No Level One Monsters
This is a new solution to an ongoing problem.
Years ago, I started developing “scope” as a form of quadratic development to complement linear character advancement.
That’s when I came up with the terms:
Personal, Local, Regional, Global, Planar, and Cosmic.
As part of that, I ranked nearly every monster from the D&D Monster Manual according to scope — whether a monster of that type represented a threat of a certain scope. I had to figure out how many people could be affected.
I associated each scope with a group of 3-5 exty people, as follows:
1-Personal 3-5
2-Local 300-500
3-Regional 30k-50k
…and so forth
A monster would have to pose a threat to so many people in a given scope. That limits cosmic threats to archvillains and eldritch abominations, which is cool.
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Now, that’s all great but what’s this about 1st-level monsters?
Here’s the problem I encountered some time back — 1st-level monsters just didn’t make sense, logistically. Why on earth would a villain recruit a bunch of kobolds or goblins that could easily be slaughtered by adventurers.
Sure, minions might be able to threaten commoners… but let’s pretend that isn’t our only justification for the existence of these monsters.
I’m oversimplifying the problem but that’s the most immediate and pressing concern — 1st-level monsters didn’t make sense on a logistical level.
Not unless they were free, anyway. Well, … if you’ve looked at all the new character classes I posted recently… there are some free minions for players to take advantage of — heh, did you catch what I did right there?
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So I continued developing dungeon generation procedures in spite of the fact they didn’t support 1st-level monsters. And then yesterday, I had breakthroughs in several different areas of dungeon and quest/rumor development.
Humanoids should make up the majority of notable 1st-5th level creatures.
Sure, you have animals to consider but unless we’re talking mega-fauna then either these “low-level monsters” are an appendage of something bigger — in short, a higher-level, more meaningful monster.
I mean, when do you ever fight just one goblin?
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The point is that you don’t make a dungeon for a bunch of low-level monsters. Not even for your brand-new, just-out-of-the-box PCs. You make a dungeon for a baddie. “Low-level dungeons” aren’t a thing. You can still have kobolds in the dungeon, you can even keep your precious 1st-level monsters.
What needs to happen though is a “bigger reason” for the dungeon. You don’t make a dungeon for some bandits. You don’t make a dungeon for some goblins. You make a dungeon for a bandit lord. You make a dungeon for a goblin king.
Everybody still with me?
I’ll come back to this with some more stuff later.
Level 1 monsters are all about quantity, when used as mooks.
In the BFRPG modules I’m running, there are a lot of goblins and kobolds, but they tend to be in fairly large bands, because they’re fighting for territory. One particular dungeon module revolves around a veritable army of goblins trying to secure a new lair, with dynamic raiding parties, scouts and skirmishers.
Also the existence of low hit-dice monsters as races assumes a world in which individuals becoming high hit-dice individuals is uncommon. That’s one of the problems I have with games that include what you refer to as the Epic and Paragon tiers. Worlds in which individuals that powerful stride around leaving trails of devastation in their path aren’t always compatible with the life-and-death scrum between iron-age agrarian societies and hunter-gatherer societies that neighbor them.
Think, for a moment, if George Washington were a level 9 fighter and Ft. Necessity was his first fighter stronghold; how ridiculous of Louis XV to employ 1 hit die indians in his service against the British colonists! But let’s face it, Washington was maybe level 4 when he put down the Whiskey Rebellion.
Hehe, your George Washington example reminded me of the argument I’ve made about the meaning of the Intelligence score and how it’s disproportionately favored in many games.
A wolf or snake or trapdoor spider can lay an ambush, and they have an Intelligence of 1 or 2 (or “n/a” for the spider in 3e) and they will kill you.
So how much does that Intelligence score really mean, and why is literacy such a big deal that it’s only available to characters with a score above a certain mark? (Not that literacy is good for much.)
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Now, you’re right about little monsters and numbers.
What I’m getting at is what we consider a “monster.” We call a serial killer a monster, and a villain might balk at the destruction wrought by a lone hero (“He’s just one man!”) but when are they a monster?
Taking that to the next step, what is a “dungeon?” When is a dungeon formed, and why? When we imprison criminals against their will in the basement of a castle, we might call a dungeon…
So I’m drawing a connecting line between “monster” and “dungeon.”
That’s one reason why early editions never used Intelligence Scores for most monsters: because Intelligence was ONLY used for languages known and certain spell effect/bonuses. It’s a pretty useless stat for determining actual intelligence of an entity; it only bears on skillpoints, which you don’t REALLY need to get the job (in this case hunting prey) done.
As for Dungeons, it depends on the nature of the dungeon. Lower level dungeons are likely natural caves or abandoned sites. Whatever may have built the dungeon might have been more powerful, but it’s long gone: that’s usually one of the central premises of the old introductory dungeons.
