GM puts before you. If the GM wants to force an outcome he will be able to do it easily by virtue of having infinite power within the game world.


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## Lizard (Jan 6, 2009)

Nail said:


> *"How many (and what type) of non-combat powers would be appropriate to put in the BBEG's stat block?  Should they be of the At-Will/Daily variety, or more like rituals, or ...?"*
> 
> The idea here is to get at what the "out-of-combat" limits of a BBEG should be (since 4e RAW doesn't have such limits).




I would like to see something like:"Orcus knows, and commonly uses, these rituals: A, B, C. He also has access to a unique ritual, which he sometimes teaches to his most devoted priests: D."


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## dammitbiscuit (Jan 7, 2009)

evilbob said:


> My point - and others have said it better, so sorry to just rehash - is NOT that you can only say "no" if there are no rules.  It's that when there were more rules, it was easier to say yes.  It was easier, because there was already a base to build off of - as opposed to having to build from scratch every time.  And when the players knew the world they existed in had set rules that were not arbitrary, it was better for them -and- the story.  (It's easier to trust a DM when you know they are also following the same rules you are.)



The trouble in 3.5 was that 5 players, most of whom were trying to build decently optimized characters, could become increasingly deadly, skilled, and/or optimized with their PCs. As a 3.5 DM, sometimes I didn't entirely understand what I was supposed to do with certain monsters, or I thought I knew what to do but ended up having the players just stomp the monster flat. In 4e, it tells you what the monster's role is and gives you the tools you need for that combat role.

If the DM and the PCs are using the same rules, the DM will need to have hours of prep time, or else consistently be outplayed and failing to challenge the players properly.


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## DLichen (Jan 8, 2009)

I can see where the 3e guys are coming from, but I don't really feel that it is a matter of the rules but of presentation.

The 4e rules can support monsters doing cool things out of combat, but the 4e books have pretty much failed to deliver on that account. If you want Orcus to be a big bad manipulator, all you can do is whip up the story and hope it is good. Big Bads with the capital Bs really should have more fluff and samples with their entries so that DMs have something to build off of.

The Draconomicon for some example has some really cool flavor ideas and background which I feel should have been in the monster manual entries on dragons to flesh them out a bit.

Edit:

I also see a lot of parallels between this and the removal of crafting rules. On one hand, it's cool to have a set of rules that make a blacksmith a blacksmith. On the other hand, nearly none of the PCs ever used it, the rules were flawed, and it was generally a waste of space. Remove it in 4e however, and now if one PC says he wants to have a smithing background and handcrafted his set of dwarven armor, any PC with a weakling wizard can claim to do the same since there's no rule repercussions. The removal of crafting might have been good for the game in general, but it also leaves a hole where DMs have a hard time arbitrating.

On one hand, it's cool to have rules that tell you which monster can hatch a grand plot, summon an army, bind nations around its thumb, and pretend to be your grandmother with magic. On the other hand, most of the time it's just garbage and DM fudgery. But without it, the game world feels a bit more empty.


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## YuriPup (Jan 8, 2009)

Look I completely expect the GM to be using different rules than the players. 

All the time.

Sitting at the table its 5 brains vs 1 brain (in my case). The other brains should be deeply knowledgeable about what they are able to do. I on the other hand will be no more than a generalist on 95%+ of the mobs I am controlling, will miss tricks and synergies that are there in the first place and so forth. 

There are times, as DM, I /am/ in competition with my PCs--particularly if I want an NPC to get way (so as to become reoccurring), or heaven fore fend, I ever have to capture my PCs (ugh). 

I expect DMs/GMs to use handwavium extensively as I have learned that I will rarely correctly predict all the PCs solutions to problems, or how they will find their solutions. I expect that the handwavium will be woven in to the campaign and plot on a reasonable basis but I am sure we have all had plots short circuited by being out thought by PCs.

From the flip side, I know in on SR game, we spend 3 weeks planning how to extract the target from the clutches of Aztec. In the end, we slung the target under a balloon, explode filled it with hydrogen, and had him whisked away by air elementals. 

Then we asked the GM how /he/ expected us to do the mission (as we were fairly sure he didn't envision our plan)--he said front door, guns abaze.


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## LostSoul (Jan 8, 2009)

evilbob said:


> My point - and others have said it better, so sorry to just rehash - is NOT that you can only say "no" if there are no rules.  It's that when there were more rules, it was easier to say yes.  It was easier, because there was already a base to build off of - as opposed to having to build from scratch every time.  And when the players knew the world they existed in had set rules that were not arbitrary, it was better for them -and- the story.  (It's easier to trust a DM when you know they are also following the same rules you are.)




This makes sense.  I think it's bound up in a certain way of playing D&D.  I think it's the reason why you have % in lair, the number of creatures that make up an orc warren (even level and % chance of there being an ogre or whatever!), etc.  All that stuff.

The idea is that there's a functioning world out there for the PCs to explore.*  The DM referees the world as the players explore it.  It functions logically and if something strange happens that the players don't expect the DM probably has a good reason for it going on behind the scenes.  (Or he has a different worldview - he sees the real world through a different lens - which is why I find this a really hard gamestyle to get right.)

* - This is not simulationism.

So you say "Yes" when it makes sense, when it follows with the world you've created.  You say "No" when it doesn't.

I find this means, in practice, much more "No, that doesn't work" than "Yes, give it a shot."  

