Check out the Astral Deadnought from Mordenkainen's Tome

WotC's Nathan Stewart celebrated hitting 5,000 Twitter followers by sharing a page from Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, the upcoming D&D book due for release next month. The art gloriously evokes Jeff Easley's art from the cover of 1987's Manual of the Planes (a monster originally called an "ethereal dreadnought" and changed to "astral dreadnought" in D&D 2E).

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[Gradine]

Despite my love for hardcore monsters, I have no issue with WotC designing monsters for the lowest common denominator. I don't think you can design for both sets and they went with what they think the majority is. That makes sense to me as a good business decision. I do, however, think there should be / should have been some guidelines for modifying monsters for more advanced groups.

I'm genuinely curious as to what, specifically, you are asking WotC to provide? An entirely new set of tables and equations? I'm not sure exactly how much design space exists between that and the generic advice to adjust difficulty up or down if you notice a pattern of encounters not lining up with the baseline expectations of the system. There's this piece of advice given by the DMG: "Reduce the difficulty by one step if the characters have a benefit that their enemies don't. Any additional benefit of drawback pushes the encounter one step in the appropriate direction." (p. 85) You could easily argue that Feats qualify as a benefit that their enemies don't (having been designed with the assumption that feats aren't in play), so there's at least that. What other possible guidance could exist? I'm not asking that to glib, I just can't think of any off the top of my head, and I'm genuinely curious what you (or anyone else) would actually propose WotC do to resolve this.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I'm genuinely curious as to what, specifically, you are asking WotC to provide? An entirely new set of tables and equations? I'm not sure exactly how much design space exists between that and the generic advice to adjust difficulty up or down if you notice a pattern of encounters not lining up with the baseline expectations of the system. There's this piece of advice given by the DMG: "Reduce the difficulty by one step if the characters have a benefit that their enemies don't. Any additional benefit of drawback pushes the encounter one step in the appropriate direction." (p. 85) You could easily argue that Feats qualify as a benefit that their enemies don't (having been designed with the assumption that feats aren't in play), so there's at least that. What other possible guidance could exist? I'm not asking that to glib, I just can't think of any off the top of my head, and I'm genuinely curious what you (or anyone else) would actually propose WotC do to resolve this.

I think Templates and Traits to add to the creatures of the MM to create higher tier enemy could be interesting.
Like each Trait comes in 3 different 'tiers'' that a Dm could use to buff an enemy to this thier.
Ex:
Shadowed
Nemesis: Increase Int to 10 if its lower. The creatures is trained in stealth and has advantage on .....
Elite: Increase 3 stats by 2. As above, plus the creatures can.....
Epic: As above, plus the creatures does something really awesome....

So with this, I could create a cruel dire wolf who made a pact with the creatures who lives on the dark side of the moon to terrorize the village of the young heroes who killed its mate. I take a basic dire wolf and add the Shadowed trait at a Nemesis level and my mini-boss is created.

Many of us do this easily on the fly or with little prep, but I'm sure many would appreciate such help from WotC.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Am I the only one who wants to redesign the Donjon as its own plane, and have all astral dreadnoughts (and possibly a few other creatures/phenomena) lead there? This would be a great place for any of the "near-infinite dungeon as campaign setting" supplements that have been released by various companies throughout the years.

 

[dave2008]

I'm genuinely curious as to what, specifically, you are asking WotC to provide? An entirely new set of tables and equations? I'm not sure exactly how much design space exists between that and the generic advice to adjust difficulty up or down if you notice a pattern of encounters not lining up with the baseline expectations of the system. There's this piece of advice given by the DMG: "Reduce the difficulty by one step if the characters have a benefit that their enemies don't. Any additional benefit of drawback pushes the encounter one step in the appropriate direction." (p. 85) You could easily argue that Feats qualify as a benefit that their enemies don't (having been designed with the assumption that feats aren't in play), so there's at least that. What other possible guidance could exist? I'm not asking that to glib, I just can't think of any off the top of my head, and I'm genuinely curious what you (or anyone else) would actually propose WotC do to resolve this.

To be clear I am perfectly happy with things the way they are. The monsters work for my group, but my personal taste are different and I like make more difficult versions of monsters.

The advice you quote from thr DMG is a start. But they could have done more to clearly define the intent of the standard designs and how to modify the standard monsters. They could provide more guidelines for what constitutes a step up or down in difficult. For ex.: "If your group chooses to use the magic item guidelines in the this book, decrease the difficulty by one step." I'm not saying this is correct, just a suggestion of how more guidance could be give.

or

they could give guidelines for how to make a creature more difficult, such as: "If a creature is not performing up to its CR for your group, you can increase its difficulty by one step by adding damage to its attacks equal to half its CR."

I don't need this, but there are lots of suggestions like these that could help newer DMs.

I'm not really interested in templates to increase difficulty like @vincegetorix suggests. But a list of traits could be useful as well.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Am I the only one who wants to redesign the Donjon as its own plane, and have all astral dreadnoughts (and possibly a few other creatures/phenomena) lead there? This would be a great place for any of the "near-infinite dungeon as campaign setting" supplements that have been released by various companies throughout the years.