Also, you may be getting into some serious semantics there about monsters. Mechanically, “monster” is simply a non-player race entity which may or may not be hostile. Philosophically…
http://youtu.be/F-g6ThHjPG4?t=1m5s
You mentioned the difficulty reconciling Paragon- and Epic-tier adventures. I’ve run and played in a couple games at that power level. It’s hard to move and act at that kind of scale. Stuff is just too big.
That plays a part in the declaration of “no 1st-level monsters.” In those first few levels, you aren’t really struggling against monsters — you’re struggling against each other, and creatures at your power level.
It wasn’t to be taken literally. There would still be 1st-level monsters.
A monster then, is something enormous and terrifying and strange. Yes, a goblin can be scary but what makes them monstrous is being in a group.
You might still build a cavern around a group of goblins — but at the center of it, you’d have a 6th-level goblin overboss (which coincidentally, I think is the same as your B/X level 4 George Washington).
Absolutely agreed. Y’know, in Jeffro’s reviews he’s been doing over at Castalia, he did a retrospective of a Poul Anderson book (Three Hearts for Three Lions) that totally made the concept of the ‘green menace’ make sense; greenskins were aligned with Chaos not in a sense that they were unpredictable and lawless, but rather they were aligned with Fey and represented an existential moral threat. In a way, I think that Warhammer captures this a bit, in a less theological way, in their “Waaargh” magic; the way it was described in the game I had was that while orcs themselves were not magical, when a large group of them got together, their own ‘orciness’ created an energy, “Waaargh”, which could be harnessed orcish shamans. One fey creature might not pose a threat, but a large group of them produces a counter-resonnance which is antithetical to a stable (and moral) reality. Their existence is a manifestation and cause of corruption.
I understand a lot of what I’ve said probably comes across as disjointed and I apologize for the information gaps.
In creating these dungeon generation procedures, I’m trying to incorporate concepts and ideas from outside of traditional tabletop RPGs as well. I’ve done fair bits of video game design as well, and so in creating dungeon procedures I’m using elements of “level design.”
Some time back I wrote about creating a steady stream of rewards for dungeon exploration, basically amounting to bananas in Donkey Kong (collect 100 for an extra life!) or coins in Mario.
Using this methodology creates expectations for rewards and helps to encourage the players forward, to explore every room. At the same time, some rooms are left empty to allude to hidden treasures and also laying groundwork for misdirection.
Here, where I’m talking about “no 1st-level monsters,” I’m alluding to the important of “boss monsters” and will be working up to how to implement bosses in the dungeon context. This draws from an episode of Sequelitis Egoraptor recently posted about the Zelda series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOC3vixnj_0
It’s a good 30-minutes long and he covers a LOT of material. Fair warning, he swears a lot and he’s pretty harsh to all the games in question, showing the most deference to the original NES Zelda (’cause it was first).
He talks about player motivations and rewarding decision-making in some very meaningful ways. I’ve also listened to it like a bazillion times.
Also, I think he’s pretty funny. ;)
His core argument seems to be a preference for pure sandbox vs plot (in the form of scripted event triggers required to engage and unlock said ‘plot’). The first game, of course, had the advantage of keeping its story “all there in the manual”.
I get his argument in favor of a non-scaling truly open world, even if in tabletop terms this can translate into punishing idiot players who poke 20 hit dice dinosaurs on the Isle of Dread with stick.
Also, dude is like the Zelda equivalent of an OSR fan.
I’m not sure how I’d adapt this into my gaming. As a GM, you need to be prepared for and familiar with what you’re planning on running, so it’s not always easy to come up with new things on the fly (depending on the rigidity of the system) without having your world overrun with quantum ogres. I’m in a bit of a bind myself for tomorrow’s game, since I have no idea what the players want to do; no one wanted to do downtime, and we’re in a sandbox phase of the story. The players have access (and knowledge of)to a half-plundered dungeon, the dungeon they just started, a dungeon-town/event-triggered-by-investigating-the-town/rumor, and a stumble-upon dungeon that is currently hidden. It hasn’t been long enough in-game for the patron NPC to receive the spoils from the first successful quest and drop more than mere hints about the rest of the realm. So, I’m going to have to be ready for anything!
Ah, there is a quality of his argument which I’ve had difficulty pinning down precisely because many people have a knee-jerk reaction to his frank discussion of the Zelda series. I’ve never been particularly invested (I thought Link to the Past was entertaining but tedious) and so I had little difficult assimilating the ideas expressed in his video.
Well… except for the fact that it is FULL of ideas. I keep picking up on new things every time I listen to it.
To start with one thing that’s been on my mind — there’s the idea of the “emotional through-line in a dungeon” represented by the “big key,” the “treasure chest,” and the “boss room.”
Put simply, I hate locked doors and treasure chests in games, D&D or otherwise, because they’re like shooting an eye on a wall (to borrow from another part of his discussion). They’re rote and meaningless and not actually difficult or challenging.
