What roles do monsters actually have?

[Username17]

This seemed tangential enough to D&D 4e that I felt it deserved its own thread.

They were either a basic flavorless brute, or they played like a mage, though usually with more hp. But seriously, for the most part, they were rather bland. Especially the melee types. I mean, you seen one giant in 3.5, you've seen em all, because all of them are just slightly different hit dice with differing strength scores, and that's it. Like literally no interesting attacks.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I disagree with part of that. Playing "like a mage" is actually a fair amount of territory in D&D - literally over a hundred pages of the PHB are dedicated just to things that a "mage type character" might be able to do. A Beholder plays and feels very different to an Efreet despite the fact that both of them are "using magic." Indeed, magic use by monsters has a tendency to be pretty tightly themed. A Mindflayer hurls stun cannons around while a Dao puts up walls, it really honestly varies quite a bit.

But of course you're totally right about all the big dumb melee brutes being pretty much the same. The difference between an Ogre and a Fire Giant is pretty minimal as far as actual abilities go. If you just made an Ogre Fighter and gave him some armor and a decent weapon, he'd look an awful lot like a Fire Giant both socially and game mechanically. Certainly his combat participation would follow pretty much the exact same script. They have reach, they do a lot of damage, they have a lot of hit points, and they have mediocre saves.

But it got me thinking, what actual roles should exist?

The 4e stuff has me puzzled. I honestly can't tell the difference between a Brute, a Skirmisher, and a Soldier. They all run up and hit things, it doesn't even fucking matter. The Artillery and the Lurker seem pretty similar to me as well. The Controller stands out, as does the Leader. But the Leader isn't even defined as a role, it's supposedly a template you put on other roles. Totally bizarre thought process here.

Things that I don't want to see:

• Any role based on "getting hate" because that's totally retarded. I can see a place for monsters that get more dangerous if you leave them alone, and I can see a place for monsters whose damage output is disproportionate to their defenses, but having monsters (or characters) whose supposed contribution to the battle is that other enemies spend attacks on them is retarded.
• Any role based on Metagame concerns.
• Any monster role designed specifically to hose a player role or vice versa.

So anyway, a very simple schema might start off with the basic designations:

• Imp (-5/-15)
• Speed Bump (-10/+0)
• Grunt (-5/-5)
• Glass Cannon (+5/-5)
• NPC (+0/+0)
• Meat Wall (-5/+5)
• Boss (+5/+5)

And something that of course springs immediately to mind is the fact that these numbers are reducible. That is to say that a Grunt Monster advances a power level and becomes an NPC, and an NPC advances and becomes a Boss. Similarly, advance an Imp a few power levels and he's a glass cannon.

So really there's 3 states of enemy:

Offensive Enemies: These are enemies which have an offensive output substantially higher than their defenses. This inherently makes them high priority targets because the amount of enemy offense you can negate per unit of player offense spent is very high.

Balanced Enemies: These enemies have offensive outs roughly balanced with their own defenses. This makes them medium priority targets because the amount of offense you spend to drop them is roughly commensurate with the offense for Team Monster that you eiminate by doing so.

Defensive Enemies: These are enemies which have an offensive and defensive output which are unbalanced in favor of the defenses. This makes them very low priority inherently because they take a long time to get rid of relative to the amount of threat they pose. Defensive enemies often will be unable to accomplish much unless and until other enemies have already come in and softened targets up for them.

Different power levels relative to the PCs push that up and down into various territories. A Defensive enemy above player level, for example, is extremely harsh since he will require positional advantage and such for the PCs to even be able to harm it at all. But a Defensive enemy below the party level is in the same position relative to the PCs - has to pretty much wait for other enemies to damage the PCs before he poses much of any threat. Todays evil fairy (glass cannon) is tomorrow's Imp.

Within those categories however, it seems to me that there is room for roles based on combat actions and depth. Here's the first division:

• One Trick Ponies: Many monsters honestly just want to have one thing they do and have them just spam that. They should have one attack tactic and one defensive vulnerability because they are expendable monsters and that's how they roll. A Cockatrice is a deadly deadly chicken (offense specced), a Salamander is a deadly and resilient lizard (balanced), but both of them basically just have one attack (death breath or fire burst) and spam it incessantly. Any monster that just runs up and hits things like a golem would fit into this category.
• Short Entry Monsters: Many monsters do about three things, and mix it up here and there. Most 4e monsters fit into this category or fall a little short. The standard would be to have two tactically different maneuvers and a use-limited super move.
• Complex Monsters: Sometimes, especially for named characters and major villains, it is nice for a enemy to have the kind of depth one would ask a player character to have. Lots of different abilities, use limitations on many of them. When facing killer clowns or major demons you should expect them to be pulling weird shit every round, and they should deliver.

