Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 9617559" data-attributes="member: 6915329">I was looking at the Onyx Storypath game The World Below. In that game (and I think other Storypath systems; I'd have to go check), there are some basic monster chassis of different power levels--Pests, Blights, Scourges, and Horrors--and then a whole bunch of abilities that can be added to those chassis. So you'll end up with a creature like, say, the Arachniidia and it'll have stats like this:[ATTACH=full]400317[/ATTACH](Antitheses are special abilities)I wondered how that would work in other systems. 3e had monster advancement, which was similar but would involve some recalculation. With this, it's all laid out. Admittedly, in a slightly "meh" way (I would have had each Antithesis on a separate line). But you could easily do something like this for monsters (civilian/mook/lieutenant/bosses for humanoids, or lesser/average/greater/legendary for monsters). Not all of the The World Below monsters have all four levels, so you can definitely have monsters that don't have variants. But anyway, it's the abilities that are important right now. In some 3x books--at least the Ravenloft Van Richten Guides--there were big lists of abilities you could give a monster and they each had a CR adjustment. And this thing in The World Below reminded me of that. I could see doing something like that for a 3.X2 as a system-wide thing.Roles like Brute or Artillery could be modeled via various abilities.A lot of monster abilities are just spells, so they could be done as elemental damage or inflicting a condition, with a note that it can be dispelled/countered (to avoid the gripes that I've seen when 5e made those changes). And other abilities can be quantified (and more added in other supplements, of course). It might be a hefty chapter in a monster book or the DMG, but it would certainly be more balanced all around. ...I don't think this would be very backwards compatible, though. As a game that invokes the flavor of 3x without trying to be a copy of it, maybe, but not something that would be interchangeable with it.</blockquote>

Verification