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Am I the only one who doesn't like the arbitrary "boss monster" tag?

Natural armor bonuses was always hilariously nebulous - yes. I disliked the Troglodyte for having way too high a bonus for its level. If 'natural armor' was a monster ability, you could purchase with some resource available to you as you increase in HD, it would be explainable, but yes, in 3E it was mostly made up.

Natural armor was 3ed response to being too tied by in-game physic laws.

A red dragon was a "soldier solo", even if it did not have such tags attached. So they needed it to be able to threat a whole group, fight well, and being able to stand under fire while being hit relativelly few times. So they give him "wing buffets", and "firebreath", and "tail slaps" (instead of just giving him more attacks, which can be focus fired on a single character to kill it in a round, they gave him an extra attack against those behind him). The AC wasn't really easy to obtain while using the game rules (he didn't have high dexterity, his size is actually a handicap, he can't wear plate armor or magical rings...), so they just made up a huge natural armor bonus, big enought o give him the AC he needed story-wise.

In 4e they used a similar approach, just it was coded, instead of made up. They gave him a high armor, because the story needs red dragons to have high AC values, regardless of his Dex score and size or whatever. They gave him "soldier" level armor, and that's it.
 

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From my point of view, I just sometimes get a bit frustrated by comments about what has always, or never, been a part of D&D, when those comments are true only of certain editions but not others.
My goodness, yes. Me too.

I don't think you can apply the term "historically" or "traditionally" if it only goes back to 2000 or so. :) Maybe I'm a bit grognardy, but for me, "historically" and "traditionally" means "1e/BX/BECMI" era D&D and earlier.

Likewise, "always." If it's not constant from around 1e through 4e, it's not "always". :)

-O
 

My goodness, yes. Me too.

I don't think you can apply the term "historically" or "traditionally" if it only goes back to 2000 or so. :) Maybe I'm a bit grognardy, but for me, "historically" and "traditionally" means "1e/BX/BECMI" era D&D and earlier.

Likewise, "always." If it's not constant from around 1e through 4e, it's not "always".
I'm not sure if you're taking the Mickey or not! But for what it's worth, my own preferred approach is to avoid appeals to history, or tradition, and rather to recognise that people have often been doing different sorts of things with D&D for as long as it's been around, and that over that time its mechanics have changed quite a bit too.
 

I guess I'm a math guy or something.. I agree that anything involving spells or spell-like abilities is hard work (in any system really, because there is no logic to the power level of certain effects).. but I was fine with all the little bonuses. In contrast, I found it difficult, personally, to explain 4E numbers after the fact.

Which is backwards. You should be using the fact to explain the 4e numbers :-)
 

Which is backwards. You should be using the fact to explain the 4e numbers :-)

Ok then :p - I guess I found it difficult to express my ideas in number form without very explicit mechanics :p

I am more comfortable as a player in 4E - everything is defined. There is no fudging your defences to fit your archetype - you have to select powers or feats or equipment to do that.
 

I really liked your example, but have a couple of comments. Making its attack bonus suddenly +11 is, in my opinion, disconcerting, although it depends how you're doing it. Don't forget that many other checks might come up involving its base attack bonus and/or its strength, so you really ought to adjust one of those components. For your example I might have just reduced its HD a little so that it isn't so good at attacking, and if it doesn't have enough HP, give it some more Con.

Your solution changes a few more things, though. It's unfortunately not that simple.

Lowering his HD lowers his BAB, but also his saves. Raising his Con score to compensate then increases his Fort save, but his Ref and Will saves will be hosed and now (in this example at least) his Con is unreasonably high; I was already pushing the envelope with a 22. His skills and feats are also lower, so if I had chosen a feat loadout that I liked a lot (and a lot of feats have feat prereqs, exacerbating this problem) I'd be forced to abandon it.

It's not always going to be a big deal, but it does two things that I think are bad. First of all it simply adds time and headaches to the process of monster building.