Now, given those divisions, a monster can further be divided into what it is that it actually does. Monsters that pile up damage with their actions play somewhat differently than monsters who pile up control effects to assist other monsters.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

It took me a while to figure out what you meant by the +#/+# next to each monster role, but I believe this is it:

Just like in Magic: The Gathering, the first value is "offense" and the second is "defense".
Unless that was mentioned in a previous thread and I'm stating the obvious.... well, anyways...

A suggestion so far; there seems to be little difference between "Meat Wall" and "Speed Bump" other than relative level of damage absorbtion before dropping, as if they are the same category but Meat Wall is more advanced.
Consider folding both into the same role.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

That all sounds reasonable. I don't see a question anywhere, so I'll just wander a bit...

I agree with RC that 4e's system of scaling monster numbers is a good idea. It might be best if there was a full 1-20 numerical outline for all the different monster roles. Then each monster description would really only need to concern itself with the special abilities.

What is the plan for unique creatures that break the mold for their kind? Is it possible for a traditionally found Offensive Enemy to become a Defensive Enemy? It is possible for a traditionally found One Trick Pony to be a Complex Monster?

I hope there are ways for monsters to jump roles. It makes the game dull when you know without looking that all monsters of race X are One Trick Pony's. Maybe there could be templates (excuse the 3.x reminders) that change monster roles.

For example, if you wanted to change a lvl X One Trick Pony Grunt into a lvl X+4 Short Entry Monster Meat Wall. You would give it the numbers of an appropriate level Meat Wall monster and add some special abilities from a themed chart.

[Username17]

Just like in Magic: The Gathering, the first value is "offense" and the second is "defense".

Yes. Offensive and Defensive damae modifiers to be precise.

A suggestion so far; there seems to be little difference between "Meat Wall" and "Speed Bump" other than relative level of damage absorbtion before dropping, as if they are the same category but Meat Wall is more advanced.
Consider folding both into the same role.

They are the same, both are a Defensive Spec.

I hope there are ways for monsters to jump roles. It makes the game dull when you know without looking that all monsters of race X are One Trick Pony's. Maybe there could be templates (excuse the 3.x reminders) that change monster roles.

Absolutely. As I see things, a Complex monster is just a One Trick Pony with extra powers. The goal then should be to have a sufficiently large "deck" of abilities that to go from a One Trick Pony to a Short Entry Monster you just deal out some more options and let it go.

For things like the Cockatrice, it's probably best if there is a list of available abilities and have OTPs pick one, Short Entry Monsters pick 3, and Complex Monsters pick 8 (or more). Better still would be to hierarchy those abilities - the first list being basic attacks (OTPs get 1, SEMs get 2, CMs get 3), the second being super attacks (OTPs don't get any, SEMs get 1, and CMs get 3), and Weird Crap (which only Complex Monsters get to draw off of).

So when you face a generic Cockatrice it might have poison breath or a death gaze, while a more story important Cockatrice might have both and also some sort of use limited death crow. And if it's a named character Cockatrice it can do all kinds of stuff.

-Username17

[K]

Personally, I don't like roles.

Seriously. In Red Box DnD a dragon was a monster with a fire breath or something and a few low level spells for exceptional "talking" specimens.

By the time 3e rolled around, they became users of spell-likes, combat monsters with tail slaps and wing buffets, spellcasting for all, powerful senses and automatic powers like fear auras, good armor, and all around suitable monsters for whatever you need (despite being CRed deadly low).

The thing is that I don't see why a cockatrice can't do the same. On top of death gaze you could have a wing buffet, a death glance (nauseates people in a AoE because the gaze only briefly touches you), a ride-by death gaze with a lower save, and a Power dive attack.

My point is that while a monster can be thematically simple, it doesn't have to be tactically simple. Things that are tactically interesting are challenges without having to blow the math off the top. They also avoid the Brute v. Archer Problem.

The Brute v. Archer problem is where you have a powerful monster who excels at melee and he gets nailed by a archer with a good movement rate. This is a definite RPG problem because in movies or cartoons the giant melee monsters either do Inuyasha things where their weapon attack attack means jumping 60' and is completely the same as a ranged attack OR they are like golems who pick up pieces of the floor and toss them at the heroes.

Tactically simple things just don't have a real place in a tactics game, so roles of any kind are generally a bad idea.

