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Aaaaaaah, I get it now. I understand what I have been unclear on. Mea culpa. I'm not actually in need of ways to model that. My question is actually more straightforward. Given that: 1) Proficiency bonus is a useful shorthand for the all-around competence, skillfulness, and capability of a...

Nothing in particular wrong with that approach. But what's the benefit of doing that instead of just... raising the proficiency bonus?

I am totes the wrong guy to weigh in on "balance," FWIW, but I picked up Fifth Edition Foes at my friendly local's Black Friday event, and my take on it is that it's worth getting on sale. It's got a couple of classic beasties you've probably been missing - but which couple will vary from DM to...

Oh, absolutely. It's a totally valid approach (and, coming from a slightly different direction, there's no reason not to give a creature something like the bard's Jack of All Trades ability, making it decently good at things it isn't even proficient at). There are lots of options working both...

Well, mechanically, it means a critter with a proficiency bonus of +4 that calculates as a CR 1 or less. Situations that might suggest that combination will be things you can either imagine wanting or not, so I leave them as a creative exercise for the reader. Beyond that... uh, I feel like I'm...

I've done a number of perfectly serviceable maps for my current campaign using OpenOffice Draw. Like any other design software, it has its own learning curve and quirks, but you can do some pretty slick stuff with it once you get the feel.

Yes, you can, but those are single-focus abilities. Sometimes that's what you want. And sometimes you want to be able to say, "This creature is as generally skillful and knowledgeable as a 15th-level adventurer, despite that it hits like a ten-year-old." A couple of responses in this thread...

In contrast, my impressions of 5E are that it's the most supportive of D&D's diversity of settings in its baseline assumptions that any edition has ever been. I don't recall any prior edition taking as much time in its PHB and DMG to namedrop all the established settings, nor to make as much...

For monsters, in general, probably not. But it's also not that difficult to imagine some sort of, say, fiend or fey or humanoid that was neither physically impressive nor a dense block of hit points that should also be notably competent with whatever skills and powers it has.

But D&D is already in the "mainstream consciousness." Most people with any glimmering of pop culture have at least some idea what it's all about - even if it isn't an especially good idea, it also isn't 100% inaccurate. Twenty years ago, if you told me Frodo Baggins was going to be on a Burger...

I like that approach, which underlines my being of two minds about the tools 5E gives for NPC building. On the one hand, I really dig the simplicity of "figure out stats and hit dice and you're pretty much there," and I'm wicked glad to not have to build every farmer and shopkeeper out of class...

Seeing those calculations laid out together kinda underlines for me what a blunt instrument CR is after all. Which, it really has to be, I think. Because all those spells and skills and special abilities that don't factor into it really can affect how an encounter goes. But there's no way of...

MostlyDm: Yeah, that was my gut feeling too. It doesn't feel like it breaks anything, but I am notoriously lousy at intuiting the sort of thing people seem to mean when they talk about "balance." Dausuul: That always felt off to me too - as written, it forces you to estimate and then revise. I...

According to the monster-building rules, the proficiency bonus for a monster or NPC is based on its challenge rating. As I read it, this number becomes something that you only finalize after doing all the rest of the calculations for CR. So, all you monster and (especially) NPC designers, how...

Hmm. As phrased, all four of the choices on offer might be equally likely or unlikely to catch my interest, all things being equal, and my preferences would be heavily weighted by entirely different factors. So the things I would be considering: 1) Is it heavily dependent on connections to the...

I really liked this one. The theme of "pact magic" strikes me as a very flexible one with a lot of potential beyond the obvious fluff that tends to accumulate around the warlock class, and it's nice to see some continuing exploration of its possibilities.

"Oh. Be-bop."

In a delightful convergence of subjects, our group's game last night was also a potluck. (We've done this a couple of times now when meeting on Saturdays.) Our friends are conscientious enough to ask about food restrictions for everyone, though not everything has to be limited by what one...

Indeed, this. "It's my party" is true, but it has its limits. And hard-and-fast answers are hard to come by. And when a couple of microcultures with differing expectations of these boundaries come up against each other, you have, well, this thread. So all you can reasonably do is try and figure...