OSSR: 4th edition D&D.

[tussock]

This is a personal consideration of the

4th edition Dungeons & Dragons

• Monster Manual 1
• Player's Handbook 1
• Dungeon Master's Guide 1

and the events surrounding their production which lead to them being the unremitting, eye-gouging, shitfest that they are.



Disclaimer: I am not a fan of the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, but I wanted it to be so good. Fuckers broke my heart.

Note: You can buy these things cheap on amazon and places, originals, still haven't sold out. Second hand ones go for a couple bucks each. Do not include the approximately two hundred pages of bullshit errata they need to be compliant with later expansion material (let alone the actual errata that fixed a few sizable problems), but whatever.

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What lead here, as well as I've been able to decipher it from various sources.

2001: Peak sales for 3rd edition D&D, and also for all of D&D ever, easily beating the previous 1981 peak. Black & white softcover splatbooks, a few mechanically dodgy hardcover expansions, the legendary 3e FRCS tome, the original adventure path, and peak in core book sales after the Aug 2000 launch. Gave D&D a seat at the big kids' table at Hasbro.

2003: Having finished with all the good books, the 3.5 sub-edition is an attempt to repeat that sales peak by reprinting them all with trivial changes in more expensive formats. Probably thrown together in about six months, it doesn't work, sales continue to decline, though the more expensive new book format maintains individual profitability. The company clearly fails to distinguish between what's good for a particular book, against what's good for the game as a whole, and have no feel at all of the latter.

2005: Having finished the reformating, Eberron and everything else just following a traditional mid-edition decline in gross sales, management needs something new. They are required by corporate structure to have $100 million dollars of in-house sales per year, every year, to hold onto the full in-house development team. They do not have that. Rob Heinsoo has been sent from the D&D Miniatures division to join the lead team, as they have bigger sales than the D&D division at this point in time. By Hasbro rules, their combined sales don't count (because D&D Minis is a "different game"), nor do CRPGs or the novels or, well, anything really, which is nuts, but there it is.

In reality, the randomised pre-pained plastic D&D miniatures in the minis game were mostly being bought in very large quantities by unboxers who resold what people actually wanted for their current D&D games on ebay at a good profit. No one at WotC seemed to know this, nor did they understand the lag in market response when they changed to a cheaper, crappier, painting scheme, and most of the unboxers got caught holding a lot of unwanted product that D&D minis department thought had sold just fine.

They never did fix the painting back up. Never saw it as a problem. Didn't show up in their sales figures you see, so they could ignore those comments. Some other excuse was found somewhere. Exemplifies every response they had to 4e.

Hell, there is zero market research, Mearls once said there hadn't been any for D&D between the 3e playtest ending and the web surveys he did during the 5e playtest, and no one in house knew how to even try doing it (handily explaining Divine Metamagic going core in 3.5, and how they just kept on nerfing Fighters, because you know, lots of people want to play Fighters, so nerf!). By 2005 they reject everything so carefully surveyed from '96-'99 about what players actually do with the full game over years of play, declaring the past is a foreign country, and go with a model of what draws the most comments and epic cheering threads on their message boards (which is obviously just five fa/tg/uy trolling everyone else after learning to game the moderators), plus guesswork from other things that are popular at that time, and a seemingly distorted look at individual book sales numbers.

How could it not be a disaster, really?

---

I reconstruct the grand plan roughly as follows.

• Only core books sell enough, so they'll sell core books every year, a MM, a PHB, and a DMG.
• Every class will have an ability structure that can be readily added to so everyone can use each new PHB.
• Monsters must be constantly re-printable in a way that expands on the previous MM.
• World expansions will release each year that conform to the limits imposed on each successive DMG rule set, slowly expanding the playable space, increasing replay value.
• Online support content will be monetised on a monthly subscription format, based on Dungeon and Dragon subscriptions, bought in house to push for that $100 million.
• Digital tabletop included, for reals this time, honest, starting from scratch.
• Class balance will be achieved, by, uh, everyone is a Wizard.
• High level play will work at all, low level play will be survived. E6 was popular, right?
• Attention will be given to the wildly successful money machine that is World of Warcraft and it's division of characters into roles of DPS, Controller, Tank, and Healer.

Their online presence promises to transform into, uh, a brain in a jar, Gleemax, which, yeah. That did not end well at all, but it did waste a lot of everyone's time during the development hell that shat out 4th edition D&D.

I wanted to read what the developers were writing on Gleemax, but it kept dragging my fairly modern computer to a dead stall while doing so, and it was obviously a mess compared to the old wizards.com webface.

tw: murder.

The man in charge of digital development murdered his wife before killing himself not long after it switched on, and then it was later abandoned. I recall all the content on it was basically lost. So, uh, controlling sociopath with disturbingly authoritarian imagery, eh. Probably didn't help.

---

There's more than all that, if you dig around. The problems at late D&D 3rd edition (and right through 4th edition) are the same scale of problems TSR had on the way to bankruptcy in late 2nd edition, and it produced the same shit books that were not fun to play D&D with. But basically, they had no fucking idea what most people even did when playing D&D any more, no idea what the things they were selling were being used for, and were hyper-focused on oddities of the Hasbro corporate structure that buried the very idea of ever selling a complete RPG product. Then they started designing 4th edition, under the code name Orcus, and things got catastrophically worse.

[OgreBattle]

What is gleemax anyways, name of the wizards forum?

[GâtFromKI]

What is gleemax anyways

I don't know but it looks like a dick.

[RobbyPants]

I’m not sure if Gleemax was a third party or what. Some time after I joined the forums in 2006, they switched it all over and fucked up a ton of archives in the conversion process.

[deaddmwalking]

What is gleemax anyways, name of the wizards forum?

It was. WotC transformed their message board from a style similar to this to one that was all black and neon green. They also cleared out the historical data - they didn't really want people talking about other editions - they tried to FORCE the community to focus on 4th edition.

It was not taken well.

Effectively, nothing about 4th edition was tailored to people who LIKED 3rd edition. The communication at the time was 3rd edition was shit and you were stupid for liking it - you'd be crazy not to adopt 4th edition because it is god's gift to gamers.

[tussock]

My understanding is they genuinely had no data and no fucking idea what people did with D&D, and the development of 4th edition fell apart through arguments about their ongoing internal speculation on that matter.

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Orcus is the name of a demon lord who will screw you for breaking oaths.

Not so much in D&D where he's just king of the undead, but in mythology, he's basically the guy who fucks you up in the afterlife when you promise a thing and then deliver a different thing. It's ironic, you see, because they promised us a better D&D, but delivered us 4e, and Orcus hurt them so bad.