(But, that doesn't means that classes can't have flavors. I just mean that everyone needs to sneak, control, fight in melee and ranged, and generally hit all the things in the Five Things Every Adventurer Must Do thread. For example, Wizards should sneak by casting Invisibility, Rogues use distractions, and Fighters have Elven boots and cloaks.)

[Draco_Argentum]

That is a full 1-20 numerical outline. No scaling bonuses because those mess the rng up.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

Tactically simple things just don't have a real place in a tactics game, so roles of any kind are generally a bad idea.

Tactically simple =/= roles. Roles are just a shorthand way of describing how a monster is primarily going to function as a challenge against the Pc's. Whether the term "roles" is a good one or not is irrelevant. Monsters will have differing tactical strengths, and roles are a useful tool.

The thing is that I don't see why a cockatrice can't do the same. On top of death gaze you could have a wing buffet, a death glance (nauseates people in a AoE because the gaze only briefly touches you), a ride-by death gaze with a lower save, and a Power dive attack.

Monsters shouldn't be "balanced" with respect to the five character traits. There are two reasons for this; it would be less fun if every monster was well rounded, and monsters usually don't live very long.

If every monster was balanced with respect to the five traits, every monster would become derivative. They would be able to respond in the same ways to the party, and iconic/niche monsters would lose their thematic punch. We want our Beholders to be deadly when they are close by, and ineffective at range. We want our Dragons to be exceedingly scary in open spaces, and more easily defeated in enclosed spaces. We want the party to adapt their tactics to attack the monster's weaknesses and to deflect its strengths.

A good example of an unbalanced monster is the Ankheg. It has no ability to sneak above-ground, and it has no ranged attack worth mentioning. It is also incredibly stupid at an Int 1. But it has no need to sneak or to have ranged attacks, because it can burrow. When a party encounters a cluster of Ankhegs, they know that their best course of action is to try to keep the fight at range as long as possible.

If the Ankheg was Int 10, had a longbow and stealth boots, then there would be no need to play off it's particular strengths and weaknesses. The party wouldn't need to follow rock trails like in the movie Tremors because the Ankheg could sneak up on them aboveground or shoot at them with it's longbow.

No. The most drastic, and therefore interesting fights come from fighting significantly lopsided enemies.

Finally, if an enemy isn't going to live very long, then in many cases (Imps and such) tertiary abilities aren't needed. It simply won't have a need to use abilities significantly weaker than their main shtick.

Note that this doesn't mean that monsters should have only one ability apiece. Monsters like 3.x Giants are too dull. But their secondary (and later) abilities should be fundamentally interesting first, in addition to being less impressive than their main shtick.

[NoDot]

A suggestion so far; there seems to be little difference between "Meat Wall" and "Speed Bump" other than relative level of damage absorbtion before dropping, as if they are the same category but Meat Wall is more advanced.
Consider folding both into the same role.

If we take this a little farther:

• Offense: Imps, Glass Cannons
• Balanced: Grunt, NPC, Boss
• Defensive: Speed Bump, Meat Wall

AKA, Franks list.

The thing that bugs me about that, though, is Attack Rolls falling behind as the characters level.

Should we fold those up into Damage Rolls/CAN? 3d6-3 attributes added to 3d6 directly strikes me as a bad idea. (OK, it's a recipe for disaster!) 2d6-2 attributes added to 4d6 directly might work better, but that's still a range from +0 and +10-way larger than is probably a good idea.

[Username17]

Player Characters (and named villains) need to have depth of tactical options. Encounters need to have discreet tactical choices pre-made such that different choices by the players will have real relevance to outcomes.

And monsters... they don't individually need anything. They just have to be a building block that can go into an encounter. And I don't mean the 4e method where you take random bullshit of the appropriate level and type and mix it together (seriously: 1 Rockfire Dreadnought, 2 Fire Giants, and a Mindflayer? What the fuck, man?) but that the expected reasonable sorts of encounters should be decent and have meaningful tactical choices in them.

Most enemies can and should be encountered in groups. Giant Weasels don't need or particularly want any tactical depth because you are only going to fight them when they are set to intercept attacks on gnomish druids or being ridden by kobold lancers. "Stand and face the Giant Weasel" is not a major confrontation, it's an incident. Like encountering a locked door or a trapped chest, it can be solved.

If you're facing the flautist and her team of rats, it is not important or even helpful for the rats to be individually tactically complex. Their job is to be numberous and die in numbers. She has to be tactically diverse and to have different things she can do with the flute to change the battlefield.

The thing that bugs me about that, though, is Attack Rolls falling behind as the characters level.

With the current math, attack rolls don't have to float with level. As K said earlier, an AC/Attack Roll arms race is something we can make do without.

