Let me throw out some concrete examples:
Here is a monster listing from the Monster Manual:
Flameskull Level 8 Artillery
Tiny natural animate (undead) XP 350
Initiative +7 Senses Perception +11
HP 70; Bloodied 35
Regeneration 5
AC 21; Fortitude 18, Reflex 23, Will 21
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 fire, 5 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 radiant
Speed fly 10 (hover)
Melee - Fiery Bite (standard; at-will) ✦ Fire Reach 0; +10 vs. AC; 1 damage plus 1d8 fire damage.
Ranged - Flame Ray (standard; at-will) ✦ Fire Ranged 10; +12 vs. Refl ex; 2d6 + 6 fi re damage.
Area - Fireball (standard; encounter) ✦ Fire Area burst 3 within 20; +12 vs. Refl ex; 3d6 + 6 fi re damage. Miss: Half damage. The flameskull can exclude two allies from the effect.
Mage Hand (minor; at-will) ✦ Conjuration As the wizard power mage hand (Player’s Handbook 158).
Illumination
The flameskull sheds bright light out to 5 squares, but it can reduce its
brightness to dim light out to 2 squares as a free
action.
Alignment Unaligned Languages Common, one other
Skills Stealth +12
No more hit dice, no more fixed saving throw targets for effects, just basic attack powers and defense numbers. Now, to convert this monster (which, by "proper encounter design" as per the DMG, is only one of several encounter foes), you would follow these instructions from the DMG:
Boosting a monster’s level is easy. Just increase its attack rolls, defenses, and AC by 1 for every level you add. For every two levels, increase the damage it deals with its attacks by 1. The monster also gains extra hit points at each level, based on its role (see the “Monster Statistics by Role” table on page 184). Decreasing a monster’s level works like increasing it, but in reverse. This process works best for adjusting a monster’s level up to five higher or lower. Beyond that, the monster changes so much that you’d do better to start with another creature of the desired role and level range.
On the other hand, Skill Challenges are the system for running non-combat encounters for the players. First, in 4E it is important to understand that all skills have a base value equal to half your level. If you are Trained, you get another plus 5, if you are also Focused in that skill, another plus 3, which is about as high as you can get over your comrades. (And for a few skill tests, you must be Trained in order to attempt it).
My biggest complaint here is that the skill list is rather short. But with brevity, list of skills each get more relevance. Thus the skill Thievery includes everything you can think of that is not in the skill Stealth.
What is a "Skill Challenge"? It's a series of roles, each player getting a chance to contribute, where the goal is to get the required number of successes before rolling too many failures. The difficulty of those skill rolls are based on the adjudication of relevance of the skill and how the player describes us
On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:59 PM, L C <lightcastle_at_...> wrote:
>
> Completely? So the "Here is the same monster/NPC at different levels -
> we've done the math for you" is no longer relevant?
> Interesting. (I've only skimmed through 4E, it looks like a great game
> for what it is trying to be.)
>
> >The math
> >in the system is built so that at any level, the abilities of the
> characters
> >to succeed at skills or attack roles is within one or two of a "base
> >resistance". From that number, monsters are either easy, normal or
> hard for
> >a given level, but easily scalable to the characters' current level.
NPCs,
> >in this case, would have a broad range where they are relevant (e.g.
> levels
> >11-20), and only have to be spec'ed-out with a few keynote abilities, not
> >full stats.
>
> Interesting. That certainly takes care of that problem, but probably has
> annoyed the hell out of some people who loved the 3 and 3.5 ability/need
> to stat everything out.
> I always pined for the days of 1st Edition when I could make a monster
> just be "a 3rd level fighter" and that was enough to use, so I'd be fond
> of the change.
>
> >Thus, when making dungeon crawls, or skill-based story-telling sessions
in
> >your setting-of-choice, you are in many ways using the relative-based
> >narrative that has been discussed here ad nausium. True, there are still
> >numbers; but those numbers have now been built around a Pass/Fail cycle,
> >with guidelines in the DMG on how to cycle your encounters (both
> combat and
> >non-combat) so that the story has a dramatic flow.
>
> I heard that they tried to make 4E handle non-combat significantly
> again. It even looked like it wasn't a bad system for it. I always
> disliked how 3rd Edition went into "The game is about fighting monsters
> and that's it" but it seemed a solution to some of the problems with
> D&D. 4E seems to have tried to go back the other way, but with some
> massive redesign. As I said, it does seem an interesting approach. Still
> highly tactical based, and if I recall, even the non-combat skill
> resolution was very "tactics to win" based. (I could be misremembering,
> though.)
>
> >So while D&D may be focused on tactical combat, even their designers
> >have realized the benefit of tailoring the story to dramatic flow. In
this
> >case, it was just pre-built into the system so that the process of
> DMing is
> >easier for the general public. This is lightly touched on if you read
> design
> >notes or the guidelines in the DMG, but not widely know about the system,
> >since it's not relevant to most players. (Whether they succeed at this
> >narrative scheme, I could not say. I've not played more a few combats and
> >skill-based encounters, just to see what the new system was like.)
>
> Interesting. And yes, I think relevant to the "the numbers aren't fixed"
> question.
> I think the first question someone would ask would be, "So the same
> Dragon is equally difficult at 2nd and 15th level?"
>
> LC
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Powered by hypermail