Are Monsters in Today's D&D Edition Lame?
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I definitely think the mindset towards playing D&D has changed to be more videogame-like. Where players were once expected to think their ways around encounters ( especially in the days when XP came from gold, not kills) they now take for granted that enemies are little more than "mobs," creatures to be killed and looted. They can't be too lethal because players can't conceive of not being able to fight them. Now, I think we all identified in some way with our characters, even back in the day; even Gygax, Kuntz, and company immortalized their favorite characters by making them part of the lore. But we never took their survival as a given, and our favorites only gained that status by being successful and surviving. Today, I feel like characters are often player inserts, with too much invested in them from the onset, and their demise is treated almost personally.
@@williampalmer8052 Rob Kuntz's Robilar was the only character to survive the temple of Elemental Evil. They may have had lore around their characters but it was earned in game.
When I run games I can't tell you how many times I've heard players refer to monsters as mobs and when they appear as spawns.
Yea, I definitely feel like people take their characters too personally. I'm guilty of that too, too a certain extent, but I'm self aware. Also, that's what my group does, so it isn't just me mucking it up for everyone else
My last campaign died when I got frustrated with my players and hit them with an intelligent roadside ambush, they complained worse than veterans who lived through the same encounter but with real IED's and AK's instead of game mechanics.
I was utterly disgusted by their level of butt-hurt and almost quit the game after over two decades of play.
These 'Stranger Things' players are the bane of the game.
@@UltraDonny5000 u sound like a fun-as-hell gm. I'd enjoy that style game lol cuz let's be real, monsters hunt with evolutionary traits and skills that have kept them alive for that long, humanoids don't just run at pc's until they die. That's just stupidity and honestly its insulting.
Then you have failed as a dm...
Lost of monsters used to be cooler. I see 5e as putting bubble wrap and rainbows everywhere by comparison.
Lots and lots of rainbow flags, thats is for sure 🤣
@@House_Of_Cards_ Hehe, I was not thinking of that. ;)
Well, now you have to get spiked armor to increase AC. This helps prevent the "hug attack". Unfortunately, it attracts the twerkers.
@@House_Of_Cards_
Oddly enough, it's not a liberal or progressive thing.
It's posers wanting to engage in the hobby, but unable or unwilling to play the game as it was. They want cheats enabled so they can feel über without actually having to try.
I honestly think 5e monster feel into that same trap the rest of 5e fell into with this almost Marvel themed DnD. You look at the Wight from 5e and he looks more like a Superhero villain. Same thing with the new concept of Vecna I feel like. They just don't feel like fantasy anymore and a lot of their abilities feel like less of a threat.
Also I feel like the monsters almost are an after thought in 5e. With so much of the upper stat block being almost a copy and paste feel. There is very little weakness and strengths to monsters anymore. Like where did all the radiant weakness of undead go or their necrotic resistance. It feels like a move of "oh but we want everyone to be on equal ground when fighting the monsters. Can't have the Necromancer feel like he is contributing less in the fight then the cleric."
I would have to agree with that statement. Marvel like creates was funny. 😂
5e undead have been reduced to a mild inconvenience.
Yup . Skeletons were hard to hit or even hard to damage if you try attacking them with sharp weapons . You take blunt weapons to do the work .
Zombies are immune against blunt damage and doesnt fall over and die. They can still be alive even with 0 hp on them .
Monsters were obstacles that arent just easily conquered . You adapt yourself to the adventure and plan while hoping for the best.
People are just fearing of consequences and dangers in a game of a fictional setting.
There is no real balance except different solutions to one problem. Many people have an one-track-mind and see any consequences as a big problem. Perfectionism in a game where there is no perfect way .
Its inevitable that gaming will change as time goes on. I'm an old hat myself. Started with the red box in 84, stopped after Tasha's released for 5e. In that time, I watched the landscape change with each edition. From 2e's wild mismanagement to 3e's corporate infusions. When you have more people joining the hobby, more ideas will be thrown around. The game, much like the art will change with the times, and with experiences of those people growing up in those times.
Have monsters changed? Definitely. Survival is far, far easier now in 5e than in 1e. It's not for me to say if that's good or bad, but from personal experience I found 5e worthless to run after about 7th level, because nothing in their books challenged my group. Are monsters worse? That depends on the monsters. I'll be blunt, a great deal of the 1e and 2e monsters were filler trash. Bags of hit points that didn't do anything except exist as bags of hit points. The difference between a goblin and a kobold was negligible. Not that the 2014 monster manual did much different from that, but I ended up just making a lot of my own creatures in the early days because outside of one or two gimmicks, they didn't have anything else to them.
The complexity of the game comes into play here as well. Can you imagine the sheer amount of book-flipping you'd have to do draining a level from a 5e character? Their CR system was utterly useless as it was. Suddenly having 2 characters losing, say 2 levels would throw that broken balance into chaos (Though maybe that's the point).
I don't think modern gamers would fear a level drain for the right reasons. They'd fear it for metagame reasons. The eye-roll and sigh of having to figure out how many fewer HP and HD and Skills and Feats and Spells and Abilities and all the other baggage the new systems comes with would be an absolute nightmare. It's bad enough 5e has you stopping the game every ten seconds because someone has some ability that has a reaction to another person's reaction or feat or feature, add into the fact someone 'reverse-making' a character by a level or two during an encounter would have had me running around the back yard like a lunatic trying to hunt ducks with a rake.
You simply can't have certain mechanics in the newer editions. And to be honest, it's not an edition that was made to be a survivalist game. It's a kitchen-sink, corporate, middle-of-the-road game these days. It's made to be 'broad appeal' to the kids with power fantasies. I won't tell them their fun is wrong. They get to do whatever makes them happy as long as it's not hurting anyone else. But the game itself isn't remotely the same as what it once was. The difference between even 5e and 3e is so much that outside of the trappings of numbers and some stats, it doesn't run the same at all.
In terms of art, I have to agree that I loved the early art so much more. Russ Nicholson and David Trampier were the reasons I became an artist. Their art depicted a grittier feel. The black shadows at the end of a hallway with carved ruins hit so much different than a full colour would have (Though Erol Otus could do some very dark scenes in colour too). I won't go into how styles change in art (It's something I'm keenly aware of, working in the field). But I will note that a lot of WoTC upcoming artwork is bad because it's watered down, committee art. I know, because I've been in those 'committee' meetings where 'broad appeal' and 'Safe for Brand' is thrown around by bloated, line-worrying weirdos who don't understand the product they make. You actually hit the nail on the head with the note of 'Disnifying' in a lot of the new art. Characters that are smiling! Smirking! Even with battle going on. Terrifying things are done away with easily by the happy characters.