-Username17

[NoDot]

Well, that solves that problem.

One more thing, earlier, there was talk of "Imp Time," with various monster types being worth some number of "Imps;" did CAN eliminate the need for that?

[edit] It's on the bottom of this article on the wiki, but it definitely sounds like its need was eliminated by the CAN system.

[Calibron]

So let me see if I have this right. Let's use an earth elemental as an example creature. As a defensive character(speed bump or meatwall) a OTP would just have high defenses and have the power to throw balls of sticky mud at people that do damage, of course, and entangle on a failed save, maybe reduce movement speed on a successful save. As a SEM they'd gain the ability to throw up Walls of Stone(that maybe hit you when they burst out of the ground and threaten a wound) around the battlefield and drag people into the ground so that they'd be unable to take physical actions until they made a Strength/Escape Artist Check or used dimension door or something. As a CM they'd get more stuff like being able to cover the ground in spikes or other potentially damaging difficult terrain, entomb people in their Walls of Stone, a "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies" power(not automatically deadly of course), be covered in spikes so everyone who attacks them in melee gets hurt, cause earthquakes that knock you prone, and other crazy crap.

As an offensive monster OTP they'd throw rocks that would dent/tear your armor/skin on a failed save and make you easier to wound. As a SEM they'd gain the ability to make pieces of the ground suddenly jut up to hit you, and on a failed save you'd go flying through the air and effectively suffer another attack when you landed, and probably either be able to throw up Walls of Stone or drag you into the ground.

I'm guessing when it comes to powers CM won't have huge differences whether they're Offensive, Defensive, or Balanced since they'll be covering all their bases and only have one or two more types of powers based on their specialty.

[RandomCasualty2]

I definitely like the idea of having monster base stats be X + level, or X+ level *2 or some permutation there of. It's alot easier to be able to do that in your head and have it be simple instead of having some crazy table you've got to look shit up on.

The roles should then provide some modifiers to that base.

I'm not sure what roles we want. It depends I guess on how deeply you want roles to define a monster. You could go so far as to say you've got monster roles like "Dumb brute", which mean you're weak willed, but good at melee attacks and so on.

Or you can simply have generic stuff like offensive monster, defensive and balanced, and let the DM place a few modifiers for each. You also probably want some kind of controller role or something for monsters that have powerful abilities that do more than just inflict damage and minor status conditions. It's rather unfair to put an orc and a cockatrice with the same numbers, given that one just deals damage and the other can petrify you.

It depends really on what stuff you want to be role specific. If you've got shit like movement that's part of role, then you can have roles like skirmisher, who bases itself on speedy attacks. If your roles are purely to determine attacks and defenses, then you're probably best off having generic roles that show which of those the monster has focused on.


Minions and Elites

The other thing I'm considering is the expendability rating, which I consider somewhat different from role. Really, you only want to have minions and elites if your system is going to use a lens system for encounters. That pretty much that any given encounter looks different based on the people who are playing it.

4E kind of tried to do this, but ultimately failed, because they failed to include any mechanism for making creatures into different types. Yeah, the fen hydra is an elite, but there should be some level where it's just a normal monster for me and some epic level where I'm dropping the things left and right. Unfortunately in 4E, you really had no way to make a monster from elite to minion without totally recreating it.

There isn't any battle somewhere going between cyclops minions and common rat minions where one hit by either side kills one of the others. That just shouldn't really happen in your game. No, those cyclops are going to at least be normal monsters compared to the rats. They only become minions when faced with opposition that's way more powerful than they are, and solely as a simplification tool. If the battle is supposed to feature a lone cyclops as a big bad, then he's an elite.

And the thing is that it could be the very same cyclops in all three cases. The expendability rating simply tells you how important he is to the plot. Now this is a very cinematic concept and isn't especially simulationist at all, because it means that the same creature may well have three different stat blocks depending on what it's fighting. But I think this is a good thing because it allows you to introduce scale into your encounters. A house cat against an adventurer is just a minion, but a house cat against a mouse is a real monster.

Basically it would involve some means of level equalization. If a creature is say 5 levels lower, you can raise its numeric level by 5, but change it to a minion. If a creature is 5 levels higher, you can drop it 5 levels and make it an elite. When you go down the chain to a minion, you lose a bunhc of powers and mostly just get base attacks. When you go up to elite, you gain lots of cool abilities on par with stuff the PCs will be using.

So a level 6 troll could be a level 1 elite. or it could be a minion in a level 12 quest. The level ensures that its base numbers are something you care about but the minion or elite status makes it a major or minor factor in the adventure accordingly.

