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<blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9619971" data-attributes="member: 907">Definitely. There was a growing understanding of the issue over the course of 3e's life cycle. I remember when 3.5e came out, they did some hyping up of having remade some monsters to be more CR-appropriate. To a large degree, 3.0 monsters were created by just taking AD&amp;D monsters and translating their special abilities to 3e, and eyeballing a CR based on those. I remember an article on the website calling out the ogre mage as being poorly designed, because it has 37 hp, AC 18, and attacks at +7 for 3d6+7 (or flies and uses ranged attacks at +2 and 2d6), which is on par with something like an owlbear (CR 4) but it has to be CR 8 because they have a 1/day cone of cold dealing 9d6 points which is WAY too strong for a CR 4 creature. I believe the article then went on to provide a redesigned version with significant physical buffs and with the magic toned down a notch, and I think the Elemental Mages from MM5 were a similar attempt at a &quot;fixed&quot; ogre mage.PF1 goes half-way to target-based monster creation. They provide target values for each CR, but you still build the monster using PCish rules. So basically they say &quot;A combat-focused CR 5 monster should have an attack bonus of about +10 and 55 hp. A CR 5 Magical Beast should have about 6d10 HD, which alone provides +6 BAB and 33 hp. So you need to give it Strength 18 for +4 to attack and Con 18 for +24 hp and you'll get to about the right values.&quot; To me, that kind of seems like the worst of both worlds, but at least there are actual guidelines for how strong a monster should be at each CR instead of &quot;compare it to other monsters.&quot;</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Staffan, post: 9619971, member: 907"] Definitely. There was a growing understanding of the issue over the course of 3e's life cycle. I remember when 3.5e came out, they did some hyping up of having remade some monsters to be more CR-appropriate. To a large degree, 3.0 monsters were created by just taking AD&D monsters and translating their special abilities to 3e, and eyeballing a CR based on those. I remember an article on the website calling out the ogre mage as being poorly designed, because it has 37 hp, AC 18, and attacks at +7 for 3d6+7 (or flies and uses ranged attacks at +2 and 2d6), which is on par with something like an owlbear (CR 4) but it has to be CR 8 because they have a 1/day [I]cone of cold[/I] dealing 9d6 points which is WAY too strong for a CR 4 creature. I believe the article then went on to provide a redesigned version with significant physical buffs and with the magic toned down a notch, and I think the Elemental Mages from MM5 were a similar attempt at a "fixed" ogre mage. PF1 goes half-way to target-based monster creation. They provide target values for each CR, but you still build the monster using PCish rules. So basically they say "A combat-focused CR 5 monster should have an attack bonus of about +10 and 55 hp. A CR 5 Magical Beast should have about 6d10 HD, which alone provides +6 BAB and 33 hp. So you need to give it Strength 18 for +4 to attack and Con 18 for +24 hp and you'll get to about the right values." To me, that kind of seems like the worst of both worlds, but at least there are actual guidelines for how strong a monster should be at each CR instead of "compare it to other monsters." [/QUOTE]

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