In my last game (4E), the PCs created a cursed magic item.  If there had been more detailed rules for creating magic items, they wouldn't even have been able to try.  If there had been rules about failing to craft items, it wouldn't have been cursed.  If there had been fluff describing the process it wouldn't have been cursed.

I would have had to have said "No" to their idea because it didn't fit with the world.

Without that restriction, I can say "Yes" as long as it's going to be good for the game.



evilbob said:


> In 4.0 you are MUCH more responsible for creating those "world rules" now. (And my own enigma: why they never mention this in the core books.) This is good for creativity and lack of boundaries, but bad for being completely on your own to decide balance, flavor, mechanics, etc. Which is why 4.0 is so weird, since the "how combat works" rules are SO detailed and SO restrictive - exactly the opposite of the "how the world works" rules, which basically don't exist.




Agreed - though I think 4E _can_ be flexible in combat too.


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## Elder-Basilisk (Jan 8, 2009)

LostSoul said:


> This makes sense.  I think it's bound up in a certain way of playing D&D.  I think it's the reason why you have % in lair, the number of creatures that make up an orc warren (even level and % chance of there being an ogre or whatever!), etc.  All that stuff.
> 
> The idea is that there's a functioning world out there for the PCs to explore.*  The DM referees the world as the players explore it.  It functions logically and if something strange happens that the players don't expect the DM probably has a good reason for it going on behind the scenes.  (Or he has a different worldview - he sees the real world through a different lens - which is why I find this a really hard gamestyle to get right.)
> 
> * - This is not simulationism.




I for one would like to know when and why simulationism became wrongbadfun. I for one rather enjoy the playstyle.



> So you say "Yes" when it makes sense, when it follows with the world you've created.  You say "No" when it doesn't.
> 
> I find this means, in practice, much more "No, that doesn't work" than "Yes, give it a shot."
> 
> ...




I would think that whether or not the players' idea fits with the world is system independent. Either it is possible to make items or it is not. Either it requires special abilities (rituals, feats, etc) or it does not. Either the PCs have those or they do not. (In 4th edition, the players generally can't make magic items without the appropriate ritual and without being the item's level or higher). Either it is possible to make cursed items or it isn't.

Consequently, I have difficulty taking the claim that you would have had to say no to the PCs' idea if you had any rules regarding the items at face value. I presume that since you said yes it either means that their idea fit the world and was possible within the world given their resources or you don't care whether or not the idea fits the world. If the former is the case, then there would be a way to work with more formal rules to accomplish the goal and it could well have led to a fun adventure. If the latter (which seems to be the preferred and perhaps only playstyle supported by 4e), I think it is shortsighted. For my part, the feeling of being a part of a consistent world that reacts appropriately to my character and his/her actions is a big part of the fun of the game. I would rather come up with ideas that fit the world and have a world react appropriately than have the answer to all my ideas be yes and be left with a world that is not consistent and does not make sense.


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## brehobit (Jan 8, 2009)

Thanks to all in this thread.

This is the first time I've felt there were people who understand* what the pros and cons of 4e really are.

Lizard's essay in particular almost had me standing up and clapping.

Mark

*where understand means "agrees with me"


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## LostSoul (Jan 9, 2009)

Elder-Basilisk said:


> I for one would like to know when and why simulationism became wrongbadfun. I for one rather enjoy the playstyle.




I didn't mean to imply that simulationism was wrong or bad.  I like it, it's fun.  I don't think I'm very _good_ at it, which was the point I was trying to make (and failing) when I said "which is why I find this a really hard gamestyle to get right."

My point is that, just because you have a world that you're running and basing your decisions on what makes sense for that world, that doesn't mean it's _necessarily_ simulationism.



Elder-Basilisk said:


> I would think that whether or not the players' idea fits with the world is system independent. Either it is possible to make items or it is not. Either it requires special abilities (rituals, feats, etc) or it does not. Either the PCs have those or they do not. (In 4th edition, the players generally can't make magic items without the appropriate ritual and without being the item's level or higher). Either it is possible to make cursed items or it isn't.




I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.

Let's say you're playing in a world with no magic item creation.  Those secrets have been lost to time.  Cool.  The rules, however, say that PCs can create magic items and they tell you how.

The DM makes a decision here; does he go with what makes sense for the world or with the rules in the book?  Whatever ends up being used at the table, that's the system in play.

If it's predefined (by the rules or the world, either way) then you've decided that it can be done or that it can't be done.  _That's_ why I think it's harder to say "Yes" to ideas the players come up with.  If you've already decided how things work, and the players try something that goes against it, you're going to have to say "No" in order to maintain consistency.  (Nothing wrong with that; you probably _should_ be saying no, though it's good to consider that there are always trade-offs.)



Elder-Basilisk said:


> Consequently, I have difficulty taking the claim that you would have had to say no to the PCs' idea if you had any rules regarding the items at face value.




Probably a good idea, since I _did_ have rules available and I ignored them.   I'm not sure if that should be considered a house rule or a ruling.



Elder-Basilisk said:


> I presume that since you said yes it either means that their idea fit the world and was possible within the world given their resources or you don't care whether or not the idea fits the world. If the former is the case, then there would be a way to work with more formal rules to accomplish the goal and it could well have led to a fun adventure. If the latter (which seems to be the preferred and perhaps only playstyle supported by 4e), I think it is shortsighted.




The case in my game (and gameworld) was that I never really thought about magic item creation except that I knew you needed to use a ritual (Enchant Magic Item or whatever) to do so.  That's about it.

When the PCs wanted to try, I said, "Yeah, cool, go for it."  It fits the world; it's a magical place, you can always _try_ to do something with magic, even if you're not really ready, but the consequences could be dire.  