This is a partial solution to 3.5s problem of monsters getting phased out much too quickly. Because you don't want the battlefield cluttered with a bunch of weak shit that can't even hit the PCs.

The only place this breaks down is when you start having PCs try to bring along a bunch of extra minion fodder of their own to try to roll natural 20s on minions and kill them. Since once you make something a minion, just having a bunch of rats could kill them. So you'd need some rules to deal with that. Perhaps a minimum damage required to kill rule or something, since you don't want the epic PCs flooding the dungeon with 1st level commoners to try to get lucky against the level 18 hill giant minions.

As far as the importance of minions, I think it's necessary to have stuff that's easier for the DM to track. If you're going to throw down 20 or more creatures of the same type, then They should just pretty much die in one shot and not have to worry about status conditions. If you trap a minion in a web, then it's just trapped there. It can't get out period, it's just out of the combat. Debuffs similarly could just take minions out of the battle, as minions are weak in general and bebuffing one should just make it a non-credible threat. Since minions are abstracted anyway, they shouldn't be able to get buffed themselves. The only real status effect you should care about for minions is charm or control. Since it should be pretty possible for an enchanter to grab hold of a bunch of minions and start using them to his advantage.

I like the 4E rule that you've got to hit a minion to take it out though, so no automatic damage to wipe out all the minions instantly.

[Username17]

I like the 4E rule that you've got to hit a minion to take it out though, so no automatic damage to wipe out all the minions instantly.

That's only on misses though. If you use a damage effect which is literally automatic (like a Rod of Reaving or a Cloud of Daggers), then the Minion dies at any level. Seriously a first level Arcane powered character can kill a Minion of any level every time without rolling dice using at-will powers. A Wizard can do it to a 3x3 area worth of Minions.

I just don't think that route is worth pursuing.

The other thing I'm considering is the expendability rating, which I consider somewhat different from role.

I think the expendability of a creature can and should be set by the relative offensive output vs. defensive prowess. While having a never ending arms race of damage vs. hit points reaches untenable numbers very quickly, having a much smaller damage test modifier against a damage soak modifier scales quite nicely.

The only problem I see is that it scales right off the RNG fairly totally given time. But I don't actually see that as a problem so much as a feature.

-Username17

[K]

Player Characters (and named villains) need to have depth of tactical options. Encounters need to have discreet tactical choices pre-made such that different choices by the players will have real relevance to outcomes.

Things can still have tactical options without being good at everything. You can easily say that Wizards are good at ranged and less good at melee and that cockatrices are better at melee than ranged, and have the obvious tactical choice to have the wizard attack the cockatrice at range.

My point is that if you need to defeat a cockatrice in the first room of an ruined temple to get to the inner rooms, the it has to be an interesting fight. It's not a door or a trap or some other speedbump, but something you are expected to spend at least an hour of real life doing(the shortest time I've ever spent on a DnD combat). That being said, it has to have some options other than substandard attack OR death gaze.

Things can be thematically simple and tactically interesting, as shown by the cockatrice example that has a number of powers based on his death gaze. One does not have to be sacrificed for the other.

Most enemies can and should be encountered in groups. Giant Weasels don't need or particularly want any tactical depth because you are only going to fight them when they are set to intercept attacks on gnomish druids or being ridden by kobold lancers. "Stand and face the Giant Weasel" is not a major confrontation, it's an incident. Like encountering a locked door or a trapped chest, it can be solved.

If you're facing the flautist and her team of rats, it is not important or even helpful for the rats to be individually tactically complex. Their job is to be numberous and die in numbers. She has to be tactically diverse and to have different things she can do with the flute to change the battlefield.

But that is a different issue: the lack of unit rules. 4e's one real improvement was the introduction (but not execution) of the idea that minions need to part of the leader character's tactical options. A Pied Piper character IS the rat pack, and he needs to be able to do tactically interesting things with those rats even if his only answer to ranged combat is "Disperse swarm and hide behind a rock."

By the same token, a giant weasel is part of the kobold's Weasel Charge attack and part of the gnome druid's Sacrifice the Wild active defense.

Personally, I don't see a problem with a trained unit of kobolds just be a CR 5 thing that dies when you've killed half the weasels and most of the kobolds and has the tactical options of a Cr 5 character.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Where does something like the Ghôls or Soulless from Myth come in? Ghôls are like Grunts, except that their mobility gives them significant defensive and offensive possibilities. Soulless are probably Glass Cannons, except that their ability to traverse otherwise impassable terrain gives them some significant advantages.