Indeed, that's what you get with publicly traded company art. Can you imagine them trying to draw the original MM1 succubus these days? The board would faint like a boatload of anemic waifs.
Different days, though.
@@timjohnson2533 wonderful analysis! Well stated and spot on.
Man, I can remember entire parties running away if they encountered a Wight, nobody wanted to loose a level, so we would retreat, formulate a plan and come back prepared. I miss OD&D.
Exactly!!! My parties knew when to cut and run. It's such a joke now.
Time to learn how nets work!
Come back with many barrels filled with oil, and enough alchemist's fire to raze Waterdeep, three times over, just to be sure.
Everything in D&D is becoming insufferably cutesy, and it absolutely ruins the experience for me. The next time I see a werewolf described as a "big heckin pupper," I'm going to vomit.
@@BazztheBazz where are werewolves referred to in such a loathsome way?
I'm sorry, what? Where?
Hasbro wants to become the next Monopoly, an easy to pick up game that's in every home, which sucks.
Wait... is that in game text? Like it's one thing as a tongue in check was for a DM to down play the fact that he throw a werewolf at them but... as something published?!
I'm sure if someone made it the Pathowogen, it'd be much more terrifying than 5e.
Though the other thing I see is that... the Lycanthropy curse just seems really confusing to read, and to me looks like the kind of thing that just ruins the fun of the game.
It's like a Stunning Strike on that one person, until they get Remove Curse. At which point, goodbye tense curse sequences!
I miss the days when D&D was considered satanic.
I don't.
Goblins. They reached the pinnacle of lethality in 3e and then became a nuisance in later editions. By 5e they aren’t even the slightest bit of challenge.
Goblins aren’t cowardly. They’re cunning. They aren’t stupid enough to try to stand and fight against a creature twice their size. Once you apply that to them, they are extremely dangerous.
Goblins use ambush. They hit and run. They use their reputation to their advantage.
After my players destroyed a goblin village, I hit them with a goblin party that was out for revenge. This has become one of the things those same players fear me repeating, decades later. This was a 5th level party against 4 goblins, three wolves and a goblin rogue 3 leading them, which is two less wolves than my standard goblin mounted scout party.
The first round was the ambush. The players lost the roll for surprise, so the goblins had the jump on them. The two unmounted goblins fired arrows from the tree line to take out the pack horses. The two mounted goblins hit the lightly armored rogue scoring one bite, one trip and two spear attacks reducing him to half his hit points. The leader hit the unarmored mage with his wolf’s bite and trip, giving him a sneak attack with his spear, killing the mage outright.
Round two, the players actually got to act. The fighter rushed to protect the rogue, who was flat on his back. The cleric moved to try to help the downed mage, not knowing he was already dead. The rogue stood up. The two mounted goblins moved to where the archers were hidden. The archers fired two more shots into the horses each, both killing one each. The leader turned on the remaining horse, hitting with a bite, failing the trip and stabbing it with a spear, killing it.
Round three, the goblins legged it. The rogue tried to hit the leader with an arrow, but missed both shots. The goblin archers got picked up by the two mounted goblins and rode off. The leader disappeared into the tree line too, riding at full speed. The fighter had no ranged weapon, neither did the cleric.
The combat ended with the players having to carry the supplies that it took three horses to carry and a dead mage. But the goblins weren’t quite done. Night fell and the goblins had tracked them to where the PCs camped.
The goblins waited until the players slept, leaving only the previously unwounded fighter awake on guard. I had him roll a perception check, but he couldn’t have succeeded against the goblins’ Stealth modifier, so I didn’t bother to calculate their skill roll, except to make sure it didn’t come up a 1. The rogue and cleric died to a coup de grace in their sleep. The fighter took a short sword attack from the leader, dropping him by almost a quarter of his hit points. The two goblins hiding in the dark outside the camp fire’s light waited to fire until after the leader legged it. After the surprise round, the two in the camp headed towards where the archers were hidden, the leader ran off into the dark and the two goblin archers hit the fighter with three out of four arrows. In the second non-surprise round, the fighter took seven hits from the bows of all the goblins, killing him outright.
That was a total wipe of a 5th level party using only 4 goblins, 3 wolves and a goblin rogue 3 leader. The players, to the last, made goblin replacement PCs, completely altering that campaign.
Yeah, you can’t do that as a DM with 5e. It isn’t possible within the ruleset. Goblins don’t have a +12 Stealth at the start in 5e (+4 racial, +4 size, +3 class skill, +1 skill rank, +2 from Dex, in Pathfinder 1st. +4 racial, +4 size, +4 skill ranks, +2 from Dex in D&D 3e.)
You don’t need bigger and badder monsters in older editions. You just need to use what you have. They’re challenging enough, if you know how to use them.
The players in that game could have avoided that fight entirely. They came across a goblin village that was under the oppressive control of an orc tribe. They got to learn about goblin culture as goblins instead for attacking without thinking. It ended up being a fun campaign anyway, but they could have brought peace between the goblins and a human farming community instead.
Oh yes, that sounds like _so_ much fun... handwave away exactly how you set up camp because it's never mattered, you just had a _bad_ adventuring day, and you are trying to get back to town so 1/4 of your gaming group can actually _play_ like he came here to do, after all it isn't like the DM will murder us all in our sleep after making _every_ assumption in favor of the NPCs and botching the mechanics or anything...
I have seen DMs try to pull off the mid-night throat slitting (or "mere" thievery) routine many times in my _many_ years playing TTRPGs, as a player, as an observer able to see "behind the curtain", and twice as a DM. Only once was it carried out fairly, and _that_ because the players were expecting an _eventual_ attack and took great delight designing out their fortifications in detail. In the _vast_ majority of cases, there is a serious mismatch between the player and DM expectations. The players are expecting the DM to "fast forward" to the next interesting thing, where the DM will set the stage and then ask for basic information like "what's your marching order" before time resumes. Instead, time resumes _in media res_ with the PCs already screwed.
Just to be clear, your general point that enemies played well usually punch well above the same enemies played poorly is certainly valid. And I have no problem with finishing off downed characters or otherwise having highly lethal games (I'm currently most enjoying running CoC7, which can be quite lethal on both sides). I only point out the probable issue here because I made exactly that class of error twice in the first campaign I ran, and know how easy it is to screw it up.
