OSSR: 4th edition D&D.

[jt]

Is that the source of that stuff that leaked over Age of Sigmar, or was that popularised beforehand by something else?

Magic had been using it for a long time, and shortly after 4E it started using it a lot more. It was also used quite a bit in Warcraft 3 and even more in World Of Warcraft. Whether that was the originator or it was just an industry wide trend in lazy naming, I don't know.

[maglag]

They have ~8 HD (80hp big Red, 10hp newborn). At high level you're supposed to ride one as a mount

You did? Anybody recalls the exact rules for that?

Bit tangent, but was there ever any efficient way in D&D of a PC actually getting a dragon as a mount? 3e technically had rules for that but unless you were pretty high level you would be getting a meh dragon.

Or any cool mount for the matter. Because it seems like either we got weaksauce stuff like the paladin's mount or uber stuff like the druid's animal companion. Or had to burn a lot of money to buy/train something and it felt more trouble than it was worth.

It just seems a pretty thin line since either your mount is weaker than you and will crumble to area effects, or your mount's as badass as you and then you've got twice as much power as a non-mounted character.

Anybody knows any RPG system that does cool fantasy mounts properly while keeping non-mounted characters viable? D&D or otherwise.

[zeruslord]

Is that the source of that stuff that leaked over Age of Sigmar, or was that popularised beforehand by something else?

Magic had been using it for a long time, and shortly after 4E it started using it a lot more. It was also used quite a bit in Warcraft 3 and even more in World Of Warcraft. Whether that was the originator or it was just an industry wide trend in lazy naming, I don't know.

I think it's driven by a combination of factors: the need for a diverse but logically connected set of combatants and a system where you don't rely on a DM to come up with variations when things get stale (and therefore need to create and name everything that's going to appear beforehand). In MtG and WoW, you actually do need to create and name ten different orcs that do slightly different things for this expansion and then add another ten next year, and the year after that, etc. Your first set might have "Orc Berserker" and "Orc Shaman", but "Bloodrage Berserker" and "Bloodrage Shaman" comes after that, and two years later when the Bloodrage clan is featured again, you're either making up words or moving on to "Bloodrage Shieldbiter" and "Bloodrage Spiritsinger" and there we are.

AoS and 4e don't need to do this for the same reasons that WoW and MtG do it. AoS really doesn't need to do it, except that they want to trademark the name of every miniature and don't think they can get away with giving them totally made up names. In 4e it's mostly that they think they need to provide a unique statblock and name for every orc variant that will ever hit the table, rather than trusting the DM to slap together the level 5 orc barbarian leader based on the level 3 orc barbarians.

[Foxwarrior]

Anybody knows any RPG system that does cool fantasy mounts properly while keeping non-mounted characters viable? D&D or otherwise.

I mean, all you have to do is trade out a fair amount of character power from the rider in exchange for the powerful mount they get. Like, say, with 500 points you could have a 67 point knight riding a 433 point dragon, while someone else is playing a 500 point wizard.

[Orca]

FWIW, PF2 also fails in every way at allowing to people to ride dragons. There's no option to do so, the riding rules are crippling even if you had such an option, and monsters are built differently from anything on the PC side to the point where you are advised to ... somehow ... rebuild a monster if it joins team PC.

[Username17]

Bit tangent, but was there ever any efficient way in D&D of a PC actually getting a dragon as a mount?

To the extent that anything worked in AD&D at all, getting Griffin mounts and Dragon mounts worked well enough. There were listed ways of acquiring them, and gold and time costs associated with training them. And once you did that, the rules for riding them worked about as well as the rules for riding horses.

Dragon Mounts broke in 3rd edition because of the confluence of several factors:

• Dragons became more powerful and physically smaller. Meaning that a Dragon that was a level appropriate companion wasn't big enough to carry your medium sized ass until the game was basically over. That's not an exaggeration for effect: the Adult Green Dragon is the youngest Green Dragon that can be used by a human as a flying mount and it has 20 hit dice.
• The obsessive bean counting of "wealth by level" and gold to equipment conversions had set in, meaning that "displays of wealth" such as special mounts or boats or whatever was simply not something characters wanted to do.
• The massive reduction in gold and expected downtime meant that if you wanted to buy Griffin eggs and train a Griffin mount you could not because you didn't have the spare cash for that and also didn't have the spare time for that.

But getting a dragon mount in AD&D wasn't really a problem. Many iconic characters did exactly that.

-Username17

[tussock]

Cheers, Frank, good stuff.

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It does seem the long names here exist because they expected to be putting out five different monster manuals in five years, and wanted a whole stack of Orcs and Lizardfolk and various other things in each one. Traditionally that would've been giving them an actual name and backstory, or just saying Orc Barbarian 7 and stating that out.

In both cases, with words that meant things, but here their monster manual format doesn't really leave room for those sort of solutions.

@maglag,

Things in 1st edition aren't costed in feats or level limits or anything. If you subdue a dragon it'll submit to you thereafter, there's rules for flying mounts in the DMG, explicitly including Dragons, and the Dragons themselves have suggestions for when they put up with that and when they kill you and/or leave. You've got to be pretty tough to subdue a useful one, and Griffons and Hippogriffs are a bit more common because you can raise them tame if captured young or bred locally, where dragons need a boss keeping them cowed at all times. Horses and things don't get rules to protect them, so if you're going to ride, you eventually need a Dragon, and they are regularly encountered.

As to combat, they fight, and if you can reach you fight too; big penalties for missile fire, and spellcasting is all but forbidden. Easy as that. The AD&D problem of mounts is they are large, get in the way, and don't fit everywhere.

And aye, in point buy games they're just like an ally cost if they're big enough, you might even get to choose how often the GM has to let you use it.

4e mounts will turn up when I run into them, none of it is good.

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There's dragon fluff in 4e too. It threw away so much history and continuity and even intellectual property to tell a story about how Bahamat and Tiamat exist because Io got cut in half with an axe. Also, that they are not literal dragons you can fight, in an edition where they put a demon lord back in this core monster manual. It's just all so incoherent.

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Dragonborn are a new PHB race in 4e, I'll cover that side of all them in the PHB review (being lazy). That makes this effectively four NPCs, level 5 reaction fighter, level 10 1-vs-1 guy, level 13 where ... Skirmishers are rubbish, and level 26 where it stunlocks you for bonus damage, or tries to.

The encounter groups says they hang out in groups of 2-3 with stuff like Redspawn Firebelchers and Rage Drakes, because they are "sellswords, soldiers, or adventurers". But that's not what adventuring parties look like, the entire concept of armies in 4e is just weird, and who exactly are they selling their swords to in any of those groups, the ogre? Same everywhere, but the mechanics and the fluff are just sort of next to each other and not getting on. Counselling needed.

Dragonspawn introduces us to that Redspawn Firebelcher and his buddies, including the Bluespawn Godslayer. They're a replacement for 3e's half-dragons.

TERRIFYING IN STATURE, THE GODSLAYER can lay waste to entire cities. Unlike its more bestial dragonspawn kin, this creature is smart enough to serve anyone capable of buying its loyalty.

