An observation regarding encounters

[Lord Zardoz]

This is some observation / speculation on my part based on what I read from this thread / blog:

http://mouseferatu.livejournal.com/497515.html?thread=2362475#t2362475

Monsters will become less interesting. Will it simply become "you're facing a mastermind" or "tank" or whatever?

...

"Once you build a monster with high hit point and high damage, it's obviously a basher. But that alone is boring; it's not interesting monster design. So you still want to give them something else. The ettin, for instance, has the whole two-heads thing, so it can go twice in one round, and take unrelated actions."

So no, you won't just be facing a mastermind or a tank. You'll be facing a mind flayer, or an ettin. They just happen to--among other things--fit the mastermind or tank position.

Now, while I know that some people are rather annoyed at the idea of monsters having more specifically defined roles, I think that this has a rather beneficial side effect of making it much easier to customize encounters or adventures.

Lets say you just purchased a new adventure, but your players end up a few levels ahead of what the adventure is geared for. Normally upscaling encounters is a pain. Consider an encounter is set up to have say, 4 Bashers of CR 3 and 1 Mastermind of CR 6, for an encounter level of 8. and you want to kick up the encounter to level 10. You can keep the same intended feel of the encounter if you replace the Bashers and the mastermind with higher level Bashers led by a higher level Mastermind.

Not that its very difficult to replace say, Goblins with Bugbears at present, but it does get trickier when you go past pure melee types. Also, even with going from one melee type to another, there are plenty of ways to end up at a given CR / Difficulty. One monster may have huge strength, the other may be built around its AC and Damage Reduction.

Your thoughts?

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Alnag]

I think it is really nice, because it inion this actually adds a bit of setting feeling into the encounter. Take the goblins for example. They are no longer homogenous creatures. There is that evil goblin shaman (mastermind), who uses the other goblins for his own purposes. There is this big, bad and evil goblin ... chieftan (brute) who pretends he acutally rules the tribe. There are those poor young goblin warriors (mooks) and yes... here is the old, tricky goblin hunter (lurker), the only one who is not under the shaman influence.

The "roles" for monsters actually adds the dynamics to the monsters who so far has been only clump of statistics. Sure, you could build your own goblin society dynamics before, but I thinks this really helps. Structuring of reality helps to grasp it and use it...