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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3821265" data-attributes="member: 4937">Old school players had to eyeball these things.  We welcome the guidelines, but we can always still eyeball if we have to.I'm not sure I fully agree.  I do agree that any single monster that loses its initiative roll is going to be in trouble, especially one with a low AC.  Brutes do fine in some circumstances, and less well in others.  I've seen giants of various sorts just level parties.  My main experience is that non-monsterous NPC's are rarely worth thier full CR.If mooks are defined that way, then I'm not sure there is anything like a problem.  IME, one attribute of CR system is that as CR of an individual monster increases, doubling the number of monsters increases the actual EL by a greater incremental amount.  For a 5th level party, doubling them number of a CR 1 creatures they encounter doesn't really increase EL by +2.  For a 10th level party, doubling the number of CR 6 creatures comes much closer than increasing EL by +2, and by the time you get to CR 20, doubling the number of CR 16 may actually increase EL more than two. In the case of something like a CR 12 monstrous foe, that might first be reasonable as a BBEG around 9th level, its going to be a long time before a party fully outgrows the challenge it presents.  I think if by mooks you merely mean CR between -6 and -8 of party level, once the party level gets high enough we've got no problems in 3rd edition with challenge per se.  If a mook encounter means '16 Mature Adult White Dragons', or '16 11-headed Pyrohyras', or '16 Abyssal Greater Basilisks', or '32 level 12 clerics', '16 Krakens', or '32 Collosal Monsterous Scorpions erupting out of the cavern walls all around you' then I think your problem won't necessarily be challenge, but the fact that such an encounter is a) ungodly complex, and b) potentially breaks versimilitude wide open to reduce such supposedly rare and awesome foes to the role of mooks.   At high levels, attack bonuses tend to overwhelm AC's.I get the feeling that part of the reason the 1st edition crowd might feel less constrained by 3rd edition is that we are much happier fudging the rules.  Fourth edition might be a welcome break for you if only it says, "You are the DM.  Rules are there to be broken."In I3 Pyramid (my conversion available in the Library), Hickman plays fast and lose with the 1st edition rules to achieve the very effect you are going for.  He has an encounter with 5HD monsters (in this case humans without class levels!), wherein most of them have fewer than 10 and often as little as 1 hp.  The result is an encounter where the foes have a decent chance of hitting, but drop very quickly.  That is what passed for elegant design in 1st edition.I don't think you have to bend the rules that much, but really you are the DM - you can give the monster however many hit points you want.  DMs don't cheat.  The only thing that a DM can do that is 'cheating' is remove the fun from the game. (Note: often DM fudging does remove the fun from the game.  With great power comes great responsibility.)  What would be wrong with taking some low CR opponents and writing?'Really Sharp Claws' (Ex): This monster gets a +5 bonus to attack.or'Really Strong Jaws' (Ex): This monster does +3 damage.Problem solved?  Well, sorta.  Because we are still breaking the simulation.  We might as well have made all the new orcs 7th level warriors, or whatever.  But if all you want is a mook and you don't want to worry about it, something like that works.</blockquote>

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