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During 4e development, D&D 3e was busy putting out books under the Forgotten Locations and Dungeon Tiles banners. Entirely forgettable, they're small colourful cardstock maps to sit under your nice new pre-painted plastic miniatures. It seems they thought this was all everyone was doing with D&D these days, and the rest could safely be scrapped. Sales continued to decline.

Orcus 1 started with four months of design work. James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and Rob Heinsoo laid out a broad vision of tightly balanced close range combat encounters between mountains of hit points, five-on-five like the minis game (or basketball), PCs winning each by the skin of their teeth, and very little else.

PC attacks (or interrupts, or stances) worked on a system mostly reminiscent of deck and hand mechanics from Magic the Gathering. From larger class lists, you know a few powers for your character, and a subset of those is randomly usable at once. Drawing to hand and recovery from the graveyard and reshuffling and other such timing varied by class, but mostly you always have a small number of interesting things to do.

About what I'd expect for radical mechanics in late 2005 in retrospect, how to have a selection of useful class powers that can't form into a uniquely repetitive stack. 'twas a problem of 3rd edition character building.

That was followed by a four month development cycle, lead by Heinsoo, with Gutscherra, Donais, Baker, and Mearls. I understand this is for putting the details like "where does cleave fit best" and "what does sleep even do now" and "what would this all do to Barbarians anyway" into the basic system. The deck and hand mechanic got transferred into the early-production stages of Book of Nine Swords at this point, and the junior team working on that had to restructure their entire project into a novel activation schedule.

They basically succeeded, though it does seem a bit like they ran out of time to check it worked, or that sort of thing just wasn't in the company budget. It was released to fair sales and lots of message board hufflepuff not too long after the system it demonstrated had been completely abandoned for 4e.

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Presumably the D&D development team expected the next round of design, Orcus 2, to open up the design space a bit. Perhaps the "what happens between fights" or "um, more monsters show up, maybe" or "perhaps someone rings an alarm bell" or "can I talk to the Lizardmen" was assumed to be just obviously what would be added next, stuff like hit point recovery and maybe hiring archers. No idea how those meetings went but you have to question their internal communications given what happened.

Orcus 2 spent another four months in design to round out their first full year of it. Heinsoo takes lead, with Wyatt and joined by Bruce Cordell. They apparently polished their deck-and-hand-based spells-for-all large-room-only combat system, bloated up the hit points and damage stacks (there's a note I made from somewhere of 1 die damage at low level up to 9 dice at high level), checked their math worked, and called it ready for final development.

The meeting to discuss this development phase (where normally they'd be making sure everything was in the right place, things played nicely with other things, that they hadn't missed anything obvious, and just generally filling out the game into a complete whole) instead called bullshit. This obviously did not support the things the dev team were expecting to add during development. I imagine a quote of "What even the fuck."

So a full year into the project, just four months of pre-writing dev time remaining, a decision was made and the whole essence of Orcus, at least on the PC side, was binned, shit canned, flushed, done away with. Gone.

More people were bought in (all the above, Collins back, Noonan, Decker, Sernet, Stark, Carter, Longstreet, and Perkins added), instead of development on Orcus 2 they'd re-write ... well, large parts of the underlying core system from scratch, and then make everything they had work with it again, and somehow squeeze some D&D into it along the way, whatever the fuck that meant. No pressure.

The notable books which followed this decision, but didn't include the changes made to 4e after it, are Magic Item Compendium, and Star Wars Saga Edition.

MIC was well enough liked, and mostly not used for 4e. Lots of pundits at the time said they wouldn't mind if the new D&D followed the structure of SWS, give or take. I wonder if things like condition tracks were in Orcus, seems likely, would have greatly simplified that whole fucking saving throws and condition tracking bullshit.

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Team Flywheel redid the PC side of the game, they had four months to put together basically an entire edition while not in the same room with the monster/world team. Healing Surges would limit damage recovery over a day, various things would need written to interact with them. Everyone would get a Daily schedule of "better stuff", plus Utility movement-focused powers, plus limited "good stuff" Encounter powers, as well as some tactically active At-Will powers because refreshing in long fights was gone (would fights be long? Doesn't seem they knew any of that at this point, there is no record of playtesting this or Orcus before it. It was said in later marketing that fights would be quicker than 3e, which they are not). This is the AEDU branch of development, and they had no time so it had to be the same for everyone.

Damage dice stacks were cut back to be easier to use (but they didn't change the hit points!!!!!!). Things like stances (seems a fair way to do Barkskin or Shield or Melfs Minute Meteors) vanished from the game. Everything was mechanically refit to this new system, or chucked out, perhaps wistfully hoping to be recovered in later PHBs.

Team Scramjet redid everything else at the same time. They seem to have decided there was no time to change the system monsters used, nor time left to develop how everything fit into a traditional D&D game world, they weren't even sure what PCs could do at this point, so the worlds would be made to fit the monsters as-is. Points of Light was their solution, the 4e D&D worlds would literally be an unending sequence of abstractly connected Orc with Pie in Room. The 4th edition FRCS would, uh, not be well received on that note. I mean, obviously.

I note that they sort of went in opposite directions there. One team re-did the fluff to match the new mechanics, the other tried to re-do mechanics to match older stories. As a result 4e characters need a long rest every day, but there is nowhere apparent exists where you can have one.

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The main thing is, the development reboot here probably removed the bit of the game which made the combats interesting to be in. All that bullshit you track each round makes sense as a thing if you're also drawing cards each round to see what you have available, if you're considering the timing of your reshuffle, like maybe an auto-save is somewhere in the last four cards, or the Cleric might draw a timely buff or cure, or two characters might finally get their synchronised powers to work together to fix this.

Rob Heinsoo, after being sacked for 4e's failure to sell books, joined Jonathan Tweet and made 13th Age.

It's a reasonably dynamic game, a lot less tracking bullshit, and fights that actually end. It's still in production and still selling, so it's probably a good bit better than 4e D&D. Not a high bar, but still, apparently has rules for things outside combat. Even has an SRD.

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Back to bloated monstrosities, the 4th edition MM1 is bad in many ways that connect back to all this. That's the next few posts for me.

[maglag]

My understanding is they genuinely had no data and no fucking idea what people did with D&D, and the development of 4th edition fell apart through arguments about their ongoing internal speculation on that matter.

...
Even has an SRD.

I still stand that last bit you seemingly overlooked may've been the actual greatest failure of 4e. Well, that and wotc completely ditching the OGL, replacing it with a "if you want to write books based in our stuff, we get all the rights of your work, fuck you."

