How often do you downgrade monsters...

[Tinker Gnome]

From what their CR is listed as? Like, you are looking at this really cool monster, but you notice it has a CR of 20 and the PCs are only around 8th level. So, you decide to weaken it enough to be a challenge to 8th level PCs.

 

[Amaroq]

Either "never" or "all the time", I'm not sure how to answer this.

For example, one of today's monsters was a Level 4 Ghoul Strangler, which was a modification of the Level 6 Bugbear Strangler, reduced in level, made undead, and tweaked sufficiently that if it weren't for the strangling you might have felt it was more Ghoul than Bugbear.

Another of today's monsters was a Level 5 Controller which was a monster-mash of several Controller powers in the Level 4 to Level 6 range; fun for the whole party!

Basically, I like to do a lot of monster-writing: almost every encounter has at least one "signature" monster: the player who was dragged away by the Ghoul Strangler isn't going to forget that fight anytime soon, even if the rest of the fight was against generic undead .. and the wraith remnant of the Necromancer's Apprentice was great fun both to play and to fight, especially as he kept bringing more bad guys into the fight in the most inconvenient of places.

 

[S'mon]

With 4e I do a lot of adjusting, either using the character builder or manually. Eg I needed a shadowy lurker critter for my 3rd level PCs and I had a DDM card for a Shadow Demon but it was 11th level, so I downgraded it to 7th.

Other times monsters just seem too high level for my world/setting, I use 1e-style giants in my 4e world so I need to downgrade the baseline stats, eg:

Hill Giant 14th to 9th.
Fire Giant 18th to 12th.

I also use "half hp, 2/3 XP" a lot.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

In 4e, all the time... both downgrading and upgrading. I have made 3rd level Treant, 14th level Kobolds, and recently upgraded the Black Pudding to an Elder Black Pudding.

In 3x, very rarely. I thought was easier to build from scratch than it was to modify an existing monster. I only owned a 3x MM because one of my players had an extra copy. I did alot of on the fly changes in play rather than detailed work ahead of time. This was mainly due to the time it took to do the detailed work, so I would detail the signature BBEG and wing the rest.

In 2e... rarely, and only within a limited range. I wouldn't adjust more than a couple levels either way as it got a bit... erm, odd.

In 1e... I only ran that for a short time back when I was a wee DM and I don't think I veered off the RAW much at all.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

In 3x, very rarely. I thought was easier to build from scratch than it was to modify an existing monster.

Same here. In 3e, powering a monster up is fairly straightforward, but scaling one back is something of a pain to do "correctly", imxp. So I usually take more to a bottom-up approach:

(1) define a monster "kind" (eg, incorporeal undead),
(2) identify the most common salient features of that "kind" (eg, ability damage, miss-chance, spawn)
(3) devise a scale of increasing power-levels for those features/abilties (eg, 0, 1, 1d4, 1d6... ability damage).

This-- along with a few skill packages, relevant feats, and more specialized monster abilities-- provides a nice pile of informal "building blocks" that easily fit together to make fairly generic versions of the monster "kind" in question.

As a procedure, this isn't really as formalized as I've made it sound here, nor is it "correct" or truly balanced by any stretch of the imagination. But it works well enough to throw together a run-of-the-mill mook to fill a thematic gap when no MM creature really works.

 

[weem]

In 2e and before I didn't tweak much at all - stuck with what was available.

In 3e I tweaked some - but usually not by adjusting levels, but rather damage etc. I tried to stick with level appropriate monsters and make small adjustments as needed.

In 4e, I tend to bring something down to an appropriate level more than I raise one up. With that said, I try not to make huge jumps... 3-4 levels is ok, but not a 20 down to an 8. I can usually find something I can tweak (in the monster builder) within a few levels so it's not a big deal.

 

[Jhaelen]

Quite often, though not usually in a way you've been suggesting.

I'm particularly fond of downgrading solo monsters, so I can use two of them in a single encounter. Nicely circumvents the potential grind problem solos represent.

 

[Rechan]

Often. Because I think the cooler stuff are higher level.

 

[Piratecat]

Extremely often in both 3e and 4e.

 

[Infiniti2000]

In 3.x, only up, never down. In 4E, I swing it both ways! :lol

The MB in 4E just makes so much simpler.