Monster feats

[MrWaeseL]

Why do monsters have such ridiculous feat choices? A bruiser with alertness but no Improved Natural Attack, for example.

[Username17]

1090689542[/unixtime]]Why do monsters have such ridiculous feat choices? A bruiser with alertness but no Improved Natural Attack, for example.

Because monsters have completely arbitrary bonuses to begin with. A monster's basic attack does as much damage as the author wants it to. If you want them to do more damage, then you can just write in a bigger damage die - or give them a higher strength. Or make them more acidic, or whatever.

As such, there is absolutely no reason for a monster to even have feats that add numerical abilities to anything - since their base values that the feats add to are already arbitrary. So monsters instead get whatever feats happen to give out actual abilities that the author wants the monster to have (often as not as a bonus feat) and all the rest of the feats are "wasted" (spent on things that don't influence the author's vision of how the monster should interact).

Basically, there's no design reason why monsters should even have feats, since they are written to have whatever numbers and abilties the author wants - the feats don't actually matter (since they can already have whatever bonus feats you want them to have).

-Username17

[User3]

1090695162[/unixtime]]
Basically, there's no design reason why monsters should even have feats, since they are written to have whatever numbers and abilties the author wants - the feats don't actually matter (since they can already have whatever bonus feats you want them to have).

-Username17

Monster feats (and feats that simply add numerical values) are useful for advancing monsters by HD, as I believe they were intended to be used.

[Josh_Kablack]

Basically, there's no design reason why monsters should even have feats, since they are written to have whatever numbers and abilties the author wants - the feats don't actually matter (since they can already have whatever bonus feats you want them to have).
-Username17

Not quite 100% true.

Monsters have feats for the sake of system consistancy and in order to make monster races playable with (largely) the same set of rules that non-monsterous characters use.

In hindsight, this probably wasn't an entirely wise design decision, but there you go.

[RandomCasualty]

1090695162[/unixtime]]
Basically, there's no design reason why monsters should even have feats, since they are written to have whatever numbers and abilties the author wants - the feats don't actually matter (since they can already have whatever bonus feats you want them to have).

Yeah, it's one thing where I really question why the designer's bothered to give monsters PC like stats and use PC methods for determining BaB and such. Natural armor, spell like abilities, ability scores and any other extra stuff you want to give them, like immunities are on a "give em what you want em to have". I really don't know why they don't do that with BaB and saves too.

Things would have been a lot easier, and would have prevented crap like the collossal scorpion's near invincibility and other inflated high strength monsters.

[User3]

They went halfway with "monster classes."

If they had just made each kind of monster into a class with a mechanic like the "racial class" PrCs, and made monster powers cost "Equipment by level," then the whole system would be more balanced.

That would have solved such idiocy like spellcasting monsters not having Spell Focus and high Strength monsters not having Power Attack.

However, some monsters were built to be hard to fight against anyone. That's why outsiders always get a bunch of immunities for no good reason. Even the low level outsiders were built to be low level challenges for high level guys.