Zero Buzz on 5E...Is It Dead Out The Gate?

[ishy]

Well based upon the comments, the half dragon template is incomplete.
And further information on it probably is in the DMG.
But the template in the MM seem kinda boring. Just adding immunities, breath weapons etc.

[Harshax]

You've said this twice. Why do you assume this is more likely than the game just being nonsense? From history presented and the rest of the game, i feel fairly confident assuming there will not be templates to fix everything

I can't speak for 4th, but every edition since 2nd has had templates or classes you could apply on top of monsters. 2e made every sapient species a potential character race. 3rd went farther and even made beholder's an option.

It's not a huge stretch of the imagination to assume this game will handle orc-monks, troll-clerics, and pit fiend psionicists. It's one of the most popular method of adding an element of unknown to the game and has been a codified part of the game through at least 3 editions.

It's not stupid to assume the pit fiend we've seen is actually a stock monster, because every edition I'm aware of have had rules for making unique versions of stock creatures. Shit, even 1E had elite orcs or hobgoblins with extra hit dice or better to-hit, so it's hardly a stretch of the imagination that this trend will obviously continue in 5e.

So there, I've now said it three times. We've already seen proof that 5e barely strays from the path of everything that's come before. It's a logical conclusion that templates and non-oberoni monster mods will be in 5e too.

[DSMatticus]

You're being an idiot. No MM has ever been released with the premise "assembly required," and it would be completely fucking stupid to do so. Entries have always been intended for you to be able to read them straight out of the book. And the fact that there have been various rules in various editions for slapping class levels or templates onto existing complete monsters to create new complete monsters in no way changes the fact that every previous edition's monster entries were intended to be 100% ready to use straight out of the book. The pit fiend you are looking at is something the DM is supposed to be able to play straight from that entry, and if the DM does so it is a joke.

I do not know why you are bending over backwards and making a bunch of fanboyishly stupid arguments to give the leftovers of the 4e team the benefit of the doubt with respect to whether or not they wrote an MM full of boring fucking monsters. It's the people who made 4e, an edition full of nothing but boring fucking monsters.

[Mistborn]

I do not know why you are bending over backwards and making a bunch of fanboyishly stupid arguments to give the leftovers of the 4e team the benefit of the doubt with respect to whether or not they wrote an MM full of boring fucking monsters. It's the people who made 4e, an edition full of nothing but boring fucking monsters.

Let's be fair. If the Intellect Devourer is and indication some of the monsters will randomly oneshot even level 20 PCs despite being level 2. That's stupid but it's substantially more interesting than 4e.

[Harshax]

You're being an idiot. No MM has ever been released with the premise "assembly required," and it would be completely fucking stupid to do so.

3E had specific rules for improving monsters in its first printing. Did that ever change, or is your helmet strapped so tightly that you can't recall this fact?

Entries have always been intended for you to be able to read them straight out of the book. And the fact that there have been various rules in various editions for slapping class levels or templates onto existing complete monsters to create new complete monsters in no way changes the fact that every previous edition's monster entries were intended to be 100% ready to use straight out of the book. The pit fiend you are looking at is something the DM is supposed to be able to play straight from that entry, and if the DM does so it is a joke.

The Pit Fiend can be played right out of the book as is, dumb ass. It will run like a typical brute encounter. It will be boring and it will die against simple tactics and understanding the inherent weakness of bounded accuracy. It won't be fun. It won't match the glory of facing a 3e pit fiend. And it certainly won't support your basic premise that my conjecture on the content of 2 books, of which we've only seen two pages, is deeply flawed just because you think 4e designers are worth less than a bag of smashed assholes.

You may not like the Pit Fiend. Well, neither do I. But my experience with previous editions of D&D make me inclined to believe that what we've been shown is the stock orc equivalent of the species, Pit Fiend.

I do not know why you are bending over backwards and making a bunch of fanboyishly stupid arguments to give the leftovers of the 4e team the benefit of the doubt with respect to whether or not they wrote an MM full of boring fucking monsters. It's the people who made 4e, an edition full of nothing but boring fucking monsters.

