User talk:Tarkisflux/Rants/Revised Creature Scaling

General Proposal Stuff

There's a great big hole here where magic just drives right on through, but I don't think this is any worse than standard in that respect. And some of this looks like a boost to thugs, so it might be a net positive. But I'd like some feedback. Am I missing anything? Places for improvement? Etc. - Tarkisflux 06:09, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I like most of what's here; the idea of additional damage for big creatures cuts down on a lot of the practice of slapping on extra Strength bonuses to monsters. I may have to adopt this for my monsters, even though that would require quite a few changes on my part since I was essentially doing the previous "slap on extra damage and hit points and call it a day".

I like that it places more emphasis on the attack rolls than the damage; I think this makes it more suitable to a Wizard-level game where casters are deciding things with a single roll for a save-or-die spell. As I suggested in the IRC chat, I think the onus should be more on the idea that a single hit from a giant's club is actually a severe blow instead of a minor inconvenience; if they don't hit very often, I'm OK with it because D&D rules never have any reduced combat performance for low hit points anyway. So I'm fine with the reduction of attack rolls for larger creatures. Another thing that I was wondering, though, is how does this interfere/overlap with the currently existing penalties or bonuses for attack due to size? I was actually just thinking when I was trying to come up with a way to make a balanced cyclops race that the mechanics should be such that the Strength bonuses the creature possesses and its penalty due to size should even out to equilibrium; if this were achieved, the premise of higher damage with Strength without super-high attack rolls (which is why Strength is so valuable in the first place) would be achieved. As you well know, current creature scaling does not make this the case (for example, improvement from Medium to Large gives +8 Strength versus a -1 size bonus to attack). This would, in my opinion, more fairly scale monster attacks and offer larger monster encounters at low levels by at least not granting them a bonus (I'm guessing in certain cases they may even end up with a cumulative penalty to attack rolls) and making them more alongst the same kind of gameplay offered by casters with save effects. - TG Cid 14:36, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I've reformatted the other page to better highlight stuff, and I think it answers most of your questions there.

Re Str mods, I think size based attribute mods at all are bad for the game. You already get bigger weapons and more damage and can carry bigger loads because of the size adjustments, so you're stronger than smaller people even if you have the same strength score. Cancelling out the size penalty is not something that I think should be done, else why bother having it in the first place? The current accuracy for damage tradeoff is pretty solid I think (it wasn't before though), and I don't see a reason to do more for them. - Tarkisflux 20:36, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Things I know I'm missing

• Rules for climbing creatures to stab them in the back need to be written. They will be if this isn't a terrible plan.
• Doing this probably means revisiting the trample ability, and maybe some of the other size based combat abilities (bullrush, overrun, etc.).

I'm sure other stuff will be added to this list. - Tarkisflux 20:36, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Other Extensions

I could actually extend this to magic. The per die penalty deals with lots of effects nicely, and setting the AoE to a function of your size covers lots more. Beyond that it's not too difficult to make magic target your size creatures, and then allow people to stack those sizes into bigger creatures. Mass spells then do double duty as spells that either get a lot of creatures like you, or a couple of creatures much bigger than you. Giving save bonuses for not fully covering a creature's size (like casting a medium single target spell at a large creature) probably covers most of the rest. The only things still sticking out would be buffs, but effect or duration could probably be tweaked there as well. - Tarkisflux 20:36, 6 January 2011 (UTC), but it's not as easy as I originally thought and I've already come up with several unhappy consequences of my sketch notes here. There's still a few possibilities, but I'm not putting up any more suggestions until I run through them a bit more. - Tarkisflux 22:39, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Comparison with Power Attack

This has a weird effect in combination with Tome Power Attack, in that in some cases it may actually be optimal to be smaller, take the size penalty to damage, and make up for it by power attacking away your bonus to hit for a net bonus. This isn't true if you have a bunch of bonus dice to apply it to, but I don't think I like applying it to bonus dice (listing that as a separate comment) --IGTN 01:42, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Indeed it does. Shit. I don't have a solution for this at present. Will ponder. - Tarkisflux 08:59, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Replacing Stat Adjustments/General Complaints

This doesn't work very well as a replacement for size-based ability adjustments. Using a d8 weapon as a base (longsword, battleaxe, spear), advancing a creature to from medium to large according to the default rules increases strength +8 (+4 to hit, +4 damage with a one-handed weapon), gives a -1 penalty to hit and to AC (-1 AC aggravated by -2 dex and offset by +2 natty armor), and an average +2.5 bonus to damage due to the size increase, for a net effect of -2 touch AC, +3 to hit in melee, -2 to hit at range, +6.5 damage. A d6 weapon would increase by 1 point of weapon damage, for a total of +5 damage.

You want this to make hits by large creatures more powerful, but less frequent; just power attacking away all the to-hit bonus from increased strength, which under core rules gives a net of -1 to hit, +10.5 damage for being large with a longsword, and -1 to hit, +9 damage with a scimitar. Under Tome rules this gets more extreme, to +14.5 or +13 damage.