3rd edition had a lot of 3rd party support (pun intended) and they all jumped ship when Wotc said they would not be supporting OGL anymore. One of those 3rd party was Paizo who just decided to do their own D&D clone with a srd and OGL and we all know how that turned out.

Basically, they had data, but they also got greedy, they made the choices that they thought would allow them to milk the most money on the long run. They dreamed of a pay-to-play game where every player got an online subscription besides needing to buy new core books every year and yeah. Hold back obvious content to release later.

Maybe they could've salvaged something if they got the online bit working properly, but they completely understimated the challenge of all the needed digital work and never delivered.

[tussock]

There was a good few books put out for 4e under their horrific GSL licence, right at the start. Almost every company that tried it put out one book, and then stopped, because they did not sell. Because 4e is a bad game, and the people who liked it were house ruling like never before. I'll do a "what happened later" at the end.

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The 4th edition D&D Monster Manual

It's terrible. In every way an RPG book can be bad, this book is bad. Well, nearly, the binding apparently holds up well, it's physically able. Content, it compares very poorly to the 1st edition Monster Manual, the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual, and the 3rd edition Monster Manual. I rate it below such tragic wastes of a tree as the Pathfinder Bestiary 6 (which is at least very pretty and has stories).

It wasn't a huge surprise that this book would be one of the worse ones. The 3e MM IV and MM V were bad books, like 60 monsters you wouldn't use anyway in 200 pages of pointless word count, much like the worst of 2nd edition there. But also that they had everything about 4e already present.


The art is ... I don't even. Some people like it, for its grimy brown "even the fire is dull and smoky" aesthetic of dark creatures in misty shadows on dark backgrounds, with back lighting. They are wrong. If you're ever thinking of art in a reference manual with images of what things look like, consider, the first thing folk do IRL is pin their sample to a white board under a bright light so they can see what the fucking thing looks like.

But there's layers of wrong in that front-of-the-book art piece. Even McDonalds wouldn't get away with calling it aspirational. There's 11 actual monsters vs 3 PCs, which doesn't work. One of them is an epic Solo Soldier, which doesn't work. Do any of these monsters even work together? Hahahaha, welcome to 4th edition, you are attacked by a scorpion riding a frog (except not riding it, because mounted combat doesn't work).


The example statblock says monsters are simple to use and easy to find everything on, the explanation of everything in that pic takes them just five pages!


Then you turn the page and find the Aboleth Overseer making it all super complicated for no benefit at all. An Elite with 348 hp, and you're supposed to fight his friends the 200 hp Aboleth Lasher and 128 hp Aboleth Slime Mage too (so it can just use Enslave every round, I guess, but honestly Lashers are far stronger use of encounter budget because the worst bit in there is just being Dazed and taking damage), plus a few minions in the form of Aboleth Servitors, who aren't even Aboleths, nor are they Skum, because the game has decided to ignore everything about the game's history, on top of everything else.

3e's Aboleth slime you to make you take damage from leaving water, and give you the ability to breath water if you stop fighting them. That's good monster writing, it's a critter PCs can interact with who's obviously going to just casually enslave them, and also it can cast a Dominate Person if they annoy it. 4e's just beats you up and a side-effect of your death is they can paint your corpse the same way things used to work.

They could've easily had a L18 Aboleth with 6+ recharge on dominate vs anyone, tentacles that give you the slime curse, and an aura that gave you water breathing. A level 10 Solo Aboleth too with some reactive or area attacks, and some Skum minions at about L14 in between them. Except of course the original game design was based around nothing outlasting an encounter! Once they saw that as a bad thing, it was too late to salvage the Monster Manual. Like, the game could have replicated all the classic D&D monsters within the new format, but their encounter-only game design made concepts like "you're all gunna work for the Aboleth for a while" no longer fit for purpose.

And that severely limited their initial monster designs down to "it hits you again, have a condition (save ends)".

---

Abomination have nothing to do with each other. Individual monsters are at least one page though by the new format, so here they saved a whole page by putting five unrelated types on four pages. This is later wasted with massive amounts of white space and ludicrous monster choices.

The Tarrasque is quite fast and you cannot fly near it because arbitrary magic is magic. The main problem though is it is a level 30 Solo Brute, so has 1420 hp, and you'll spend a long-ass time often missing but sometimes hitting it for 30 damage a hit. Possible no one actually ever finished that fight, it would take many, many hours, and is not interesting along the way.

Angel and Archon in 4e all became a pile of no one even gives a fuck. Officially they wanted everything in the MM to be fightable, because everything is only ever a single to-the-death fight. Unofficially someone was fervoured enough to force their very specific Christian theology into the game without even bothering to justify it. Andy Collins, was it? Anyway, you also can't summon these guys as buddies because the game would explode, because it's crap.

To those of you involved in the decision to do this to the archons, and other inexplicable changes for the sake of change, I apologize for calling your design choice “stupid.” I meant to say “super-stupid.”

Azer make you ask what's the difference between Archons and Azer now, and the answer is the Azer are like -1 to hit, but +1 damage. They are the same things using the same abilities, right next to each other in the book. It's all so bad.

Balhannoth first appear in 3e's MM IV, probably transplanted from here. For this new stuff, Lore checks, right? Useful? DC 20: After it teleported to attack you, you can roll that to know it can teleport to attack. DC 25: It's an elite, so never found in large groups, which you can know when you find it not in a large group. DC 30: This is what you roll to know it was not making any sound when it attacked you without sound.

People paid money for those Knowledge DC tables. Seriously. That is garbage. I get it's a dumb beatstick because it's 4e and everything's a dumb beatstick, but maybe just stop writing.

Banshrae pre-introduced in the 3e's MM V, these are insectile humanoids with no mouths who explicitly cannot sing or play wind instruments in 4e (DC 25!). Their attacks are still made with blowguns. One of the designers was clearly not on board with the edition goals. That is a little "this game is really stupid and no one will even notice if I do this" sort of a monster entry, that is. It took two years for the 4e community to find that particular easter egg. There was even 4ries jumped on that thread to defend 4e's integrity, because of course there was. Surprised they're not here yet.

Basilisk reminds that despite nothing being allowed to exist outside combat, save or die still exists within it. Like all SOD in this edition, it's not really functional enough to win them the fight, but it'll still kill PCs if they stick at it. This one sticks at it, nothing you can do, closing your eyes does nothing because rules must fit within the three lines of text. The Venom-Eyed Basilisk instead of stone, spits exploding poison with it's eyes, because just woo, whatever, who cares, right, it's only D&D.

