Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jefgorbach" data-source="post: 5264393" data-attributes="member: 28278">While your 7 factors are all important, it mostly reduces to intelligence, wisdom, and circumstance.  Intelligence reflects the creature’s ability to plan, recognize, and adapt. Predatory animals have the basic intelligence  to employing ambushes, determining and isolating visually weaker members of a group, stealth; and in the case of pack animals like wolves, lions, etc cooperative team work as any nature show will show so use allow them to use/adapt to the terrain and events accordingly. Wisdom reflects its common-sense and gut-feeling/intuition – so even if it hasn’t encountered a given class/race before, a successful Wisdom check might allow it to instinctively recognize the strongest/weakest party member. Regardless, a starving or wounded creature will be more willing to attack without retreat than it would otherwise; as would one protecting its lair/young. Those of at least near-human level intelligence will react accordingly, adjusting the encounter to reflect THEIR strengths as much as possible, so plan/run it as you would given the information they have available: terrain, whats known about the PCs (visually or via rumor/information gathering), available skills/weapons, etc. Obviously, the effectiveness of intelligent foes would be reduced against newly discovered classes and species, however they would be able to generally group the PCs by melee/ranged fighters, clerics, and spell casters using their own clan/racial knowledge as a guideline then plan accordingly. Likewise historical foes generally know how to most effective counter their foes’ racial abilities and traditional classes; applying that knowledge as possible.</blockquote>

Verification