But it's only a level 22 Elite Brute with AC 36 and cities are still supposed to have like 10,000 people in them in 4e, so he ain't laying waste to all that much. You don't need a magic weapon to hit it or anything. Also, you can't actually buy it's loyalty. You'd think that'd be a thing when they just said it, but no, this is 4e D&D and that is not allowed and wouldn't work if it was.

Drake are theropod dinos, plus traditional Drakes, plus Pseudodragons because whatever, categories, just chuck 'em in. It's OK, they all have teeth.

Procys are in as the Needlefang Drake Swarm, good to see D&D still absorbing some things from wider culture. The presentation is often rated as the most OP monster in the entire book, for its level.

Minor action trip (!), big bonus damage vs prone, free attack vs everyone who starts adjacent, Soldier numbers, if you compare that to almost everything in the edition, that combo is ridiculously brutal, would let the Godslayer actually level cities. 3e's MM III had Needletooth Swarms that were CR 6 and did less damage, these are indeed mean.

People used five in a fight to mirror the Jurassic Park scene, leading to TPK. Welcome to 4e, one of the pillows has a brick in it.

Drider have half their large statblock to say they can use Web, Fairie Fire, and Darkness, only uniquely so.

Drow have the same stuff as Driders, repeated in each stat block, filling pages. Only some of them are a bit different, or use different actions, or whatever, random. Remember how cool Drow were, back when everyone wanted to play them, well, ask your Dad maybe. Here you can play them easy, no one cares.

Drow Priest has a thing where they are higher level than the others, and give them all +1 to hit and +2 damage for existing. The whole game could've really used that sort of thing as a general mechanic for high level leaders using low level assistants, then they wouldn't have needed 1 hp minions, and PCs could still smash 'em. But ah well, why have a general mechanic when you can have a hundred different specific ones to do the same thing only worse.

Dryad are now boring shrub monsters (with spiky wooden boobs) who disguise themselves as faeries. Faeries also only exist to be fought, so that does nothing. You can play one later on, without the disguise, but lets you starve slower so ... whatever.

Dwarf are the first classic PHB race alphabetically. The depth of AD&D lore, kits like the Hearthguard, Battlerager, Craft Priest, Pest Controller, and Vermin Slayer, the Derro and Duergar, 3e stuff from the Dwarven Defender and onward pushing them into friends of the Stone Elementals, the war machines, traps, so much to pull from!

4e gives us the L4 Dwarf Bolter with a crossbow, and L5 Dwarf Hammerer with warhammer.

Efreet meanwhile, get a Firebade, a Cinderlord, a Flamestrider, a Pyresinger, and a Karadjin, based off nothing and meaning ... nothing. Fluff text says they are all nobles because no Efreeti is a commoner. DC 35 Lore says sometimes they sometimes venture out of the Elemental Chaos, where you will have fought them so you can make that DC 35 check to realise they were there.

The AD&D version of this monster, in 1/3 of a page, check it out 1977 MM ...

The efreet are creatures from the Elemental Plane of Fire, just as djinn come from Plane of Air. They are enemies of the djinn and will always attack when they encounter them. An efreeti can be forced to serve for a maximum of 1,001 days or by causing it to fulfill three wishes. They are not willing servants, and they will seek to pervert the intent of their masters by adhering to the letter of commands.

An efreeti is able to do the following once per day: grant up to three wishes (and go free), become invisible, assume gaseous form, detect magic, enlarge (as a 10th level magic-user), polymorph self, create an illusion with both visual and audial components which will last without concentration until magically dispelled or touched, or create a wall of fire.

An efreeti can also produce flame or cause pyrotechnics as often as desired. Attacks based on fire do no harm the efreet if the fire is of the "normal" sort; magical fire attacks are at -1 on both "to hit" and damage dice.

Efreet can carry up to 7,500 gold pieces weight, afoot or flying, without tiring. They can carry double weight for only a limited time - three turns afoot or but one turn aloft. For each 1,500 gold pieces of weight under 15,000 add one turn to either walking or flying time permitted. After carrying excess weight the efreeti must rest for six full turns.

The fabled City of Brass, citadel of the Efreet, is on the plane from whence they come. Capture of an efreeti is possible there, but tens or even hundreds of efreet would possibly have to be faced also. Efreet are infamous for their dislike of servitude, their desire for revenge, their cruel nature, and their ability to mislead. A powerful Sultan rules the Efreet. He is served by many different sorts of nobles and officials (pashas, deys, amirs, valis, and maliks).

The efreet are able to communicate with any intelligent creature they encounter by means of a limited form of telepathy which enables them to understand and speak appropriately.

Efreet are able to travel the material, elemental, and astral planes.

Now mechanically that's a rat's nest, the AD&D PHB has spells to capture them, but in a fraction of the space and wordcount you have story potential, more abilities, wishes to be cruelly perverted, and a sturdy and functional adventuring buddy that've stayed in the game in one fashion or another until this awful book. That can do everything all this 4e lot can do and more.

I know 3e fucked up wishes so you could chain them and they never backfired, but fix that, don't just throw out everything about everything. Gah!

Eidolon is oddly just called Eidolon. They refer to it as the "'Rogue' Eidolon", but didn't use that as it's name, and I don't even. They want to namename namename everything and there's a monster comes with a name name to start with and they cut one of the bits off to make it less connected with D&D's history.

Eladrin are another new PHB race, not-elves, who as well as presenting a couple NPCs, and also a Bralani of Autumn Winds who does manage to closely remind me of a Bralini, and a Ghaele of Winter who does not remind of a Ghaele at all. They're now all faeries, but live with the other PHB races because that's just what not-elves do.

Elemental are ... like half this book is elementals so far, but these ones are a pair of the old elements stuck together each. There's a Firelasher, a Rockfire Dreadnought, an Earthwind Ravager, and a Thunderblast Cyclone, and I like the concept, it's reasonable mechanics attached, except we already had mixed elementals called quasi-elementals and para-elementals and ... again they threw out something that is fine for something different that is fine. There's no gain here.

Elf are still PHB, now fluffed like crap-tier Eladrin. There's a level 2 Archer and Scout and that is remarkably unthreatening. Human Guards are level 3, and there's a lot more Humans. Again, history, you know, Bladesingers, Arcane Archers, Mage/Thieves, ancient Archmages, whatever, all gone. The Orcs and Goblins in here are gunna mess these two up so bad.

Ettercap have webs and poison, in a faithful and compact representation. Hooray. It works for some of the monsters, just not the interesting ones who borrowed things from the PC side of the game. There are two of them, seemingly because it was too compact, so filler ahoy.

Ettin is L10 Elite Soldier, who acts exactly like it was two monsters with the same stats, and if you don't try to flank it it's probably doing less damage than that Needlefang Drake Swarm. In play it obviously looks mega-hasted, but OK, there's only so much they can do in this action system. Also an Ettin Spirit-Talker with the same trick plus Spirit Call (standard; recharge 5+).
[*]"The ettin spirit-talker initiates a howling chant to demonic spirits, filling the area with swirling spectral forms: close burst 5; +15 vs. Fortitude; 2d6+6 necrotic damage, and the target slides 3 squares."

