DMG II Excerpt - Monsters

[CapnZapp]

Templates were rarely used I think because they were a hassle to calculate everything when you could just reskin something else.

This.

If I'm not satisfied with a critter, I simply change it. I don't have patience to follow some arbitrary rules (what do you mean I can't give this boon combined with this power-up).

Having a few templates are good, I suppose, as examples. Not if you argue they're all the combos you can do.

I can see why they're there (because it's fairly simple to assign a junior editor the job of spewing forth a few numbers; and because adding in something truly innovative is a lot of hard work) but I agree having lots of them is just wasting space.

We would be better off with guidelines on how to combine and modify the powers of existing monsters.

 

[avin]

Monster templates are a waste of space for 4e monster design. Who uses them?

I do. A Demagogue Succubus was essential to one of my first games.

 

[BlightCrawler]

Monster templates are a waste of space for 4e monster design. Who uses them?

I've used it once. I have a whole empire of bad guys set up to use it a lot more (a mummy empire). On the whole, I'm kind of disappointed with the DMG offerings since they seem to be rather narrow in scope (helllloooo undead themes!)

I really love templates though and want to see more. These templates sound like its more of what I'm looking for. I'm glad they are expanding it.

What I do NOT use are the character class templates. Bleh. Partly because the PCs in my game are expressly unique (there are no other Clerics outside of the PC) but I just prefer all the character rules to stand for PCs. Bad guys and NPCs can be reskinned monsters. But maybe I'll play with it sometime and change my mind.