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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7072454" data-attributes="member: 4937">I had one DM try to fix that by giving all monsters max hit points, and that might work in some cases, but in his case he'd let the equipment and such get out of hand prior to that so that it didn't really matter.Back in the early 90's when I was going to 'fix' 1e, it was immediately clear to me that monsters needed explicit strength, dexterity, and/or con and that only monsters that had those advantages could possibly keep up with PC's.   Con bonuses in particular give the hit point boost monsters need to keep up.And yes, dragons needed a rework.There is the additional problem that Unearthed Arcana is just broken and that balance between classes is amazingly poor to start with and even worse once you throw weapon specialization and cavaliers in the mix.  But post Unearthed Arcana, it became very clear to me that 'demihumans' like orcs, goblins, bugbears and the like needed to be classed.  It was no longer enough to say that a bugbear lord was 5HD and had +1 to hit and damage to expect that monster to be a valid mini-boss.   In addition, there is also an issue that THAC0 for monsters capped (in 1e) at 16HD, with much worse 'to hit' than the caps on PC's.  Combined with the fact that monsters didn't generally get any sort of bonus to hit and PC's with good armor class were essentially immune to physical attacks.  Almost nothing could hit them without rolling a 20, and even then, most things had such low damage per attack that the rare hits were never threatening.Because four ancient reds will instantly incinerate entire parties of high level PC's unless you rework the rules on breath weapons.   If four 72 h.p. red dragons breathe in the same round, then even if all 4 saving throws are passed everyone in the party takes 144 damage, which is enough to kill pretty much any realistic PC in the game - 20th level bards, 18th level fighters, even high level barbarians might go down.  Even if everyone in the party has some form of fire resistance, all the non-fighter types are now dead even if they pass all their saving throws and the fighter types are dead if they fail one or two saves.   Realistically, this is a 'die no save' encounter unless the PC's achieve surprise in some fashion. I assume that if you are beefing up the hit points on the dragons, you've also dispensed with 'Damage from breathe weapon = dragon's hit points' mechanic and adopted something more reasonable like 1d6/age category?</blockquote>

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