OnlineDM
Adventurer
I put something up on my blog recently that I thought might be of interest to the EN World community.
I wanted to be able to create monsters very quickly in MapTool. It didn't take all that long to begin with, but I wanted all of the math to be handled by just setting the monster's level. Set the level and automatically get the right hit points, defenses, attack rolls and damage rolls.
So, that's what I have now. There's a MapTool campaign template file (created in version 1.3.b66) that has sample monsters of each role. There's also an Edit Monster macro in the file (courtesy of JonathanTheBlack from the MapTool forums, with some enhancements of my own) that lets you quickly set the monster's level and role and so on. My default PC token is there, too.
As part of this process, I needed to create damage expressions that were a simple function of the monster's level. Since the official WotC damage tables are a little messy in this respect (they change both die size and number of dice in addition to the flat bonus as monster level increases), I decided to create my own damage tables using the power of MapTool.
Instead of increasing the number of dice rolled at higher levels, I increase the size of the die. And since I'm using MapTool, I'm able to to do things like have a 29th-level monster deal 2d15+21 damage on a standard attack. Yes, I'm using weird dice.
My tables result in the same average damage per roll at each level, but always rolling two dice. This means that you'll get a bit more variance in damage ranges at higher level (though a bit less variance in the first three levels, since you're rolling two dice instead of one). Personally, I think this is a good feature, but your mileage may vary.
My table has the two official damage expression tables from WotC, and then four columns of my own: Standard damage, multi-target damage (25% less than standard), 125% damage (25% more than standard - my default for recharge powers) and 150% damage (50% more than standard - my default for encounter powers).
Anyway, the tables are downloadable at this link if you're interested.
I wanted to be able to create monsters very quickly in MapTool. It didn't take all that long to begin with, but I wanted all of the math to be handled by just setting the monster's level. Set the level and automatically get the right hit points, defenses, attack rolls and damage rolls.
So, that's what I have now. There's a MapTool campaign template file (created in version 1.3.b66) that has sample monsters of each role. There's also an Edit Monster macro in the file (courtesy of JonathanTheBlack from the MapTool forums, with some enhancements of my own) that lets you quickly set the monster's level and role and so on. My default PC token is there, too.
As part of this process, I needed to create damage expressions that were a simple function of the monster's level. Since the official WotC damage tables are a little messy in this respect (they change both die size and number of dice in addition to the flat bonus as monster level increases), I decided to create my own damage tables using the power of MapTool.
Instead of increasing the number of dice rolled at higher levels, I increase the size of the die. And since I'm using MapTool, I'm able to to do things like have a 29th-level monster deal 2d15+21 damage on a standard attack. Yes, I'm using weird dice.
My tables result in the same average damage per roll at each level, but always rolling two dice. This means that you'll get a bit more variance in damage ranges at higher level (though a bit less variance in the first three levels, since you're rolling two dice instead of one). Personally, I think this is a good feature, but your mileage may vary.
My table has the two official damage expression tables from WotC, and then four columns of my own: Standard damage, multi-target damage (25% less than standard), 125% damage (25% more than standard - my default for recharge powers) and 150% damage (50% more than standard - my default for encounter powers).
Anyway, the tables are downloadable at this link if you're interested.
