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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lacyon" data-source="post: 4177496" data-attributes="member: 63046">How are you going to put "Evil Twin" in the MM, and why? The PHB already serves as a mechanism for creating Evil Twins.Yes. But no monster in the MM should come with instructions requiring you to apply a template before running it. They need to be playable out of the box.Adding a template to a creature bumps it up to Elite or Solo. You have to know more abilities for one creature, but have fewer creatures overall, so complexity level doesn't have to increase dramatically.Yes. Monsters the GM makes up himself are going to be as complicated as he wants them to be. Templates are one tool for doing that, though they don't increase overall encounter complexity.Monster books are for GMs who either don't want to do that work, or want some baseline creature abilities to build from. In either case, the monsters in the monster book (such as the phane) should be playable out of the box.Perhaps I misread you. I interpreted your statement to be an indication that running an evil twin was "easy" because you could just copy what the PC was doing. If you can't, then you have to spend more time figuring out what the Evil Twin should be doing this round, which leads to more time spent on the GM's turn, which has some negatives that the designers want to avoid.I don't need to assume that the DM is dumb, just that he's going to take the same 2-3 minutes (probably a bit more, since he doesn't know all the nuances) that the PC would per action, and he's going to take that for *each* "evil twin" instead of 2-3 minutes total for team monster. This nearly doubles the RL time of the combat.It's fine to create "evil twin" characters and use them in a game. It's fine to flavor them as having been summoned by the phane. It's fine to use that as a plot device or even stand-alone encounter.It's bad when you have to say that the phane is worth ___ XP (or ___ CR), because his actual power level varies according to his opponents. It's bad when you put a monster in the monster book that can't be run out of that monster book without getting into PC-level complexity.Having the *option* of PC-level complexity, on the other hand, is a good thing.1) No, it can be played at least as out-of-the-box as N vampire lords with full PC writeup. Plus a phane.2) So very wrong. No matter how strong you are, an 18,000 XP Pit Fiend is supposed to be 18,000 XP worth of challenge. Its abilities are constant. The evil twin's abilities scale with the party level, and thus the XP value must scale with the party level or the system breaks - it can't be assigned an XP value in the book.It IS in the core rules. It's called the PHB.The game CAN handle it. It's in the PHB. It doesn't belong in a monster book.</blockquote>

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