ProgBard
First Post
In discussions about 5e monsters, there are two major areas of criticism: most monsters are bags of hit points with few interesting actions, and there aren't enough variants that scale up low-level foes to challenge higher-level parties.
These two ideas are often conflated, or at least entangled with each other, but they're distinct things, and I think it's helpful to treat them as different dials if you want to be precise about the kind of changes you want.
CR is affected by a relatively small handful of factors: AC, HP, attack bonus, DPR, and sometimes save DC. That's it. If all you want is to dial up the (calculable) challenge of a monster, those are the knobs you turn; nothing that doesn't impact those numbers will affect CR. That's one of the reasons class level and CR have such a counterintuitively wonky relationship; a 20th-level bard in studded leather, specializing in mostly buffs and enchantments, may have a lot of hit points, but she's probably not going to hit those other columns high enough to register as anything close to a CR 20 foe. It's weird, but that seems to be part of the design. But the upshot is that in practical terms, the simplest way to up the volume on the Challenge dial is to take a minion monster, give it a pile of hit dice, slap some heavy armor on it, increase its Str, and let it multiattack with a high-damage weapon.
But what a lot of folks who are interested in monster redesign talk about wanting are monsters that do more interesting things than hit you over and over again. The Monster Features table on pages 280-281 of the DMG isn't a bad place to start for this, either for selecting powers to graft onto another monster, inspiration for inventing new powers, or a baseline for porting powers from previous editions into 5e mechanics. But note how relatively few of those features directly affect CR. Unless the feature effectively means a mechanical increase on one of the aspects of CR calculation, it probably won't nudge the CR rating - even if it's a power like Charm or Etherealness that in practical terms makes a creature tougher to fight.
The independence of these two factors means that DMs who want to homebrew modified monsters should be clear about their goals: Do you want a higher-CR monster, a more complex monster, or both? Many of us are going to answer "both," but it's helpful to keep in mind that this means doing more than one kind of thing to the statblock.
The good news is that the MM seems to be full of CRs that were kind of handwaved, so the extent to which you're bound to the strict CR calculator in the DMG is more or less up to you. The bad news is that that's the only number-crunching quantifier of CR available, so if you don't want to kinda handwave the process, you don't have another yardstick to check your math. You may or may not care about this. Some folks do, and it's unfortunate that this puts them in a bind.
But at any rate, let's be precise about objectives when we discuss monster mods. Making a tougher creature is one thing. Making a creature more interesting and fun to run is another. Making one that hits both targets is yet a third, and the tools that do one thing won't necessarily do the other in tandem.
These two ideas are often conflated, or at least entangled with each other, but they're distinct things, and I think it's helpful to treat them as different dials if you want to be precise about the kind of changes you want.
CR is affected by a relatively small handful of factors: AC, HP, attack bonus, DPR, and sometimes save DC. That's it. If all you want is to dial up the (calculable) challenge of a monster, those are the knobs you turn; nothing that doesn't impact those numbers will affect CR. That's one of the reasons class level and CR have such a counterintuitively wonky relationship; a 20th-level bard in studded leather, specializing in mostly buffs and enchantments, may have a lot of hit points, but she's probably not going to hit those other columns high enough to register as anything close to a CR 20 foe. It's weird, but that seems to be part of the design. But the upshot is that in practical terms, the simplest way to up the volume on the Challenge dial is to take a minion monster, give it a pile of hit dice, slap some heavy armor on it, increase its Str, and let it multiattack with a high-damage weapon.
But what a lot of folks who are interested in monster redesign talk about wanting are monsters that do more interesting things than hit you over and over again. The Monster Features table on pages 280-281 of the DMG isn't a bad place to start for this, either for selecting powers to graft onto another monster, inspiration for inventing new powers, or a baseline for porting powers from previous editions into 5e mechanics. But note how relatively few of those features directly affect CR. Unless the feature effectively means a mechanical increase on one of the aspects of CR calculation, it probably won't nudge the CR rating - even if it's a power like Charm or Etherealness that in practical terms makes a creature tougher to fight.
The independence of these two factors means that DMs who want to homebrew modified monsters should be clear about their goals: Do you want a higher-CR monster, a more complex monster, or both? Many of us are going to answer "both," but it's helpful to keep in mind that this means doing more than one kind of thing to the statblock.
The good news is that the MM seems to be full of CRs that were kind of handwaved, so the extent to which you're bound to the strict CR calculator in the DMG is more or less up to you. The bad news is that that's the only number-crunching quantifier of CR available, so if you don't want to kinda handwave the process, you don't have another yardstick to check your math. You may or may not care about this. Some folks do, and it's unfortunate that this puts them in a bind.
But at any rate, let's be precise about objectives when we discuss monster mods. Making a tougher creature is one thing. Making a creature more interesting and fun to run is another. Making one that hits both targets is yet a third, and the tools that do one thing won't necessarily do the other in tandem.