Bat picture includes the bat swarm, which the book itself does not. Bats have a flyby attack that is unlike each other and also unlike anything else, because ... caring about doing things right is so 1999. They used that sort of thing as a marketing highlight. Like a toddler picking shit out of their nappy and showing it to you all proud.

Battlebriar are slightly before 4e, from 3e's MM III. They are both spiky, but with very different mechanical ways of expressing that, yes indeed. Doesn't burrow + trample mean it never takes damage if it just waits for the encounter music to end each time? Who knows, tactics entry says it doesn't bother winning.

Bear is nether Black nor Brown, because fuck tradition, but instead Cave and Dire, even though those are the same thing, and the artist struggled to say otherwise. Like, the person whose job it was to put the text on the image saying which was which, instead just skipped that one. The cave bear does not get a crush attack because 4e is poison, also, you might have then noticed there is no fucking difference between any of the monsters if they sat them right next to each other like that.

Beetle is where someone did something good with this edition.

That's well done, it's fast, it hurts you if you start your turn next to it (so, bigger than it looks in effect), and the attack is ongoing necrotic damage (save ends) which is lovely flavour for a few of the rot scarabs burrowing into you. Most importantly it's very easy to use. Within the limit of most everything in this edition being a pain in the ass, that is solid design. Then they ruin the page by having the Fire Beetle shoot fire out it's butt and not give you a light to carry around for the day. Because ... they hate D&D. They just do. The text even gloats about how other monsters (who do not need light) use them for light (which they do not give off).

Behemoth I quite like, as a rename of Dinosaurs, even though it's from the same bible basher who fucked up the Angels and Archons no doubt. They're both recognisable (ankylosaur and stegasaur) and have not terrible names. The mechanics are just arbitrary bullshit of course, but well, that's 4e.

Beholder could be good, right? Appropriately a solo, they gave it 10 different eye options, a free random eye attack on anyone within 5 squares, plus two chosen eye attacks on its turn (and a few extra as it dies off). But it's mostly, like, nothing quite works in 4e so mostly it has to zap away for damage and the others are just reasons the random attacks aren't doing anything useful. Absolutely no anti-magic cone out the front, gone, because god forbid monsters do anything interesting that requires players to change tactics in this game.

Which makes it a rather uninteresting disintegrate-zap robot all things considered. I give it a 3/10, they didn't even bother making the zaps have different ranges, come on.

Berbalang is just a weird choice for 4e. Traditionally you normally fight its astral projection form, never even meeting the original. But 4e monsters never exist outside combat, so this guy is a ... he's a solo who splits up into monsters and then rejoins for a bonus and is nothing to do with Berbalangs. It's not even a good mechanic set, looks a pain in the ass to work with. Just, don't do that.

Boar is Dire and Thunderfury. Thunderfury does Thunderfury as often as it can. You might even say Thunderfury gunna Thunderfury. Also has a Thunderous Charge. Those mechanics don't seem to help it win, but, um, they sure are there.

Bodak Skulk and Reaver tamed from 3e days by having their Gaze be an encounter power. Far more likely to work than most, but only drops to 0hp, and only one PC each, often misses, so really just an annoying use of healing. Almost thought they might be dangerous, but not really.

Boneclaw is a reach Soldier and thus very boring. That's bad everywhere, and this guy is a perfect no-one-moves slog fest, but there's worse Soldiers later.

Bulette I so want to care about, because it has such good history in D&D, but there's a Dire Bulette and it is exactly the same monster, plus nine levels, and they are pissing on their own concept here. The whole fucking idea of this whole fucking shit show is that the monsters do different fucking things. This is word for word copy with bigger numbers (there's one slight phrase change presumably to skirt the automatic detection of such bullshit). Like, people can probably just put bigger numbers on stuff, the actual design bit that we paid for is the annoying little bullshit arbitrary mechanical differences I've been pointing at so far.

That is why these monster groups take two or more fucking pages instead of half a column.

That was their only job in 4e, there's nothing else here. It's vacant. There is supposed to be a stat block that does something pointlessly different to the other stat block, that's why there's two of them instead of a system of just increasing the hit and damage bonuses and they didn't bother with the Bulette and the Dire Bulette.

See you for the Cs. I have more to say but just, Dire Bulette is dire. That is so bad.

[maglag]

Ah, this brings back memories of when the first 4e monster was previewed, the Pit Fiend, and lots of players suddenly went "WTF where are all the non-combat abilities? And the actual cool combat abilities a pit fiend is supposed to have?? And why has it so much HP compared to its actual damage???"

And the scary bit is that 4rries started rallying right there going "lol who needs monster combat abilities just MTP something up lol" with at best some going "don't worry surely the pit fiend's non-combat abilities will be included in the actual book, this is just a small preview after all".

Oh, and also remember something about "monsters have an inherent magic enanchement bonus to attack and damage rolls so they don't benefit from using lesser magic weapons" although that may be only mentioned in the DMG (maybe? I recall at least a preview article about how you wouldn't end with a barrel of +2 rapiers after fighting through drows but may've end up not included in the final product), but fuck you players, you need to worry about getting said magic weapons anyway to keep up with the monsters. And then it turned out they had screwed up the math anyway and PC to-hit with magic items still couldn't keep up with monster defenses.

Although one thing they've may done well is getting rid of full damage immunities, so something like a fire elemental had just quite high fire resistance instead of blanket immunity and could be burned if you were able to produce stronger flame, a la dominions 4/5.

[jt]

You totally missed my least favorite part of 4E, the fact that everything is named Nounverber Portmanteaufucker. Here's all of those up through the section you've reviewed.

Fire archon emberguard, fire archon blazesteel, ice archon hailscourge, ice archon rimehammer, ice archon frostshaper, azer beastlord, banshrae dartswarmer, shadowhunter bat, warthorn battlebriar, earthrage battlebriar, macetail behemoth, bloodspike behemoth, thunderfury boar

I actually like 4E's monster block format, it's easily glanceable and an improvement over having to cross reference obscure spells. I wish they had something that easy for the missing non-combat half of the monster.

[Username17]

The Banshrae's iconic mouthlessness and flute usage dates back to the Monster Manual 5 in 3.5. People asked - quite rightly - if perhaps they were supposed to be using their blow guns and flutes by sticking them up their asses.

That a monster from the Monster Manual 5 that had already been highlighted by everyone who had read it as being fucking incomprehensible got folded over into the 4e Monster Manual without anyone fixing anything is just how 4e rolled. Like, I could possibly give Noonan credit for having put that into the Monster Manual 5 as an Easter Egg butt joke - but even then it's more likely that it's the result of multiple half-assed drafts getting cobbled together than one half-funny ass joke slipping under the censors. The idea that anything in 4e was intentionally ironic rather than just shamefully low-effort is not credible.