Heh. My emphasis, that's just about the arcetypical 4e experience, that is. Huge textual lead-in out of nowhere, followed by small damage and slide 3 squares. I couldn't tell you why an Ettin got that power, nor why it does that, and nor could anyone else. It's just there. I'll cover that fully in the PHB bit, where it's much more common.

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I'm looking forward to Gnolls. Almost every entry is just loaded with questions about why were so many weird changes made, when less changes was at least no worse and often seems a better concept even within the limits of 4e.

Things like those Efreet could've been a single half-page block and left them with more capability and ... but everything had to fit a type, and so a multi-capable monster like the classic Efreet got broken up into different Soldier and Artillery and Controller. Blerg, types not fit for purpose, innit.

The format they set themselves is so limited, and then the odd one just works so well within it. I'm sure more could have if they'd figured out what the monsters were supposed to do and given themselves room to do it without forcing everything into such small boxes. The bright spots are few thus far.

[maglag]

Bit tangent, but was there ever any efficient way in D&D of a PC actually getting a dragon as a mount?

To the extent that anything worked in AD&D at all, getting Griffin mounts and Dragon mounts worked well enough. There were listed ways of acquiring them, and gold and time costs associated with training them. And once you did that, the rules for riding them worked about as well as the rules for riding horses.

Dragon Mounts broke in 3rd edition because of the confluence of several factors:

• Dragons became more powerful and physically smaller. Meaning that a Dragon that was a level appropriate companion wasn't big enough to carry your medium sized ass until the game was basically over. That's not an exaggeration for effect: the Adult Green Dragon is the youngest Green Dragon that can be used by a human as a flying mount and it has 20 hit dice.
• The obsessive bean counting of "wealth by level" and gold to equipment conversions had set in, meaning that "displays of wealth" such as special mounts or boats or whatever was simply not something characters wanted to do.
• The massive reduction in gold and expected downtime meant that if you wanted to buy Griffin eggs and train a Griffin mount you could not because you didn't have the spare cash for that and also didn't have the spare time for that.

But getting a dragon mount in AD&D wasn't really a problem. Many iconic characters did exactly that.

-Username17

Thanks!

So if you were a player and wanted a dragon mount in AD&D how would you be expected to get it and how early could you realistically pull it off?

Anybody knows any RPG system that does cool fantasy mounts properly while keeping non-mounted characters viable? D&D or otherwise.

I mean, all you have to do is trade out a fair amount of character power from the rider in exchange for the powerful mount they get. Like, say, with 500 points you could have a 67 point knight riding a 433 point dragon, while someone else is playing a 500 point wizard.

That just reverses the problem of area attacks, now the rider's the one that's going to drop to a nuke that barely fazes the dragon.

[tussock]

Story time, I did see a 5th level AD&D Party get themselves a Red Dragon, an act which in itself killed two PCs. They held it for about two levels, until one day the party got hurt and the dragon didn't, so on the way back out of the dungeon it killed them all and went home.

They did wreck the place for a couple levels though, having a dragon about, even a little one was very powerful. AD&D balance was found through player-chosen difficulty settings, you could go as deep as you liked, and getting better gear, or a dragon, meant people took more risks, levelled up quick, and sometimes that all backfired.

[Username17]

So if you were a player and wanted a dragon mount in AD&D how would you be expected to get it and how early could you realistically pull it off?

You need to be able to "subdue" a dragon, which means fighting it while taking voluntary penalties on your attacks. Also you need to be able to take it back to your house and your house needs to have a treasure room. In AD&D, you get the latter bit at level 9, though conceivably you could get a bunch of gold and gems and buy yourself a fort earlier or you could have an adventure where you cleared monsters out of a fort and then kept the fort, because in AD&D you could do those things because of the lack of "wealth by level" forcing you to sell off all acquired real estate.

You had to run into and then defeat a Dragon big enough to carry you. Dragons were rare, but appeared on all the encounter charts, so iterative probability was that you were going to encounter one at some point. Dragon encounters were incredibly dangerous but also extremely snowbally for both sides. This was an edition where area direct damage was "very good" and Dragons had a breath weapon whose damage value was "their current hit points." So if they get the drop on the PCs, it's save or die from dragon flame for basically the whole party and even if you make your save you're still probably mostly dead. But if you get the drop on the dragon and get a few major hits in, the breath weapon is "save versus trivial damage you don't care about."

You could realistically imagine a scenario in which you bested a ridable Dragon at level 5 or 6, but then you'd better gain some levels quick because you aren't "strong enough" or "rich enough" to keep its loyalty and the DM is encouraged to have your dragon fuck off when they are tired of you solving all wilderness encounters with flame strafe. At level 9 the party Fighter is simply given class features that allow them to keep a Dragon Mount indefinitely, and that's also coincidentally the level where you don't have to be extremely lucky to subdue a dragon in the first place.

So some parties would have a Dragon around for a while as a Pokémon or special mount at level 5 for "until the DM got sick of it" and level 9 dragon mounts were considered normal bling.

The core issue with mounts is that in AD&D AoE direct damage is high quality offense that people use because it's good, and mounts have no special protections at all. By level 9, even a Pegasus or something is just going to fucking die if the party gets fireballed and it fails its save. And if the party gets fireballed twice, it's going to die whether it saves or not. If you wanted to play a cavalier, you needed a dragon mount by level 9. The Paladin's special mount was a "cruel hoax" class feature, because it wasn't tough enough to survive mid level adventurers and you didn't get a new one for a long ass time.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

Anybody knows any RPG system that does cool fantasy mounts properly while keeping non-mounted characters viable? D&D or otherwise.

Earthdawn? There were lots of problems with the mechanics, but there was a whole class that revolved around having a mount, and you could 3e-style take a level or two "dip" into it to get a few mount-related abilities.

[OgreBattle]

Warhammer Fantasy/40k is where I'm most familiar with mounts. Straight upgrade in power, balancing point is points value.

I don't like the idea in D&D of say a Paladin's mount being a class feature that is balanced against a rogue's roguiness or wizard's batmanness. I feel party power should be determined the same way as monster power, if the party happens to have minions and mounts with them then they've got a higher CR now.

[tussock]

It helped in oldschool D&D that fights weren't balanced at all, difficulty was largely player controlled and you could just roll through more fights or go deeper into the woods or dungeon to make use of your sudden power gains should they happen. 4e by comparison is very tight difficulty control, every fight is finely tuned and an extra guy on either team makes them very different.

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Flameskull is an obscure D&D monster, classically a puzzle box thing where there's a lot of wrong ways to attack it, and it's a weird buddy to pick up if you solve the puzzle without killing it. None of that's a thing in 4e so this one has the fire beams and one of its old spells in each type and that's that. Zappity zap.

Formorian are the twisted giants, now native to the underdark of the feywild, which is now a place that exists for Formorians to be from. Like the Cyclops, they have Evil Eye powers that aren't like anyone else's Evil Eye powers and obviously could've been named better. As giants they are higher level than some humanoids, the same level as others, and lower level than some. They get a full page artwork that must be about half black ink, and I wouldn't know they have one big eye and one small one without reading the fine print of their Evil Eye powers.

Foulspawn are ... uh ... hmm.