Your system gives it -1 to hit, +1 damage with a one-handed weapon, and, effectively, -1 AC and DR 1/-. With a two-handed weapon it instead gets +2 to damage, (vs +8 under the old system). I'm ignoring bonus dice for now, since most brutes don't have them

So, if Large Size is to remain a feat worth considering at the same level as Wings of Evil (admittedly, this is in part because the old system made being bigger an almost unqualified good unless you needed to hide or avoid touch attacks), it needs to grant bonus damage comparable to what it does now (although something merely on the order of the un-power attacked old system would be good), the damage bonuses need to be bigger for being big.

Also, applying this damage to each bonus die messes up your incentive structure. Huge creatures are now encouraged to get as many bonus dice on their attacks as possible; in other words, to become sneak attackers, assassins, and so on. Little things are discouraged from being rogues twice, once by having ankle stabbings no longer work for sneak attack (plenty of vital tendons and arteries in the ankle, though), and again by applying a large damage penalty to each sneak attack die, making them not work. Unless you'd rather the archetypal rogue be a Meteor Ninja (Float like elephant! Sting. . . also like elephant!) and not a Halfling or Sprite, this is a problem.

To fix this incentive structure, I'd

1. Remove the part where damage adjustments are applied to each die
2. Increase the damage bonuses greatly (multiply by 3 or 4, maybe as low as 2 if you decrease the costs of size increases dramatically. Like, opening Large Size to first level characters greatly)
3. Maybe increase the damage penalties a little, but not nearly as much as the bonuses. Just enough to be noticeable
4. Change the rule about sneak attacks.
5. Don't care what the target's size is if you've Grabbed On, probably, and maybe allow something like one sneak attack per round against larger targets otherwise.
6. Also, remove the thing where you have to enter their space; there's no reason why being big means you can supercede weapon reach.

Also, D&D sizes pretend to be symmetric about Medium, but they're not. Smaller things than medium tend toward much lower on the CR scale, and granularity breaks down there. Applying the same bonuses and penalties for relative size symmetrically, so that Fine is to Medium as Medium is to Colossal seems appealing, but you run into a weird thing where some of the danger difference is a function of level. You could put a CR term into the bonuses you give, so that size comes to mean more (numerically) at higher CRs, which would keep the damage bonuses and penalties from completely negating (common) scorpion stings at level 1 while at the same time making size gaps that large still relevant at high levels, but I'm not sure how best to do that (maybe have different columns for different attacker CR ranges, or multiply something by CR). --IGTN 02:55, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Before I get too into a reply, thanks for sanity checking this. I appreciate it.

You're right that this does a bad job of attribute adjustment tracking, but I don't actually care. At their best, which they rarely are at, I consider those an unnecessary thing for the game. So my forgetting about it doesn't bother me much, except in so far as it makes this basically incompatible with the current monster manual (which it already mostly was).

As one of my primary goals was to make huge and such creatures viable as low CR encounters, especially against other low CR creatures of the same size, losing the pile of attribute mods doesn't seem a bad thing. I also don't think that bigger is better is worth keeping, so if this is moving away from that as an unadulterated good I'm fine with that as well. Being bigger or smaller should be different and situationally useful. Even if that means sacrificing or re-working the large-size feat.

As for the bonus die thing, that is primarily there for flaming weapons (assuming non-BoG style bonus dice here) and the like, because higher CR creatures are going to need to deal more damage and they don't have a scaling way to do it otherwise. It's a smallish thing, but a bigger sword with more fire is the sort of thing that I think should burn you more. And i just applied that to all the bonus dice... but I get the point about sneak attack / death attack / whatever being problematic in its incentives. It's not like you get a bonus to your sneak attack dice when you use a greatsword instead of a shortsword, and doing so would set all the wrong incentives anyway. So yeah, that stacking should probably go away. On that subject though, I don't even know what a sneak attack means when your weapon size is on the order of your targets torso size, and I sorta doubt you could pull one off. I'm actually inclined to disallow precision damage at all when you greatly exceed your target's size.

Regarding vital areas, I intended to write up rules that allowed you to basically damage low hanging limbs such that they started limping or couldn't walk or whatever, and thus allowed access to actual vital areas and real death instead of just maiming. I don't think I indicated you couldn't sneak attack a calf (though it may have been implied through poor term use), and I'd honestly like to have people doing that. Hamstring a guy to make him easier to climb, or just keep hamstringing him until you can walk up to his eye and carve it out, whatever. I support these things a lot, but more than that I want big creatures to play differently than non-big creatures. Forcing you to fight it differently by having several piles of hit points (similar to the joined creature thing, but with fewer action) seemed the easiest way to do that.

