I've mentioned in previous posts how I enjoy the calculations that go into a monster's stat block, and have had fun reverse-engineering the monsters to fit them into racial and class progressions. That's why I'm a bit disappointed that Greg Bilsland has said that "the construction of monsters still appears to be a science, but is no longer an exact science."
I guess I just don't see the argument for this. If you're advancing a monster, through some size advancement, template or class levels, why wouldn't you apply them with a rule-based system? If class levels and templates aren't going to be provided in a way that allows us to apply them in a calculable way, then how will they be provided, just as concepts? And if they are calculable, is the process just too difficult?
Bilsland says
The math and science are so finite that often repairing stat blocks becomes not a case of creating a flawless, pristine creature, but rather, a creature with a minimal amount of mistakes... [w]hen you’re dealing with a combination of advancement, templates, class levels, and monstrous races in a limited amount of time, some mistakes are bound to slip by...
Fair enough, but aren't we getting digital tools with D&D Insider? Is this not a perfect fit for a digital tool, both for the designers at Wizards as well as the players? I had hoped that tools like xmld20 and HeroForge were no longer going to be needed, not because I don't enjoy working on them, but because the promise of online D&D applications seemed to confirm that this game does have that mathematic component which could be eased for players and DMs alike. This addresses his concern about the "inane attention to detail" that he has mistakenly assumed isn't fun for some of us. And there's no reason that a DM can't fudge numbers whenever he wants to, if it is becoming tedious -- that has always been within the rubric of the DM -- but I don't know why this means there can't be a formulaic way at all.
Of course, as with most current 4th edition discussion, we're working with only snippets of information, so I have no idea how the monsters, the classes and the templates are going to be implemented. But I, for one, am likely to take these advanced creatures, reverse engineer them as Bilsland is doing now, and will come up with errata for what I will probably see as an incorrect stat block.
Showing posts with label insider. Show all posts
Showing posts with label insider. Show all posts
Friday, September 28, 2007
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Blogwatching
I just finished going through all of the blogs that are accessible from here, which had a bunch of teasers to ruminate over.
James Wyatt talks about the "rule" about an encounter using up party resources, and thus a party can only face so many encounters before they need to rest -- but what if the big encounter happens first? As a DM, this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed, and they claim to have done so. Huzzah, but how?
He also talks about his work on the demons in the 4.0 Monster Manual, and while he doesn't give anything away about them, it caught my eye because the monster books are my favorite ones, so I'll be watching what he says closely.
Chris Perkins also mentions the Monster Manual, and how one of my favorites won't be there, because he has been promoted to god status. This makes my mind race about how they're going to handle the gods in 4e -- there's nothing like a statblock for a god to make a DM feel powerful, and a player feel puny. How long am I going to have to wait for that!
Stephen Schubert reveals himself as the math geek at Wizards, mentioning negative binomial distribution; as someone who has been picking apart the structure of the game from a programmer's point-of-view, it's nice to hear them come right out and state that there is something mathematical behind their decisions. Until we see some progression charts or combat rules, we'll have to wait and see where this comes into play.
The programmer in me really perked up at Mike Mearls' blog post, where he discussed "intended use" of game elements. Specifically,
If we also want to make it a playable character race, we'll design a separate racial write up for it. We won't try to shoehorn a monster stat block into becoming a PC stat block.
Considering the amount of work I've done for xmld20 in this area, tearing apart the monster entries into races and monster classes, this comes as mixed news: will I still be able to figure out this breakdown if they don't supply it? Will every monster be provided in a class-based way? Or am I stuck with what they give me? Their discussion of race levels fuels my hopes a bit, since they're thinking more ... mechanical, I guess you'd call it.
Didier Monin discussed D&D Insider, which I'm excited about, for the most part. The part I'm not interested in, as I've mentioned before, is the set of applications they're providing, and that's what he focused on. Sure, character generators might be nice, but as a third-party developer, I have these hope that they're not that good so I have something to work on. And even if Griff thinks there might be times where we'd want to use the Game Table, I think we'll just play DDO instead.
Two things by Rodney Thompson caught my eye: he discussed the idea of magic items as "immediate reward" (versus XP as a "delayed reward"), which is a good way of thinking of it. But then he states that you
...don't have to actually get a new magic item for the potential for reward to be there, and in many cases you'll feel as though you've been rewarded when someone else gets an item. In 4E, I think there is going to be a very interesting dynamic between magic items and players. I believe it was mentioned that some traditional things about magic items were going the way of the dodo...
I like the first part, but... what things are going the way of the dodo? As Griff mentioned in an earlier post, there's no more XP cost to crafting, but that doesn't seem to cover what Thompson is talking about here. Next to the monsters themselves, the magic items are my favorite bits to the game.
Thompson finished by dropping a bomb: 25th-level spells. This took a second reading for it to sink in. Is this just a high-end spell, using everything the wizard has, with metamagic and such? We're not talking about a 49th-level wizard I assume...
Finally, Logan Bonner got my jaw dropping when he stated
...[w]ell, that assumes that there will be monks, that they have ki strike, and that DR exists. Now, at least one of those is true...
Everybody loves a monk, don't they? You can't get rid of them, can you?? Not when we've been waiting patiently for them to appear in DDO all this time...