Picking a lock is a die roll. A sterile skill check. There’s no strategy to the action — not even when you’re using percentile dice.
And yet they’re omnipresent in games as obstacles. Why? More often than not, they’re to force the player down a particular path. Go here, do this. Go there, do that. It isn’t a truly interactive experience — it’s a guided tour, it’s following directions. It isn’t what you play a GAME to experience.
Cookiemonger and I argued a bit about this, and there is a *point* to using locked doors and chests, and that’s pacing. It’s important to include things requiring steps to be taken in order — but I’d say that it’s better to NOT use them unless they’re absolutely necessary.
When Egoraptor mentions the exhilarating sprint to the Treasure Chest and the Boss Room, THAT’S when you want to include something like this — for anticipation. But you know how many times you’re allowed to pull that kind of stunt? ONCE. You get to do it ONE TIME, to build anticipation.
You NEVER build a “puzzle” or a “battle” around anticipation. That’s not what thinking or fighting are about. A puzzle is something you put together using your wits, while a battle is fast and furious — at least in an action game anyway, if we’re talking grand strategy battles… it’s a different genre.
When you build a battle around anticipation, it HAS to be an exception to the rule, done for pacing in the larger context of EVERY battle in a game. Most battles must be pitched affairs where everything hinges on getting a couple hits in quickly, while a FEW fights are slog-fests.
Namely those fights with automatons or the undead which help to underline how inhumanly tireless the creatures are.
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There’s a LOT of material worth discussion in that Zelda video, and he makes a point of saying he doesn’t believe any of the games is ‘good’ or ‘better’ — only that they’re different, and that he has his favorites.
On the subject of lock-picking…
I have to say that I am a HUGE fan of the Skyrim/Fallout 3 lock-picking mini-game, and even MORESO of the Fallout 3 computer hacking game being used in combination with electronic locks.
The mini-games were simple enough and enjoyable enough (plus they gave you XP) that I would often do BOTH in order to maximize my rewards. That speaks VOLUMES for what is normally tedious in RPGs.
One part I forgot to add is that one can add equipment and extra hit dice (within reason) to level 1 creatures to make them “leveled” opponents. Doing so is highly recommended for greenskins, who are even given command structures in their monster text in most editions. So, even among a 1st level race of mooks, there ought to be some stratification.
There’s a concept D&D doesn’t handle very well, in “force multipliers.” While 4e represented the pinnacle of set-piece encounters, D&D combat has pretty much *always* supported set-piece puzzles, traps, and battles.
I really think that Force Multipliers were supposed to be treated as either non-standard game-overs or “inevitable plot defeat”. Rather than grind it out and crunch the numbers of a 6 on 100+ battle, it’s easier to say “Though many fell beneath the valiant blows from your blade, alas, wounded and exhausted, you collapse, one by one.”
I’m trying to make force multipliers a thing.
I wrote about this some time back, where each character is supposed to have an “advantage” of some kind that enables them to punch above their weight. I might have even used that as my post title.
Or something like that.
Put another way, every character is a Glass Cannon in a certain context.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GlassCannon
They can dish out a lot of damage but can be overpowered by someone else using one of the basic combat presets. That means one of the most powerful tools in a party’s arsenal is COOPERATION.
A defender is tough and can stand against a striker, but a controller’s attacks will just go around them and hit the party. A leader can outlast a controller with ease, but will be outmaneuvered by a striker.
So a PC played “smart” will achieve a great deal on their own, and taken together a party can become nearly unstoppable.
Not all force multipliers are equal — but I think it should be possible for example, for a small group of PCs working together to take on a single enemy much larger than them.
Statistically speaking, a bunch of 1st-levels might be able to take on a 6th-level ogre or troll. The troll can easily squash them but let’s say they sneak in and blind him by stabbing out his eyes with hot pokers?
That might not sound like such a random or crazy thing to happen in D&D — honestly, I imagine that kind of thing happens all the time. But!
But where it becomes important is in how these creatures are represented statistically. 3e had some tables in the Monster Manual which described “minimum HD” for creatures of sizes above Large (Huge, Gargantuan, etc) and this is like an extension of that concept.
Some monsters are inherently more powerful because they are… inherently more powerful. But not all effects should be translated into “more HD” or “more damage” because of problems like what happened with 3e undead.
In order to make undead that would put up any kind of resistance (since they had no CON score, and thus lousy hp), the designers would inflate the HD — making them impossible for a cleric to turn.
Part of this is, “Each effect in its own place.”
Sometimes a monster will have more HD. Sometimes they’ll do more damage. Sometimes they’ll be a higher level or have access to better spells. Sometimes they’ll have a magic item.
Part of this is creating a system through which you can make these kinds of adjustments without worrying about a cascade of fractures in your game’s balance. It’s about making sure that the designs you come up with, and changes you make actually DO what you want them to DO.
And so forth.