@@yellingintothewind The guys I play with have been playing for 30+ years. We play a rougher game than some do. That game started because they wanted to fight a goblin horde in a campaign and I was chosen to run it because they watched me play a goblin in another game that we had going at the same time.
They were expecting it. That’s why they attacked first when they came across a goblin village. They just didn’t realize how lethal the retaliation could be if they didn’t get them all. They had fun with it, even during the TPK.
By the end of that campaign, they had a new understanding of the so-called “evil” races. They started questioning why goblins attack, rather than just thinking they are evil. They derailed the horde, they just did it as a part of it.
@@almitrahopkins1873 As long as everyone's enjoying it, the opinions of random people online don't matter. Just keep having fun.
That said, I was not objecting to the lethality of the game. I run an incredibly unforgiving game; the only reason the body count is so low is my dice are merciful. Nothing quite like managing to line up on 4 out of 5 PCs with a lightning bolt, have 3 of them fail their save, and then roll in the 10th percentile on damage. At least when I'm fumbling my rolls as the villians, we can all laugh about it.
I suppose there is some value in handwaiving "your heroes get hunted down and slaughtered on their way back to town", if the situation is truly untennable and the outcome all but certain. It lets you get everyone, including the currently sidelined player, back in the action faster without dragging out the game to its inevitable conclusion.
@@yellingintothewind That was the bit that I didn’t understand. They’ve seen me play goblins multiple times. They’ve watched me do that exact same thing as a single PC more than a dozen times. They knew I favored the stealth approach to combat. I think they intentionally put themselves in a position for it to get a chance to make new characters instead of just saying they wanted to change characters.
10 minutes into the second session, they TPK’d and they probably knew it was coming. We have a standard rule about new characters joining, that they have to come from around where the other PCs currently are. They might have been able to defend their campsite, but they didn’t even try.
@@almitrahopkins1873 That changes the analysis considerably. If the _players_ are good with the PCs collapsing in an exhausted heap at the end of the day, relying on luck to not get found and executed by their enemies, then dying through the night is an excellent end to the arc.
It's just when the players _aren't_ good with _that_ that problems happen. I've been in games where the players assume they need to explicitly state everything in advance, lest the DM assume they characters are incompetent. (Worse, when the DM then uses that above-table knowledge to circumvent the PCs actions, but that is not an issue with marginally competent DMs). It grinds play to an absolute standstill when you need tactical maps and time for the players to arrange their defence-in-depth _every night_ .
This is one thing where _Blades In The Dark_ really shines. It has a flashback mechanic where players can explicitly halt the current action to go back and resolve something that the PCs would see as obvious but the players didn't. It has scaling resource costs, depending on how big an oversight the players are trying to correct, so they can't just do it forever, but it mitigates the worst of this sort of thing. Unfortunately I haven't figured out a _good_ way to map the concept to D&D since it lacks the stress mechanic from BitD.
2e and 3e undead, were brutal. every party HAD to have a cleric just in case
shadows drain str
wights wraiths (-1 lvl)
vampires (-2 levels)
ghosts aging you 10-40 years per hit (2 or 3 hits on a human and they're dead)
Mummy curses
banshee scream (save vs death or die)
it really feels like Dnd has gone from classic fantasy like Lord of the rings, and conan
to an episode of Adventure Time
the only one of these 5e doesn't have is level-drain, because undoing levels is a lot more complicated
Yes 5e and 5.5 will be easier for players. The monsters are nerfed. The players don’t want or expect to die in the game. 1AD&D was much more deadly.
"Stables of characters." Yeah, that sounds about right, tho lots of of them "retired" after a point, getting kingdoms, or settling-down with families, setting up businesses, coming out for rare adventures every now and again. Our levels averaged higher, but...yeah.
To answer your question, it depends on the publisher. If it is from WotC, yes it is woosified/froofroonated. Other publishers of 5e monsters have done better, have been as woosified as WotC and others have been worse.
@@unknowncomic4107 i do agree with that
Finally! Yes, yes, they are. I don’t play WOTC stuff but my Tubes are inundated with their garbage so I can’t help but watch their never ending shenanigans and the new generation of monsters RAW are a joke.
Couple this with their Superfriends approach to characters at Level 1 (and accompanying snorefest of modern backstory). I literally saw some bloke talking about how he has a barbarian planned who grows to 19 feet when he Rages and jumps 20 feet at foes….
Ugh. Weak monsters, super powered characters, no consequences.
@@rlbink2498 this is why I never use monsters as written. I will mix in my own homebrew rules and pull old mechanics forward.
I play d&d for 32 years now... I must admit that I did not like at all this permanent level draining thing of the old and I am glad that it is off the table in 5e. But... Yes monsters now are nerfed to oblivion and their CRs are terribly calculated and cannot be used as a guide by new DMs. I think that this is why monster manuals of third party creators have been so popular these days, they are simply better.
I never liked it at all; I rewrote most level-draining monsters for my table to either have a save, or a different mechanic (such as CON-score drain or damage -- I mean, c'mon, Dracula punches me and I forget Dwarvish?).
@@Scarbonac It's the same in my campaign. You get a save, and if you fail that, you lose CON (and/or some other stat). To recover it, find a cleric that can cast a restoration spell. Barring that, you have to have _full bed rest_ for two weeks per CON (or whatever) lost, for each one drained (two weeks for 1 CON lost, four for two, etc). Only the worst of the undead (vampires, liches etc) do full level drain, but the same rules apply.
Another side of the debate I think is not brought up enough is I think undead should have something that make them feared more than most other monsters and I think that's whay the original designers were going for. I've been rewatching the Lord of the Rings movies again and sure the heroes were worried if orcs were around but ghosts and spirits still spooked them. I think it doesn't make much sense for skeletons and zombies to be push overs in the game as it seems to me people see them as a toy soldier to push over instead of a horrifying entity they've never seen before.
I completely agree with you!!
One thing thats always confused me about the 5e skeleton is that they don't have immunity to piercing.
Which should honestly be obvious
@jasonfurumetarualkemisto5917 I've always thought resistance would be fine. Most attacks would pass through them or past them because they have less mass but if something hits them it might deflect off and do less. Maybe you're right that it should have more than resistance, where if 5e had more options it'd have higher piercing reduction than what half gives.