Remember that the Monster Manual 5 was the result of David Noonan being told explicitly that the fans didn't want the Monster Manual 5 to waste large amounts of page count on monsters with class levels, on irrelevancies like cave maps, or on long-winded tirades about monster gangs. Then the draft he actually turned in was measurably more of all of those than the Monster Manual 4 and his only explanation was that "he couldn't help himself." So the big question really is why David Noonan didn't get fucking fired when he presented his Monster Manual 5. The secondary question of why the Banshrae was so obviously and hilariously contradictory is an open one - it could easily have been the result of people hacking together two obviously incompatible drafts for Bard Monster #17 or Mr. Noonan could have been trolling his audience with that and the entire rest of the Monster Manual 5.

That 4e copied a laughably unworkable monster draft from the Monster Manual 5 and simply regurgitated its two wholly incompatible facts (mouthlessness and blowgun use) is simply how 4e was. There's no evidence of self awareness in any part of 4e. The fact the Banshrae was like that in 4e was simply the result of the same procedural content generation as the rest of the game. The only bit of self awareness anywhere might have been the selection of the Banshrae in the first place as a "joke monster." But considering how humorless and procedural the rest of the monster manual is, I suspect that there was simply a quota of Monster Manual 5 monsters to pick so that there would be more iconics left for the 4e Monster Manual 2. And Monster Manual 5 has very few genuinely new monsters. With all the monsters that are just upgrades of normal D&D monsters, and the fact that the Banshrae are to be found quite early in that fucking terrible book - it's actually not surprising that they would get selected to fulfill MM5 sourced monster quotas for the 4e MM.

The core issue of course is that the 4th edition Monster Manual has multiple pages given over to writing up "Troglodyte with club" and "Troglodyte with spear" and elects to use what shockingly few slots it does have to write up shit no one cares about from the Monster Manuals 3, 4, and 5 - all while pointedly and obviously avoiding D&D standards like fucking Frost Giants. The 4e authors genuinely seemed to believe that their biggest problem was running out of D&D content to write, and their response to that was to deliver an edition that was deliberately crippleware.

-Username17

[maglag]

The 4e authors genuinely seemed to believe that their biggest problem was running out of D&D content to write, and their response to that was to deliver an edition that was deliberately crippleware.

Precisely, they wanted to milk as much money from the players as possible, and that meant dividing the game in pieces to be sold separately. Like gnomes and monks and druids and freaking barbarian weren't in the first player's handbook.

Kinda like how video games started chopping off basic bits from themselves and then selling them for extra as DLC, sometimes even on day 1. Sometimes even on the initial game disc itself.

Why sell a full production when you can sell incomplete stuff and get the players to buy the missing bits later?

[tussock]

The rules around treasure (and the whole DMG) were written after the Monster Manual was finished, this whole book doesn't consider or mention treasure in any way. Much the same was true in 3e, a lot of monsters there are much better with some magic gear but 4e is much less an approximation of functional if a solo Soldier could pick up another +2 to AC.

---

The namename namenames are poison and I avoid speaking of them as much as possible. They're get some words from me at some point, but yes, so many layers of bad.

---

The image for Banshrae in MM V are, they're playing a flute. So they fixed that bit in the 4th edition Monster Manual in the knowledge DCs to say they can't play wind instruments. So they addressed the complaint about the art, specifically, but not generally.

It means they actually had some form of, they had input from forum posts to design, and yet were so stunningly tone deaf about it all. The problem wasn't really the flute, you see, it was the lack of a mouth. They needed the flute because it was their blowgun (even though that could not possibly work, but it was). Layer upon layer of bad.

And in retrospect the reason the MM V had the same crap as the MM IV, is they were both based on prototypes of this and if people didn't like ten different types of Orcs they must surely be a loud minority and not our entire customer base, because everyone is playing D&D Minis because it's outselling D&D proper, and has lots of types of Orcs, you see.

[tussock]

Continuing.

Cambion fight with a magical flaming sword, and drop a normal sword because at some point someone decided that element of post-combat insult to realism would save the day. Turtles all the way down, bad, bad turtles. They're not listed with the devils because a few of them are raised by devil-worshippers, ....

This may not have occoured to them, but you mostly only see devils in the game because devil-worshippers summon them with a ritual you can't have. Did I mention turtles?

Carrion Crawler traditionally are a lesson in how your low level PC has geared up and kicks ass and you're all over-confident so here's a bunch of saving throws to let you know it's still dangerous out there without killing your character. Not everything Gary Gygax did was mean, just most of it.

Oh, but wait. This is 4e, and Monsters must only be Soldiers, or Brutes, or Lurkers, or Artillery, or Controllers, which all really just punch or zap stuff. Because that's all monsters ever are, AMIRIGHT? RIGHT?

No. That is not D&D. But it is 4e, so in 4e the Carrion Crawler just another "it hits you, thing happens (save ends)". I mean, fair enough, the thing these warned you about; danger, risk, a reason to not just waltz around like you own the place, that's not here either. It's all so bland.

Chimera has nothing wrong with it. For a 4e monster design it hits everything it should do, spot on, other than not being a Solo. But it's not a bad look at where 4e is so bloaty and hard to work with.

Everything is unique.

• To use multiple attacks, a unique action required.
• To have a special effect on a charge, complete unique new action.
• Every breath weapon unique in what it does, but then it gets Bloodied Breath too, because they sort of tried to have themes with some of their powers and it has a dragon head, so that's another action on every dragon in the book, except when it isn't.

As much as they abbreviated things into tight confines in these stat blocks, the things bloat up if the monster is anything beyond the simplest possible basher. And Chimeras are dead simple, and these ones can't even use their claws because that would require even more multi-line unique actions. Because 4e is terrible. Also more dull brown over-shaded art (my own overlap, this book does not wrap text or anything).

Choker get Body Shield, where you hit your friend no save, because sure, why not, little guy slinging a barbarian around as a shield. Arbitrary anything can do anything means something things are just wrong.

Chuul in 3e are cool because they can drag you into the water they leapt out of to surprise you, dun dun dun. Except in 4e they can't do that, because this game is a pile of garbage at every zoom level. The L23 Elite version has a wtf psychic lure to pull you because they like to pretend this game works at all. But it does not.

