Generalizations the GM can get away with

[Ry]

Speaking of villain classes, I've been tinkering a bit in the last 3 days with making some of these for D&D. There's a hell of a lot more crunch to play with and hey, I had to find SOMETHING to do after Hyp cramped my style....

Those sound really handy. What archetypes are you trying for / how are you grouping?

 

[hong]

Those sound really handy. What archetypes are you trying for / how are you grouping?

3 so far: evil mage, assassin/finesse fighter, and tank/melee brute.

I'm trying to make them so they're actually worth CR = level, as opposed to the NPC classes, or PC classes with NPC amounts of gear. I suspect it's a futile pursuit given how airy-fairy CR becomes at high levels, but it's a way to indulge my gearhead gene.

 

[Ry]

Hey, my game is going to be capped at 10 (was going to be 6, but in prep I realized I wanted to open it up a bit more). So if you can get it to not break down horribly by CR 10, I'd be grateful to see it.

 

[Voadam]

My 16th level characters are not wary of random orcs, but ONLY because of metagame knowledge. If it wasn't a random orc, it would have a name on its mouseover tooltip.

Knowing they are random orcs is the catch. I've been caught off guard a number of times in the game.

The last orc to surprise the 16 level party I DM was a 16 level barbarian/brutal killer who was leading an invasion, he had a name though which along with his superior gear and leading position was a bit of a tip off.

 

[billd91]

One of the nice things about Classic or 1E (or even 2E) is that it's pretty easy to just say something like "These creatures are an offshoot tribe called 'Pyrogoblins'. They're normal goblins except that each can breath fire at one target 1/day for 1d6, save for half." You just give them 1 bump on the xp table and you're done.

I'm not saying that can't be done with 3E. But the monsters in 3E seem "built" according to the rules, and it's ambiguous as to what constitutes an increase in CR, etc. When players are struggling to squeeze every bonus and synergy out of the system, to give a monster an arbitrary bonus may seem to some to be outside of the DM's power!

I'd much rather just write "Boss Hobgoblin: AC 4, HD 4, HP 28, D 1d8+3."

It is a bit ambiguous what constitutes a +1 CR, but it wasn't really all that set in stone what constituted a +1, +2, or +3 on the XP table or what was a special ability vs an extraordinary special ablity in earlier editions either.
If you aren't sure that a bonus would be worth a full +1 CR, you can do what Paizo has done with some of its adventures in Dungeon: add a +25 or +50% to awarded XPs for an encounter due to miscellaneous circumstances.

 

[Amitiel]

You can get away with it at lower levels, but the higher the level the more difficult it becomes to have ths set up and still run a believable game. It'd be more useful for random encounters than for regular play.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

One of the nice things about Classic or 1E (or even 2E) is that it's pretty easy to just say something like "These creatures are an offshoot tribe called 'Pyrogoblins'. They're normal goblins except that each can breath fire at one target 1/day for 1d6, save for half." You just give them 1 bump on the xp table and you're done.

I'm not saying that can't be done with 3E. But the monsters in 3E seem "built" according to the rules, and it's ambiguous as to what constitutes an increase in CR, etc.

Thats different from eyeballing exp in 1st edition how?

 

[Ry]

I'm going to take a different approach; flip through DMG NPCs, a few other NPC sources, and a few Monster Books, and see what groups together for each item by CR. I'll group them into Low, Medium, High, and try to pass if I see crazy outliers (like the natural swim bonus of an intelligent eel - that shouldn't be allowed to throw off the skill range).

 

[Ry]

Quickly upgraded from flipping through to using the SRD xml database for monsters, a few excel equations, and then some simple pivottables.

With an average and a standard deviation, I was able to compute a likely range (low, medium, high) for hit points by CR. Here's the file with the results.

I can do this for monsters... for all stats (hp, init, etc.) I could do the same with NPCs but I need a database of NPCs.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

One of the nice things about Classic or 1E (or even 2E) is that it's pretty easy to just say something like "These creatures are an offshoot tribe called 'Pyrogoblins'. They're normal goblins except that each can breath fire at one target 1/day for 1d6, save for half." You just give them 1 bump on the xp table and you're done.

I'm not saying that can't be done with 3E. But the monsters in 3E seem "built" according to the rules

Poor John Cooper. You just made him soil himself laughing.

Leaving aside the clearly untrue notion that 3E follows rules any more than any other edition ever has, one bump on the XP table is the same thing as raising CR by one.