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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3765834" data-attributes="member: 2067">Monster Combat isn't 99% of my game, though. It's maybe 25-75% depending upon what the party's doing at the moment and where their focus lies. When I'm not hurling XP gristle at 'em, the monsters serve as background population, NPC's, advisers, party members, social rivals, contacts, trainers, etc.: basically as a role in the world and in the party. Designing them for combat is an important goal, probably even THE most important goal, but to make it basically the only goal is to totally miss the boat on the other reasons monsters exist.If that is true, I have to wonder why. Or, perhaps more relevantly, why you just can't use a "higher level" beholder or throw a beholder at a lower level party to gain the BBEG challenge you seek. Or even have some sort of template or guidelines for when you want to use a monster (any monster) as a solitary boss.Designing monsters for only one purpose is narrow minded design. If Beholders only exist to challenge a party as a boss monster, the designers are artificially limiting what I should be able to do with a Beholder (which should include "playing one as a PC" IMO). I don't believe for a second that you need to sacrifice combat awesomeness in order to maintain PC or simple "world element" balance when you're starting from scratch like 4e is.</blockquote>