I will say that I as a long time player and newish DM it takes a lot of effort on the DMs part to make monsters feel threatening. For me I did a spider encounter and the only thing I changed was giving the spiders a drag ability if they hit someone with their webshot. It was a fantastic first session and first combat where the players felt they were at risk but they were going to be relatively fine given it being a 6 man party with two life clerics. The initial start went exactly how I wanted with 3 players getting webbed and one of those getting dragged further into the den . The party freed their two companions and then advanced forward with all but one tripping on a wire slowing their progress. They made it in time with their party member who was dragged off looking a tad worse for wear but alive, free, and standing. He was just surrounded by spiders. Once the party was grouped up they cleared it fine with some scrapes and bruises but they managed.
Im not sure why people play in a game in which there is no threat of death. Where is the challenge?
Not everyone is looking for challenge. Some are looking to tell a story with some randomness and collaboration to guide it. For those people, dying to a random goblin in a cave is an anticlimax that ruins the story. Unfortunately for those who want the story of, "life is cheap and nobody matters" they are not the target audience of DnD anymore because they are the minority voice these days.
@@beanstheclownWell, there is 'challenge' and there is 'the dice suck again and again and the game makes balanced encounters, but the dice somehow always rolling awesome for the GM and almost always sucking for the players just ruin the fun. Some systems give more agency to the players to at least make it 'feel' more balanced. We finished with d20 based games (like pf2e) because it ruined the enjoyment. Back to GURPS.
@@beanstheclown D&D is dying precisely because of the absolute garbage they put out. They havent put out a decent adventure in nearly a decade, other than remixes of old school modules. A--- trying not to laugh--- RECIPE book is their best seller in 5 years. They just layed off all their talent including their entire book team, and then forced out WotC's pres. However, you will have the opportunity to buy your D&D Monopoly game at a Walmart near you. Hopefully there is no chance of losing. Im sorry you sucked too bad to be able to beat a goblin without 6 death saves and a power nap.
People play for the social experience. For the fun. For roleplay. For the story.
@@theravenousrabbit3671 I play for adventure and challenge, and yes, for fun, role-play and story. But without adventure, and challenge, I might as well read a book or chat with friends..
The bottom line is that Original D&D and OSR in general are not for people who get easily offended by the most trivial things in life. That is not the type of personality who will sit down and enjoy these types of RPGs. There are plenty of games for millennials to enjoy, but I do not see these maladjusted, spoiled snow flakes playing a Dark Souls type game neither. Non of these are for them.
The youngest millennials are 30 now grandpa.
Take your pills and go to bed.
To be fair, I think level drain is more intelligent than anything else, especially given the level of paperwork involved post AD&D. I think making a wight's damage semi-permanent would be the better solution.
I have to agree with your assessment. I thought level drain was inexplicable as why does a monster (a wight in this case) make me forget my spells or lower my fighting capability permanently. It doesn't make much sense, but it made the undead terrifying and that was the greater point.
Having played most of the editions of the game, I think the better way to implement energy drain was the one from the Core of Pathfinder 1st Edition, that is either permanent negative levels or removable negative levels.
With some tweaking, and by moving restoration spells to high or very high levels, that concept could make draining monsters really scary without all the bookkeeping that the older versions of that ability required.
You just add a penalty to all levels and base scores involved in checks or other calculations, such as caster level for the effects of your spells, and reduce your maximum hit points and that's all. You do not have to forget spells, lose feats and class abilities, and so on, since they would most certainly become a lot weaker anyway. You may lose the use of feats that have a certain level prerequisite, but you would still have them, no need to remove them from your sheet.
One thing I would personally add is that if you die by energy drain, not only you rise as some kind of undead, but since your very soul would have been consumed by the drainer, you could never be resurrected, even if your corpse would eventually be recovered and the drainer slain. There would be literally nothing to bring back from the land of the dead.
I generally disliked energy drain, more because its a pain in the rear mechanic. Get hit with energy drain, have to stop the game for a few minutes to recalculate everything. Permanent punishment mechanics kinda discouraged me as a DM from using anything other than ghasts or weaker undead.
I switched to GURPS partly so i could set my own tone and expectations. Sorry, no duck player character races and the Orcs don't want to tell you their side of the story so don't ask. *They don't speak your language anyway.
I can understand changing the magic system to allow spells per level instead of spells per day. I also get changing a few abilities to make them less over powered. The whole let's make the tarrasque weaker to where it can actually be defeated is where I draw the line. The concept was a creature that was to balance to Plane and then goes back to sleep until the Plane needs rebalanced due to over population and/or over use of magic. There really is no reason to nerf all the monsters, just create new ones and make the originals a higher "CR" or in a special section for situations where you need a much greater enemy or to actually give the players a real danger.
@@RvnKnight a handful of lvl 20 paladins can pretty much smite anything into oblivion. Hell, they don't even need to be that high lvl!
@@thepickleddragon8590 they've almost always been that way. That's why you dropped the tarrasque on them: to remind them that they can't kill everything and there is always something bigger. Now, not so much.
@@RvnKnight too true
Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. I do think that the monsters in 5e are too weak and that many of them lack scary powers that make the players nervous. That said, I *hated* level drain so much that it made me not run undead when I was DMing older editions. It's not that it's too powerful an option or that it takes away player agency. It's that it slows down the game terribly unless you have separate character sheets for each level. There are too many mechanics tied to level, and it always felt like an enormous burden to put on players.
@@Chris-io4iz the drain is just an example. Its not so much about that than the strength of the monsters in relation to the PCs
@thepickleddragon8590 oh absolutely, and I agree completely with the overall premise. That was one of the few monster design things from earlier editions that I didn't like, and it was just because of how clumsy it was. Between the weaker monsters and the superhero characters, 5e makes it very hard to challenge, let alone frighten players.
All filler - no killer
The biggest issue: Stat blocks. 2nd biggest issue: Lore. 3rd biggest: lack of monster maker/balance... list goes on, but yeah monsters have gotten weaker in later D&D
I consider myself an old school style player but I don’t like level drain for 5e. It’s a clunky mechanic that gets players out of the combat immersion and they start looking up which class ability is tied to which level. That level of bookkeeping can be done away with for an equally scary ability. Maybe a blow from a wight can remove magic from
Magic weapons, or incur ability score drain, or steals 1d4 spell slots from a creature. This does the same thing as level drain but without the clunky bookkeeping
The 5e Wights should be buffed to represent having potential (class) skills retained from life. Buff them enough and they might fill in some of the mid-level voids that Undead have. Definitely have their spawn be more wights. Not just zombies.
