DMing with Charisma

Generally I’m not the kind of person who ranks things by power level. I tend to leave that to the experts. But I do talk with people and I see a lot of gameplay. One of the big benefits of running D&D Delve Night for a couple of years was that I got to see literally hundreds of character builds, and I’ve noticed some trends that more powerful characters follow.

As I understand it, the power level of racial powers can be ranked roughly like this:

• The dwarf
• Minor action encounter powers that attack enemies
• Immediate-speed powers
• Minor action encounter powers that affect enemies without an attack roll
• Minor action at-will powers
• Powers that help the character using them
• Standard action powers

So it’s a little weird that the duergar, with a minor-action encounter power that attacks enemies, is so underpowered. But let’s compare it to two other races with similar powers that get a lot of play, one older than the duergar and one newer:

Without traits, the duergar’s power level is largely reliant on its racial power. And how does it measure up?

The racial power only targets one creature, and that creature must be within 3 squares (but not adjacent, or that’s an opportunity attack). It has an attack bonus as though it was targeting a secondary defense, but it actually targets AC. It relies on Con, which is only a primary attack stat for battleminds and certain warlocks (hint: infernal warlocks are the expected build for duergars). With all these penalties to hitting, its damage should be serious. But instead it’s just on par with other racial powers, and it deals small ongoing damage of the most-resisted damage type.

So literally the only things that the duergar has going for it are darkvision and an encounter power that usually misses but deals -2 to attack rolls (save ends) when it hits. That’s nothing to sneeze at but it’s not enough to make anybody actually want to play the race. So let’s try to make it viable.

As before, let’s look at the monsters. Interestingly, every one of them has speed 5, like the dwarves on which the race is based. As much as I hate to lower a race’s power while trying to increase it, this fits too much to ignore. But every duergar also has resistance to fire and poison. Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s add that in. PC resistances tend to be 5 + half-level and the deva has two, so that works without being too unbalanced.

We also need to update their build to be in line with current design. There are eight duergar in the MM2: two Con-primary, two Wis-primary, three Str-primary, and one Cha-primary. The Cha-primary and Con-primary have secondary Dex, and the Wis-primary have secondary Int. So Cha and Int are rare, but Con and Wis both make sense as the mandatory ability, and Str and Dex can make both strong cases as the new third stat. When monster precedent fails, I’m inclined to earn toward race precedent. Their attack power uses Con, and duergar are basically evil dwarves. So let’s use the same stat line as dwarves, and we’ll modify the power to fit. And since many of the monsters are trained in Religion (the knowledge skill that tells players about devils), we’ll use that.

These changes pretty much bring them back up to competitive, especially since fire and poison are such common damage types. But I want to give them one more trait, something small and flavorful. I’d love to give them the devil keyword, but PC don’t have keywords, so that’s out. Since they’re hardy creatures who were enslaved by devils, let’s give them something to resist the attacks of devils.

Which leaves us with:

How to reskin this power so that it works with Wisdom is an exercise left to the reader.

This race didn’t need to be half-rewritten like the bullywug, just updated. I tried to give it the general feel of dwarf + devil. As much as I wanted to pull in the 3E duergar and add 4E versions of invisibility and enlarger person and psionics and stuff, that’s not really what they are any more. Plenty of room there for a racial paragon path, though.

D&D has lots of options, and it’s fairly obvious that they’re not all equally powerful. I’ve ranted about this, but over time I’ve also been doing something about it. Rarely, it’s a house rule to limit to power of a given option. More often it’s a house rule to power up something that’s fun or flavorful but isn’t as good as a more common, powerful option. Every once in a while I like to look at one of these options and see if I can tweak it so that players who go for it aren’t taking a hit for their characters.

I know that working on game balance doesn’t really fit with a free-form, DMing-with-Charisma style. But I believe that one of the points of a system like D&D is the ability to let players play just about anything. If a player sees something they want to play (especially after spending forever looking for it) and find out that it isn’t fun, there’s a problem. Not everything can be perfectly-balanced all the time, but if a player has their heart set on a specific character, the system shouldn’t be working against them.

Races in 4th Edition have a very simple, consistent formula. Each race (now) gets a +2 bonus to one ability score and a +2 bonus to a choice of two others, a speed of 5 through 7 (except for the pixie, who flies at 6 but walks at 4), two languages, a +2 bonus to two skills, two to four racial traits (except for shifters, who get none, and eladrin, who get five because shut up), and some racial power. There’s little variance from this formula for PC races.

Monster races, however, aren’t so lucky. Included at the end of the Monster Manual and Monster Manual 2 (and the occasional other weird place), monster races are seriously underpowered compared to PC races in the Player’s Handbook series. They have fewer racial traits, occasionally lack powers, and weren’t given the same treatment that PC races were when Wizards shifted from the two-stat-bonus system for ability scores to the one-and-a-choice system.

It makes me wonder if they were never meant to be played, which in turn makes me wonder why they were published. I expect that the authors expected somebody to play them. After all, the big taboo in playing monsters is that they’re, well, monstrous. They’re not supposed to fit in with PCs. But PHB2 introduced playable lycanthropes and reincarnated spirits, and PHB3 gave us minotaurs (formerly a monstrous race) and psychic crystal robots. At this point, “monstrous” is kind of a loose term. Dark Sun gave us bugs. So I don’t see any reason that the monstrous races shouldn’t be treated the same as PC races, given that there’s no strong reason to differentiate them.

