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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9620276" data-attributes="member: 8461">I'm not a fan of explicitly designating roles per se for monsters, if for no other reason than it further encourages a meta-game mindset which has always struck me as a poor fit for the vagaries of play. While I agree that some monsters are better at certain activities, the eccentricities (for lack of a better word) of any given situation are quite often more salient than their roles.That said, probably the most palatable example of this that I can recall is how Bad Axe Games' Teratologue (part of their Trailblazer set of &quot;3.75&quot; products) differentiated between &quot;total CR&quot; and &quot;spine CR,&quot; where the latter only took into account the &quot;spine&quot; of the monster's stat block (e.g. its Hit Dice, attack values, saving throw values, and a few other things common to all stat blocks) and the former took into account the totality of the stat block (most notably the special powers, spells, and spell-like abilities, if any).What it found was that the more the spine CR matched the total CR, the more likely the monster was to be a &quot;martial&quot; type, which could get the most bang out of its proverbial buck if it closed into melee and slugged it out. By contrast, if the spine CR was notably weaker than the total CR, the monster was essentially a caster; if you had it close to melee, you were likely ignoring most of its special powers (which made up a large chunk of its total CR) and so it would be punching considerably below its weight class (hence why things like balors and pit fiends, if you ignored their long lists of SLAs, weren't able to stand up to high-level martials in a fight).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 9620276, member: 8461"] I'm not a fan of explicitly designating roles per se for monsters, if for no other reason than it further encourages a meta-game mindset which has always struck me as a poor fit for the vagaries of play. While I agree that some monsters are better at certain activities, the eccentricities (for lack of a better word) of any given situation are quite often more salient than their roles. That said, probably the most palatable example of this that I can recall is how Bad Axe Games' [I]Teratologue[/I] (part of their Trailblazer set of "3.75" products) differentiated between "total CR" and "spine CR," where the latter only took into account the "spine" of the monster's stat block (e.g. its Hit Dice, attack values, saving throw values, and a few other things common to all stat blocks) and the former took into account the totality of the stat block (most notably the special powers, spells, and spell-like abilities, if any). What it found was that the more the spine CR matched the total CR, the more likely the monster was to be a "martial" type, which could get the most bang out of its proverbial buck if it closed into melee and slugged it out. By contrast, if the spine CR was notably weaker than the total CR, the monster was essentially a caster; if you had it close to melee, you were likely ignoring most of its special powers (which made up a large chunk of its total CR) and so it would be punching considerably below its weight class (hence why things like balors and pit fiends, if you ignored their long lists of SLAs, weren't able to stand up to high-level martials in a fight). [/QUOTE]

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