It's been pointed out before that Astral Dreadnoughts seem to have silver cords of their own, and could be Astral Projecting from somewhere.

But I don't think if an Astral Dreadnought has true physical form somewhere else, that it's necessarily as massive as they are. In fact it could be quite the opposite and on their native plane, they're actually weak and tiny little creatures.

 

[MarkB]

Am I the only one who wants to redesign the Donjon as its own plane, and have all astral dreadnoughts (and possibly a few other creatures/phenomena) lead there? This would be a great place for any of the "near-infinite dungeon as campaign setting" supplements that have been released by various companies throughout the years.

I like the concept, but it does remove the "kill the dreadnought and all its past victims suddenly appear" loot bonanza / swallowed victim retrieval.

Maybe a deceased Dreadnought becomes a portal into the Donjon, which will remain open for a few days, providing an easy limited-window delving opportunity.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Maybe a deceased Dreadnought becomes a portal into the Donjon, which will remain open for a few days, providing an easy limited-window delving opportunity.

It doesn't even have to "become a portal," per se, just continue to function for a few days. I love the idea that you have to climb down the corpse's gullet to get there.

In fact, even in games where I don't use the "linked donjons demiplane" idea, I might still do that rather than have the creatures/loot just appear near the corpse. You have to spelunk the dead creature to get your treasure and your friends.

 

[Parmandur]

Am I the only one who wants to redesign the Donjon as its own plane, and have all astral dreadnoughts (and possibly a few other creatures/phenomena) lead there? This would be a great place for any of the "near-infinite dungeon as campaign setting" supplements that have been released by various companies throughout the years.

This is one of the single most Metal ideas ever.

 

[CapnZapp]

Thoughts:

1. This does a much better job than the 4E Manual of the Planes at evoking the Jeff Easley cover. Though I still miss the vivid, hallucinatory background of the Easley version. A white background doesn't really do it justice.

To be honest, it is you yourself who are saying:

The astral dreadnought doesn't have that problem. You can drop this sucker on a party in a big empty field* and still have an exciting, dynamic combat.

[SIZE=-2]*Good thing, too, because "big empty field" describes pretty much all of the Astral Plane.[/SIZE]

To me, a white big empty field background is exactly appropriate and you should concur

 

[CapnZapp]

I'm genuinely curious what you (or anyone else) would actually propose WotC do to resolve this.

I'm anyone else, not Dave, and my suggestion would be an "Advanced Monster Manual" where the design assumes
1) the feats in the Player's Handbook
2) the multiclassing options in the Player's Handbook
3) the level of magic item the actual treasure guidelines of the DMG result in

In other words, nothing out of the ordinary. Just using the product features you have paid good money for.

By the way:
a) I think the proportion of gamers that run "option on" games is way higher than 10%. In fact, I think that figure is just plucked from the air to help apologize for WotC's stance.
b) This manual would obviously be of use for all players, not just options-on groups. If you so readily accept "you can always make the monster harder yourself" and "simply use this with groups of a lower Average Party Level" then you should have no trouble accepting a short blurb in its preface saying "this is for advanced players that have mastered the game's options. You can always consider it's challenge ratings to be 25% or even 50% higher if you have a weak, uncoordinated or newbie group". And of course, it should not just merely duplicate existing monsters - to be of real value, I propose that at least two-thirds of it offer monsters not previously seen with 5E stats. (As for new versions of existing monsters, demons are particularly egregious offenders.)

Thank you for asking.

Edit: what are the basic changes needed, then?

* a fixed action economy. Only those monsters that would otherwise be unbeatable should retain a Teleport action as your standard action, for instance. Every other monster should be able to pull off its main attack sequence AND be able to do other interesting stuff in the same turn.

* a fixed skill section. Around 10th level player characters become unbeatable as regards skills. If you focus on a particular skill you realize no monster can match you, let alone surpass you. This feels exceedingly wonky. Of course a monster described as a "stealth master" and an "expert ambusher" needs to out-stealth a level-appropriate party. This means a CR 5 monster should probably have a +15 bonus at the very minimum, since all min-maxed parties will contain at least one character with passive perception of 17 or higher.

* roughly twice the hp

* robust support for Solo creatures. This includes a second doubling of hit points, and at least twice the actions (of all kinds) given by the Basic Monster Manual.

* at least some effort at Epic rules (I guess at CR 21 and above). A real Archmage NPC needs to be able to break the rules on concentration, attunement and everything else. As a good example of how to fix the action economy, introduce an Epic Time Stop spell which isn't restricted on what actions you may take.

Just scratching the surface here, so you can get an inkling of how large this AMM task would be and how valuable it would be to be able to purchase a finished product instead of having to do it all by yourself


Edit 2: if the mods feel it's warranted to break off this sub-discussion into a thread of its own to keep the focus here squarely on the monster, no complaints from me.