That one's power is he gets a little better at hitting you after you've hit him enough. It may not be terribly interesting, but I do appreciate when their format collapses down to so little. They even gave it tactics just to be complete. "This fearless foulspawn attacks with its bloodsoaked fists. It fights to the death." Exciting, isn't it.

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Just to mention: a lot of things in this manual do not collapse well, quite simple ideas like "can breathe fire twice" take up ten lines. They're using a format for the monsters full of abbreviations and symbols and colour cues and extremely abstract formalisms at times, which is hard work to read. And yet it all does such a shit job at actually compressing the information they wanted to get across with so many of these monsters.

So. I guess they didn't really want it to. It's the conflicting design goals here, monsters have to each do one or two things only (a couple more for solos), monster groups almost always want lots of variants on a theme and room for more, and they expect to be filling a 4e Monster Manual 5 in 2013 with more of the same. So you have simple concepts with limited abilities that need to take up a fair bit of space, and then some monsters demand complexity above that and the format just can't handle it at all.

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Galeb Dur show what the format does handle. They have powers that slow PC movement, and others that trip and push them 1 square. Action denial vs melee, but because it's all based on standard conditions and pushing, it fits in small stat blocks. This is what they wanted their game to be, this monster doing its thing and other monsters taking advantage of it and players having to work around the limitations monsters are throwing at their basic plan. Which is an extremely narrow game space.

And of course, it's all a pale shadow of the spanner that classic Galeb Dur can throw in your gears, they have good spells classically.

Gargoyle are often found with Galeb Dur, and Gibbering Mouthers. That's just a thing where you don't need to turn so many pages to find the other ones, and quite common throughout the book. It's like making quick teams for school sports. They can fly out of reach and then sulk in stone form with massive resist all damage and regeneration. I'm pretty sure that's a very, very slow TPK if any DM wants it.

Ghost hides in the floor. Because everything is arbitrary and unique here, stuff like the Haunt which have always been loaded with arbitrary unique powers fit right in.

But the famed wail (uh, Terrifying Shriek) of the Banshee does 2d8+3 and push 5 and immobilise (save ends). Come on, 4e design and development team, make it a Solo, make it fucking worthy of the name of a 9th level Wizard spell in Wizard edition. Even in tiny low-level skirmish edition here there is room for classically very scary and dangerous things to at least use all the tools you have toward that end. Instead of being some garbage bag of a level 12 controller. Level 12? So many questions.

Ghoul have always been cool, three paralysing attacks, low level terrors, and high level "not going there" mobs. 4e are not any of that. There's a very weak stun, but it's just not the same. The high level version does the same thing by using different mechanics. Why not, right.

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Giant should be another gigantic entry, surely just use the 6 classics and you'd still have ... 32 others waiting for the remaining publications, plus the standard Jarls and such, easy money. So of course they did not do that, because this is 4th edition, and everything must be bad. For each Death, Hill, Fire, and Storm giant, there is also a Titan of the same type, which is basically the same monster only a couple levels higher and Elite.

5 pages, 9 stat blocks, it would've fit the classics so well, as is. Put titans in later books if you like, make them epic solos, just ... there's not many consistencies in all of D&D history, going back to '74, and this was another couple of them gone for no gain, this change doesn't even do anything other than annoy customers.

4e was already mechanically very new, translating the regular starting monsters was more than sufficient, and had copious room for expansion. They already have the Death Giant and Formorian in here, but not Stone or Cloud or Frost giants, and this format naturally adores the Hill Giant Chief, Frost Giant Yarl, and Fire Giant King! Also not here.

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Gibbering Beast include the Mouther, and low-hovering Abomination, and ... another beholder, only with more mouths. I would've thought probably just use variant beholders in the beholder entry, really, rather than this concept, there's tonnes of them and are mostly simple enough for 4e.

Githyanki and Githzerai are where this book should shine, if it was going to do so at all. They've had uniquely named high level variants with relatively undefined power sets (or, at least a hint of that) since the original Fiend Folio. The early Supreme Leader, Captain, Knight/Monk, Warlock, Sergeant, Gish/Zerth, and minions, across 10 levels at least. Easy. But no! So little in here is what it should be. They got a Gish and Zerth (I mean, yay, that is good) but at the top of the food chain instead of the bottom as they belong, then Cenobite and Mindslicer and Warrior and Mindmage. OK, it's psionic and wizard themed, they even have Encounter and Daily powers, the Cenobite ... seems a wasted name there, but someone tried, and it's got good bits. Nice art too.

B-, shows skill, has read background material, could do better.

Gnoll. I appreciate Gnolls. They're unlovable. People enjoy them as foes. They classically capture, fatten, torture, and eat everyone, and there's not much to like about that other than killing them. But they do camp up until they run out of food locally, so you can find them and rescue people, huzzah. Imperatively heroic adventure, good stuff.

Except in 4e, where now they are the mortal extension of the Demon Lord Yeenoghu (demon poop). Run around and kill absolutely everything, and always on the move, and also have a camp where they have slaves. But the slaves now fight to the death with the Gnolls, obviously. So, I guess, if you hear Gnolls are nearby, just wait for them to go be someone else's problem.

4e, it's a small skirmish battle and the PCs will kill the hostages because they are fighting with their kidnappers and also all of their family is dead anyway and they are crazy and evil. Still unlovable, just why even use them, that's not a fun story.

Gnome is now a monster, rargh.

Goblin and also Bugbear and Hobgoblin.

A member of the goblin species has skin of yellow, orange, or red, often shading to brown.

Like, all the Goblins you could ever need for low level anything are here. This is more goblins than anything ever. It's very complete. There are more in other books though, because of course there are, one of them might pick up a slightly shorter spear.

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4th edition art, all shadows from the start.

The first module came out before these books, H1, Keep on the Shadowfell. It includes many of the lowbie monsters herein, including various Hobgoblins. A lot of Hobgoblins. A lot of Hobgoblin Soldiers, even. And they must have playtested it, it's in the lead published module that shows off the edition. They get +2 AC as a constant bonus on top of being a Soldier. So you need like a 14+ to hit them, at a time when you've only got 2 encounter powers, and they probably take 5 hits to go down anyway, which with just one attack per round you're talking 14 combined rounds of attacks per Hobgoblin Soldier.

They are explicitly very determined to not stop fighting, and there's 11 Soldiers, plus 18 more hits for the Minions (thankfully just 36 attacks average), and with all the rest of the Hobgoblins it's about 50 rounds of combat each for five PCs! It's four fights technically, but the text and layout encourage them to join into one last mega-grind eventually.

I note this because people were legit saying the fights were extremely grindy before the books even hit the stores, because someone decided the special power that Hobgoblins get is +2 AC for standing next to another Hobgoblin, and then went and stood a lot of them next to each other and the map backs you into a corner and makes you grind it out in narrow corridors to limit their numbers advantage.

OK, so humanoids have a theme power. Goblins shift a square when you miss them, which is pretty much useless but does take time to resolve and take note of them having used. Bugbears have an encounter action that gives them +1d6 damage if they attack with advantage. Most are like that, fussy stuff that the DM has to track but not really doing much, then the Hobgoblin's thing made them just awful to fight, a sneak preview of the awful everyone would be at higher levels.