11:19 We can't gripe too much about the Flumph being a cutesy 5e thing. It was goofy back in 1e Fiend Folio. I never got the appeal.
.
You should also consider looking at Gnolls over the editions. The current ones have a demonic twist, vs the old "yet another band of humanoid raiders".
@@dm_curt yeah the flumph was a 1e creature but it was a terrestrial jellyfish and not that disneyfied thing!
I will be interested to see what they do with gnolls. Wotc is keen to give monstrous humanoids more free will. Gnolls as they are can be best described as locusts swarming the countryside.
@@thepickleddragon8590 I can't speak for the upcoming MM. Hopefully, they don't Disney-fy the gnolls. 2014's MM and Volo's guide have them as (not playable as PCs), descendants of hyenas that feasted on Yeenoghu's kills. Themes of Hunger and Rampage through the lore. Unimpressive stats for the common gnolls, other than if they score a melee kill, they can get a bonus 15ft move and bite.
The Volo's guide special gnolls are a little more interesting than the ones from the MM.
Hopefully, they don't screw up one of the creatures they actually made a little more interesting over the years, to appease players who complain that of all the anthropomorphic playable races, there aren't any dog-like ones, and they'd like a redeemable Gnoll or something.
Current MM states that like a demon, it lacks anything resembling a conscience and can't be taught or coerced to put aside its' destructive tendencies.
@@dm_curt Probably, the best way to characterize the gnoll would be the original concept of a fusion between a gnome and a troll. They would be more original as some sort of twisted hybrid creature than as just another lame demonic spawn.
@ObatongoSensei That would be an option, but probably end up as "Troll, but smaller and cuter! Tiny Troll!"
Pardon my lack of faith in WotC in pulling off good monsters in the new book.
@@dm_curt Well, the current gnoll is already a smaller, cuter troll, but also lamer.
There are actually two depictions of gnomes in folklore. The one used in the D&D race is the celtic one, basically a land bound fey with some illusionary power. But the one I would use, since I'm mediterranean, is the greco-roman one, in which gnomes are earth elemental creatures, alongside other elementals like undines, salamanders and sylphs.
A smaller but tougher troll with earth elemental powers would not be that much cuter in my opinion.
Certain monsters used to encourage careful planning, which I enjoyed. Very few experienced players back in the day would look at a vampire or ghost and think "let's just charge it."
I always hated level drains because it was a pain - "What did you roll for hit points last level? What spells did you pick up?" and unravelling 5E characters, where characters gain abilities every level would be an even bigger pain. Something people forget in game design - generally, if you make the game easier to "win" - the players will like it more. It may get couched in terms like "player agency" and "not fun", but it's much more basic.
A simple fix - instead of level drains, the monster does 1d4 CON damage in addition to hit points damage. Lose all your CON, you're toast.
@@LordOz3 we always tracked all our hp rolls for each level for just such an occasion. I think the initial hp loss was a 1d4 and the full level loss was computed when it was determined to be permanent
This is why I love 3.0/3.5. That's where I ended lol. I picked up pathfinder and haven't touched d&d since
This is one of the reasons OSR is a thriving community.
A good change to level drains would be draining individual stats or all the stats at once at a very small pace. That way you ain't gotta basically have char sheets for every single level your character has gained because some ghost got handsy.
I think the problem lays in the shift of tone when 4e put the spotlight into FR instead of Greyhawk, since both have very different tones in storytelling.
Grayhawk was was a sword and sorcery setting, gritty and harsh where the even characters were very flawed. Monsters were there as antagonists to fight and overcome.
Forgotten realms are a whimsical power fantasy where monsters are there only to be in the harem of Ed Greenwood's Gary Stu (Elminster).
So...wait. So...I agree with what you're saying, but that creature you showed as an example...no. That's a Flumph. That's a first edition monster. They go all the way back to...not the beginning, but close to the beginning of DnD. They were introduced in Greyhawk as a joke. They're from the Plane of Silly and Unused Monsters. They're supposed to be friendly. They're nearly pacifist. Flumphs are fine. We can keep those.
@@pianotm the flumph does go back to 1e but I was commenting on how they turned it into a Disney creature. The original was basically a terrestrial jellyfish
Nobody like level drain. Nobody like doing a lot of math in the middle of a combat
This mess is why I've stuck with previous editions and cherry picked aspects that lend themselves to my current game.
The new editions have steadily progressed toward bubble wrapped, handholding, technicolor, children's games.
In 1E and 2E, energy drain was horrific, and mostly because of the permanent effects on the character. Back then, we would adventure months to gain a level at the mid to high end. If you got hit with energy drain and paid for a Restoration, it did not put you back where you were, it put you at the bottom of the level, so you would lose weeks or months of effort. It was an extremely punishing tactic, mainly used by bully GMs. 5 wights in a low level 1e game? Really? You'd have one less player for sure.
@@justinsellers9402 that adventure was for 9th level characters. I was just postulating on what would happen if a wight went up against a 1st level party
@@justinsellers9402 with gold and magic items giving xp i never thought it was that bad of a grind. Of course we played a ton in the 80s
energy drain was worse than death. losing all those levels and experience and all that work down the drain
So, they were well designed. An horror creature actually horrfying players :D
@@MiguelAngelSanchezCogolludo Mechanics should not horrify. Atmosphere, role play, and esthetics should horrify.
Noobs who started with 5E want to play on Easy Mode. That's how kids today were raised.
lmao "Gosh darn kids these days, using the systems we made, get off my lawn!"
@@dking6021 hes right tho
The game was actively made safer for the PCs because they didn't want to scare off new players.
I stopped playing D&D in the mid 90’s. When I came back to RPG’s in 2020, boy was I shocked by the transformation and it has gotten exponentially worse over the last 4 years. There seems to be a clear agenda to change RPG’s into things that fit into a safe space sphere instead of embracing the ideas of free thought and challenging storylines and good storytelling.
oh, it's night and day. Matt and I have created videos that highlight some older edition modules.
Hasbro has said what their agenda is, they want D&D to be in every house like "Candy Land" and "Monopoly", which is horrible for the brand, but the C-suite at Hasbro are clueless like most of CEO and CFOs.
@@grindcoreninja6527 That hurts me SO much.
@@dracoyaminiatures5143 What the fuck are you going on about?
Most monsters are much weaker. Bounded accuracy is part of that and lack of permant loss and massive player resources play a part. In the old day your level 1 wizard could have 2 hp and only 1 spell a day
Back in the days, 1970s-1980s, playing DnD was like 'How am a I going to die this time'. Character creations was simple.