(Hmm, I guess I had thought about magic item creation beforehand - and magic in general - the basic, vague idea floating around in the back of my head being that it's possible to "reach too far", to play with forces that you don't yet understand or have control over.)

Now let's say that I had taken the time to define magic item creation and all that stuff in my worldbuilding prep.  The player's idea doesn't fit with the world.  Tough luck.  I say "No."

Which is fine; there's nothing wrong with that (in fact, it can be awesome), but I don't agree with the argument that having pre-existing rules (either in the books or part of the gameworld) means that it's _easier_ to say "Yes".

As for "there would be a way to work with more formal rules to accomplish the goal and it could well have led to a fun adventure" - I guess I consider resolution of a Skill Challenge to be that set of formal rules.  But I see what you're talking about (see below).



Elder-Basilisk said:


> For my part, the feeling of being a part of a consistent world that reacts appropriately to my character and his/her actions is a big part of the fun of the game. I would rather come up with ideas that fit the world and have a world react appropriately than have the answer to all my ideas be yes and be left with a world that is not consistent and does not make sense.




You bring up a good point.  I agree, of course, consistency is very valuable.  This is making me think about working _within_ a framework of some kind versus leaving everything "loose" and "open" and the differences between the two styles of play.  Obviously, different approaches are going to be more or less rewarding, depending on what you want to get out of play.  Working within that framework can be very rewarding (to display your mastery of the system, for example, or to get the feeling that you're _there_, in a living, breathing world; or both, for that matter), but so can playing it fast and loose (opening the door to player creativity, letting interesting ideas that no one ever thought of before carry play down a different direction).


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## StarFyre (Jan 9, 2009)

FOr us, players never were happy with the planar creatures in 4E....they didn't feel epic enough for what they liked.

I agreed.

What I did was, use part of our custom magic system for them.

THe demons though, to represent the chaotic nature of the abyss (we use a customized cosmology....a mix of 2/3e and 4e with stuff added in for good measure), they have something similar to the wild magic system we use.  In a way, very similar to magic in warhammer (when casting a spell in warhammer, if you are rolling more than 1 d6 and you ever roll double 1s, it's a miscast..you then roll 2d6 on another table and very bad stuff can happen, including your wizard model being sucked into the realm of chaos and removed from play for rest of the match).

It brings a very chaotic, wild, unpredictable aspect to demons (espec demon lords who can do them with even more wild results).

The final result..made a couple encounters so memorable, friends still talk about it    even the ones that died..heheheh

I'm just glad with all the streamlining, D&D remains one of the best systems for house rules, etc 

Sanjay


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## Donp (Jan 9, 2009)

StarFyre said:


> FOr us, players never were happy with the planar creatures in 4E....they didn't feel epic enough for what they liked.
> 
> I agreed.
> 
> ...



I really want to know more about the way you used Wild magic with demons. Could you please elaborate on that? If you don't want to threadjack could you please send me a personal message.

Thanks.


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## DracoSuave (Jan 9, 2009)

Elder-Basilisk said:


> I for one would like to know when and why simulationism became wrongbadfun. I for one rather enjoy the playstyle.




Simulationism isn't necessarily a wrong or bad or unfun way to play.  It's just not something that Dungeons and Dragons has ever been effective at accomplishing.  The closest was 3.x, but even that was far of the mark by a long distance.  Everything 'simulationist' in it felt more like a kludge designed to make game balance decisions make sense (which is the opposite of simulationism)


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## evilbob (Jan 9, 2009)

LostSoul said:


> Which is fine; there's nothing wrong with that (in fact, it can be awesome), but I don't agree with the argument that having pre-existing rules (either in the books or part of the gameworld) means that it's _easier_ to say "Yes".



I think you have some very good points, and it leads me to believe that really, it comes down to a style of play preference.  Some folks like the more "suggestive" style of 3.5, which gave you lots of pre-built things to work upon, whereas 4.0 leaves it much wider open, which suits others to a tee.  Either one doesn't prohibit any particular style or method, I think we all agree; they just play into different strengths.


(For me, the only remaining nagging thought is still:  why detail out combat so heavily when the rest of the "world rules" are so un-prescribed.  But then again, it doesn't really matter.)


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## gizmo33 (Jan 9, 2009)

I don't see this as just being about simulationism.  It's about not really taking into account the contributions of the players to the plot in other than superficial ways ("do you want to win the battle using your axe, or using your sword?").  

If you know the mechanics of Orcus' gate spell, for example, you can fairly judge the player's various attempts to close it (or respond to the uses of the Arcana skill) and define it's limitations rather than just arbitrarily decide based on some plot agenda.  Combat and Skill Challenges are handled this way already.  Why do monsters even have stat blocks?  Why doesn't the DM just decide when they die rather than having to track hitpoints and 5-foot steps?  The DM following certain rules behind the scenes isn't alien to DnD.  In fact, it seems to me to be a central part of 4E.  Still.

The whole point of Skill Challenges was to provide a more mechanics-based system for resolving events.  Saying "it's not used in combat, so I can just make up the results based on plot considerations" could be used for PCs Diplomacy with the King as well.  But really, if you're a story teller and you want to follow plot considerations instead of following rules then why are you getting involved in rules discussions anyway?  Who cares what the rules decide to cover - just ignore them as you do anyway.  