So, where does that leave us wrt your suggestions -

1. Damage adjustments still applied to each dice (where weapon counts once), but not precision damage dice. Precision damage dice likely disallowed entirely when you are much larger than your target.
2. Double current damage bonuses. Anything more than that makes size matter more than I want it to, but doubling the current numbers makes the percentage increases closer to the percentage decreases on the reduction side, which I should have gone for in the beginning anyway.
3. I'd like to also double current damage reductions, but that's probably not going to work. Might multiply by 1.5 and round down (so -2, -3, -6, etc.), but I'm not sure if attacker gets -2/+4 and you get +2/-3 works out in a way I like just yet.
4. I don't see a reason to do this if sneak attack dice don't suffer the per die penalty anymore. You climb up, your main weapon doesn't deal much and you rely on sneak attack to get anywhere.
5. Not willing to not care about the target's size once your grappled on. There's a difference between a thumbtack and a letter opener stabbing you in the kidney, and I want that reflected somewhere. Combined with the SA boost this should be fine.
6. There totally is a reason to force you into their square. It was on the table before I got to it even. Creatures have a natural reach equal to their space size, so tiny creatures have a reach of 2 1/2 feet (which is an artifact of WotC not wanting to put small creatures there, it should actually be less). But it gets rounded down to 0 on the table and the game tells you they have to enter the square you occupy to attack you. The justification is pretty straightforward too: grab a 12" action figure and tell me he could wield a proportionally sized shortsword and attack you without entering your 5' space. It's really the ratio that matters, and that holds out regardless of what yours and his actual sizes are. So this is in, and staying unless you can convince me that it's actively bad in some way.

As to what this does to CR, well it makes low CR giant creatures glass cannons who will murder you if they get a good shot in. And if makes low CR small creatures like they were before, annoyingly hard to hit but likely dead if you do. Which makes none of them really appropriate for CR<2 encounters, but I think a 3 hit die huge giant would probably fall in around CR3 without fancy tricks now. - Tarkisflux 08:55, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

High-CRed big things need more damage, but things like Nightcrawlers don't have those bonus damage sources. It might be simpler to just double or triple the damage bonus at higher CRs.

The big complaint I have about weapon reach is that, while a 12" thing would have to step in to my 5' space to attack me, I wouldn't necessarily need to do the same to hit a colossal scorpion or a blue whale with a 10' pike. The reason tiny things need to be in the same space isn't because they're smaller than their opponents, it's because they're smaller than the grid. --IGTN 02:15, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Doubling the bonuses for high CRs isn't really dealing with the actual problem, especially since higher level characters are going to have more options for just avoiding the stuff that different sized creatures bring with them (like just becoming closer in size and negating most of the adjustment). High CR things do need more damage, sure, but it needs to not come from mundane sources like strength and weapons as long as hit die inflation is alive and well (and maybe not even if it isn't). It can come from shadow flame wreaths or auras of apathy or extra extra attacks or whatever other special things we want to dream up, but relying on size adjustments to provide these bonuses is failing to recognize the short shelf life on mundane style encounters that don't need bonus dice or other special effects.

An adjustment should be made for reach weapons (thanks for reminding me of those, a couple of notes that you can use a reach weapon to attack from adjacent while everyone else has to get in and that you can attack from within while others have to climb (first step only) should work), but I don't think the rest of your complaint is compelling. The current "somewhere in the square, doesn't fill all of it (gelatinous cubes not withstanding), and is pointing some direction" setup is entirely too vague to be able to make an argument that you can always reach something without having to enter its square. The "somewhere in the space" thing specifically contributes to smaller creatures falling off the grid and having to enter your space. At some point your space is 4 or more times the size of their reach of a smaller creature, and there's no reason to assume or way to show that you occupy the quarter or less of your space that they can actually strike. There might be a way to justify that sort of thing if squares were less abstract and there was facing, since in those cases you could actually say where any body actually was at any given time, but it's not in this game so I'm not going to make it. The reason only really small creatures fall off the grid is because the grid was designed around medium creatures and people didn't bother with the non PC sizes. If it was built around colossal creatures, medium guys would fall off it for the exact same reasons, and so I see no reason at all to add some sort of special protection for medium and larger sizes in that respect.

So game logic justifications are right out for what you want. I'm not at all sure why you want to be able to stab a gargantuan blue whale in a place that will make it die from your space though, and knowing the reason for that might help convince me that it's worth ignoring game logic to make happen. So, why for that stuff? - Tarkisflux 10:13, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

It occurs to me now that it isn't 2 in the morning that your "fall off the grid" point may have a lot to do with the fact that larger creatures have a smaller height : space ratio than medium creatures, and as such you can make a better argument for where they actually are in their space than you can with medium creatures. I went and increased space sizing in my table a bit ago, so much that "entering their space" in this setup is functionally the same as "approaching their space" in the old one. I don't know if bigger things occupying more space helps assuage your concerns about weapon reach or just gives you new headaches about this setup, but I probably should have said something about it earlier. The change impacts game logic more than I anticipated, but at the time I figured I was just correcting a WotC inconsistency. - Tarkisflux 20:14, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Competing System

I have a draft of a competing system based on some of the same principles and some different principles (it's missing a table, and including some things that really need to go on a table aren't anywhere else) at this page if you want to look at it to compare.