Crazy Jerome
First Post
I think, as much as I like 4e's monster design philosophy, that the roles perhaps stood out a little too strongly. Perhaps they have it backwards. Don't start with role and then add a skin for the monster flavor. Start with the monster core and then skin with roles. Perhaps roles should even be monster themes that you could ignore for a more old-school feel. Even so, I have some reservations about how that affects different types of monsters. It sounds fine for humanoids and the like, but I'm not sure how well that works for say....manticores.
Start with the monster core and then skin with roles works ok until you run into the problem that 4E was trying to solve with roles in the first place. It's most obvious when you consider adding caster class levels to monsters in 3E. Adding 1 or 2 levels of sorcerer or cleric or wizard or druid isn't a big enough deal to matter much what monster you do it to, once you get past CR 3 or 4, but adding 6+ levels is. You start with something like a mind flayer, 6 levels of caster is significant. You start with a hill giant, it isn't chicken feed, but nothing compared to what 6+ levels of barbarian would do.
At that point, the meaning of "level" has gotten really fuzzy--thus the wonky adjustment math that grew up around this issue. What a lot of people wanted was either:
- I'm making a hill giant barbarian or hill giant druid. How many levels do I need to get him to do what I want? Then what is the real CR?
- I'm making a hlll giant barbarian or hill giant druid of CR N. How many levels do I add to get that?
Presumably, you could get to somewhere similar with a 1E/3E/4E mix, perhaps with something like "role" in a slightly different context, and as the middle step out of three. That is, you start with 1E monster. Then you apply an 4E-ish role (if needed) to establish a new baseline, maybe as simple as "dvine caster". Then on top of that you add, as per 3E, whatever cleric, druid, etc. levels you need.
In my example above, you go to manipulate your hill giant. He's already ready for barbarian stuff. So you don't need a role and/or it already has a "brute" default role. Ergo, tacking on barbarian levels has an expected effect. Then you decide to make a druidic shaman. You take the same base hill giant and assign "divine caster" role. This changes the base creature, possibly moving power up or down (depending upon whether you retain its full "brute" strength). Now with this divine caster hill giant, you can slap on as many druid levels as makes sense.
That won't match 4E in fast to build monsters, but it would address that 3E problem of getting real numbers for challenges that work and mean something.