There’s a lot of work to do in putting all races on a (more) level playing field. But I think the best way to start is with the most obvious outlier, from the Monster Manual 2:

Bullywugs, as far as I can tell*, are still on the two-stat-bonus system for ability scores. They’re one of only seven races that don’t get +2 to two skills (shardminds get three, humans and orcs get none, and bladelings, duergar, and githyanki get one; note that five of these seven are monstrous). They have no racial power. They only have one racial trait, and it only triggers when an enemy spends a healing surge, something that fewer than a dozen monsters do, most of which are in the MM1. Only one monster in MM2 allows allies to spend healing surges so Wizards knew when the bullywug was printed that its only trait was a rare corner case. And it also uses the Poison keyword, so any enemy immune to poison (the most common immunity) ignores the aura. So the only thing they can expect to use in any given campaign is swamp walk, a trait reliant on the DM’s kindness in determining the setting.

The lore of the race almost supports this, but not enough. The whole point of bullywugs is that the natural world hates them, more than aberrations, undead, evil gods, and everything else with stats. Clearly this included the designers. But they’re adorable in a Ninja-Tutrle-esque way, so let’s see if we can save them from their creators.

There are four bullywugs in the Monster Manual 2 as actual monsters, and all of them have good Dex. So let’s keep Dex as their mandatory ability score. Since Con is already included in the race, that’s going to be one of their optional ability scores. We need to determine the other. Of the four monsters, one is Str-primary, one is Wis-primary, one is Con-primary, and the fourth is Dex-primary. The Con- and Dex- primary monsters both have Str and Wis high and tied. We can make a case for either Str or Wis here. But since the half-orc is already Dex/Str,Con, doing the same with the bullywug wouldn’t add anything interesting to the race list. Let’s make them Dex/Con,Wis, a unique set.

Their speed, vision, and languages are fine. Of the forty-four published races, thirty-seven have speed 6 (and the pixie should count, so thirty-eight). The monster bullywugs have normal vision, so that fits. And the monsters only speak Primordial, so that’s a given as their second language.

Let’s determine their other skill bonus. Athletics is good because it’s already there and all of the monsters have it (Athletics determines jumping distance, and bullywugs are frogs, so draw conclusions accordingly). But three of the monsters only have Athletics. The fourth, a shaman has Nature. Athletics/Nature isn’t exactly new or special, but it fits for a race that lives in swamps, so we’ll take it.

The racial traits and powers are harder, because we’re largely free-forming it. The aura can stay, but since it’s so rarely useful it won’t factor into our balance considerations. Swamp walk is also a good choice for a trait. But we still need two mid-level traits and one power to bring them up to a PC race. The only power that all bullywugs share is one that heals any creature who hits them with a critical hit, something that’s neither fun nor helpful. I thought I was going to have to start making thing up wholesale, until I saw this:

Bullywugs say they were created by the original primordials, not by the gods…By amassing legacies of savagery, the curliest bullywugs imagine that they will one day be reborn as slaads.

So the race was created by primordials and aim to become paragons of chaos? Now we have something interesting. Slaads also don’t have any consistent powers or traits save that most of the have a teleport speed, which is too powerful for a low-level PC. But just the idea of chaos as an origin and goal is helpful. So let’s try building them some racial traits that leverage this drive toward chaos:

The idea is that the bullywug is changing frequently and randomly. It’s like the resistance offered by the shardmind but less powerful than the resistance offered by the diva or vryloka. Interestingly, it tends to go away just when you need it; if you’re in a fight where resist 10 fire is really helpful, you have a good chance of losing it if you take too much damage and need healing. It might make sense to drop this to a d8 and take away psychic and force, or to a d6 and also take away radiant and necrotic. A paragon path could also modify it. I know most races use resist 5 + half-level rather than 5/tier, but I’m toning this one down a bit because…reasons. I could be convinced to change it.

Yes, it duplicates the wild sorcerer trait. I’d actually forgotten about that one until I started looking up the correct language for the mechanics. But I’m not really bothered by the chaos race having ties to the chaos class, especially since bullywugs don’t gain a bonus to Charisma. A bullywug wild sorcerer would be underpowered but awesome, which I’ll allow.

Primordials (elementals) and gods (immortals) fought a massive war deep in the lore of 4th Edition. Since bullywugs consider themselves fledgling primodials, this makes sense to me. It’s more flavor than anything that can really be expanded by feats or such. But attack bonuses are rare and cherished, so I think we’re done with racial traits. Now we need a power.

What makes a monstrous bullywug different from a PC bullywug? Since the race version doesn’t have the trait that heals enemies, maybe the PC version has gotten over this, to the point where nature doesn’t think the PC is quite as abhorrent as its brethren. But what if it was instead able to harness this “wrongness” and turn it into a strength?

It it powerful? No, not really, unless you’re knocking a bunch of damage off a brute or solo’s next turn. It would be much stronger as an interrupt rather than a reaction. But for a power available for free at level 1, it fits, and it’s a rare racial power that affects an opponent without an attack roll. Again, it can be modified by feats to perhaps inflict ongoing poison or other ailments.

So we end up with this:

A lot more complicated, isn’t it? But it’s also a lot more balanced, and we’ve taken the worst published race in 4th Edition much closer to something playable. It’s not the only bad race (the whole point of the races in Monster Manual 2 seemed to be to make the already-lousy races in the Monster Manual look almost decent by comparison), but it’s a start.

* – A lot of the monstrous races have gotten updates via the D&D Insider subscriber system. Since I’m not a member, I hear about them third-hand, so I’m not real clear on what has and hasn’t been updated. In general I treat them the same way I treat an obscure rule book that none of my players own–if I can’t read it, it doesn’t exist.