That strikes me as the sort of thing where 4e Role concepts start coming in. Ghôls don't hit hard or last long, but their mobility makes them difficult to engage, and if they find an opening they can pounce on more vulnerable targets. That feels like a Skirmisher-style enemy. Soulless are fragile and deal only moderate long range damage, but often can only be engaged at long range, which covers a lot of their weaknesses. I'm not even clear what you'd call that.

So on some level, I think mobility needs to be factored into the monster role. Low mobility is what makes Giant Scorpions puzzles instead of monsters. Exotic mobility is a part of what makes the various incorporeal undead as dangerous as they are.

[RandomCasualty2]

I think the expendability of a creature can and should be set by the relative offensive output vs. defensive prowess. While having a never ending arms race of damage vs. hit points reaches untenable numbers very quickly, having a much smaller damage test modifier against a damage soak modifier scales quite nicely.

The only problem I see is that it scales right off the RNG fairly totally given time. But I don't actually see that as a problem so much as a feature.

-Username17

Yeah, if we were running a computer game, actually having expendability roles isn't necessary, since you could just have level handle that.

The problem is that sometimes you want big swarms of enemies, but you really don't want to have to track HP for each of them. And you seriously groan when someone tosses a fireball into a pack of them and some of them are merely wounded. Because that's a pain in the ass. And ultimately the idea of the minion concept is that you'd be able to take out a bunch of minis, like zombies, and not worry which mini corresponds to which minion. A zombie is just a zombie, and you don't have to remember which one happened to be zombie minion #17. And that's actually a nice goal for a tabletop RPG, because seriously as a DM, I don't want to be bothered by that shit. A computer can track that shit just fine, but as a human being running a live game, the gain you achieve from individually numbering each zombie and worrying about what happens to him has a very low benefit : tedium ratio. I'd rather just make them harder to hit, but have any shot kill, as opposed to having to track their hp individually.

I realize that there are problems with the minion concept, like the ones you pointed out, but I still think the concept itself has merit. Even something as simple as "minions are only damaged if an effect hits them" could work.

The elite concept is a bit more up in the air. Now, I do kind of think it's nice to just have a creature that can take some hits. It's possible to achieve the same resiliency by just giving it a higher AC. A creature 6 levels higher for instance, is still going to be real bitch to destroy, but the other importance of the elite concept is that it has more abilities than a standard monster. So maybe having an elite as the big boss monster would give your villain a bit more character, and may be more engaging than just a villain with a huge AC that your character miss on most of their attacks. But I guess that's a fun factor question. Would you like to hit more and have to do more damage, or just not hit very much?

[Voss]

Huge AC definitely isn't the answer. Thats just relying on the dice fluking out (and rolling high) before player frustration sets in and they mutiny over poorly designed encounters.

I'd rather the 'boss monsters' act mostly like PCs, and the standard monster be a bit easier, but outnumber the party. I like the idea of throwing a dozen hobgoblins at the party, and not pretending that is somehow level appropriate for a 9th level party. And that sort of thing was the biggest problem I had with 3e, since by the book that was somehow supposed to make sense, apparently after a frontal lobotomy, because I look at that and say 'what the fuck?'

[Draco_Argentum]

If all abilities granted are level appropriate having lots of them shouldn't be a massive power increase. Take the Dragon's traditional role. Usually you fight one and its a hard fight. It is hard to kill but mysteriously doesn't kill the hero and it usually has a few tactical options.

That sounds like a 0/+5 monster of the right level with a CM sized list of abilities. (Maybe 0/+10 depending on how resilient then numbers actually make them)

[Boss] and [Elite] are really just tags to let DMs know that the monster has a lot of abilities and should not be used in groups.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

I made a post on EN World about minions and I suggested that characters and monsters have scaling hp with level. Say for instance that each level a character's damage goes up by 5 and all monsters hp go up by 5 as well. This might take some tweaking and people might be shocked at hitpoints in the beginning. But, I think this mostly solves the problems of extra NPCs throwing rocks at 21st level minions.

I definitely like the idea of having monster base stats be X + level, or X+ level *2 or some permutation there of. It's alot easier to be able to do that in your head and have it be simple instead of having some crazy table you've got to look shit up on.

The roles should then provide some modifiers to that base.

I'm not sure what roles we want. It depends I guess on how deeply you want roles to define a monster. You could go so far as to say you've got monster roles like "Dumb brute", which mean you're weak willed, but good at melee attacks and so on.

Or you can simply have generic stuff like offensive monster, defensive and balanced, and let the DM place a few modifiers for each. You also probably want some kind of controller role or something for monsters that have powerful abilities that do more than just inflict damage and minor status conditions. It's rather unfair to put an orc and a cockatrice with the same numbers, given that one just deals damage and the other can petrify you.

