One unsung hero of D&D game design is Andrew Finch. He had a lot of roles at Wizards over the years, and he was involved in D&D playtesting and design as early as I was. To my mind, his biggest single advance was his table of monster stats by level. The table went against our general design guidelines, and it was just what the game needed. It also helped us see the awkwardness that comes with a simulation-first approach to monster building.
Andrew and I met at a convention in San Francisco, and he introduced me to the generic RPG Theatrix, on which he had been one of the designers. Theatrix focused strongly on the narrative, with an explicit “scene” structure and mechanical effects on the plot. It was ahead of its time and not much of a success. To my surprise, Wizards made the correct decision and hired Andrew, and over the years he filled many positions. At some point or another, he was involved with just about everything that anyone did at Wizards. Andrew contributed to 3rd Ed by working behind the scenes. He playtested, commented, discussed, and debated with us. He came up with the monster stat table after the scramble to release 3rd Ed was behind us and we were developing the game further.
One of the underlying tenets of 3rd Ed design was that in some way we were simulating a magical world, with the game system sort of “measuring” that world rather than defining it. That’s why prestige classes use skills or class features as prerequisites rather than class and level. In the same way, a monster’s Challenge Rating (CR) was assigned after the monster was designed. We would design monsters according to a template and then eyeball their CR based on the result. The CR is a rating that helps the Dungeon Master organize play, but it’s not something that a character in the game world could discern or measure.
A lot of my work on 3rd Ed was inspired by RuneQuest. In RuneQuest, monsters have stats like player characters, and their combat scores are derived in an orderly way from these stats. You can look at a griffin’s Strength, Constitution, and Size scores, for example, and from those numbers derive the monster’s hit points and damage bonuses. In AD&D, monsters didn’t have any such regularity. In original D&D, monsters did only 1d6 damage by default, so monsters invented earlier in the game’s history tended to deal less damage, or at least less damage per attack, as with the troll. Hit Dice were often whatever the original designer needed them to be for the supplement or adventure where the monster first appeared. So one of the things that we did with monsters in 3E was to make them more like RuneQuest monsters.
Monsters got Strength scores and all the other abilities. We invented monster “types” to mirror the classes that defined PCs. Outsiders, such as demons, had a different suite of skills, attack bonuses, hit points, and saving throws than vermin or humanoids of the same Hit Dice (level) and abilities.
After finishing 3rd Ed design, I worked on D&D miniatures of one sort or another. Here is where Andrew’s chart becomes especially useful. For skirmish battles, the alignments served as factions and they needed identities in terms of how their units operated in the game. Chaotic Evil, for example, had faster units, with lower Armor Class, higher hit points, and plenty of damage. Some of the monsters in the Miniatures Handbook were there to reinforce these alignment identities.
The problem we had was, what sort of Armor Class did a unit need to have in order to have a lower than average Armor Class? What counted as “more hit points”? Andrew’s chart answered that question.
The same way that I had played the heck out of RuneQuest and revered it as a model of good RPG design, Andrew loved Champions and the Hero System. In that system, everything is costed out and balanced so that any benefit you gain in one area of character ability comes with an implicit reduction in other abilities. He wanted to see the same thing in D&D, where advantages and disadvantages (“ads” and “disads”) would imply changes to the baseline stats. But what are the baseline stats? Andrew’s chart gave us baseline figures for things like hit points and damage, one line for each Challenge Rating.
Once we had Andrew’s chart, it became easier to see something wrong with the way we had done monsters in 3rd Ed. For a lot of regular monsters, it works OK. These monsters have high or low values on various combat stats, plus maybe some special traits. But for odd-ball monsters, it breaks down. How do you balance a save-or-die effect? You can’t, and that’s why Champions doesn’t have one. How threatening is a colossal scorpion? If your high-level party can fly over it, it’s not very threatening. If for some reason you have to go toe-to-toe with it, it’s quite threatening. So what CR should it get? The orc warrior was probably the worst offender based on how often it showed up in games and how much damage it did. I can remember a party in Living Greyhawk getting trashed by orc warriors. According to the physics of the game system, an orc warrior with 4 hit points can deal 9 or 10 damage on a swing with a two-handed ax, triple damage on a crit. What CR is that? It’s too unbalanced to give a proper rating to, and we defaulted to the standard 1/2.
While the orc warrior was hell on low-level parties, it was a useful addition to mid-level battles. At mid levels, the orc’s ability to deal real damage gave it some gravity that the other bottom-level warriors didn’t have. They were effective as mobs of bad guys, especially supporting bigger monsters. In 4E, this niche of low hit points and high damage was filled by mooks. The 1-hit-point mook is a good example of a monster that diverges from the baseline in an intentional way, providing a threat but not much of a challenge.
