NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pants" data-source="post: 2964201" data-attributes="member: 8849">The problem with the MM Ogre Mage, as I see it, is that it's just not built well.Many people bring up good points about monster abilities being pared down because they 'aren't useful in combat.' That's a foolish idea. A well designed monster has abilities that can strengthen its flavor and its use in combat.The Ogre Mage, for example, has the sleep spell-like ability. Now, for a devious creature that relies far more on subtlety, manipulation, and guile this is perfect. Same for charm person. The problem with these is, that those chosen abilities are completely useless in combat. Sure, they may work on mooks during combats that the PC's will never see, but against a CR 8 (or a CR 6 party?) they're useless. Sleep won't affect anyone in a level 6 party and charm person only works on humanoids, which is fine if Ogre Mages are only manipulating humanoids, but I've always seen them as manipulating anything. These abilities just don't work and add in the Ogre Mage's horrible staying power and it's general one-cone-of-cold-poniness and it ends up being a horribly designed creature. Swap out sleep for deep slumber or add an addendum in the SLA for removing the HD limit and swap out charm monster for the piddly charm person. Change the rest of the monster to the redesigned version (maybe up the CR by 1) and voila, a better version that doesn't dump on the flavor of the critter, like the current redesigned version and the old versions did.</blockquote>

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