It depends really on what stuff you want to be role specific. If you've got shit like movement that's part of role, then you can have roles like skirmisher, who bases itself on speedy attacks. If your roles are purely to determine attacks and defenses, then you're probably best off having generic roles that show which of those the monster has focused on.


Minions and Elites

The other thing I'm considering is the expendability rating, which I consider somewhat different from role. Really, you only want to have minions and elites if your system is going to use a lens system for encounters. That pretty much that any given encounter looks different based on the people who are playing it.

4E kind of tried to do this, but ultimately failed, because they failed to include any mechanism for making creatures into different types. Yeah, the fen hydra is an elite, but there should be some level where it's just a normal monster for me and some epic level where I'm dropping the things left and right. Unfortunately in 4E, you really had no way to make a monster from elite to minion without totally recreating it.

There isn't any battle somewhere going between cyclops minions and common rat minions where one hit by either side kills one of the others. That just shouldn't really happen in your game. No, those cyclops are going to at least be normal monsters compared to the rats. They only become minions when faced with opposition that's way more powerful than they are, and solely as a simplification tool. If the battle is supposed to feature a lone cyclops as a big bad, then he's an elite.

And the thing is that it could be the very same cyclops in all three cases. The expendability rating simply tells you how important he is to the plot. Now this is a very cinematic concept and isn't especially simulationist at all, because it means that the same creature may well have three different stat blocks depending on what it's fighting. But I think this is a good thing because it allows you to introduce scale into your encounters. A house cat against an adventurer is just a minion, but a house cat against a mouse is a real monster.

Basically it would involve some means of level equalization. If a creature is say 5 levels lower, you can raise its numeric level by 5, but change it to a minion. If a creature is 5 levels higher, you can drop it 5 levels and make it an elite. When you go down the chain to a minion, you lose a bunhc of powers and mostly just get base attacks. When you go up to elite, you gain lots of cool abilities on par with stuff the PCs will be using.

So a level 6 troll could be a level 1 elite. or it could be a minion in a level 12 quest. The level ensures that its base numbers are something you care about but the minion or elite status makes it a major or minor factor in the adventure accordingly.

This is a partial solution to 3.5s problem of monsters getting phased out much too quickly. Because you don't want the battlefield cluttered with a bunch of weak shit that can't even hit the PCs.

The only place this breaks down is when you start having PCs try to bring along a bunch of extra minion fodder of their own to try to roll natural 20s on minions and kill them. Since once you make something a minion, just having a bunch of rats could kill them. So you'd need some rules to deal with that. Perhaps a minimum damage required to kill rule or something, since you don't want the epic PCs flooding the dungeon with 1st level commoners to try to get lucky against the level 18 hill giant minions.

As far as the importance of minions, I think it's necessary to have stuff that's easier for the DM to track. If you're going to throw down 20 or more creatures of the same type, then They should just pretty much die in one shot and not have to worry about status conditions. If you trap a minion in a web, then it's just trapped there. It can't get out period, it's just out of the combat. Debuffs similarly could just take minions out of the battle, as minions are weak in general and bebuffing one should just make it a non-credible threat. Since minions are abstracted anyway, they shouldn't be able to get buffed themselves. The only real status effect you should care about for minions is charm or control. Since it should be pretty possible for an enchanter to grab hold of a bunch of minions and start using them to his advantage.

I like the 4E rule that you've got to hit a minion to take it out though, so no automatic damage to wipe out all the minions instantly.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Binary zombies are great. There isn't a rats vs. zombies problem if they all have 1 hp. If you use the right attacks and defense numbers, the proportions of surviving zombies when the fight is done can be exactly the same as when the zombies have 20 HP and the rats 3.

It also makes finishing moves work quite nicely.

[Username17]

Binary zombies are great. There isn't a rats vs. zombies problem if they all have 1 hp. If you use the right attacks and defense numbers, the proportions of surviving zombies when the fight is done can be exactly the same as when the zombies have 20 HP and the rats 3.

It also makes finishing moves work quite nicely.

That's problematic. On many levels. It forbids automatic accuracy attacks from the game. It makes battles incredibly frustrating when players are not neatly in the numeric level to treat the rats or zombies as horde monsters. It's just not functional.

Sure having a binary zombie is fine when you're more powerful than it is by a substantial margin, you roll a d20 and most of the time you hit and kill and the rest of the time you miss. No muss, no fuss. But when the zombie is not substantially weaker than the PCs the game gets fucked. The players start missing the zombie a substantial amount and the zombie itself becomes a decent sized chunk of the total opposition. Suddenly the fact that you throw attack after attack and don't build up any damage on the zombie becomes irritating rather than liberating.

