How to create balanced monsters

[kosall]

I'm starting a campaign using the Tome feats and some of the other features and I was wondering what other people do to fix the challenge level a little.

Specifically how would they change/fix the 3.5 monsters that either seem over the top or bring up some of the weaker monsters or if most through out the monsters entirely and homebrew their own. I tend to use monsters straight out of the monster manuals for basic encounters. Upgraded encounters get templates or class levels and the final encounter would maybe be a template and class levels.

I also tend to vary my NPCs equipment and have them use the items that will eventually fall into the PCs hands.

I once tried to make a basic monster creator that varied abilities based on CR and adjusted HD, BAB, Saves and other values to provide some kind of basic challenge but it was never as good as just grabbing an iconic monster from the original monster manuals and converting it.

[Kaelik]

If you are playing with Tome only, and are disallowing stupid caster tricks like DMM and Incantatrix and Arcane Thesis, the only changes you should need to make are:

Redo feats for all monsters, useful ones out of monster supplements like Draconomicon/Lords of Madness/Libris Mortis or other WotC books should be about half of them. The other half should be Tome feats.

You don't want to make the mistake of giving the 39HD Dragon all Tome feats though.

Other than that, meh. don't use all their items for stuff to power them up if you are using Dragons, but Outsiders and Giants and Elementals are fine.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Oh Jesus. Don't try to 'redo' monsters at all. It's just way too much work. If a monster seems weak for its level, consider throwing it at a lower-level party or in greater numbers. If a monster seems overpowered, just wait a level of two.

If you want to make some kind of BBEG where having lots of abilities is important, then consider adding combat feats and the like. If you want to scale up monsters, the fiend classes (and feats) are a great way to do it. If I was writing up a fire giant barbarian, I'd only give her combat feats for the new feats gained.

[kosall]

Redoing monster feats doesn't seem too bad. I might just make a few types of monsters and reuse the same feats by type and number. Like a fighter type monster should pickup X feats in Y order for Z CR.