Today DnD is like 'What treasure have you customized for me'. Character creation is geared to make all classes strong and customized. DnD itself have become softer so the players are more or less fixed to win... my opinion.
@@vincentk3502 without question there has been a massive shift in the game. Not sure if it says something about the developers or who they are developing for.
@@thepickleddragon8590 I do it myself with the kids I DM, I make it so its a win-win situations however I warn them "If you do stupid, you will die. It is ok to run from a fight that you are losing or avoid battle to win the encounter to achieve the main goal.'
It took a lot of xp in TSRs days to level up. It took huge chunks after name level (9th-11th depending on class) just to reach your next level. Everything you did to get to name level, do it again for about 2 hp more and maybe a tiny bit more power.
Also so many save or die mechanics, or certain mechanics that happened when you were hit with zero save. Brutal game. That's why hirelings were vital and Charisma was NOT a dump stat.
WOTC made a game that allowed for a much more rugged character build. While I liked it and had fun with it, random players who'd join your table could have some very specialized builds that would exploit a rule. Wasn't really my cup of tea, and while you could build anything, you needed an encyclopedic knowledge of ALL the source books to do so. Sure, a digital copy could help,but that wasn't how we played then. Plus digital copies were less than perfect. It allowed a player to take several Dragon Feats for their Ogre character. Though he may have pushed the truth there.
Anyway, 3.5 was very easy to figure out xp needed for next level. It was your current level times 1000 plus what you'd earned before. The math could get strange because xp was a spell component and was spent to create magic items. But that's because WOTC removed the permanent Constitution loss creating magic items previously cost.
Anyway WOTCs more rugged pc builds allowed for much better survivability. Players expected to survive and could build combinations that allowed for very high reliable skill success, saves, and AC defenses.
To me 3.5 became more and more unwieldy as more and more splatbooks released more and more options. Overall this was great! But trying to find everyone of them in a not as digital age was labor intensive. Designing BBEG to fight your players could take a week and give you again an unwieldy character sheet with a poor idea how this pile of abilities and skills would behave. Granted, some dms were highly adept at this. But I needed to spend a week building them and then running test fights to see if what I built worked the way I expected. And this was for one model who'd have whatever retinue I'd also have to run at the same time. Took practice.
It was fun, it was difficult. And if I needed to create several at once it was a lot of work.
Granted, I'm sure other dms were more adroit than I and they didn't have my issues. While I did get better, it took practice. And every new splat book consumed more time to reveal the new builds, new feats, new spells. Whew! Both amazing and exhausting at the same time.
Tangented a bit, sorry. My point is WoTC made it possible to survive those Save or Die moments of TSR by a more sturdy build. So players began to anticipate higher and higher levels. TSR days you'd get to name level carve out your area of influence via your castle, church, stronghold, or tower and have a more political influential campaign. While we wouldn't retire our high level characters, they'd hire our new characters to go investigate this headache they've ignored for many levels just to take care of it while the High level did what they did with their influence.
I think part of the "let's play something new" was that it took so long to raise your level your playstyle wouldn't change unless you acquired some magic item. So it was more interesting to try a new class or whatever. Plus sometimes players left, characters died. So high level characters no longer had the support at the game table they did making adventuring with a bunch of 1st level characters boring or way to dangerous.
WOTC made it much easier to survive and much faster to reach level 20. Especially 5e. Not having to wait for hp recovery nor meditate/study your spellbooks for spell slot recovery allowed for rapid play upon play.
I both miss the dungeon survival game it was, but enjoy how dynamic and superhero 5e is.
Just my two cents. Enjoy
I do agree that the most recent updates have renditions of both the artwork and the monster design in a direction that I don't specifically like, but that is irrelevant, I think. If they make this for the wider audience it makes sense to design and draw for that audience. If you like it gritty - you can always make it gritty yourself - in that regard all the official books say that anything inside is a guideline and the DM can interpret those guidelines at his/her behest. And furthermore in those lines - I don't get rants of the sort like "oh I miss older editions, where monsters were deadlier and they could drain a level..." - if you want deadlier monsters that drain the PCs level - you as a DM have both the tools and are empowered by the rules to do so. If the party can take it - you do you, and have fun - that's what it's all about. The internet is full of gritty illustrations that you can also use for your game if you are missing that extra grimdark "oompf" - you can even use the illustrations from the older editions. 5e is insanely modular and a lot of people point it out as a weakness, but I think it's the opposite - the fact that it's so modular means that I can graft A LOT on it and the system can take it - just make it what you want it to be for you and your party.
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I remember the Aboleth in 1e killed a couple of the players in a Forbidden City run, wonder how toned down that is these days.
@@HermieMunster they are disappointing
People in the comments act as if there's some mystery as to why D&D is trending in this direction when Hasbro has said they intend to make D&D more similar to "Monopoly" and "Candyland", easy to pick up, more family friendly and in every house.
Which is stupid, but MBA's are going to MBA.
That sound similar to Talislanta
Shadow Wight / Shadow Wizard / Shadowcats / Shadowmanes
SIZE: 6'6"-7'6"
EXCEPTIONAL ATTRIBUTES: Mental attributes as in life; physical attributes
are average when in corporeal form, otherwise non-existent
LEVEL: 1 +
ATTACKS/DAMAGE: Touch: d8 (drains substance; see SPECIAL ABILITIES)
SPECIAL ABILITIES: Immune to weapons while in spectral form, ability to
steal a victim's substance by touch (victims drained of all hit points by this form
of attack become powerless shadowforms)
ARMOR: Unarmored
HIT POINTS: 10 +
HABITAT: The Nightmare Dimension, material plane (rare except in the Shadow
Realm)
COMMENTS: Shadow Wights who were spell casters while alive may retain
their magical abilities in death, becoming Shadow Wizards.
I think it has also to do with Level being far more significant, Old School dnd has a lot less of a difference between levels, meanwhile it feels a lot worse to lose access to an entire new ability
Its also that I think they want the bigger monsters to have more impact, so to do that you kinda need to weaken all monsters so the higher tier ones can be challenged earlier on
I'd rather call them bland than weak. I think the concern in modern design is the death spiral.
It's not even D&D anymore, more like a Marvel super heroes game.
So this isn't so much a matter of "wussifying" or "dumbing down" the difficulty in my eyes. It is more a natural part of the refinement process of what is essentially still an emerging genre of game/storytelling.