However, if your players are under the impression that you should be following the rules, and that's the reason that additional rules cause you heartburn (because they'll call you on them), then I think you have bigger problems.  The solution IMO would begin by being honest with your players about what kind of game you want to run and outline which types of rules, if any, you intend to follow.  

You can always avoid conflict with players by sitting their characters in a featureless gray room with nothing to interact with - but IMO being a good DM includes taking some risks and being able to let players in on the event resolution of the game without freaking out about the loss of control.  Akin to the Gray Room is a room where there are a bunch of objects, but the only one you can interact with is a sword, the rest are illusions.


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## chaotix42 (Jan 9, 2009)

@ DracoSuave & Felon - Isn't Safer (Seraph) Sephiroth from FF VII? If Sephiroth was in FF XII it's news to me!

@ Gizmo - Your last post seems laden with excessive hyperbole. Are there any DMs in this thread afraid of losing control over their PCs, sitting them in featureless rooms and reading them short stories about their adventures?


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## Nail (Jan 9, 2009)

gizmo33 said:


> If you know the mechanics of Orcus' gate spell, for example, you can fairly judge the player's various attempts to close it (or respond to the uses of the Arcana skill) and define it's limitations rather than just arbitrarily decide based on some plot agenda.  Combat and Skill Challenges are handled this way already.  Why do monsters even have stat blocks?  Why doesn't the DM just decide when they die rather than having to track hitpoints and 5-foot steps?



Well said.

..except - in 4e - it's called a "shift" instead of a "5-foot step".


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## Nail (Jan 9, 2009)

chaotix42 said:


> Isn't Safer (Seraph) Sephiroth from FF VII?



Yep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephiroth_(Final_Fantasy)


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## gizmo33 (Jan 9, 2009)

chaotix42;4620493@ said:
			
		

> Gizmo - Your last post seems laden with excessive hyperbole. Are there any DMs in this thread afraid of losing control over their PCs, sitting them in featureless rooms and reading them short stories about their adventures?




It might seem like excessive hyperbole if you read it as a description of someone's game. The featureless gray room was intended to be a thought experiment that goes along with the rest of what I was saying. There *are* DMs that appear to be afraid of losing control over their PCs. It's pretty easy to find those posts in this thread alone, though it's a matter of interpretation because complaining about "rules lawyers" and such never really seems to have much detail.


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## Regicide (Jan 9, 2009)

Anyway...  I think the gist of it is that the answer of "What can X do outside of combat:  Anything the DM wants" doesn't work for people since X can be a kobold or a demon lord and they clearly should have different answers!

The draconomicon seems to have circle the solution without really hitting it.  Lair features and such are nice but for a penultimate villain I think it falls short of giving an idea of the experience the villain will give before meeting them.  Can he scry in order to send minions in ever increasing difficulty conveniently equipped with level appropriate loot to make the characters more powerful?  Can he make traps so that when he capture the PCs and he can tell him his evil plan then walk out of the room confidant that his fiendish, er, diabolic trap will kill them?  Can he control his insatiable hunger and surround himself with armoured troops at all times, or would he eat them?  Does he have a few million gold to access all the busted magic items from adventurer's vault and make himself 5x more powerful which any creature with an IQ above freezing would do or is sensible things like this verboten in 4E?  Can he do rituals and trigger a stored one to gate in an entire cadre of his followers at a moment's notice?  Can he MAKE a portal so that he may have a static portal set to escape with or create one on the fly if the players cunningly destroy his escape plan?  Can he block teleportation into his throne room?  Can he surround himself with gaurds when he leaves his lair?  Can he see someone sneaking into his bed chamber?


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## JohnBiles (Jan 10, 2009)

Lizard said:


> See, I have the exact opposite reaction.
> 
> In 3.5, I had a kobold race, and I could easily create kobold wizards, kobold fighters, kobold rogue/barbarians, kobold whatevers, give them whatever items they needed, give them the skills that made them seem "real". The kobold chief had a high charisma, diplomacy, and bluff, because he needed them to be a leader. It's what a leader would logically have.
> 
> In 4e, I don't feel there's a kobold race. There's a kobold hive with kobold being born into castes from birth -- he's a slinger, he's a dragonshield. They feel as if they exist only for the fight; there is no society, no culture, no baby kobolds and old kobolds. There's just kobolds who spawn into the encounter and despawn when the encounter ends.




I have the opposite experience.  The existence of Dragonshields, slingers with glue pots, etc. gives me a distinct feeling for the roles of Kobolds in war, whereas a Kobold Fighter 3.5 style could be customized so many different ways it gives me little to no feeling of Kobolds as a culture.  

Plus, it is so easy to tinker with monsters in 4E that I can easily make baby kobolds, old kobolds, PHD in Physics Kobolds or whatever else I need.





Lizard said:


> Now, this can be mitigated. The rules make it easy enough to build kobold NPCs. You, the DM, can tinker with trained skills and modify equipment and attributes -- give the Dragonshield more charisma and make him Trained in Bluff if you want him to seem more leaderly, etc. But the rules as written do not actively encourage this. Instead of a kobold race, you have a box of miniatures. Pick the ones you want for the fight, and get on with it. Fights over, put them back in the box.




I'd say the exact opposite, they do encourage you to do this by providing both simple and more complicated ways to tinker with them or invent your own and making these methods quick and easy to use without breaking the universe.




Lizard said:


> Maybe it's because I always used programs like PCgen and Herolab, but all of my humanoids are classed, which meant I could use them across all levels pretty easily, and they never felt boring of 'same old', because any kobold (or orc or hobgoblin or whatever) could have any of the abilities a PC could -- magic, psionics, incarnum, whatever. You couldn't say, "Oh, it's




If you had to do it all by hand like most of us, 3E customizing was an infinitely more painful process.