Collossus is one of the biggest Elite Brutes in the game, probably averages about 21 damage a round (which is much higher than almost everything else). Has 662 hp, so takes ten minutes of non-stop bashing to down itself (in game time I mean, hours in real life).

Crocodile are Visejaw and Feymire, and there is no excuse for those names, they are just basic crocs.

There are a couple lines of errata on Swallowing that are also on most other Swallowing monsters in the game, because most of them use the same rule (as an individual copy) but then also lots of them don't. It's the worst of both worlds, and the one they mostly used was WRONG.

Cyclops have seven types. Two are minions that have the same Evil Eye actions, making just six different Evil Eye actions between them. None of them should exist at all, none of the Evil Eye actions have anything to do with D&D whatsoever and most of them are rubbish that serves to trigger an interrupt (and really, fuck off with the interrupts).

Also, no one gives a fuck about your seven types of Cyclops that don't even include the Cyclopskin at all!

Dark One, or rather Dark Creepers and Dark Stalkers. It's funny, they have 5 actions just to use stealth, but at least it works because it's unique to them and not relying on the completely broken and non-functional system players use at launch. Tragically they just fight to the death with it, all the old "put the lights out and nick stuff" is gone. Because EVERYTHING GOOD IN D&D IS NOT ALLOWED IN HERE.

Should've also used a Creeper Minion for the Stalker, with him being Elite. There's so much like that they just didn't even bother. That's who the Stalker is, a boss for large packs of Creepers who are blinding you as they die, that's what his powers are for. All gone.

Death Knight is. Present? Yes. They use several wordy actions each here to repeat a couple of annoying-ass class abilities that Tanks have in 4e, Marking, because why shouldn't the monsters have annoying garbage abilities too? Why should the players have all the unfun?


Look at all that glorious white space, some of the book is well packed, and so much of it is just not. You can't read the text, but it was all terrible. Not kidding, four terrible things that make the game worse, all lined up, above all that text they never wrote.

---

Demon and Devil actually get some fluff. Woo! Something to just read. Finally! This fucking book.

So, the Elder Elemental Eye accidentally created the Abyss under the primordial vastness which would later be the Elemental Chaos. Something something the gods fight the primordials, Devils fall from Grace, Elemental Chaos forms so now everything Elemental is sort of a Demon.

Nine Hells is Nine Hells though, fallen angels here because modern Christian doctrine is very important in D&D games or something. No deals to be made, you summon them, they get your soul, fight happens, the end. Hell is ... reached from the Astral Sea, so uh, there are no outer planes now but that is what an outer plane is so, like, why any of this change?

Balor is L27 Elite, because they wanted to leave room for the Demon Lords, which is fine, Paizo started pushing the various Evil Lords in Dragon Magazine long ago by the time this came out. He has no Vorpal Sword, nothing else does much, so it's just a beatstick.

So are the other Demons (so is everything), Barulgura, Evistro, Glabrezu, Goristro, Hezrou, Immolith, Marilith, Mezzodemon, and Vrock are a lot of very different levels and don't play together because like, who wants to invade the Abyss or anything. No Succubus because she switched teams when replacing the furies FOR NO REASON.

Poor Mezzoloth. Yugoloths gone, Gehreliths gone, Archons gone, Angels gone, Eladrin gone, but seven kinds of Cyclops. So bad.

Devils include the traditional Bearded, Bone, Chain, Ice, Imp, five not even different types of Legion Minions, Spined, Succubus who makes you hit yourself, and the Malebranche round them out. Meh.

Pit Fiend is weaker than the Balor at L26, which is wrong. 4e is dinky enough to give it a 10 square teleport trick, which seems completely pointless, a summon that is of course a ludicrously weak waste of an action, so half a page of fiddly rubbish to hit you with a big club for an hour or two really.

Points for rare inclusiveness (except the little guys, and the Legion are awful), but they didn't use the tools at their disposal to make these monsters work together. As a result all of the suggested encounters are just a demon and some other random fucking guys with quite weak support for why.

---

Destrachan are a thing I couldn't tell you why they're in this or 3e. Someone stuck a non-combat rule for it in the Knowledge check, sneaky, no where else to put them though!

Devourer are not badly done. It's all a very wordy way to give a timeout (save ends) for people hit, or a vampire drain from the next one, or a self-heal from the last after killing someone. Except sidebar says, it doesn't need to kill anyone now to get it, because it probs did that off camera.

So doing anything at all off camera requires random sidebars and hidden knowledge check abilities.

Displacer Beast have a 50% miss chance usually on, which is obviously a terrible idea in a game of padded sumo. Game design is not that hard, just don't do stuff like that.

Doppelganger is one of the town guards. Does not fight to the death, amazingly enough.

Dracolich are made from Dragons by a ritual you can't have, except not as you like, but only these specific three, because everything must be uniquely specified or not exist.

It has stupidly annoying interrupts for area stun every time you attack it, and the biggest has 1335 hp too. That has to be ... like, why is that even there. Dracolich is Dragon plus Undead, if that doesn't mean anything in your new edition (and in 4e it totally does not mean anything at all) then just don't even put the Dracolich in. Duh.

Especially a Dracolich that explicitly no longer work right for the Cult of the Dragon to be a thing (except they still are, just suicidally so), because fuck D&D, right, no one even plays it, here's 4e instead.

---

Eponymous Dragons deserve a long look, for the extra levels of tragedy they are, they'll be along next. I am apparently a quarter of the way in.

[jt]

Really enjoyable analysis (rants) so far, thanks for wading through the garbage to make it. Also "namename namenames" had me in stitches.

[Emerald]

Remember that the Monster Manual 5 was the result of David Noonan being told explicitly that the fans didn't want the Monster Manual 5 to waste large amounts of page count on monsters with class levels, on irrelevancies like cave maps, or on long-winded tirades about monster gangs. Then the draft he actually turned in was measurably more of all of those than the Monster Manual 4 and his only explanation was that "he couldn't help himself." So the big question really is why David Noonan didn't get fucking fired when he presented his Monster Manual 5.

Could you expand on this, or do you have any relevant links? I hadn't heard any of that before, and that sounds like a fun trainwreck to read about.

[Krusk]

Remember that the Monster Manual 5 was the result of David Noonan being told explicitly that the fans didn't want the Monster Manual 5 to waste large amounts of page count on monsters with class levels, on irrelevancies like cave maps, or on long-winded tirades about monster gangs. Then the draft he actually turned in was measurably more of all of those than the Monster Manual 4 and his only explanation was that "he couldn't help himself." So the big question really is why David Noonan didn't get fucking fired when he presented his Monster Manual 5.