I saw people grind out those Hobgoblin Soldier fights, and carried on playing, and noticed that the fights as they levelled up just got more and more grindy and soon started repeating this horrible experience. Word of mouth just kept getting worse.

..., a hobgoblin patrol might be present. However, don't use a hobgoblin patrol if the players seem bored with hobgoblins.

Dear game designer person who wrote this. Please inform your boss about the issues with Hobgoblins being super fucking grindy boring crap before the game comes out.

Hobgoblins used to be cool, man.

---

Golem have Flesh and Stone and not Clay or Iron. Same issue as Giants, history of the entire game, "4th edition" of what?! There are ... wow, 92 other Golems for D&D. Same bad choice, they've even got other golem-things in other sections here. It just keeps happening, they were super-determined to give people reasons to not buy in on day one in this book. To eye it as if it had twice the price at least.

They are Elite so now come in pairs for no reason at all, their quite simple special powers are gone, they get a trample attack, which is different to everyone else's trample attack, and also not called a trample attack, but that's what it is.

Gorgon are Iron and Storm because filler, there's usually a 2nd one of each monster type and they often don't benefit by it's existence. Anyway, standard Trample rules, and the usual two failed saves on (save ends) type SOD. Another monster fits the system nicely enough, but also much less of a "run the hell away" type problem.

Grell are super-sneaky flying pack-hunting Carrion Crawlers, except they eat you much quicker, devastating monster classically with a couple weak points. Much like Carrion Crawlers, these don't really do any of that any more and turning 11-attack stun-spam monsters into 1-attack monsters obviously changes how they function in the game. They can potentially stun (save ends) here but, that's not the same thing at all.

Grick I don't think I've ever used, and I don't see any reason to change that with these ones.

Griffon includes Hippogriffs, are there to be flying combat mounts and look to do a pretty good job of it. Aside from how annoying 4e is to even read, let alone use at the table, system-wise these are good, they're doing reasonable things.

Grimlock are immune to gaze, blindsight, very bland. 4e represents these sort of differences very easily, they suit being Minions and a boss type, and that's what they are in this case. Yay. I mean, the things 4e does well aren't terribly interesting but at least this was done well.

Guardian are the Shield Guardian and a bigger one. Feels a bit like a thing NPCs get now and you don't. Which, well, it's still not the Clay Golem and Iron Golem, is it.

---

Mike Mearls has often publicly stressed that 4th edition was reviewed as roughly "it does not feel like D&D", and that he tried to fix that in various ways, but also said that no one at the office at the time knew what that meant. I get the feeling he still doesn't know what that means.

[*]Classic 10x Grell get surprise and 100 paralysing attacks go off before you can move
[*]but it turns out that's OK because at least someone has Freedom of Movement for just this sort of occasion
[*]and Grell are reasonably slow, especially when they're busy eating the Rogue.

D&D is full of that sort of bullshit, and none of it is in the 4th edition. There's room to change heaps about the game, rules, mechanics, but the content of the monster manual and what those things can do, that's been tested by millions of people for 30 years before this book was written, the bad things were gone, fuck Nilbolgs, but don't mega-nerf the Ghoul and Grell and Gorgon into some pointless nothing monsters and tell us it's D&D. And don't make it take two whole fucking game sessions to fight a few hobgoblins after you've levelled up a couple times. Gah!

[Yesterday's Hero]

This is a very ambitious review. Nice.

I played 4e about a dozen times. Sometimes as a DM but most of the time as a player. Combat was super grindy. One of those sessions was with a group I met online, I played with them only that one time. It was a 5th or 7th lvl game. They had this hose rule:

Monster HP is divided by 2, Monster damage is multiplied by 2. Fights were super dangerous but I think it made it better.

[maglag]

Even wotc themselves eventually just said to halve all the monster HP in one of the erratas but it boggles the mind they ever thought it was a good idea to have such grindy combat.

[nockermensch]

Awesome.

I didn't think I could get any more angry and disappointed by 4E, but this review is proving me wrong. I was SEETHING (save ends) at several points and we're not even at Paragon Paths or Skill Challenges yet.

[erik]

Awesome.

I didn't think I could get any more angry and disappointed by 4E, but this review is proving me wrong. I was SEETHING (save ends) at several points and we're not even at Paragon Paths or Skill Challenges yet.

This is all just the crust of a rotten meat pie. The monster manual may be the largest failure of 4e, but it was the same errors set on repeat. The real meaty bits will be in the other core books.

[Username17]

Just to mention: a lot of things in this manual do not collapse well, quite simple ideas like "can breathe fire twice" take up ten lines. They're using a format for the monsters full of abbreviations and symbols and colour cues and extremely abstract formalisms at times, which is hard work to read. And yet it all does such a shit job at actually compressing the information they wanted to get across with so many of these monsters.

So. I guess they didn't really want it to. It's the conflicting design goals here, monsters have to each do one or two things only (a couple more for solos), monster groups almost always want lots of variants on a theme and room for more, and they expect to be filling a 4e Monster Manual 5 in 2013 with more of the same. So you have simple concepts with limited abilities that need to take up a fair bit of space, and then some monsters demand complexity above that and the format just can't handle it at all.

You can't really understand any of the design decisions of 4th edition until you wrap your mind around the first commandment of 4th edition game design: Save It For the Sequel. Every single decision is geared towards filling the page count in a manner that leaves "premium content" for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th iterations of the core books. This means that not only is every single thing intentional crippleware, but every format is designed to chew through wordcount and pagespace to an unbelievable degree.

It's several layers of pagespace gobbling. So Andy Collins insisted that there only be eight classes in the basic book (to the point that when they added the Warlock they took out the Swashbuckler to make room), but each class was defined very rigidly so that there was still room to make expansion material to "allow" you to field obvious concepts within classes that they already made. So the Rogue can only use a finesseable blade or a hand crossbow, so if you want to play Rogue who happens to use a morningstar or sap you need expansion material. But that expansion material requires all new powers, and each power takes about 20% of a fucking page. So when you produce the "Obviously Rogues can use the sacred weapon of Hruggek" errata, it isn't one sentence, it isn't one paragraph, it isn't even one page. It's like four or five pages and it creates a "build" that allows you to play a Rogue who specializes in like one of two weapons that were inexplicably off the Rogue power list in the first place.

Everything is like this. It's a matryoshka doll where every part of the format is designed to waste space and be deliberately and obviously missing classic elements that can be added later but also to contain sub-parts that are themselves designed to waste space and be deliberately and obviously missing classic elements that can be added later and to be part of larger systems that are designed to waste space and be deliberately and obviously missing classic elements that can be added later. It's fractal.

