could've come up with it:
Tangent: Since 2000, the design directive for monsters has shifted more toward “one memorable encounter.” When all we had was the Monster Manual, every monster had to carry a lot of weight. Especially if the monster was intelligent and social, there was a lot of pressure for that monster to have the details you’d need to build an extensive adventure site around.
But after seven years of monster books, the DM of today has plenty of monsters to choose from. It’s OK to design a monster to be used once, memorably. Not every monster has to shoulder the weight of being an important, repeatable antagonist.
A few weeks ago I started playing around with this idea for the GURPS Fantasy game I've been working on. I wanted to inject more of a mystery/horror element to fighting monsters.Threshold: The idea here is pretty simple—at some point in the middle of the encounter, the monster reaches a threshold and changes. It might get stronger, it might grow tentacles, it might explode with the fury of a thousand suns, whatever. What you’re going for here is a twist on pacing: The PCs “figure out” how to fight the monster, then boom! It changes and they have to employ different strategies to earn the win.
The obvious threshold is hit point total—and it’s a pretty good one because you know the DM is acutely aware of it. But there are lots of other potential triggers for a threshold ability.
One other factor bears mentioning: complexity. By definition, the threshold is reached in the middle of a fight, and the DM is usually a pretty busy person right then. Go easy. It’s a huge drag for everyone at the table if the DM is saying, “OK, Strength +8…that means +4 to the primary attack and damage… oh, but it’s the sole attack, so…” You get the idea.
Until the PCs have spent enough time investigating or chasing the monster, it would be essentially unbeatable and run away from any encounter. But once the players had build up enough anticipation, the monster's stats would change so that it could be defeated, but it was now willing to stand it's ground and fight. I'm not sure how WotC is handling the idea of threshold, but I just planned to have two seperate write-ups for the monster, before and after.
It's something I wanted to incorporate from the Orrorsh setting for the Torg RPG. Torg used a "Drama Deck" of cards players could use to alter combat situations. In Orrorsh, players could only play a full hand of cards (a big deal during combat) after going through all the paces of a horror story.
I suspect in WotC's case they're going off a different inspiration, video game bosses, specifically those who can only be defeated after going through several stages of combat. It's also the backbone of Heroclix & Mage Knight combat, where characters cycle through several different sets of abilities in the course of a battle.
Having sat through more 3x monster fights than I'd like to remember where players got bored and reduced the combat to how a running tally of damage done to the monster, I suspect the Threshold concept will end up having a greater (and more postive) impact on D&D gameplay than the designers expect.
