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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grimstaff" data-source="post: 3711649" data-attributes="member: 34880">From the WotC website:"Here are some functional roles that monsters fall into:Mastermind: These are monsters that are capable of being the “big bad” in an adventure—the guys behind the scenes pulling the strings of all the other monsters. They often have mental powers, spellcasting, and more complexity, but there’s no reason they can’t be absolute terrors in melee. They’re usually smart and social. This is a rewarding category of monster to spend some complexity on, but beware! DMs will often use masterminds in conjunction with brutes and mooks, so there might be a lot on the DM’s plate already.Brute: These are the classic D&D monsters: scary, straightforward melee combatant. Despite our nickname for them, “brute,” they aren’t necessarily dumb or unsophisticated. They can be intelligent and cultured; if they rely on wading into melee and carving up PCs, then they’re brutes. The design challenge here is to create a monster that’s interesting (not just “another ogre”) but is respectful of the DM’s limited processing power.Mook: These are low-level monsters that function well in groups—and their “groupability” is what separates them from the brutes. We want every mook to have a game-mechanic benefit for grouping up (see the minion section below). This can either be an existing mechanic (sneak attack is a good example of something that works better when you’re grouped) or something new you make up.Lurker: A pretty obvious category. These guys use camouflage, stealth, guile, or magical means to ambush the PCs. Making that “Aha! Gotcha!” moment as compelling as possible at the table is the key to making a good lurker.Decathlete: These are the monsters that can do it all—strong melee attack, strong ranged attack, and often battlefield maneuverability that the PCs of that level can’t easily match. Dragons are the classic example.Artillery: These monsters have better ranged attacks than melee attacks—think beholder. At higher levels, they often exert some sort of terrain control or use other means to keep PCs at a distance. At low levels, they’re just archers or what have you.Special: What’s a category system without a catch-all? For our purposes, specials are monsters that have a primary purpose other than “the next room in the dungeon.” New familiars, steeds, helpful monsters, and monsters playable as PC races all fall into this category."<a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20070727a" target="_blank">http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20070727a</a>Personally, I don't care what they call 'em, as long as we're done with 3 page statblocks.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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