Never played 4E, don't know if you're being a troll or illiterate, since I've already stated that I have no experience with 4th Edition. I have however purchased and used every edition of D&D, except 4th, and in all cases except 1st (and possibly fourth), rules existed for modifying monsters. Since 3e, some of those rules came in the Monster Manual. Statistically speaking, the chances that similar rules will be in 5e are at least plausible.

I can't damn the MM, just because of the Pit Fiend. I don't know enough about it yet. The Intellectual Devourer is actually pretty cool and fucking scary. I still don't like the wasted space on the page, but I'm still on the fence about whether the MM be total shit.

[Whipstitch]

I propose that the pit fiend will prove embarrassing things about 5e CR even if there are template options. Remember, this joker's challenge rating is already pretending that he's a big hoss. The only way I could see a template making it less of a pitiful joke is if pit fiends were mandated to select from sweet ass pit fiend templates in order to be complete and considered fully 20 cr. If templates are more generic and increase the critter's CR then we'll just end up with a 20+ challenge pit fiends that may or may not make sense on their own terms but take big smelly dumps on the idea that any of this shit is actually balanced out of the box.

[DSMatticus]

You're being an idiot. No MM has ever been released with the premise "assembly required," and it would be completely fucking stupid to do so.

3E had specific rules for improving monsters in its first printing.

Would you like some herp with that derp? No, seriously, I want you to stop being a dumbass for just a little bit and reread those sentences. Take it real slow. As slow as you need.

Now, what you should have noticed is that the statement "there are rules for improving monsters in 3E" is in no way a rebuttal of the statement "the 3E monster manual provided monsters which were intended to be used as is." It is a non-sequitur. It's a great big fucking nothing.

Now, do you remember how your defense of the 5e pit fiend as presented was "that is a pile of boring ass, clearly you are supposed to slap templates on it in order to turn it into a proper monster, like in previous editions." Do you understand how "the 3E monster manual provided monsters which were intended to be used as is" is a statement which clearly rebuts your use of 3e as evidence of your claims about 5e? For example, here is the 3e pit fiend. It's not a barebones chassis. It is a complete pit fiend. You can add hitdice, class levels, or templates to it, but even if you don't it will offer the complete pit fiend experience.

But my experience with previous editions of D&D make me inclined to believe that what we've been shown is the stock orc equivalent of the species, Pit Fiend.

There is no stock orc stat block in 3e. Orcs are a race (a particular kind of template), not a monster entry. It's literally impossible to provide a "stock orc" stat block, because the game conceptually does not even have such a thing. The monster manual provides the stat block for a sample orc, which is a 1st level warrior because that is what the DM is most likely to need. You don't make an orc wizard by adding wizard levels to the orc warrior stat block. You scroll down to the "Orcs As Characters" rules at the end of the orc entry and apply those to a wizard.

There is a stock pit fiend in 3e. That stock pit fiend has its own stat block. I have already linked to the page that contains it. You can add hitdice, class levels, or templates to that entry to modify it, but even if you don't it is (again) a complete monster, and not a pile of boring ass that you have to modify before it becomes useful.

You are not describing the approach to 3e orcs, in which the monster entry provides build-your-own rules plus a sample monster built using those rules that the DM will find useful. You are not describing the approach to 3e pit fiends, in which the monster entry provides a base monster which the DM will find useful and there are optional rules for further modifying that base.

You are describing an approach in which the monster entry provides a stat block which is completely fucking useless (as it is a boring pile of ass no one would want) and then if you spend a session prep time modifying that stat block you can make it into something useful. Note how this approach is completely fucking stupid, and worse than either of the things 3e did that you are trying to appeal to. You don't waste page space on stat blocks that aren't intended to be used. Stat blocks in the monster manual should be ready to use. That's not debatable. And because you are a dumbass, "they are technically usable but you would never want to use them because they are a pile of ass without modification" is not a successful defense of this approach.

The Intellectual Devourer is actually pretty cool and fucking scary.

The Intellect Devourer is a CR 2 monster that will very likely be able to murder half the things above its CR. It is scary for all the wrong reasons, which is that the 5e team never quite managed to grasp how SoD's interact with bounded accuracy and as such some characters never stop being afraid of trivial low-level bullshit and/or some low-level bullshit never stops being scary in general.