Could you expand on this, or do you have any relevant links? I hadn't heard any of that before, and that sounds like a fun trainwreck to read about.

http://web.archive.org/web/201507290818 ... /20070727a

Their own god damn website. This isn't a rumor, or mystery, or behind the scenes info. This is feedback they put out to show how skilled they are.

[Username17]

Remember that the Monster Manual 5 was the result of David Noonan being told explicitly that the fans didn't want the Monster Manual 5 to waste large amounts of page count on monsters with class levels, on irrelevancies like cave maps, or on long-winded tirades about monster gangs. Then the draft he actually turned in was measurably more of all of those than the Monster Manual 4 and his only explanation was that "he couldn't help himself." So the big question really is why David Noonan didn't get fucking fired when he presented his Monster Manual 5.

Could you expand on this, or do you have any relevant links? I hadn't heard any of that before, and that sounds like a fun trainwreck to read about.

Original Discussion

Sadly, the original tirade by David Noonan about why he went ahead and made the Monster Manual 5 despite the fact that literally every piece of customer research they had done up to that point told them that fucking no one wanted any of the shit he was hell bent on expanding on from the Monster Manual 4 is no longer on the Wizards site. They purged all the old content a couple of times during the redesigns.

But you can still see our rants about David Noonan's terrible excuses. And even a few direct quotes.

Anyway, this was a running pattern in the runup to 4e. People said they wanted new classes and Andy Collins had the brilliant idea to limit the number of classes in the PHB to exactly eight (they cut the Swashbuckler when they decided to add an extra class). They released the preview abilities where everything was "Initiate of the Golden Griffin Order" or some shit, and people told them that was stupid and then they just... changed the specific adjectives but kept the same fucking naming convention.

"People hate our ideas. What if we give people the same ideas, but bigger?"

-Username17

[TiaC]

Remember that the Monster Manual 5 was the result of David Noonan being told explicitly that the fans didn't want the Monster Manual 5 to waste large amounts of page count on monsters with class levels, on irrelevancies like cave maps, or on long-winded tirades about monster gangs. Then the draft he actually turned in was measurably more of all of those than the Monster Manual 4 and his only explanation was that "he couldn't help himself." So the big question really is why David Noonan didn't get fucking fired when he presented his Monster Manual 5.

Could you expand on this, or do you have any relevant links? I hadn't heard any of that before, and that sounds like a fun trainwreck to read about.

http://web.archive.org/web/201507290818 ... /20070727a

Their own god damn website. This isn't a rumor, or mystery, or behind the scenes info. This is feedback they put out to show how skilled they are.

Or, just http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp? ... /20070727a

I'm not sure why you linked an archive of an archive.

[erik]

I'm not sure why you linked an archive of an archive.

Yeah, when you could be linking an archive of an archive of an archive!

[tussock]

It is quite amazing that they definitely were hearing the complaints, and acting on them, and yet not ever dealing with the underlying problems. I can imagine it was some forum admin's job to check the forums and collect notes about specific reported problems, and then some junior developer's job to action those notes, and none of them ever got up the chain to the people working on structuring the game.

---

Special entry.

Dragon has always been a big entry in D&D Monster Manuals. It is, after all ...

Dungeons & Dragons.

In AD&D, Dragons have 8 ages, and 1 hp/HD per age category. Number appearing is 1-4 or 1-3 for the better ones.

• Solo dragons are age 1-8.
• Paired dragons are age 5-8.
• 3+ outside the lair are all age 3.
• 3+ in a lair are a pair plus age 1 (10% eggs!).

They have ~8 HD (80hp big Red, 10hp newborn). At high level you're supposed to ride one as a mount, or the bigger giants use them as guard dogs, or evil NPCs use them as mounts too. Dragonlance was written for this edition. Flight rules let them strafe you every three rounds for their full hp in damage, 3/day.

In 2nd edition there's 12 ages, and varied HD by age category. Number appearing is 1, or 2-5 in a lair.

• Solo dragons are age 5-12.
• Paired dragons are age 5-7.
• 3+ are Solo or Pair with young age 1-5 (1/6 eggs!).

I (... wait, is that a lynching postcard?), but it's from a 2nd edition book where that is not a rules-legal dragon to find on its own like that, as that's age 1 in 2e.
HD are "base" ~13 at age 4, ~7-21 full range (103 hp GW Red, 40 hp newborn). No subdual capture, no pets, no mounts, don't really work with other monsters, see almost none of them compared to AD&D without lots of house rules. Flying rules are a mess, but they can still strafe every few rounds, and the breath weapon are now dice by age doing similar damage to previous, but usable after each 1d4 rounds.

3e of course, they kept most of 2nd edition, made everything a linear progression, tried to be a best of every edition otherwise, and broke some more stuff.

• Age 1-5 is Solo or 2-5, now found anywhere.
• Age 6-12 is Solo, or a Pair plus further young if 2-5.

They get 3 HD per age (660 hp GW Red, 59 hp newborn). They all become high level Sorcerers eventually, which, really, they're a high level spellcaster in 3e, but with better Fort saves. Shame that Harm had no save, really, at least they have a bit of SR.

The older ones are a bit much work to put together because of the spellcaster levels, but up to mid age get a lot of use.

---

4th edition, well, those old editions all have a few DIY steps, and again in 4e everything must be specified in a single stat block or not exist at all. A foolish consistency is the bugbear of small minds, but we'll get to the Bugbears under the Gs.

4e Dragons are all Solo monsters, which .. the suggested encounters all have them appearing with 2-4 other monsters, often Elites, so mostly it just means interminably boring combats. There are four ages each colour, and they don't exist as hatchlings because nothing exists outside combat. This is clearly laid out to have most levels with one Solo dragon at that level. There's only the metallics, so 20 stat blocks from level 3 to 30.

Each stat block is basically identical to the others in the same colour, plus numbers and maybe another unique action here and there. Every single dragon presented does the same tricks in the same way, with tiny differences that maybe happen once a fight.

See also, almost every monster in this book.

The ancient red is definitely harder to fight with the large aura damage, it's not just bigger numbers. But the fact that level 30 fights already go on forever (because hit points are 7x and damage only 3x) before even considering that it's a Solo Soldier, making people be sub-optimal about fighting them, just eeew. Can't even sentence good, so frustrated.

They previewed it somewhere, before release, describing a fight against that Ancient Red, concluding that the fight did not end, that remaining PCs could run and shoot and hours passed and then they had to stop playing. Yet, that was considered a yarn worth selling the game on. A bonus. A success above others.

