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Message: <blockquote data-quote="justanobody" data-source="post: 4497346" data-attributes="member: 70778">What if monsters had just one variant. To use the old standby say you had a monster entry for kobold.In the monster manual it gave rates of increase and decrease for various things within the roles.Brute gets more HP, striker gets more attacks, whatever.Then for whatever monster you have you can adjust them to the role you need at the time for them to perform without having to have a detailed kobold sycophant, erm striker listed in the book.Then you could tailor the encounters by having any monster be of any type or role, and the XP budget would also be in the role calculation guide to allow you proper encounter design.I haven't designed any encounter yet really so if this is the case as it stand then sorry for wasting space. But it would make more sense to have a system to allow for taking the basic monster and scaling it to whatever role as well as give it -5 ro +5 level adjustments so you could create strange types of encounter with synergies.What does anyone think?this would also mean that is there was only 50 monsters listed in the MM, you would then alternately say with 5 roles an a range of 10 levels that the MM would contain 5*11*5=275 monsters. That would mean the books could have only 50 pages and get more monsters into them.For each monster you could have abilities that are listed for the variant roles and levels.You could fit a whole lot more into a book with less effort that way since the core system has a foundation or base for monster design right? Otherwise they could at least put the same number of monsters in less pages and lower cost to increase sales. I don't know how Orcus would end up a minion, but that would be left for a DM to decide if he/she wants to scale down the level of him and apply the proper, for lack of a better word than what was used previously, template for the role desired for the encounter.Or have I totally lost my mind in this idea?</blockquote>

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