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## Squizzle (Jan 10, 2009)

Regicide said:


> Anyway...  I think the gist of it is that the answer of "What can X do outside of combat:  Anything the DM wants" doesn't work for people since X can be a kobold or a demon lord and they clearly should have different answers!
> 
> The draconomicon seems to have circle the solution without really hitting it.  Lair features and such are nice but for a penultimate villain I think it falls short of giving an idea of the experience the villain will give before meeting them.  Can he scry in order to send minions in ever increasing difficulty conveniently equipped with level appropriate loot to make the characters more powerful?  Can he make traps so that when he capture the PCs and he can tell him his evil plan then walk out of the room confidant that his fiendish, er, diabolic trap will kill them?  Can he control his insatiable hunger and surround himself with armoured troops at all times, or would he eat them?  Does he have a few million gold to access all the busted magic items from adventurer's vault and make himself 5x more powerful which any creature with an IQ above freezing would do or is sensible things like this verboten in 4E?  Can he do rituals and trigger a stored one to gate in an entire cadre of his followers at a moment's notice?  Can he MAKE a portal so that he may have a static portal set to escape with or create one on the fly if the players cunningly destroy his escape plan?  Can he block teleportation into his throne room?  Can he surround himself with gaurds when he leaves his lair?  Can he see someone sneaking into his bed chamber?




It's important to remember that 4E is a very modern RPG, in that it focuses on one thing (direct conflict, most particularly combat) and does it very well. It is not an attempt at creating a "world simulator" or dice-driven physics engine, like so many RPGs created from the mid-'90s through the turn of the millennium were. If you can't satisfy it with martial conflict or a skill challenge, it's probably not worth rolling the dice, in the current iteration of D&D.

I consider focus a strength, but I can understand why others might be miffed by this. I cannot offer much solace to those who prefer more "world simulator" gameplay excet to note that everything tends to become popular again eventually; if they wait long enough, generalists will likely see some innovative gaming satisfaction.


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## Regicide (Jan 10, 2009)

Squizzle said:


> It's important to remember that 4E is a very modern RPG, in that it focuses on one thing (direct conflict, most particularly combat) and does it very well. If you can't satisfy it with martial conflict or a skill challenge, it's probably not worth rolling the dice, in the current iteration of D&D.




  In other words, it's not an RPG, it's WotC's answer to Necromunda.


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## Lizard (Jan 10, 2009)

JohnBiles said:


> I have the opposite experience.  The existence of Dragonshields, slingers with glue pots, etc. gives me a distinct feeling for the roles of Kobolds in war, whereas a Kobold Fighter 3.5 style could be customized so many different ways it gives me little to no feeling of Kobolds as a culture.




What, mechanically, gives you the feeling of "kobolds as a culture" in 4e? There's no "base kobold", no set of traits ALL kobolds have. I can say "This is a kobold who breathes acid, has bat wings, and is a vegetarian", and there's nothing non-koboldy about it. In 3x, by contrast, there were racial traits that all kobolds had, and this shaped all the choices for them -- assuming a standard attribute array, for example, you could see where kobolds would naturally gravitate towards rogues and ranged fighters, and towards sorcerers over wizards. The strongest kobold would never be an effective barbarian, at least not compared to, say, an orc with the same stat array before racial modifiers. In 4e, I can just say "This is a kobold ass-whooper" and give him a 20 strength. On the one hand, this is freedom, on the other hand, it is a lack of definition. Mechanically, I can reskin an orc into a kobold and other than the description of its size, I would not need to recalculate anything -- his attack bonuses, damage, etc, are all derived from his role and level, not his attributes or his race. What you have, in 4e, is basically a list of statistics to which you can add any flavor text you wish. There's no such thing as a "kobold", mechanically. 



> If you had to do it all by hand like most of us, 3E customizing was an infinitely more painful process.




PCGen is free and cross-platform.  No one "has" to do it by hand, at least not anyone who can post here.


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## LostSoul (Jan 10, 2009)

Lizard said:


> What, mechanically, gives you the feeling of "kobolds as a culture" in 4e?




Because the kobold's powers in the MM will naturally lead to a specific style of combat, which informs the culture they come from.

Skirmishers gain a bonus to attacks per kobold ally adjacent to the target.

Slingers have special ammunition.

Dragonshields can move to harass opponents.

Wyrmpriests (who are Leaders) serve dragons.

Slyblades (the most powerful kobolds) are good with traps and use their allies as shields.

I think that suggests a lot about kobold culture, if one should choose to infer such things.



Lizard said:


> In 4e, I can just say "This is a kobold ass-whooper" and give him a 20 strength.




No reason you couldn't do that in any other edition of the game.  Though "Gauntlets of Kobold Ass-Whooper Strength" might be a little off.


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## Lizard (Jan 10, 2009)

LostSoul said:


> Because the kobold's powers in the MM will naturally lead to a specific style of combat, which informs the culture they come from.




Whereas, in 3e, the kobolds racial attributes (small size, low strength, high charisma) lead to specific combat roles that maximize their strengths and minimize their weakness.