My own take at the time was a combat system, above everything, should produce the result of combats, and that the eponymous Dragon, when fought in a Dungeon, in the 4th edition, failed to do so. Produced a glaring error. Which they then promoted. !

Again, game design is not that hard, just don't do that.

Soon enough one of the early splats for 4e gave a certain build of Wizard a way to reliably stunlock Solo monsters forever, and yeah, suddenly none of these Dragons were even usable any more, along with every other Solo. 1200hp that can't fight back, it just screams at you all evening about please killing it so you can stop, and you're trying, but you only have your at-will left, and it's not even bloodied yet.

Not using them was probably for the best, the later Solo designs (and they never completely fixed the stunlock problem, despite the massive errata they produced), had extra stuff they could do to regularly end conditions, but still far too many hp.

---

Obviously the idea of riding a Dragon into battle, just not possible in 4e. 3e still had rideable dragons down lower, 2e you could fudge it easily (ignoring the rules in 2e is a rule in 2e anyway), but here, no chance.

All the ways Gygax made Dragons pervasive in the early game, appearing in all the random dungeon stocking charts, being subduable to work as guards and mounts so they turn up everywhere you think about it naturally, having prices attached to things like selling them or hiring a trainer for one and feeding it for years. People built worlds of dragon-riding empires where they carefully bred a captive stock of the right disposition, that are in so many popular fantasy works that now infuse the modern gestalt. Avatar had their tall blue people ride big dragon-things to combat the Humans using airborne warfare, catching onto a wild one and thereby subduing it to ride on later was a big point in the story. Because Gygax is in everyone's head now, except the people who were making 4e D&D.

4e can't tell any of those stories, all of its design parameters are just poison for telling a grand cooperative fantasy story based on the emergent principles of common rules. It's just fights, and all short-range padded-sumo fights at that.

A 4e Ancient Red Dragon is supposed to, by it's own flavour text, right in this book, its whole thing, is to hoard riches from tribute, yet it has a fire aura sufficient to burn everything in the game, both the treasure and the people trying to bring it. They can't even tell their own massively limited stories, let alone anyone else's.

High point, at least these ones fit in the dungeon again, I guess. Low point, come on, lairs, groups of older and younger dragons together, baby minions that give combat bonuses to their allies on dying, regular young that are simple hit and run guys, elite mid age dive-chargers with good melee, solo old with large area attacks in melee and at range, they never really used anything of the potential of this system, it's bad even at the limited game it is.

---

I cannot finish the Ds here, 4e Dragons make me sad, and I also feel I need to look up some Dragonborn history. Council of Wyrms was it?

[Username17]

The absolute weirdest thing about the endless expansion of hit points at high levels is that at an earlier draft stage attacks did a lot more damage. When they first previewed the [W] system, they talked about level bonus to damage, as well as extra [W]s multiplying that damage. A 30th level character's at-wills were supposed to be doing 30 extra damage just from the 2[W] and their level bonus. Plus all the other static damage bonuses that were being doubled. You can kind of see how "ultimate" attacks like a daily attack that did 7[W] was actually supposed to be a capstone ability at one point because that was actually a metric fucktonne of damage.

By the time it hit print of course, the level bonus to damage was gone and [W]s didn't multiply shit. I forget who it was, but I think it was Andy Collins who mentioned in a later interview how he'd had to go in an excise "Heinsoo Craziness" from the game "like 7d12 damage." Even after the game was crashing and burning, no on the project seemed able to understand that massively curtailing damage outputs had been and continued to be a colossal error.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

How fixed would 4e's padded sumo problem be if you just reimplemented a level bonus to damage and the [W] multiplier?

[Thaluikhain]

You totally missed my least favorite part of 4E, the fact that everything is named Nounverber Portmanteaufucker. Here's all of those up through the section you've reviewed.

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

[Username17]

How fixed would 4e's padded sumo problem be if you just reimplemented a level bonus to damage and the [W] multiplier?

It definitely has different problems. But Padded Sumo goes away.

Consider our 30th level Fighter. He has a level bonus of +15. He probably has a Strength bonus of +7 or something. And a +6 Sword. And a feat that gives +2 damage. And is getting a +3 bullshit bonus from the Cleric. That's like 33 points of non-random damage added to every [W]. Now the weapon damage die is still just a d8 because reasons, but that still means that your 7[W] attack does 231+7d8 damage (average 262 damage). That's our Fighter cashing in a daily, and it doesn't always hit. But it has the thingy where you don't expend it until you hit with it, so one of the Fighter's blows is always going to do 263 damage. That's almost one fifth of the Ancient Dragon's hit points. Assuming the 50% hit rates that the designers seemed to think you were having, that corresponds with the players beating the Ancient Red Dragon in approximately 6 rounds - roughly enough time for everyone to use a daily or two and burn through all of their encounter powers.

Now there's another issue where the monsters appear to assume to-hit bonuses on the part of the players that are not in evidence in the final product. The Ancient Red Dragon has an Armor Class of 48, meaning that in order to get your 50% hit rate, you'd need a to-hit bonus of +37. I honestly have no idea where such monstrously high to-hit bonuses were supposed to come from, the game was incredibly miserly with to-hit bonuses of any size. The Ancient Dragon just sort of assumes you have such a bonus, but there's no means of getting there in the core book unless there's some broken power in a Warlord tree that I'm forgetting.

Even with Heinsoo damage math, the to-hit math doesn't scale properly, and you just can't play against the high level core monsters without to-hit bonuses from power creep options in expansion books that obviously hadn't been written yet. Now the question is open: was there supposed to be a bunch more and bigger to-hit bonuses that just didn't make it to the final product? Were people originally supposed to be getting +Level to attack rolls instead of +1/2Level? I don't know. Certainly if the basic level bonus to attack rolls had been +30 instead of +15 at level 30, the Ancient Red's AC of 48 looks downright reasonable.

In any case, the giant attack and damage bonuses assumed by early writers appear to go through high level 4e monsters in a reasonable amount of time. Now I can certainly see why people would balk at those numbers. For starters, we're talking about a 30th level opponent who has 1,390 hit points, which is dumb (although obviously they did that anyway), and we're talking about damage bonuses which are ridiculously larger than the die rolls. For fuck's sake, you're rolling 7d8 and adding two hundred and thirty one to the result! The difference between a 10th percentile damage roll (254) and a 90th percentile damage roll (271) is less than a 7% damage increase. The "damage roll" is a complete fucking waste of time at that point.

But what's weird as fuck to me is that when someone put their foot down and demanded that attacks scale slower, they did not also bother to recalculate defenses. Like, at all. I have no idea how anyone thought that was going to work out.

-Username17