So consider our Rogue. Supported in the basic book are two knife-based Rogues, one Charisma based and the other not. We've mentioned a bit about how if we zoom in the Rogue is made out of powers, and those powers take up an enormous amount of room (a typical character class in the 4E PHB is 12-14 thousand words), and the coverage is amazingly and deliberately sparse. If you wanted to play a Rogue with a Sap or a Rogue who specialized in being perceptive, fuck you, because powers that might cover those possibilities had been "saved for the sequel." But let's zoom out a bit. Rogue is a "Martial Character Class" and despite there being fucking four Martial classes in the PHB, there are still only three out of four of the "roles" represented. There's no Martial Controller in the PHB (not that Noonan ever satisfactorily explained what the fuck a Controller was supposed to be). Completing the role coverage for Martial characters, or indeed Arcane or Divine characters was deliberately saved for the sequel. But let's zoom out another layer: the power sources aren't complete either. The basic book promised Psionic Heroes, Primal Heroes, Shadow Heroes, Elemental Heroes, and Ki Heroes. And that last one never happened because people pointed out that it was kind of racist, and the one before that didn't happen because the game fucking died.

But consider what that would have meant had everything actually blundered on ahead. Each "build" packet of a class would be like 12,000 words, and each class would have two or three of them. And there'd be one to 3 classes for each of four roles for each of eight power sources. That's over one and a half million words, just for the character classes and their powers. We're not even getting into the weeds of feats, magic items, and epic destinies. Actually filling out the proposed framework for character classes alone would have used up considerably more wordcount than Remembrance of Things Past by Proust.

The only shocking thing to me is that, having committed themselves to this frankly insane line of development, they never had a classplosion. Having left themselves open to writing 12,000 words about expansion material for Necromancers who wanted to wield a knife instead of a staff or Samurai who wanted to wield a naginata instead of a katana, they... did not do that. The class list simply languished in disrepair the entire time. It was weird. As I showed in jest with the Bane Guard, writing a 4th edition class takes one person like one day.

-Username17

[Krusk]

You can't really understand any of the design decisions of 4th edition until you wrap your mind around the first commandment of 4th edition game design: Save It For the Sequel. Every single decision is geared towards filling the page count in a manner that leaves "premium content" for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th iterations of the core books.

to emphasize this. A sales point was the commitment to a new players handbook, monster manual, and DMG every single year. It sounds good "More content than ever before!" but in practice it was simply "less content in every book!" which people hated.

They hit it with MM 1/2/3, PHB 1/2/3, and DMG 1/2 before dipping into essentials, and then that other rewrite that wasn't essentials, and then obscurity until 5e. By the 3rd phase of core books they had backed off from annual releases on these. (yes everything is core[4e market speak] but you know what i mean).


- I linked to the archive because after the 43rd content purge from their site i assumed nothing would be there. I didn't even look at their site. Why they chose to leave this article highlighting their incompetence up is a mystery for me.

[jt]

The yearly PHB with eight classes was their only planned source of new classes. When they saw that people didn't like new build options in Martial Power they decided that the future non-PHB supplements would only give material that existing characters can use, going in the opposite direction from opening up new character concepts. (Also where the fuck did they see that? Bravura Warlords were the single most popular piece of 4E content in my corner of the world.)

The unbelievable amount of shit-shoveling it takes to write a 4E class also probably got in the way. I'm impressed that you managed to write one in a day; the time I tried it I gave up at the end of heroic tier. You get to write up to three interesting things in the class's core mechanics section then the rest is finding a hundred ways to write 2[W] + Slide 2 squares. If I was a writer on the team and realized that the system needs more classes, I don't think I'd be kicking that suggestion up the management chain.

[Dean]

Bit tangent, but was there ever any efficient way in D&D of a PC actually getting a dragon as a mount? 3e technically had rules for that but unless you were pretty high level you would be getting a meh dragon.

Or any cool mount for the matter.

Besides many monsters like Griffons just having rules in their entries for how to get them, as Frank said, there are multiple classes I can think of that just gave you the ability to get a monster of your choice as class features. Without going back into the books I recall a Paladin kit that had the option to set aside XP based on the hit dice of the monster he wanted and when he had paid off the xp debt he just got the Unicorn or Dragon he wanted. The XP cost might be painful so the better option would be to play a Fighter with the Beast-Rider kit. Beast-Rider may be the most powerful 2e option ever printed but it's not talked about because we were all idiots back then and didn't know true power from our own assholes. Beast-Rider gave you a monster of your choice from a list at level 1 and on that list were things like Dragons and Elephants and Giant Fire Lizards and so on. The "Dragon" entry did have a note that it might only be appropriate for high power games but it's supposed to be totally acceptable to start off in a level 1 party where everyone has like 3hp and can't do anything with a pet that has 50hp and gets 5 attacks a round that deal triple what anyone elses hits do.

So you could get an amazing mount at level 1 in AD&D if you picked the right kit. At least once before your DM banned the shit out of it.

[LR]

They hit it with MM 1/2/3, PHB 1/2/3, and DMG 1/2 before dipping into essentials, and then that other rewrite that wasn't essentials, and then obscurity until 5e.

I wouldn't exactly call 5e a move out of obscurity. 5e has been in the 'death throes of 4e' state for its entire run.

[Username17]

The unbelievable amount of shit-shoveling it takes to write a 4E class also probably got in the way. I'm impressed that you managed to write one in a day; the time I tried it I gave up at the end of heroic tier. You get to write up to three interesting things in the class's core mechanics section then the rest is finding a hundred ways to write 2[W] + Slide 2 squares. If I was a writer on the team and realized that the system needs more classes, I don't think I'd be kicking that suggestion up the management chain.

The powers themselves are very rigidly templated. You can do an awful lot with CTRL-V. And the differences between powers are telegraphed well in advance by the fact that the "builds" you intend to cover are very rigid as well. Once you decide that one of your builds is Charisma/Constitution, you make at least one power that can be used by your Charisma/Constitution build at each level. It's not difficult, it's Mad Libs. Even the color templating is sufficiently rigid that you can CTRL-V your way through the entire experience. More than half the text is copypasta that you fill into your design document in two minutes - and more than half the rest is "forced" once you decide what your "builds" are supposed to be.

Now there's obviously a case to be made that my Bane Guard didn't do all the things I wanted it to. The rules on interrupt actions are so restrictive that the way I tried to write rider effects onto bonus movement "doesn't work" and the synergy with the Kobold and Goblin racial powers isn't really there. But that's the kind of thing that could be edited in in post with replacement effects rather than bonus effects. But I never did that because part of my point with the class was to see how much space could be covered on a 4e class with a single day's work. And it does have much better coverage and playability than the Warlock or Paladin from the basic book.

-Username17

[tussock]

Y'all keep getting ahead of me. Forgive my small repeats of what others have said before in this thread, I'm writing these in rather short efforts through the day.

---

On we go, woohoo.

Hag had the decency to cover the shame of not being able to make the extensive classic hag powers happen at all, by changing their names. They did in past times represent quite a depth of legend, but these have, you know, 1d6+3 and push 3 squares. There's also a Rend one and a Vampiric Touch one, but eh.

The Night Hag is still here, and their haunting of your nightmares from afar is now just a thing where they sleep you after a hit and failed save, and then hit to vanish from combat and just do automatic damage until you die, because you are unconscious (no save). Changed in errata to unconscious (save ends), otherwise ... um, it never ends and you just die.

Because durations are all 2 rounds or infinity, except when they wrote "until the end of the encounter", it's just not all the authors seem to know that was allowed. This whole thing, just so bad on so many levels, because that doesn't work as a (save ends) either.