In 4e, you can begin with the idea of "I want a small, sneaky, race which focuses on ranged attacks", and then build some monsters which model this -- but there's nothing in the mechanics which enforce the concept. A kobold has a high AC because of his role as Artillery or Skirmish, not because he has a high dex -- I can decide, for some reason, that a particular kobold has a Dex of 4, and it will not 'bubble up' to his combat stats; they remain fixed unless I manually change them. Really, the only reason monsters in 4e even HAVE stats is so you can figure out their untrained skill checks; for the majority of combats, the stat line might as well not exist.

I prefer a more organic, more intricate approach. With 4e, I need to make sure to shape every part of the monster by hand, after the initial work is done; if I want it to have a better AC, I raise it, and if I want to justify that somehow, I have to decide what the cause is -- does it wear more armor? Does it have a higher dex? Is it a mutant with thick hide? Contrariwise, in 3e, if I want it to have a higher AC, I buy it armor, or raise its dex, or give it Dodge, or whatever.

4e: Start with combat stats. Justify them if you want to; you don't need to.
3e: Build a character. See what kind of numbers you get.

Which is "better" depends on your mood and goals. I enjoy the 3e approach because you can discover things about the world by seeing the consequences of racial traits.

(The NPC rules in 4e seem to take a half-step in this direction, but it's been explicitly stated they weren't used to build the monsters and that there are no fixed or absolute racial traits -- you can have non-shifty kobolds, for example.)


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## LostSoul (Jan 10, 2009)

Lizard said:


> In 4e, you can begin with the idea of "I want a small, sneaky, race which focuses on ranged attacks", and then build some monsters which model this -- but there's nothing in the mechanics which enforce the concept.




I think you bring up some interesting points, especially this; I'll return to it when I have the chance to think (clearly) about it.


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## Majoru Oakheart (Jan 10, 2009)

gizmo33 said:


> I don't see this as just being about simulationism.  It's about not really taking into account the contributions of the players to the plot in other than superficial ways ("do you want to win the battle using your axe, or using your sword?").



Wow.  This sounds rather bitter and petty.  Different games allow different amounts of player contribution to the plot.  The default assumption in 4e is that the DM comes up with the plot, the players play through it, but at certain points along the way, they'll come to "Decision Points" which let them affect the outcome of the plot.

For instance, the DM decides in advance that the forces of the Evil Archmage will attack the town the PCs arrive in.  After the battle the PCs will be approached by the Mayor who asks them to figure out who is behind the attack and to stop them.  At this point the PCs decide which way they will go, how they will figure out who the attackers were and so on.  Their skills will affect how fast they find the information, what information exactly they do find, and so on.

That's the default assumption.  Some people don't like that and allow PCs way more control over their plots.  That's fine.

If you are talking about games where the PCs get to walk into a town, kick the drunk off his chair and decide to make him run for office and become the puppet mayor for them not knowing that the town is already ruled by an illithid with a disguise spell up....yeah, that's a completely different sort of game than the default assumption of 4e.

4e assumes more of an interactive novel than a blank 3d space filled with programmed objects waiting for the players to run around in.  Some of the goals of the plot oriented, DM controlled game are not compatible with giving your players the power to go wherever they want and do whatever they want.



gizmo33 said:


> If you know the mechanics of Orcus' gate spell, for example, you can fairly judge the player's various attempts to close it (or respond to the uses of the Arcana skill) and define it's limitations rather than just arbitrarily decide based on some plot agenda.  Combat and Skill Challenges are handled this way already.  Why do monsters even have stat blocks?  Why doesn't the DM just decide when they die rather than having to track hitpoints and 5-foot steps?  The DM following certain rules behind the scenes isn't alien to DnD.  In fact, it seems to me to be a central part of 4E.  Still.



Because there are 2 parts to a game: Story and Game.  The game portion is interactive.  Your players roll dice to determine the outcome.  The story part is not.

Also, why is a plot agenda unfair?  I find a game much more fun as a player when it goes like this:

Portal appears in the middle of town, undead swarm the town, the PCs save some people but are forced to flee by the overwhelming number.  They decide to go to the capital where they search for any information on what this portal might be and how to close it.  They find a cleric at a temple who identifies it as a portal to the realm of Orcus.  He knows of a Ritual to close it, but it requires 3 rare spell components to complete.  They go on a series of adventures to track down the items.  During their adventures, they are attacked by minions of a powerful priest of Orcus who wants to stop them, they eventually find all the components and proceed to the portal.  There, they meet the priest of Orcus who has gathered to stop them personally.  They defeat him.  They do the ritual, only it doesn't close the portal.  They hear laughing from inside the portal and Orcus himself comes to crush them.  They defeat him, and with his last breath, he is sucked into the portal which closes behind him.  The world is safe.

Rather than:

A portal appears in the middle of town, undead start coming out and a PC announces, "I use Close Portal, it is a spell from the book.  It closes any portal.  This is a portal, it should work."  And the DM says, "It doesn't work on this portal."  The player says, "What?  Aren't we playing by the same rules here?  You are going to tell me the rules don't apply to this portal?  That's stupid."  The DM says, "Fine.  It closes the portal.  The world is safe.  The game is over."

One is a result of following the rules whether the plot works or not.



gizmo33 said:


> The whole point of Skill Challenges was to provide a more mechanics-based system for resolving events.  Saying "it's not used in combat, so I can just make up the results based on plot considerations" could be used for PCs Diplomacy with the King as well.  But really, if you're a story teller and you want to follow plot considerations instead of following rules then why are you getting involved in rules discussions anyway?  Who cares what the rules decide to cover - just ignore them as you do anyway.