The problem with level drain is twofold:
1) The amount of bookkeeping for changing a level gets exponentially longer the more complex character levels get. As character progression got more complex this became a major obstacle for draining levels mid combat.
2) Any amount of permanence to the drain effect leads to 1 or more players being significantly weaker than the rest possibly for the rest of the game. This sucks so removing the drain becomes top priority and can derail entire plots. If questing for the cure is not possible or takes too long the player can quickly get disillusioned with their character and want to quit or swap characters which again derails campaigns.
As a side note, trying to balance combat encounters for mismatched levels can also become a nightmare for a DM so it doesn't just suck from a player standpoint.
For all its faults, 4e did a lot to give both monsters and players a lot of cool tools to use in combat that didn't just become save or suck. However the stigma at the time and mismanagement of the game at the time lead to a backlash against the more intricate combat systems resulting in the more streamlined 5e that we see now.
All of this, plus some backlash to the amount of bookkeeping in pathfinder 1e at higher level play, and the surge of more story focused indy ttrpgs have lead to a market that wants a more bespoke and streamlined experience. Trying to balance that and keeping some of the more important sacred cows of DnD that truly give it its flavor results in the design of 5e as a whole. I think they swung too far in the other direction now and have stripped the cool out with the less complex bookkeeping, but I sure as gell don't want to go back to 3.5 or earlier either. I'm juat hoping something will come along that can keep the flavor of DnD style fantasy while delivering on mechanics that are both streamlined enough to play quickly but mechanically rich enough to pose meaningful decisions on a turn to turn basis.
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I DM'd 1st and 2nd Edition
AD&D for 30+ years and level drain was the monster ability most feared by my players. I've used it sparingly but to great effect. When my players did encounter such a creature the terror they felt was very real as were the potential consequences. I've been running a 5E game for nearly two years now and my players rarely feel as if they are in danger. This combined with the resting rules makes 5E a very player friendly game. However, once my current campaign is finished I'll be switching game systems. Possibly to 2E or some other RPG.
Try Forbidden Lands!
I feel like it has something to do with character creation. In 5e it takes so much time - it's almost a chore to make a character and fill out all the stuff in your character sheet, so when the character dies for whatever reason, the players see it like trampling over all the time and effort it took them to o through all the necessary and unnecessary texts. And what's worse, instead of rolling up a new one in like 5 - 10 minutes, eithcer is the player spending at least half a hour creating another or not bothering at all since the session is onna end before they even finish it..
And that makes for a very different play, but not necessarily better or worse. I like playing a character with motivations, goals and actual backstory to play into. I want to "play to lose" if it serves the story. I want my character to make mistakes and see the chance to learn from them (instead of the first mistake they do being also their last).
None of those seem viable under the old school approach of "Bob the 22nd found his gruesome death in the jaws of a skeletal crocodile. Now, we're watching Bob the 23rd preparing to brave the Pyramid of skeletal crocodiles. Will he find the remains of Bob the 22nd soon enough to avoid the croc?".
@@Alche_mist oh absolutely..y'know I actually didn't consider that preparing some fitting backstory takes quite some time as well, I usually have few backups ready just in case...
Yeah, I gotta say, that orange flumph looks like Disney got ahold of it
I love the word "wuzzyfication" . too and too funny.🤣
A not, the creature at the end is a flumph. I has always been a goofball
I think "Video Game" Culture was the root cause of "Care Bear" D&D. Player death was final! Then the restart button came along and bingo, you messed up, try again. A charm spell lasted a week! I had two powerful heroes on the run once with two rust monsters......ah these kids don't know what a real dungeon was like....sips his mead..
We miss you Dracoya!! Love me some Pickled Dragon videos.
Awe. You're the best!
I see 2 main reasons for this. Ever since 4th edition I notice that DnD has chased fads and the newest, latest big thing instead of being the leader setting the trends. What I mean is 4th edition was clearly influenced by WoW. I also noticed the campaign book about a wizard school was clearly HP ripoff and was the start of the overly cute, bubbly, friendly imaging.
the second reason is the desire to grow the market with the expansion into new demographics. The biggest new demo for them is clearly women. Girls and women are far more into social interactions and are adverse to ugly, violent things. They need to see themselves in the images for them to accept it. This is some of the reasons many of the books and artwork have monsters look more and more like normal humans, as well as the amount of smiles are meant to come off pleasant rather than repulsive. Monsters that should evoke recoil are now seen as friendly. I saw a picture of an owlbear from a DnD 5e sourcebook, and you would think it is something you would want as a pet. But what it should be is a freakish beast that will rend you too shreds.
With an emphasis of female gamers, (and thus how females play differently to males) theres been an increase in "self insert" characters.
So players take it more personally
@@bossbullyboy195 I will pose this insight to the ladies panel and see what they think!
I've played since '82 and had many girls/women in my groups from elem school through today and there was never an issue, they played no different than the guys at our tables, in fact I know a handful of women who moved to older editions / Pathfinder/ other 5e variants because they don't like that WOTC 5e is on easy mode, Shit even Shadowdark was created by a Woman gamer to bring back the old school feel to the game.
@@SnowWolf9999 He might be one of those guys hasn't spent a lot of time with women.
No offense to OP, I've just met dudes who act like women are some sort of entity instead of individual people.
It not just female gamers, it appealing to Gen Z and millennials which do take thing very personally and in general are soft.
Over my 35+ years of Rping I have played with a few women over the that time (that sounds dirty but will be going with it), and they have been lovely. 5E is a rules light version easy play, easy to run and easy to learn. So older roleplayer like a less bubble wrapped environment to play in and it difficult to get that dark gritty and dangerous world in D&D 5e, so have moved either backto older editions or different systems to get that danger of your character dying if you mess up
I love Flumphs! They’re the only good Aberration!
Love the Pickled Dragon and Dracoya videos. Can't wait til Dracoya gets back!
Thank you and I'll be back soon! It's good to be missed. 😂
Yep. I find it incredibly silly that they got rid of dragon's spellcasting (it's a variant now) yet sorcerers still get casting from having dragon blood in them. Very disappointed that demons and devils also got the nerf hammer in a similar manner.
I don’t mourn the passing of energy drain. It’s not fun and creates more problems with character level disparity. The current undead reducing hit points until a rest is fine. Or I have used a weak version of vampiric touch where some portion of damage dealt heals undead. Very appropriate for wraiths and vampires. The monsters need to be buffed and need options. Just swinging at PC’s with weak attack bonuses is so boring
Yes.