Halfling remains in the PHB, and these ones are better than the Elfs. The book notes they're tougher than they look, but what? Stuff in 4e is just random arbitrary levels, Drow are L13, they look just like L2 Elfs, who look just like the L26 Eladrin, tough isn't a "look" in 4e, it's just an arbitrary number that raises all your attacks, defences, and hit points.

Harpy is pull 3 squares and immobilise (save ends), sustain minor, but they have to explicitly note that the save also stops it being sustained, and that's awful. They sort of do what they used to, it's just rubbish and won't work, when it used to work and be a serious problem. There's a 5+ recharge stun, but mostly the PCs are happy you immobilised them in melee range, and that's not how Harpies work.

It's just, again, these fucking powers are all arbitrary and anything goes, they're perfect tools for describing classic harpies pulling classic harpy bullshit, and they just scrupulously eliminated everything like that, and the result is all garbage.

---

Did they read all those memes about how save-or-die sucks (in an environment where people often needed like 13+ to save at high level), and think to themselves; hey, instead of letting saving throws work, let's try having nothing interesting or difficult ever happen in the game, ever, that'll be fun; hmm?

Because there is a lot of shit in this book where things that used to be dangerous instead just slide you 3 squares and do piddly shit damage and then you walk up and hit the monster again like that didn't even happen, because sliding things 3 squares is not an actual problem!

---

Helmed Horror enters the mainline Monster Manual for the first time, and ... come on. They're not interesting other than their stuff that this one doesn't have. And they didn't use the Battle Horror for the bigger one and it would've been better here than what they did, it has two spells, that's normal for a 4e Elite.

This format these could've been good for it, knock it's limbs off and have it's allies put them back on to heal it, you can just do that in 4th edition, healed by magic missiles and just call lots of basic wizard-monster and PC attacks "magic missile". The fact it was a walking detect lies machine also, I know, useless in 4e because 4e is just little skirmishes and nothing else.

Homunculus were a little piece of the caster who did odd jobs, bad at fighting because they hurt their creator when they die. Here they just fight you. Fighty McFightfight.

Included is the Iron Cobra makes it in from the Fiend Folio, already crapped on in 3rd edition with the poison nerfs, here it is even more useless with no reason to exist.

Hook Horror in from Basic, rightly so.

Should've really been a Brute, for some reason has a Claw/Claw/Bite routine when all the traditional Claw/Claw/Bite monsters don't (look how easy it was, this fucking book, and they mostly haven't bothered), but you know, this works in 4e, and they actually wrapped the art around the text a bit (by having a space in the art for a large block of column text to fit). The 6+ recharge thing even, well, makes you charge it again, which is an actual high point for this awful book.

I'm biased for Hook Horrors and this format doesn't ruin them. Are you sick of the little brown stat blocks yet? BECAUSE I AM.

Horse can be ridden. Warhorse gives you a damage bonus on charges.

Hound does not include regular hounds, which, like, dog armour is an option for surviving low level D&D, where this you survive because very few of these pillows have bricks in them. Hell Hounds, Shadow Mastiffs Hounds, and Wild Hunt Hounds, the last of which hang out with that Bralani from earlier because he wouldn't want to be confused with a traditional Bralani for too long.

Human have some quite racist entries in monster manuals in olden days. In this they are a shattered empire who have grand plans for restoring imperial domination and bringing about cultural annihilation of all others. Fair enough, but, I don't know, maybe have someone worth fighting for? No, this is the monster book, everything here is for fighting against. rargh

Hyrda woo! So easy to do in 4e and instead it's not here. AGAIN. There's three of them because their bland nothing is sometimes acid and sometimes acid and fire. The Hook Horror is more mechanically unique than these, that is insane. Fuck this book.

Hyena are only cool because they run with Gnolls, and Gnolls aren't cool in this, so neither are Hyena. Simple, innit.

Kobold can shift one square as a minor action and, yeah, that's less annoying than Goblins by a long way because it happens on their own turn. There's 6 of them on three pages and you fight them a lot in H1, and them being shifty doesn't ever really amount to anything. They do not include a Sorcerer, which is a bad choice.

Kruthik are from 3e's Miniatures Handbook, which means they're from the 3e Miniatures game, which means they exist because it was an cheap mini to paint. Their leader doubles the damage of the Brutes they are surrounded by, which hurts.

---

Indeed, double damage and half hit points on all the monsters at all times was a general solution to the numeric scale problems of this 4th edition Monster Manual (cheers, Yesterday's Hero), often noted by its greatest supporters. "Grindy? Not really," they'd say "just half all their hit points and double their damage." Like it was a small thing.

Which is extraordinary really. That's a long way to miss by. It brings all the encounter and daily powers from the players into being a big deal, monsters that change when bloodied suddenly change really quick so they feel like a response to what you did instead of just something that eventually happened. The vaguely mean stuff on the monsters gets much nastier.

It makes some monster tricks weaker, because the game expects them to throw a lot of those attacks where you have to be hit and then fail two saves for something to happen, but most of them have damage attached that gets better so it uses up the healing surges, and that's all 4th edition combat is anyway.

Hell, the game's still more playable than the default if you cut monsters back to quarter hit points and use twice as many of them, and you can run dynamic fights with growing numbers and rapid reinforcements and full action mounts and summons and allies and all sorts of shit the game used to support. Daily powers can often one-shot things, even bosses go down to focus fire satisfyingly fast, and the Minions aren't so wildly different to the rest. That's dynamic fights, things happening, changes. Just have to select the monsters very carefully because some of them are awful to keep track of if there's even one.

---

Kuo-Toa have a Whip and Monitor but again they're wrong, the Monitor does not look anything like a Monk, and the Whips should not be the ones with the Lightning. The guy with the Harpoon should the highest level and an Elite Soldier. Blergh.

There's whole books dedicated to the traditional Kuo-Toa hierarchy and their how their roles and powers work well to break down party cohesion and they just sort of didn't bother, when this is the whole goal of the edition. They consider the name itself one of their precious IP (used here for the purpose of review, etc) and they just kinda ignored it and mixed it all up for no reason. Almost like someone else was making a Kuo-Toa rip off and wanted to just change everything enough to avoid a charge of stealing the IP.

Lamia are an old puzzle monster, not really anyone's favourite because illusions into wisdom drain into being eaten is hard to play fair against rather than just meta-game and not do that. 4e would seem like the sort of place you could make that work in a way, because illusions that pull and immobilise and a slow acting domination up close that needs reset all the time, all on a highly mobile base, it's just what 4e does.

Instead this is a completely new type of monster, which is bugs in the shape of a woman who stunlocks you and breaks into bugs to eat you. Which is another thing you can just do with 4th edition. No one was terribly sad to lose the old Lamia, and people liked the new imagery here, it's creepy, but fucking pick a new name and make the old Lamia better later.

Wanted to fill books and then sometimes just this instead. Inconsistent, they are. Like the Succubus, the Archons, so random.

Larva Mage for instance, a pile of worms that are a Lich. Just like that, new thing.