Second, it restricts what the GM can accomplish unnecessarily. In my opinion it's not even good simulation. Why is it impossible for a monster to advance by getting tougher and tougher without also getting better and better at attacking? A giant tortoise doesn't seem to get any more lethal as it grows, but it definitely gets bigger and more resilient.

3.x monster creation is a set of guidelines. They are useful. I got a lot of good games out of them. But they shouldn't be a straight jacket, and when the monster guidelines yield a result that doesn't make sense in the gameworld, doesn't match your idea for the monster, and doesn't match the CR guidelines that you are trying to get to, I see nothing wrong with editing the numbers directly to ensure a more useful outcome.

As [MENTION=5889]Stalker0[/MENTION] noted, you can always give the dolgrue Maddened with Pain (Ex): Dolgrue live in constant agony as a side-effect of their creation process. As a result, their BAB is considered 4 lower than it should be for their HD due to the constant distraction.

EDIT: If you get your fun out of running a simulationist game, where both player and GM have to play by the rules and the enjoyment is derived from seeing how the intricacies of the rule system crash together with player choices to produce an emergent gaming experience, that is awesome! In that case my post, and my whole argument in this thread, won't apply much to you.

By the same token, that sort of game values a monster creation system that is not entirely suitable for my gaming style. I want to be able to tailor monsters and encounters to challenge my PCs. I want them to be stymied in some encounters until they figure out the "trick" of it, or maneuver the enemy into hostile terrain, or whatever. That requires pretty fine control over the monster's stats, and I don't want to have to wrestle with the system to get that control.

To each their own, of course. I don't envy the designers this task, but the ideal would obviously be creation rules than allow either of these philosophies to be applied.
 
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First I want to thank my elders who told us about basic and 1st edition dragons

Second I want to point out that I have PCs who started in 3.5 and one that started in 4th. I have been running games for 17 years... More then half my life, and that still puts me in 2e territory.

At Gen Con I ran a 14 year old player at my table he was not alive when I started running 2e... And I wasn't alive when Gary first published this game.

So keep in mind for some of us, 2e+ is the only d&d we know

And that's fine. I'm about your age - I started on 1e only by coincidence. But when I talk about the roots of D&D and how it's always been, I can point to primary sources. When I ran the first round D&D next playtest I had a table who'd all started playing before I was two years old. And when I talk about the origins of D&D, there's someone (Mike Mornard/Old Geezer) who posts on RPG.net regularly about his experiences; he was in both Arneson's and Gygax's original groups for D&D and saw a lot of the very early days unfold. I might not have started playing before 2e was published, but the information as to the history of D&D is out there. And not that hard to find.

And just because you started playing with 2e doesn't mean you can't play earlier editions. I'm currently running an old D&D (not AD&D) module from 1978 (Caverns of Thracia) for two separate groups as a 5e playtest. And I'm trying to run it (and I hope succeeding) in a style that would be recognisable to the genuinely early players. Of course they'd find it weird I didn't design my own dungeon as that was half the fun (next time I will...)
 

I challange the people who believe that 3e has the best monster rules to make some.

Make a kobold sorcerer with 5th level spells and a dragon theme

Make a human who is the best blacksmith in the land

Make a sage who is a well learned old man who has never in his life won a fight, and who can only cast 1 or 2 divinations but no combat spells

Now here is the hard part... A basic party of 4 phb characters of 6th level are interacting with all of them, it may be a fight or to talk, and you don't know witch ahead of time
 

I challange the people who believe that 3e has the best monster rules to make some.

Make a kobold sorcerer with 5th level spells and a dragon theme

Make a human who is the best blacksmith in the land

Make a sage who is a well learned old man who has never in his life won a fight, and who can only cast 1 or 2 divinations but no combat spells

Now here is the hard part... A basic party of 4 phb characters of 6th level are interacting with all of them, it may be a fight or to talk, and you don't know witch ahead of time

Your point? Any of this can be done and quite easily. What's the assumption you're not including here... that each of the encounters be "level appropriate" in some way? Is that what you think the "hard part" is? Why would we try to balance these encounters around some kind of combat model other than allowing the NPCs to be the threats they naturally represent?
 


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