I have run every edition of D&D and 5e monsters are nerfed and rarely challenge my players. After my current campaign of 5e I'm switching to Runequest and Dragonbane for my D&D. I think the games are better when the players have to out think some encounters. The game gets stale and boring if there is very little risk. At least I felt 4e was decent for DM's because of the monster builder, 5e you have a hard time figuring out what will challenge your players without TPKing them. I'm tired of WOTC turning out product that leaves so much for DM's to work out. Just my opinion of a grognard.
@@davidblair4150 this is why we have a dm shortage
@@thepickleddragon8590I might run Pathfinder 1e but I’m just not interested in any other D&D. My next campaign will be Runequest roleplaying in Glorantha. I has a 7 year campaign with the old Avalon Hill RQ. In that system combat is not something you go into without preparation. Good luck sir!
i think the marketing changed. WotC wanted DnD to be mainstream, instead of a niche group of people. Bigger audience appeal had to make the game "easier." DnD was a game to win, and character death equated to losing. Back in the day, venom was super strong. Venomous snake would totally kill a 1st or 2nd lvl player if they were bitten. A wyvern, save vs poison, or you die instantly. I miss the old monsters where you actually feared them.
The 5.5 make them very wimpy
Surviving to level 10 made you god-like in older editions for good reason.
But that is what happens when you want the game to become "more accessible". You make it 'easier' and remove the challenge that turned off a lot of people.
(The Flumph's best image, to me, is from 3rd. Considering their get their name from the sound they make while moving.)
The pursuit of "fun" for the players has removed the danger.
Part of it in the beginning was that characters got more detailed so they became more "valuable" so to speak. It's one thing if you can whip up a new character is 5 minutes compared to 20 min+ for 3rd ed character. So to a degree I think some degree of rethinking wasn't unwarranted. Then you got the rise of the video gamer, J and CRPG's was what painted their expectations and we saw that reflected in 4th ed. These gamers saw tabletop as just video games IRL and brought the same mind set failing to understand videos games are set up the way they are since they can't rely on a GM so the game needs to be built around that. Then you started to have the early stages of the RPG tourists start to spoil the fun during 4th ed (OMG, Vin Diesel plays D&D?). Then of course 5th ed came out adjusting themselves to attract the mystical "larger audience" an geared it towards people who didn't care about D&D outside of it being "current thing" and would abandon it as soon as it was seen as nerd stuff again (a lot of ppl aren't really serious or cognitive actors, they're little more then meat AI chatbots and just follow the "safety of the crowd" since it doesn't require a mental overhead they aren't able to processes). Then the work nation attacked mixed with a resurgence of the tourists do to Stranger Things and the tyrannical lockdowns due to the plandedemic mixed in with a healthy does of Black Rock ERG funds, D&D isn't for us anymore.
Good thing D&D was never my main and I gave up on it after 4th (if I want to play I'll play D&D the way Gary intended, as a supplement to Chainmail, 2d6 over d20 any day baby!) but it's still sad to see the forefather of the hobby I love brought so low do to idiot normies and cringe cultural Marxists who want to subvert everything that doesn't stand in lockstep with them.
Not just the monsters. The entire experience of role games has become pandering. I like in Warhammer FRPG where the player has to realize, there WILL be times when the proper choice is to run.
I have frequently told my players that winning sometimes means avoiding a fight. Some groups have failed that test!
I'm used to the welcome to my world I hope you enjoy it attitude of DMs. Now it's walk the tightrope I have to entertain and not offend. Looking at your players almost as if they are costumers instead of potential friends there for a challenge/good time style. Either way I think there is room for all styles... even my Orks that are 99.9 percent bad so you are banned from most cities or towns. Not the Immigrant family style Orks.
they're fundamentally different games, 5e is power fantasy were as older editions were survival horror
I think it's a combination of things. The foremost to me are that characters post AD&D are demigods, and that nearly everything that used to be a monster in the past is now a playable race. So adventures have morphed into nothing but world saving campaigns against a bbeg rather than battles of good versus evil or good versus chaos. The game is less about confronting challenges, learning how to overcome obstacles, and delving into the unknown, and instead it's more about making players feel good. This also means neutered monsters, because you can't have monsters with debilitating abilities that could affect the heroes, because that wouldn't be fun. The experience has been Disneyfied.
I wouldn't remove a level from a character because that sounds like a lot of work and wound really slow combat.
A lot has changed from how the game used to be. Nowadays is more about the story of the characters and less about playing the game itself.
Early editions: far too deadly
Latest edition: far too easy
This may be heresy to some but, when the HP balance was done right, I liked a lot of 4e monster mechanics/designs best
Yeah. I play 5e with one group but my main ed is 3.5. The 5e monsters are chibi versions of their older counterparts.
The whole philosophy of D&D has changed was much more rules heavy, took way longer to level up, classes where not balanced, spells where powerful and could kill you on a failed save.
5E is a much more friendlier edition, easier to learn, easier to play and easier to DM.
Yes compared to older editions, D&D 5E monsters are lame, that is why some older Rpers have abandoned that 5E for earlier edtions or different systems where the PCs are less protected. 5E is very difficult to die if you are not completely reckless and after a few levels you have to be unlucky to die.
Yes they are lame. Monsters today are written to sell books, not challenge players. The Beholder, Mindflayer, Drow, Dragon challenged players. Giants were a challenge. Interesting. Today so many flow out the ones with potential are drowned in a flood of dross.
I know. it's so sad
Wait, you've been playing for how long and never seen a Flumph?
@@thefriendlychap4132 oh I've seen flumphs. Just not this finding nemo style flumph
Yes
5th edition is casual edition of d&d
They are going move of a interactive story telling hobby than a game.
There isndefinately a shift in the game. Games now are far less lethal and if you ever see player characters actually die you see players upset. Players should always win is not notnjust mantra but a part of the philosophy of the games. 5e I think isbthe worst for it as you can easily not die in addition going down has 0 impact on your turn
Gamers have changed
thts a flump...it's older than me in the game
Great vidie, in general i agree with you! Thx
Yes, make undead great again.
Flumph’s were in 1st edition…..
It’s up to the DM to make encounters interesting.
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removal of level drain can be linked to the removal of cohort and hireling armies that occurred in dragonlance. in fact, things became less lethal over time to accommodate the one PC per player mindset of Dragonlance. and accommodate the 4 to 6 PC party. where your average party had 5 adventurers instead of 50 adventurers plus an expendable mountain of donkeys, chickens, and hirelings.
Yes.