Lich actually reform from their phylactery 1d10 days later, if killed in combat, which it notes in their combat-only stat block, so apparently all those other non-combat things could just be in here too if people had cared to include them. Instead of this book being almost entirely grind.

One of the liches has one spell. One. 5+ recharge. That's dead lazy. There's obviously space underneath for another spell. There's also a Ritual that's in the book with them to turn PCs into Liches too, template in the DMG, though that makes them nothing like these monsters at all. I mean. It's just. All so bad.

Lizardfolk in 3e's MM III got Blackscale and Poison Dusk versions, like the Warhammer Saurus and Skink. Which I don't mind, because appropriating everything is a proper D&Dism, including stealing back shit that was stolen from you in the first place. But there are variant Lizardmen in the game's history everywhere so they could've also used Gurrash and Cayma instead, especially here.

Anyway, including a Blackscale gives them license to call the regular ones Greenscale, which they do. There's one with a spear, one with a club and blowgun, and one casts Entangle and Stinking Cloud and then also uses a spear, only that takes a page and a half to say in 4th edition. That bit Frank said about filling space, yes it is.

Lycanthrope are only two, and they got rid of the curse of Lycanthropy, so they're really just a rat man and a wolf man who lose half their powers by changing shape either way. It's elegantly simple and so completely tragic that they just skipped the only bit that matters.

Magma Beast are two pages that would've easily fit the rest of the Lycanthropes.

Manticore are more accurate when someone is riding them. Terrible kite monster design with infinite tail spikes. Not having ranged strikers sometimes hurts a lot.

Marut are no longer Lawful mystical oath enforcers, Lawful isn't even a thing here. Just leave them out, really, they left out so much, and then didn't leave out things they don't support any more.

Medusa have a Gaze which people who are blind have immunity to! Technically in the DMG blindness always makes you immune to gaze, but it only says that for the Medusa Gaze, so I don't know which one is which. This is the thing with every power being written separately to the others, random little changes that get a bit confusing.

Thus far, other than randomly high damage here and there, Petrifying Gaze is about as mean as the game gets.

Close blast 5; blind creatures are immune; +21 vs Fortitude; the target is slowed (save ends); First Failed Save: The target is immobilised instead of slowed (save ends); Second Failed Save: The target is pertrified (no save).

And what the fuck happens if I open my eyes at the start of my turn, and close them again at the end of my turn, because that attack is a standard action, and the nastiest attack in the game is not even a thing. I mean ... can someone tell me?

Mind Flayer exploded all over my monster manual.

That is what happens with monsters who do anything interesting, it just goes everywhere and gets super hard to work out what's even going on, let alone use at the table. 4e is very, very busy for GMs when this stuff turns up. Let's see.

• Basic attack is a Grab, so that's move action A-skill vs Fort to escape.
• Thrall making works vs Grabs/Stuns, but has to reduce you to 0 hp first.
• Mind Blast is sad, area dazed is very nice but it's not area stunned. At some point in development this must have been a stun, because the brain burrow works on stuns.
• Enslave is tempting to not use it because honestly, who wants to track that shit.
• Illusion is too good to pass up but why is it here, there's enough here.
• Cradle is an escape, though it's the usual 4e small scale skirmish non-escape sort of escape.
• And it has an interrupt, because that's just what we need at this point.

So that's four recharge dice going and packs of per-round saves and escape checks going, conditions with stacks of modifiers to everything. People ended up using, can I find an image ...


yes, all sorts of custom shit to try and keep track of not just monsters like this, but also the ridiculous number of picky player created conditions, that ... I'll get there, it's really much worse for what the PCs can put out at modest levels. Heh, even programmers just writing their own custom stuff to handle all the tracking.

Anyway, compare! 2nd edition Monstrous Manual; Mind Flayer

Combat: A mind flayer's preferred method of attack is the mind blast, projected in a cone 60 feet long. 5 feet wide at the mind flayer, and 20 feet wide at the opposite end. All within the cone must make a saving throw vs. wands or be stunned and unable to act for 3d4 rounds. The illithid tries to grab one or two stunned victims (requiring normal attack rolls if others try to prevent this) and escape with them.
The illithid keeps some victims as slaves and feeds on the brains of the others. When devouring the brain of a stunned victim, it inserts its tentacles into the victim's skull and draws out its brain, killing the victim in one round. A mind flayer can also use its tentacles in combat; it does so only when surprised or when attacking a single, unarmed victim. A tentacle which hits causes 2 hp damage and holds the victim. A tentacle does no damage while holding, and can be removed with a successful bend bars/lift gates roll. Once all four tentacles have attached to the victim, the mind flayer has found a path to the brain and kills the victim in one round. If preferred, the DM can simply roll 1d4 for the number of rounds required to kill a struggling victim.
A mind flayer can also use the following arcane powers, one per round, as a 7th-level mage: suggestion, charm person, charm monster, ESP, levitate, astral projection, and planeshift. All saving throws against these powers are made at a -4 due to the creature's mental prowess.
If an encounter is going against a mind flayer, it will immediately flee, seeking to save itself regardless of its treasure or its fellows.

Traditional monsters can do a lot more, and it's all massively simpler to run. They have mean powers but use them to capture people and charm spam them for enslaving so you get a chance to escape as they eat the henchmen. And they have like 40 hp, instead of 324 hp, so making them run away isn't hard. This game should feel very bad to be compared poorly to 2nd edition.

Minotaur are much simpler monsters and thus work fine in 4e, they added a thing to them and two bigger ones and it's all fine.

Mummy has Mummy Rot, using the 4e disease mechanics, but this is long enough so I'll deal with them elsewhere. It's a template for NPCs as well as some bashers, they get a free autosave vs one (save ends) a PC drops on them, so that's nice, but all those poor Solos that don't have it.

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This horrible edition. The monsters have to be so simple in concept or they explode in a cascading hail of (save ends) with 5+ refresh, there's random new nonsense everywhere (rather than the old familiar bullshit), nothing works like anything else for no reason, and so much of it is so very disappointing.

It could have worked better even within their crazy constraints. The humanoids for instance can be quite good, and then also quite awful with that little power they attached across each type. That's not a bad concept but you usually fight a lot of fucking humanoids of the same type really early in the game and if it doesn't work well it's just a bad experience.

Then that Mind Flayer is so many dice, that is crazy stuff, it's only an Elite, there's other monsters too, and what the PCs are dropping are adding more to that, but at least it's not a set of fucking 5+ refresh dice you're rolling on top of it all. These (save ends) duration and condition modifying things are just the most awful mechanic. It's so bad.

[zeruslord]

They hit it with MM 1/2/3, PHB 1/2/3, and DMG 1/2 before dipping into essentials, and then that other rewrite that wasn't essentials, and then obscurity until 5e.

I wouldn't exactly call 5e a move out of obscurity. 5e has been in the 'death throes of 4e' state for its entire run.

Not really. In late 4e, they weren't writing many books, they weren't selling the ones they did write, and there was no positive buzz. With 5e, they're writing a ridiculously tiny number of books, but people buy them and watch twitch streamers play them and write thinkpieces about how D&D is back. 5e could sell a lot of books if there was anything for sale.