[ishy]

I propose that the pit fiend will prove embarrassing things about 5e CR even if there are template options. Remember, this joker's challenge rating is already pretending that he's a big hoss. The only way I could see a template making it less of a pitiful joke is if pit fiends were mandated to select from sweet ass pit fiend templates in order to be complete and considered fully 20 cr. If templates are more generic and increase the critter's CR then we'll just end up with a 20+ challenge pit fiends that may or may not make sense on their own terms but take big smelly dumps on the idea that any of this shit is actually balanced out of the box.

Well the MM has templates and variant monsters. I linked to this earlier, but you can get an idea how templates work in 5e by looking at the dragon templates (dracolich, half dragon, shadow dragon)

[OgreBattle]

How many intellect devourers does it take to kill a pit fiend?

[infected slut princess]

And the flip side to ISP's sample sad story is an archmage hellbent on destroying some village who didn't appreciate his wizbiz, *not* memorizing Gate and trying to bind a Pit Fiend to his service but instead charming the leader of a tribe of orcs and outfitting them with top quality gear. I believe there was a previous discussion that a wizard with certain spells can just churn out money, so his elite squad of Orcs with plate+two-handers, heavy crossbows and silver-tipped codpieces is actually a better pointy-beard-evil-wizard strat than entertaining otherworldly powers with top-tier spellcasting.

Yes, this 100%.

The whole pit fiend issue just exemplifies how... lame 5e is at its core. There is no amazing crazy bad-ass hardcore shit that gets you pumped up and gives you a boner.

An evil wizard dude recruiting some orc dudes and causing some trouble is awesome. AT LOW LEVEL. A high level wizard needs to be summoning hardcore shit like PIT FIENDS -- not just for aesthetic reasons, but because the pit fiend is really fucking powerful and awesome and makes you shit your pants.

I don't remember anything about really early pit fiends, but I remember the 2e pit fiend -- it was awesome. It made you imagine cool stories involving the pit fiend.

The 3e pit fiend was pretty much the same, but 3e was a better game so you got to play a better game with pit fiends. But the key thing is it was essentially the same fucking pit fiend.

The 4e pit fiend was... well, pretty bad. They took away a lot of his interesting powers, but at least he could still summon some devil buddies. And because his numbers were very high, a gang of low level dudes would not be able to kill him.

The 5e pit fiend is even worse, if you can believe it. No cool powers at all. Level 20, so it's supposed to be awesome and get you pumped up with story ideas. But it sucks. A bunch of cops could kill the pit fiend, so if you call the cops you win. STUPID.

5e is so damn BORING because everything sucks so hard as a matter of principle. It's like giants being unable to break down doors. And "is boring" that is the most fatal flaw any RPG can have. I will play a game with flaws. I will not play a boring game.

[Foxwarrior]

Are you saying that the Intellect Devourer isn't crazy, bad-ass, and hardcore?

[hamstertamer]

I like demons and devils in D&D. They are cool and fun. I like how they are hardcore and have crazy powers.

Someone sent me a link to picture the 5e PIT FIEND.

http://i.imgur.com/qmSZduz.jpg

OMG... this pit fiend is SO FUCKING LAME!!!

It's level 20. You'd think that means it would be pretty interesting.

Well, forget about it. For magic it can shoot fireballs, detect magic, hold monster, and wall of fire (the last two are 3/day only).

There is no hardcore awesome shit. So NO at-will teleportation. No devil summoning. No wish. No blasphemy or invisibility or anything cool.

This is just a big dumb monster with nothing interesting about it. If you described a battle involving one of these, you would probably think it was maybe a level 5 monster.

And it's Strength is just 26 so hide behind a locked door and you win.

for comparison the 1e pit fiend...

HD: 13(d8)
AC: -3 (23)
+2 weapon to hit
magic resistance: 65%
Psionic abilities: 213, att.def: a, c, e/g, h i
at will spells (once per round): pyrotechnics, produce flame, wall of fire, detect magic, detect invisible, polymorph self, hold person, gate 1-3 barbed devils (60%), or another pit fiend (70%)
once per day spell: symbol of pain
20' fear radius
18/00 strength
regenerate 2 hp per round.

I think the local militia would have a tough time with him.

[Username17]

First of all, yes this 5e Pit Fiend is obviously all you get at CR 20, and if you did add any additional abilities to it, it would be higher level. The Pit Fiend isn't presented as a blank slate, for fuck's sake it already has a mace. It's finished even to the point of equipment and ready to use.

