Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 3768493" data-attributes="member: 114">Do you remember the old days of White Dwarf magazine when it used to be about D&D and other rpgs?In issues 1-3 of White Dwarf (back in 1977) carried a series of articles by Don Turnbull about the 'monstermark'. The plan was to come up with a way of more accurately assigning the relative threat level of different monsters.Basically, Turnbull worked out how long it would take a 1st level fighter with a longsword doing average damage to kill the creature (based on its AC and hit points), and then calculated the expected damage that the creature would do to an AC5 (chainmail clad) foe in the rounds that it had alive. This 'expected damage' figure was the Monstermark, and reflected a standardised average dangerousness.The results of the calculations were very interesting - some creatures were much more dangerous than their 'greyhawk-based' level suggested, while others were quite over-rated.The system catered for extraordinary abilities by adding multipliers for them - it was the weakest and most abstract part of the system, but still worked pretty well except for corner cases.The monstermark was never used in purely mechanical terms (apart from saying obviously a MM of 243 is inappropriate for a 1st level party!) but it was very helpful for sorting out - guess what - appropriate levels for monsters to be rated as, so that the DM had a good idea of where they should sit. We used to use it for working out xp awards too (might have been 10*MM = xp value, but it was a long time ago so my memory is a little hazy...)Cheers</blockquote>

Verification