Because a game with no choice and no randomness would be no fun at all for the players.  You want them to have fun.  Most of the random chance in games is heavily slanted in favor of making things come out the way you want it to anyways.  The combat rules give the overwhelming advantage to the PCs, so they'll win almost every time.  The new skill challenge rules mean the PCs win a skill challenge the vast majority of the time.

I decide what NPCs due based on the whims of the plot all the time.  Nothing in the Diplomacy skill ever says "By rolling high, an NPC will agree to whatever you want.  By rolling low, he'll immediately disagree."  I often decide that "despite your poor roll the King agrees" or "despite your good roll, he isn't convinced".

I, as a DM, treat the game as 2 different games with 2 different sets of rules.  When it is combat or skill challenge time, whatever happens happens.  Follow the rules exactly as written.  It'll be a fair decider of whether you succeed or fail at your task.  When it is plot time, I will accept input from the players and try to take their actions into account, but I will not allow their decisions to simply override everything I want to happen.  They certainly might get bonuses and benefits.  I might decide to modify things if they give me an idea that is better than what I originally thought of.  But, if I've decided that the only way to close the portal is to kill Orcus at the end of the adventure, nothing they do is going to change that.



gizmo33 said:


> However, if your players are under the impression that you should be following the rules, and that's the reason that additional rules cause you heartburn (because they'll call you on them), then I think you have bigger problems.  The solution IMO would begin by being honest with your players about what kind of game you want to run and outline which types of rules, if any, you intend to follow.




Why is this a problem?  I expect everyone playing any game to follow the rules.  That's the point of playing a game.  I certainly expect my DM to follow the rules.  I expect the DM to make up fair and fun rules when there aren't some available.  I think rules directly related to combat should be adhered to.  That's when it is the most "game-like" to me.  In the same way that I'd want everyone in a monopoly game to play by the same rules, I'd probably bring it up if a DM just randomly broke them.  But, I give leeway for there to be sections of the game outside of the rules.  I don't have a problem with a monster having a power I can't get.  That's part of the rules.  I don't have a problem with there being exceptions to rules.  Like a specific portal that has different properties than most portals and so on.


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## dammitbiscuit (Jan 14, 2009)

Lizard said:


> it will not 'bubble up' to his combat stats; they remain fixed unless I manually change them.



Actually, in the "creating monsters" or "making monsters" section of the DMG, it mentions that custom monsters' stats have a certain baseline, and above or below average ability scores change the monsters' stats by plus or minus one. (I'm Away From Book, but I know it's in the DM's Toolbox section.)

In the same way that 3.5 NPC creation encouraged racial stereotypes, it was very limiting. A kobold in 3.5 would never make for a terribly great Dragon Shaman - they have no bonus to Charisma, and a penalty to Constitution. When their breath weapon is on cooldown, they'll be resorting to crossbows, due to their extremely low strength. In 4e, I just build an NPC by either the monster creation methods, or by the NPC creation methods, and the creature will be able to perform its job. If I want to create a big, buff kobold, I will either provide story justification for it and an interesting place in the ecology, or my players will laugh at it and ask if I'm joking... and hell, if we're playing a joke game, why not?

This isn't quite the same thing as where you can have, say, a very low-hitpoints fey creature with spell resistance and lots of attacks that has the same CR as a tons-of-hp animal with mediocre attacks. Nothing you create, if you follow the rules strictly, will differ greatly in stats from the baseline. However, you achieve a similar effect by having a fey lurker or artillery monster and an animal Brute. These closer-to-baseline monsters, however, will present a similar challenge to any party, whereas fragile, magical, spell resistant monsters in 3.5 were awesome against some parties, and tissue paper against others.

As far as the spells go, I agree with Majoru. If I use Gate, my players will yawn, Spellcraft it, and buy a scroll to solve the problem. When I was a rules-following DM, I was constantly poring over splatbooks to find monsters, classes, templates and spell effects that would keep things interesting. I quickly burned out that way, actually.


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## Lizard (Jan 14, 2009)

dammitbiscuit said:


> Actually, in the "creating monsters" or "making monsters" section of the DMG, it mentions that custom monsters' stats have a certain baseline, and above or below average ability scores change the monsters' stats by plus or minus one. (I'm Away From Book, but I know it's in the DM's Toolbox section.)




I dimly recall that; however, the baseline stats are based on level/role, not species; a kobold soldier of X level and an ogre soldier of X level have the same base Str; it's up to you to make the changes to make it "feel" like a kobold (or an ogre).



> In the same way that 3.5 NPC creation encouraged racial stereotypes, it was very limiting. A kobold in 3.5 would never make for a terribly great Dragon Shaman - they have no bonus to Charisma, and a penalty to Constitution. When their breath weapon is on cooldown, they'll be resorting to crossbows, due to their extremely low strength. In 4e, I just build an NPC by either the monster creation methods, or by the NPC creation methods, and the creature will be able to perform its job. If I want to create a big, buff kobold, I will either provide story justification for it and an interesting place in the ecology, or my players will laugh at it and ask if I'm joking... and hell, if we're playing a joke game, why not?




And in 3.5, you can declare that the uber-kobold rolled straight 18s. 




> These closer-to-baseline monsters, however, will present a similar challenge to any party, whereas fragile, magical, spell resistant monsters in 3.5 were awesome against some parties, and tissue paper against others.