Now that's actually quite sad. As noted several times now, it is a quite reasonable number of shots with basic weapons to kill it even with its large number of hit points. It's tough, but only about as tough as five ogres. It's damage output is large, but not to the extent that it can seriously dent an army before it goes down. Anyone who can make an army, either by raising one with necromancy or hiring one with fabricated wealth could take the Pit Fiend down with minimal or even replaceable losses. As I understand 5e, that means a 7th level wizard, whichever way you do it.

What I think we haven't gone over is how not very fast this Pit Fiend is. If he's unable to fly around, he's not actually faster than starting characters. Even if he can, he's not faster than a dude on a horse. His spells do pretty crap damage for a 20th level character, and while that's significant at-will damage for low level characters it's also shorter range than basic archery weapons. While there are several ways for a 7th level wizard to bring the pain and crush the Pit Fiend in a fire fight, we should also discuss the very real possibility of the Pit Fiend being kited to death by a 3rd level party. All they need is a hundred and change silver arrows and some horses. The Pit Fiend goes down in less than 3 minutes game time.

-Username17

[Krusk]

So there, I've now said it three times.

So Stop?

Its pretty clearly stupid.

I asked my question because you were new. I gave the benefit of the doubt that you weren't stupid. I assumed you had some sort of tweet from mearls that said "Oh and also all the monster suck without templates applied, you've got to do that to make them all actually their listed CR" or something. Which while stupid from a design point, would at least make your argument and belief less dumb.

Your stance is that the monsters listed in the monster manual aren't for actual use in games, because
1 - 1e, designed by gygax had decently designed monsters and templates.
2 - 2e designed by gygax had decently designed monsters and templates.
3 - 3e designed by cook had decently designed monsters and templates.
4 - 4e, designed by mearls, had terribly designed monsters, and no templates.

Ergo, following the pattern 5e will have terrible monsters and awesome templates.

If anything, this shows that mearls has a history of not designing templates well.

But that isn't even the biggest thing. Even if this pattern showed us that mearls would design templates to fix everything, it doesn't show us that templates to fix everything is a good idea, or that mearls can actually do that.

Looking at his design history, I'd say thats extremely unlikely to happen. Even if the idea occurred to him to try (which it won't), he still has to actually design it competently. Which going by his 5e track record alone, we know he won't.

Your arguments are really the same ones used by fanboys who realized that their product is shit, and assume the GM will house rule it good. The GM in this instance being mearls, the man known for published rules that are shit.

Stop assuming mearls will be aware of the problem. Stop assuming he will admit its a problem. Stop assuming he has some super secret template rules hidden in a book that he didn't talk about yet that fix anything.

*edit clarity

[erik]

Speaking of templates, am I correct in reading the Intellect Devourer can function essentially as a template that can be applied to any humanoid NPC? (caveat: exp rewards only increased additively for a CR 2 critter instead of boosting the base creature)

Apply it to a humanoid and you get a nasty save or die that targets intelligence.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

I assumed that there was no template to give the Pit Fiend out-of-combat utility because they never had such a template in 4e, and these are 4e writers who are making these creatures.

The Pit Fiend doesn't do stuff outside of combat that isn't tea party because the players don't either. 5e casters are refluffed archers, same as 4e casters. The mechanic for doing things out of combat in 5e is roll a d20+arbitrarily chosen ability score bonus+arbitrarily allowable tool proficiency bonus, modified by Advantage or Disadvantage (arbitrarily applied), vs a DC the GM pulls out of their posterior. To give Faust an empire, the Pit Fiend does "Ritual Magic" vs a DC 1, using a ritual only he is allowed to perform.

You'd need more than just templates to give the Pit Fiend mechanical utility, you'd have to have the half of the PHB Mearls was too lazy to write.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Couple of nitpicks:

Mearls didn't do 4E D&D. He had an inordinate amount of input for 4.0E and certainly by 4.5E D&D assumed ownership of that turd, but 4.0E was Noonan and Collins' crackbaby.