Fourth Edition got a lot of things right, and one of them was using a chart like Andrew’s. Evidently monsters had too many hit points, but that’s a separate issue. Rob Heinsoo and I also used a chart with 13th Age. How could you not? Rob and I have played around with variants, such as half-strength monsters, and again it’s invaluable to have a baseline to work from. Thanks, Andrew
Andrew and I met at a convention in San Francisco, and he introduced me to the generic RPG Theatrix, on which he had been one of the designers. Theatrix focused strongly on the narrative, with an explicit “scene” structure and mechanical effects on the plot. It was ahead of its time and not much of a success. To my surprise, Wizards made the correct decision and hired Andrew, and over the years he filled many positions. At some point or another, he was involved with just about everything that anyone did at Wizards. Andrew contributed to 3rd Ed by working behind the scenes. He playtested, commented, discussed, and debated with us. He came up with the monster stat table after the scramble to release 3rd Ed was behind us and we were developing the game further.
One of the underlying tenets of 3rd Ed design was that in some way we were simulating a magical world, with the game system sort of “measuring” that world rather than defining it. That’s why prestige classes use skills or class features as prerequisites rather than class and level. In the same way, a monster’s Challenge Rating (CR) was assigned after the monster was designed. We would design monsters according to a template and then eyeball their CR based on the result. The CR is a rating that helps the Dungeon Master organize play, but it’s not something that a character in the game world could discern or measure.
A lot of my work on 3rd Ed was inspired by RuneQuest. In RuneQuest, monsters have stats like player characters, and their combat scores are derived in an orderly way from these stats. You can look at a griffin’s Strength, Constitution, and Size scores, for example, and from those numbers derive the monster’s hit points and damage bonuses. In AD&D, monsters didn’t have any such regularity. In original D&D, monsters did only 1d6 damage by default, so monsters invented earlier in the game’s history tended to deal less damage, or at least less damage per attack, as with the troll. Hit Dice were often whatever the original designer needed them to be for the supplement or adventure where the monster first appeared. So one of the things that we did with monsters in 3E was to make them more like RuneQuest monsters.
Monsters got Strength scores and all the other abilities. We invented monster “types” to mirror the classes that defined PCs. Outsiders, such as demons, had a different suite of skills, attack bonuses, hit points, and saving throws than vermin or humanoids of the same Hit Dice (level) and abilities.
After finishing 3rd Ed design, I worked on D&D miniatures of one sort or another. Here is where Andrew’s chart becomes especially useful. For skirmish battles, the alignments served as factions and they needed identities in terms of how their units operated in the game. Chaotic Evil, for example, had faster units, with lower Armor Class, higher hit points, and plenty of damage. Some of the monsters in the Miniatures Handbook were there to reinforce these alignment identities.
The problem we had was, what sort of Armor Class did a unit need to have in order to have a lower than average Armor Class? What counted as “more hit points”? Andrew’s chart answered that question.
The same way that I had played the heck out of RuneQuest and revered it as a model of good RPG design, Andrew loved Champions and the Hero System. In that system, everything is costed out and balanced so that any benefit you gain in one area of character ability comes with an implicit reduction in other abilities. He wanted to see the same thing in D&D, where advantages and disadvantages (“ads” and “disads”) would imply changes to the baseline stats. But what are the baseline stats? Andrew’s chart gave us baseline figures for things like hit points and damage, one line for each Challenge Rating.
Once we had Andrew’s chart, it became easier to see something wrong with the way we had done monsters in 3rd Ed. For a lot of regular monsters, it works OK. These monsters have high or low values on various combat stats, plus maybe some special traits. But for odd-ball monsters, it breaks down. How do you balance a save-or-die effect? You can’t, and that’s why Champions doesn’t have one. How threatening is a colossal scorpion? If your high-level party can fly over it, it’s not very threatening. If for some reason you have to go toe-to-toe with it, it’s quite threatening. So what CR should it get? The orc warrior was probably the worst offender based on how often it showed up in games and how much damage it did. I can remember a party in Living Greyhawk getting trashed by orc warriors. According to the physics of the game system, an orc warrior with 4 hit points can deal 9 or 10 damage on a swing with a two-handed ax, triple damage on a crit. What CR is that? It’s too unbalanced to give a proper rating to, and we defaulted to the standard 1/2.
While the orc warrior was hell on low-level parties, it was a useful addition to mid-level battles. At mid levels, the orc’s ability to deal real damage gave it some gravity that the other bottom-level warriors didn’t have. They were effective as mobs of bad guys, especially supporting bigger monsters. In 4E, this niche of low hit points and high damage was filled by mooks. The 1-hit-point mook is a good example of a monster that diverges from the baseline in an intentional way, providing a threat but not much of a challenge.
Fourth Edition got a lot of things right, and one of them was using a chart like Andrew’s. Evidently monsters had too many hit points, but that’s a separate issue. Rob Heinsoo and I also used a chart with 13th Age. How could you not? Rob and I have played around with variants, such as half-strength monsters, and again it’s invaluable to have a baseline to work from. Thanks, Andrew
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