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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7067571" data-attributes="member: 4937">2e is a whole other ball of wax.  In general, the HD of some creatures (dragons, giants) goes up but, if you were reading along, that's really not enough or even necessarily relevant to guaranteeing that things are going to be interesting nor is the power escalation of high challenge monsters across the board.  For example, look at just how much an Arcanaloth gets nerfed - among other things magic resistance falls from 110% to 60%, maximum caster level falls from 18th to 12th, and HD falls to 12+24.  The monster goes from potentially challenging even as a solo or a candidate for a BBEG, to a monster which needs support or numbers to face the level of parties I'm describing.  The only area that I can remember definitely adopting 2e style monsters into our 1e campaign was dragons.  As I noted, the 1e dragon write up is lovely in some respects, but its odd ball one off mechanics results in a big problem where the dragon is basically just a glass cannon.Supposing we have a party of 6 10th level characters and we want them to face a 10HD ancient red dragon (80 hp).  The first thing to notice is the party has about 60HD to the red dragons effective HD of 17.  The second thing to notice is though the dragon has the h.p. and saving throws of a 17 HD monster, it's still attacking on the 10HD attack matrix.  If it doesn't hit with its bite against a -2 AC, a not unlikely prospect, it's not really going to do much on turns its doesn't breathe.  Meanwhile, while the PC fighters are attacking on what is effectively the 10HD attack matrix, they get large bonuses to hit from magic items, strength, and possibly other buffs that making hitting the dragon's AC of 0 fairly trivial.   So straight up, the dragon is in trouble.   However, the dragon's breathe weapon does as much damage as its hit points or 80 damage save for half.   The fighters its facing will count themselves lucky if they can survive failing a saving throw versus its breathe weapon, and the non-fighters will count themselves lucky if they can survive the breath weapon even on a successful save!  No one in the party is likely to survive two such attacks, and many or most will likely die to two breathe weapon attacks even if they have magical protection from fire!  So this fight is basically over at the initiative roll, with each side being able to overwhelm the other if they go first with no real tension or drama and the whole fight after the initiative roll be determined by other random factors outside the players control.What is desirable here is a monster with much stronger defenses and perhaps 2/3rds or half as effective of breathe weapon.   This however was rarely realized in the 1st edition era with most attempts to 'fix' dragons rely on making them more and more potent glass cannons - the opposite of what is interesting.  The 2e dragon fixes some of the problems (4 new age categories, higher HD, better AC, magic resistance at higher challenge ratings), but leaves the breathe weapons over powered IMO.   The old red dragon in the example is still doing over 80 damage on its attack in 2e and its targets don't have significantly higher hit points.  The XP values attached to the age categories show how out of whack the balancing is here.  Just rate the XP on the basis of just breathe weapon damage and you'll see what I mean.This overall problem wasn't really addressed until 4e IMO, and then they swung the pendulum too far the other way, resulting in the grindy combats I mentioned where victory by the PC's is inevitable from the outset and its just a matter of grinding through the rounds to get there.</blockquote>

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