I hope that the Gleemax setup gets finished sooner rather than later, so following these blogs is a little easier. An RSS feed, perhaps, folks?
James Wyatt talks about the "rule" about an encounter using up party resources, and thus a party can only face so many encounters before they need to rest -- but what if the big encounter happens first? As a DM, this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed, and they claim to have done so. Huzzah, but how?
He also talks about his work on the demons in the 4.0 Monster Manual, and while he doesn't give anything away about them, it caught my eye because the monster books are my favorite ones, so I'll be watching what he says closely.
Chris Perkins also mentions the Monster Manual, and how one of my favorites won't be there, because he has been promoted to god status. This makes my mind race about how they're going to handle the gods in 4e -- there's nothing like a statblock for a god to make a DM feel powerful, and a player feel puny. How long am I going to have to wait for that!
Stephen Schubert reveals himself as the math geek at Wizards, mentioning negative binomial distribution; as someone who has been picking apart the structure of the game from a programmer's point-of-view, it's nice to hear them come right out and state that there is something mathematical behind their decisions. Until we see some progression charts or combat rules, we'll have to wait and see where this comes into play.
The programmer in me really perked up at Mike Mearls' blog post, where he discussed "intended use" of game elements. Specifically,
If we also want to make it a playable character race, we'll design a separate racial write up for it. We won't try to shoehorn a monster stat block into becoming a PC stat block.
Considering the amount of work I've done for xmld20 in this area, tearing apart the monster entries into races and monster classes, this comes as mixed news: will I still be able to figure out this breakdown if they don't supply it? Will every monster be provided in a class-based way? Or am I stuck with what they give me? Their discussion of race levels fuels my hopes a bit, since they're thinking more ... mechanical, I guess you'd call it.
Didier Monin discussed D&D Insider, which I'm excited about, for the most part. The part I'm not interested in, as I've mentioned before, is the set of applications they're providing, and that's what he focused on. Sure, character generators might be nice, but as a third-party developer, I have these hope that they're not that good so I have something to work on. And even if Griff thinks there might be times where we'd want to use the Game Table, I think we'll just play DDO instead.
Two things by Rodney Thompson caught my eye: he discussed the idea of magic items as "immediate reward" (versus XP as a "delayed reward"), which is a good way of thinking of it. But then he states that you
...don't have to actually get a new magic item for the potential for reward to be there, and in many cases you'll feel as though you've been rewarded when someone else gets an item. In 4E, I think there is going to be a very interesting dynamic between magic items and players. I believe it was mentioned that some traditional things about magic items were going the way of the dodo...
I like the first part, but... what things are going the way of the dodo? As Griff mentioned in an earlier post, there's no more XP cost to crafting, but that doesn't seem to cover what Thompson is talking about here. Next to the monsters themselves, the magic items are my favorite bits to the game.
Thompson finished by dropping a bomb: 25th-level spells. This took a second reading for it to sink in. Is this just a high-end spell, using everything the wizard has, with metamagic and such? We're not talking about a 49th-level wizard I assume...
Finally, Logan Bonner got my jaw dropping when he stated
...[w]ell, that assumes that there will be monks, that they have ki strike, and that DR exists. Now, at least one of those is true...
Everybody loves a monk, don't they? You can't get rid of them, can you?? Not when we've been waiting patiently for them to appear in DDO all this time...
I hope that the Gleemax setup gets finished sooner rather than later, so following these blogs is a little easier. An RSS feed, perhaps, folks?
Monday, August 20, 2007
Dragon & Dungeon
I definitely will miss these two magazines. With the original announcement of their demise, I hadn't a clue that it was a hint towards the upcoming announcement of 4.0. Wizards of the Coast mentioned that they would be producing a lot more online content, which immediately made me cringe, not because I dislike online content -- far from it -- but because of the difficulty I always had trying to find anything on their site, which led to the wizardslinks site.
The YouTube interview about the online versions of these magazines claimed that using the old print versions of these magazines didn't reach the scope of players that they wanted it to, and I have to admit that the online distribution will certainly improved that. It was also nice to hear that, as the print versions were, the online content is considered "official" material, for both the 3.5 material that will be published in September, through to May when 4.0 content will appear.
It hasn't be made clear to me yet whether or not this content is free through the Dungeons & Dragons Insider site, or if it is part of their pay portion. Regardless, I can see myself paying for it as I did the print copies, and if that fee is part of the general subscription to their online services, that's all the better. I just hope that the idea of a fee doesn't prevent players out there from accessing information that used to be free, such as all of the content currently linked to at wizardlinks.
The YouTube interview about the online versions of these magazines claimed that using the old print versions of these magazines didn't reach the scope of players that they wanted it to, and I have to admit that the online distribution will certainly improved that. It was also nice to hear that, as the print versions were, the online content is considered "official" material, for both the 3.5 material that will be published in September, through to May when 4.0 content will appear.
It hasn't be made clear to me yet whether or not this content is free through the Dungeons & Dragons Insider site, or if it is part of their pay portion. Regardless, I can see myself paying for it as I did the print copies, and if that fee is part of the general subscription to their online services, that's all the better. I just hope that the idea of a fee doesn't prevent players out there from accessing information that used to be free, such as all of the content currently linked to at wizardlinks.
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