Comparing 5E D&D casters to 4E D&D casters is an insult to the 5E D&D casters. 5E Casters have a lot of stupid fiddly bullshit spells, but they also get a collection of real and important spells out of the basic book that avoid the fail of rituals.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Comparing 5E D&D casters to 4E D&D casters is an insult to the 5E D&D casters. 5E Casters have a lot of stupid fiddly bullshit spells, but they also get a collection of real and important spells out of the basic book that avoid the fail of rituals.

Oops, I totally forgot wizards could summon money again.

That just makes it even harder to puzzle out how you stat up Mephistopheles in this. Summon MORE money? Create Army? All those fall into the trap of low level adventures mentioned earlier. Guts was laughing off armies before he even picked up any PrCs.

[GâtFromKI]

Another nitpick : the art of 5e pit fiend is so bland, I can't see it as an iconic 5e monster. "You're attacked by... Err... Some generic human-dragon... With a mass...". There's no point into giving it cool abilities to a random monster that nobody will notice when flipping through the MM.

[hogarth]

1 - 1e, designed by gygax had decently designed monsters and templates.

Wait, what?!

1E had many, many terrible monsters. It had incredibly stupid shit like ear seekers, which were monsters designed solely to punish PCs who listened at doors, because apparently listening at a door is a horrible munchkin thing to do and it must be punished.

[Username17]

Several things. The most obvious of course is that Gygax was not involved in 2e, that was Zeb Cook. Also, Zeb Cook was not involved with 3e, that was Skip Williams, Tweet, and Monte Cook (no relation to Zeb). 4e was originally the brainchild of Noonan, Heinsoo, Collins, Wyatt, Mearls, and Schubert. And the only reason that we put Noonan's name on the list is because out of the literally twenty four people credited with 'additional design' we happen to know his contributions and it's huge and shitty things like 'roles' and the 4e play test paradigm.

So bottom line is that an edition written by Mearls and Wyatt can be expected to be as dumb as 4th edition, because it's basically the same guys. It's not even like these guys were having their brilliant insights dismissed by committee or something - these guys claimed personal ownership of all the stupid red dots and exceptions paradigms of 4e.

Secondly, the claim that AD&D of either edition had a good monster advancement system, or even a system at all, is delusional. We could talk about how an Alu-Demon was totally different from a Cambion and I genuinely have no idea what would happen if the father was an Orc instead of a human, but really I want to talk about the Githyanki because I recently reviewed them. They come at various levels of character classes and are thus one of the closest things to a race with genuine advancement rules that exists in that edition. However, a lot of information was left out, including the entire 'Anti-Paladin' class, which many of them have. As of the time of printing, there was no writeup of anti-paladins in any official book - the DM was literally supposed to house rule up a class and then house rule up how the monster rules interacted with it. For fuck's sake, monsters didn't even have stats.

The cold hard reality is that 3rd edition and its offshoots like pathfinder are the first and last edition of D&D that even pretended that monsters out of the book could be advanced without a shit tonne of house rules and ad hoccing.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

Maybe if this was treated as a D&D version of Shadowrun? Nobody can fight the Man, but you still break into restricted areas while invisible and fight the cyberzombies.

It has been over a year since it the beta told us this was going to be the Dark Heressy Edition of d&d, so there's little to be surprised of when one sees a monster or other resource is now weaksauce.

But yeah, the Shadowrun comparison is mighty accurate.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Dogbert and virgil... I hate to break it to you, but that's a pretty inane comparison. Earlier editions of D&D were notable precisely because you could crash The Man's coronation and bitchslap him in front of the entire military until he grovelled for the privilege of being your personal French maid. A TTRPG/setting which posits that the PCs are insignificant before society's monopoly of force isn't something notable or special -- that's like the default.

[virgil]

Dogbert and virgil... I hate to break it to you, but that's a pretty inane comparison. Earlier editions of D&D were notable precisely because you could crash The Man's coronation and bitchslap him in front of the entire military until he grovelled for the privilege of being your personal French maid. A TTRPG/setting which posits that the PCs are insignificant before society's monopoly of force isn't something notable or special -- that's like the default.

Did I say it was notable, special, or even good? I was postulating a genre/setting that would handle 5E's bounded accuracy; which my first thought was that of renfaire Shadowrun.

[malak]

DMG delayed to december

Maybe they noticed there were some problems in their ruleset?

Haha just kidding; I doubt there is such a good reason for it.