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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kraydak" data-source="post: 3767816" data-attributes="member: 12306">Beholders: Designing monsters to be the functional equivalent of 5 ordinary characters has many draw-backs.  There are two ways to do it.  Firstly, you can just use a more powerful (but well balanced) monster (in 3e terms, use CR=APL+2-3).  While this entails no special design requirements, it can cause issues when the numbers get too extreme (PCs needed 20s to hit, melee brutes 1 rounding PCs).Secondly you can have a monster that has many more hp than normal for its "level" and can take more actions or otherwise has a higher offense than normal for its "level" but the basic interaction stats (to hits, saves, save DCs, AC, skills) are appropriate for its "level".  Everquest (and WoW, to a lesser extent) did this, in a large part due to programming limitations.  It works, much of the time.  It breaks *horrifically* if PCs use Charm effects.  All of a sudden the PCs have an ally with a power level all out of scale with the difficulty of landing the charm.  If facing such monsters (and note, beholders AREN'T such as designed in 3e.  In 3e beholders are closer to a trap, with offense>>>>defense.  A party that can absorb a beholder's output for 1-2 rounds will drop it in the same time span).  In D&D, the programming limitations are replaced by DM congnitive load, but the cognitive load of a monster with many abilities to forget about isn't that different that that of many monsters with few abilities each...Glass Jaws:  Glass Jaw monsters (henceforth OMs for Ogre Magi, how I loathe thee) pose several problems.  In 3e terms, they are functionally impossible to CR well.  If you CR to the defense, they WILL cause TPKs (unless the PCs get a jump on the OMs).  If you CR to the offense, they will achieve nothing.  You can hedge your bets by CRing in the middle, but it doesn't really work.In addition to being actively hard use as a DM (the CRing difficulty also makes them hard to place reasonably as a DM), they just aren't that fun to face as a player.  They end up playing more as traps than as monsters: instead of a search roll, you have a search roll.  Instead of a save, you have an initiative roll.  Either way, the encounter is over very fast.  (yes, it has to get quite extreme for the problems to become untenable, but OMs are that).This doesn't mean that there isn't a place for OMs.  However, they should be the corner cases.  A monster design protocol should be set up to produce well balanced monsters, which can interface well with a CR system (or whatever 4e uses to balance encounters).  Because OMs *inherently* need DM intervention/skill/special placement, you can treat them as special cases (and, whatever you do, for the OMs included in the MM, GIVE A DM WARNING).I apologize for poor writing, off to a game.</blockquote>

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