robertliguori said:
Oooh, ooh, I've got one!
You start by looking at the elements of the world that you're working with.
Or you can just add "Monstrous Defense Training +X"
Your world has elements like size, combat skill, armor, a tough hide, and so fort affecting difficulty to be hit. You look at what your challenge can have. You look at what they can't not have. (No first-level hyrda minions, please).
What? Why not? We have 1st level characters fighting large dragons, we can't have baby hydra that go splat in one hit? You're barely started and now you've just eliminated possibilities in a fantasy game. Great.
You then construct a table that tells you what target values a Nth level X-ifier should have. You look and note what a Nth level N-ifier needs, and see if you can reasonably make one out of your desired challenge. If you can't, you say, "I guess the game world I've made doesn't support what I want to do.
That sounds like a pretty crappy game system that I don't want to DM for.
I'll throw in an obvious exception. Huh. Maybe these are special kobolds that have performed a ritual to gain the extra AC they need. Yeah! Kobolds adorned with glyphs, painted-on with the blood of the innocent! And that explains why they've been raiding the village!"
Then PCs will want to do it eh?
Then, you ask yourself if adding the capacity to perform a ritual to grant an extended bonus to AC at the cost of a humanoid will break the game world. If the answer is no, then you're good to go. If it's yes, then you find another way to change the kobolds.
:\
But see now you're back at Zero.
I like rules. I like rules that enable me to predict the behavior of the universe.
I like results, results that enable me to create a universe worth spending time in.
Handing out ACs arbitrarily in light of the changibility of ACs prevents me from doing this. I want a game world that supports a high level of emergent behavior; if events conspire that enable and encourage me to get a strike force of kobolds of my very own, I want to know, without need to resort to fiat, what happens when I do something as elementary as dress them in armor.
In the game I want to play, when I dress a kobold in armor, it does exactly what I want it to, so that the kobold is as strong or weak as is useful for the story.
Perhaps donning armor negates Monstrous Training. Perhaps it only gives half AC. Perhaps it triples their AC. Whatever works. It may have a completely different result on a different kobold, to boot, just like giving a hammer to a sword fighter instead of a hammer fighter would.
I also can't be the only DM who had PCs Planar Bind a devil, incapacitate it, rip its armor off of its flesh, and either lock it away or use Temporal Stasis on it, then keep the armor for their very own. The rules are quite clear, after all; no dead devil, no malformations to the armor. (Hell might look for their errant devil, of course, but that's an engineering problem, and can be addressed within the context of the rules).
Which shows why removable, obtainable armor can be a very dangerous thing to put on monsters.
The problem with exception-based rules is that they assume a level of communication and shared expectations that you need either loads of source material or rules themselves to convey. There is expectation that, in most cases, you can kill a monster and take its stuff. Messing with this expectation because the item to be looted is 'too good' is not necessarily part of the default expectation; there's no reason to assume that characters won't try to loot.
The only problem inherent here is the problem that comes out of literature; artist's interpretation versus alternative interpretations.
Thing is, outside of tournament play, this doesn't matter, because it's whatever the DM feels is more valuable to their game.
