Anyone not using fiendish dire axiomatic half-celestial undead half-pixie owlbears?

[Wombat]

I use very few different creatures, especially very few intelligent creatures. Instead I just "stat them up" so they become tougher -- makes the worlds more logical. One dragon is good -- seven is WAY too many.

I have used some templates, mainly vampire, zombie, and other undead.

OTOH, I find most monsters even in the MM, well, silly. Phantom Fungus? Gimme a break...

Explains why my worlds are more centered around intrigue and counterplots than around ubermonsternous...

 

[Gez]

Sillyness comes from when you slap lots of templates just because you can.

Applying only one is generally OK -- although, of course, people on the wizards.com boards will always go for half-dragon gelatinous cubes. Yeah, right.


PS: Aeolius, if you havn't seen this adventure, you should. It revolves around your two obsessions...

 

[Aeolius]

...half-dragon gelatinous cubes. Yeah, right.

There's always room for Jell-O

 

[talinthas]

in my early days of messing with templates, my roomie and i came up with a Shadow Shadow Dragon Shade =)

 

[Epametheus]

I think I've seen more PCs with templates than baddies with templates.

I'll usually just scale up the hit dice of a creature and/or give it class levels if I want it to be beefy. Templates are reserved for creatures with history.

Well, except Fiendish. Fiendish can show up in the damnedest places.

"Hey, I guess you can identify them. Alright, the crops are Fiendish" got a great reaction from the players.

 

[Orius]

I haven't used many templates yet, but I'd probably go light on their use. I'd agree that the fiendish dire axiomatic half-celestial undead half-pixie owlbears are simply asinine. How the hell can one logically come up with such an unlikely combination?

Using say fiendish/celestial/axiomatic/anarchic/elemantal templates on a creature (and only one at a time) is ok. Hell, you can just summon the suckers uup with the summon monster spells. The occasional half-fiends/celestials or whatever aren't too overboard either, if used sparingly. But dumping a whole bunch of templates nilly-willy on a monster for the sake of raising CR just seems dumb.

I have however, frequently added class levels to monsters. Sure I use normal orcs, goblinoids and kobolds, but leaders always have class levels. I used to to that in 2e, making orc leaders stuff like 3rd level fighters instead of just big orcs with 3 HD. When humanoid opponents have classes and levels like the PCs, they become more dangerous.

And besides, I never tell the characters exactly what they're fighting. I describe what they're seeing, and always play up the most threatening stuff. Sometimes the players will eventually guess it, but by then, it's too late. Besides, they never know what I'll throw at them (like the mimic with an attitude they encountered recently), so they stay on their toes.

Common humanoids, like goblins, kobolds and such will be described as such, but classes and levels are never mentioned. Even such weak monsters can make an interesting encounter, like the time I had some kobolds sic their pet komodo dragon on the party, while remaining behind cover and sniping at the PCs with missile fire.

 

[barsoomcore]

The whole point of templates is to give the DM more options while still allowing him or her to maintain some idea as to what the final creature's CR ought to be.

Like a couple of people have already pointed out, they're not necessarily to be taken literally. A Fiendish Dire Axiomatic Half-Celestial Undead Half-Pixie Owl doesn't have to be the dire offspring of some multi-planar group grope that went undead somehow -- it's just a collection of numbers on a page. The DM might have created that combination for any reason -- but at least he has SOME IDEA as to what the beastie's CR is.

Now I'll grant you, he probably could have just made the thing up out of whole cloth and had as good a chance of getting the CR right -- the example is pretty over the top.

But the idea of a template is a mechanical idea -- whether or not it has any game world meaning is a separate issue.

 

[Privateer]

I haven't used many templates yet, but I'd probably go light on their use. I'd agree that the fiendish dire axiomatic half-celestial undead half-pixie owlbears are simply asinine. How the hell can one logically come up with such an unlikely combination?

Well, when a fiendish dire undead pixie man loves an axiomatic fully-celestial owlbear woman...

 

[Feathercircle]

Axiomatic Illithids anyone?
I had a half-golem/fire subtype/human encountered mixed in with an army of fire giants.
Fiendish is always open game.
I used a modified half-fiend/human/ranger last game.
Reptilian Ogres and a Reptilian Ogre-Mage were central to a game a few weeks ago. They had a nice army of kobolds.
I'm sure that's not all, but that's the most recent. But, then again, I run Planescape.

Axiomatic illithids? I've got an Anarchic one- and it's a wild mage and a Xaositect as well. Never a dull moment around that NPC, certainly...

 

[Jeph]

Things from the Material plane will typicaly have no template. Angels and devils tend to have zero or one. Demons tend to have two to three, as I like giving them insane variety, and making completely new demons out of base creatures is easy when you slap on Fiendish Awakened Umbral or Half-Fiendish Fire Element Half Dragon and then a spell like ability or two to boot.

ph34r my paragon psuedonatural umbral half illithid half water element vampiric psionic blink dog! PHTHREEFOURR!