The goal is to have a scaling system in which a monster today can become a horde monster of tomorrow without having special rules that break the fourth wall or putting unpleasant restraints on the kinds of abilities that players can have.

So for perusal, let's consider the following scenario:

• Your Armor Classes are not level dependent. Attacks hit you fairly often if they are appropriate to your weaknesses regardless of what level you or your assailants are.
• Your damage bonus and the damage resistance of the target are level dependent. If you target a victim who is a couple of defensive classes below you, you're going to be rolling 3d6+10 or more, and you wipe them out on a 20.
• But as that very same monster becomes a harder challenge for you, those same attacks won't be taking them out, only doing damage effects.

The net result is that you end up keeping track of wound effects for monsters at about your ecological niche, and monsters that are below your threshold just go down quickly and with a minimum of accounting.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

Minions are an abstraction mechanic. Very similar to swarm mechanics for the most part. There's a point where you just have a lot of monsters and you simply want to abstract them in some fashion. You aren't going to roll 100 attack rolls for a hundred rats, you're going to call it a swarm. Not because a rat swarm looks anything like 100 rats do mechanically, because it totally doesn't. And if we aren't bothered by the damage of a swarm being equivalent to the damage of 100 attacking rats, or the fact that a burning hands kills 100 individual rats but not necessarily a rat swarm, then I'm not quite sure why minions are a problem.

Minions are just another abstraction mechanic for weaker or trivial foes. Because nobody likes rolling a handful of d20s and just counting up the 20s. It's tedious and it's stupid. Similarly, I don't really want to be worried about the hp of trivial creatures. It's pretty much okay to go back to the old wargaming convention of having no state between "alive" and "dead"

[Voss]

The problem is, 4e doesn't present minions as an abstraction for trivial foes. It presents them as abstracted versions of opponents you are currently fighting, which makes no sense.

You can do 11th level kobold minions on your own, which work out perfectly fine. Because, yeah, at 11th level, if I'm not one shotting a kobold, I've fucked up my character no matter what. But the system presents kobold minions fighting alongside actual effective kobolds and thats frankly a stoning offense. But having to independently recreate every single monster to fake the abstraction is annoying. You could fake it pretty well in 3rd edition, however. Hit on a 10+ (or whatever feels appropriate) and it dies. Fails a save against a damage spell? Dies. (Dies at passing 2 saves) Done.

Monsters should only be minions when you don't have any reason to care about them. If Bob the evil wizard is behind a wall of henchmen, you should be able to go all Brock Sampson on the stupid butterfly guys. But Bob should be just like you.


Interestingly, the swarm rules in 4e are pretty decent. The aura effect makes it effective, and makes it feel like you have to step into the swarm in order to melee it (which is, as it should be) a really bad idea. The needlefang drake swarm is a good example of fucking up the power levels though. Those things will rip a level appropriate party to shreds in no time flat.

[Amra]

Agreed, the aura rules are good, but...

"An aura does not affect a creature that cannot be targeted by attacks that require line of effect"

...actually made my actual head actually explode.

Seriously, what would have been wrong with "Creatures within the aura are not affected by it if the aura does not have line of effect to them," or even "An aura requires line of effect"?

On reflection, it's probably down to the somewhat sucky choice of "line of effect" as a game-mechanical term. "Creatures are only affected if the effect has line of effect to them," is correct but ugly.

It's all a bit redundant anyway, as the standing rule is that you always need line of effect from the origin square to the target.

Meh, whatever.

The Minions thing is intensely problematic. I seriously don't want a 1st-level Wizard taking out nine Abyssal Ghoul Myrmidons - or even one - with an at-will power, not ever. Something with a name like that ought to be seriously awesome with respect to low-level opposition, no matter how much of a non-threat it is to Epic guys.

[MartinHarper]

The Minions thing is intensely problematic. I seriously don't want a 1st-level Wizard taking out nine Abyssal Ghoul Myrmidons - or even one - with an at-will power, not ever. Something with a name like that ought to be seriously awesome with respect to low-level opposition, no matter how much of a non-threat it is to Epic guys.

The minions thing relies on the GM not picking high level minions as opposition to low level parties. Thus, if a level 1 party blunders into a cave containing 9 Abyssal Ghouls, I'd use the stats for Abyssal Ghoul Skirmishers, and if a level 30 party goes into the same cave I'd use the Abyssal Ghoul Minion stats.

That doesn't bother me. Should it?