Level Up (A5E) Monster Builder tool

[tetrasodium]

Sorry for the double post, but I think one thing to make this amazing, would be including dice for the damage, this would allow people to make monsters on the fly, if they roll for damage.(which a lot do.)

This will gewt you a rough ballpark that will usually be good enough
[Average damage/number of attacks] - [ability bonus* number of attacks]= X
then depending on the type of dice you want to use divide X by the average for a die

• d4:2.5
• d6:3.5
• d10:5.5
• d12:6.5

There are some caveats to dice type though. Larger dice will (obviously) be more swingy. Smaller dice will reliably hurt & you should be aware that 2d12 & 6d4 are very much not the same with the d4's being likely to cluster around the middle. If you want big nail biting attacks that may or may not crush use big dice. If you want a monster that will reliably bring a predictable amount of pain use smaller dice.

I agree with Morrus that Building a thing to give dice sizes would be remarkably complex since it would need to show different dice sizes & possibly different dice sizes for different number of attacks

 

[tetrasodium]

I used a mix of monster builder monsters & monsters modified with the % ac/hp(mostly +ac/-hp) like it notes tonight during a session & things went extremely well. One player even said to another "wow man, that bless was clutch in that fight". Combats went faster with 5 players mostly having 2-3 attacks going from 2-3 attacks & 2-3 damage rolls to having a good chunk of those simply misses. Obvious misses like rolling a 3 or 4 went even faster than before when players would wait trying to add everything they could & debate if they should use the marshal's tactics die now a simple "yea that's a miss". Players moved around a lot more & even started discussing tactics with a glorious moment where a newer player noted how they don't usually talk that much about tactics.

One thing I'd love to see in the monster tool's output is a good/medium/bad save value. As a GM I can assign them where they fit for a monster but having a number for those based on the CR & numbers generated would be helpful.

 

[challberg]

A question about Limited Use Abilities. The (excellent) tool says "Limited use abilities usually do the full DPR budget and can exceed the budget; for every 2 points it does so, reduce the DPR budget for other rounds by 1 point". This matches the MoMe, except for the full budget part. The Firebird example shows that the budget starts at the average budget per attack, with the ability to "buy" excess damage, 2 to 1.

I just wanted to make sure I understand because the CR 21 monster I'm designing is going to have a very spicy attack if this is the case (77 area damage to six players!). I'm also happy to wait until MoMe 2!