I see both sides of this. From one perspective, it's annoying that a monster's "true" CR is based heavily on group composition. From another, it makes the world seem much more real -- and thus more involving -- if a group is strong in some areas and weak in others. The idea of having to know your own strengths and weaknesses, research likely foes, and make preparations for battle appeals to me. 4e's perfect balance (assuming a party with all four roles filled) means you never have to "prep" for an encounter; if everyone is playing by the rules, you will be equally good against all level-appropriate foes. Resistances/immunities/weaknesses are fairly minor in 4e, at least from what I've seen so far; if you don't have "just the right spell/weapon/whatever"... meh. The fight lasts one round longer.


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## LostSoul (Jan 14, 2009)

So I've been thinking about this, and I don't get it.



Lizard said:


> In 4e, you can begin with the idea of "I want a small, sneaky, race which focuses on ranged attacks", and then build some monsters which model this -- *but there's nothing in the mechanics which enforce the concept.* A kobold has a high AC because of his role as Artillery or Skirmish, not because he has a high dex -- I can decide, for some reason, that a particular kobold has a Dex of 4, and it will not 'bubble up' to his combat stats; they remain fixed unless I manually change them. Really, the only reason monsters in 4e even HAVE stats is so you can figure out their untrained skill checks; for the majority of combats, the stat line might as well not exist.




The bolded part had me confused.  "Of course the mechanics enforce the concept!" I thought.  "What says small, sneaky, ranged-attacking race other than Lurkers and Skirmishers with Stealth, low Str, and ranged powers?"

But that's not what you mean, is it?  You mean something like, "We don't do it the 3E way - build the monster from its Stats first and then see what kind of roles it fits; we figure out what its role _in the game is_ first and see what it needs to be."

Though I don't see why you couldn't figure out what it's place in the game world is first, assign a level, and then use the mechanics to enforce your concept.  I guess that's what I'm looking at - the level of the monster enforces a lot of stuff.

(Stats affect Defenses if they are higher or lower than the average for that level; otherwise, they don't.)



Lizard said:


> 4e: Start with combat stats. Justify them if you want to; you don't need to.
> 3e: Build a character. See what kind of numbers you get.




In both cases I think you start off with a character.  I don't see the difference.


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## webrunner (Jan 14, 2009)

The thing that confused me, is not that there isn't any NPC rituals, but that there's _one_ but not more: there's a ritual to become a Lich in the Monster Manual, and it's obviously not intended for players (since there's no rules on how to actually give a player a template)

Why arent there more of those?


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## Lizard (Jan 14, 2009)

webrunner said:


> The thing that confused me, is not that there isn't any NPC rituals, but that there's _one_ but not more: there's a ritual to become a Lich in the Monster Manual, and it's obviously not intended for players (since there's no rules on how to actually give a player a template)
> 
> Why arent there more of those?




Space limits, probably.


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## chitzk0i (Jan 14, 2009)

Regicide said:


> Anyway...  I think the gist of it is that the answer of "What can X do outside of combat:  Anything the DM wants" doesn't work for people since X can be a kobold or a demon lord and they clearly should have different answers!




This seems contradictory to me.  You're then DM.  If you want kobolds and demons to have access to different noncombat abilities, _you can do that_.  That's the definition of "anything the DM wants".  Are you upset because someone out there DMing the game could have demons and kobolds with with the same abilities?



LostSoul said:


> Though I don't see why you couldn't figure out what it's place in the game world is first, assign a level, and then use the mechanics to enforce your concept.  I guess that's what I'm looking at - the level of the monster enforces a lot of stuff.
> [...]
> In both cases I think you start off with a character.  I don't see the difference.




I guess you could do that in 3e, but it takes a lot more mastery of the rules to do so.  If you don't have much experience DMing, how do you know what kind of stats should a CR 8 have?  Don't the 3e monster-making rules have you design the monster, then assign a CR?  I think most DMs are going to get frustrated and give up, rather than make an intuitive leap to "Maybe I should do this in the exact opposite order."


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## Mirtek (Jan 14, 2009)

webrunner said:


> The thing that confused me, is not that there isn't any NPC rituals, but that there's _one_ but not more: there's a ritual to become a Lich in the Monster Manual, and it's obviously not intended for players (since there's no rules on how to actually give a player a template)
> 
> Why arent there more of those?



Draconomicon also has some of them. Rituals which are usefull to dragons trying to improve their lairs but not of much use to PCs. So maybe we'll see a change in how 4e handles explaining such out of combat acts of NPCs


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## James McMurray (Jan 15, 2009)

There are others, they just don't have stats (because they don't ned them). For instance, aboleths create servitors via a ritual. Boneclaws and Collosi are also created through rituals. Cultists summon demons or angels that way too. All of them are flavor text methods to allow GMs to design scenarios without the constriction inherent in a ritual with rules. I think the only reasons the lich ritual was given stats are that it sets a minimum level for the transformation, and gives rules for how phylacteries work.


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## TheLordWinter (Jan 16, 2009)

Perhaps it was a hold over from when they were planning to allow PCs to become liches? It seems like a few other templates in the Dungeon Master's Guide, like the Mummy or the Death Knight, also should have had similar requirements/rituals, yet did not?


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## Lizard (Jan 16, 2009)

"Lich" would be an EXCELLENT Epic Destiny.


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## jensun (Jan 16, 2009)

Lizard said:


> "Lich" would be an EXCELLENT Epic Destiny.



Funnily enough this is exactly what one of my players wants to do.  We are only just at level 11 so I have a while before it needs to be fleshed out.


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## James McMurray (Jan 18, 2009)

Lich could be the paragon path, and demilich the epic destiny. The 30th level ability would be Apotheosis, a la Acererak and the Return to the Tomb of Horrors.


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