Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 5691602" data-attributes="member: 20741">In order to play with monster modifications, you'll need at least one of the Bestiary add-ons for Herolab as well.You advance it by increasing size/hit dice, adding templates or class levels or combinations of all of these. This is not immediately intuitive in Herolab - but that's how it works. Once you get the hang of it you'll appreciate the flexibility of the system.One of the most significant changes to the approach 4E took with foes in the game are in the way that monsters and foes are designed. Unlike 3.xx, in 4E, monster designs are  decoupled from the way those rules are applied to PCs. This allows for more ad hoc monster designs and things like minions (this is a rule I like, actually, but many are not fans of the 4E/SW:Saga minion concept). It makes thing like Monster Builder easier to code as the interdependency of stats, powers and other values are far less rigidly encoded into the game rules that apply to PCs. Whatever the case, in Pathfinder the rules for monster design are NOT decoupled from the rules for PCs.  While there are different rules for advancing monsters based upon their type in terms of skill points and feats and so forth, the rules are still essentially the same on both sides of the GM screen.  This adds to verisimilitude and accuracy of estimating CRs -- but at the cost of increased complexity. Learning exactly how this works for monsters is the reason I recommend every Pathfinder GM plays with the system in the Appendices with a pencil and a sheet of paper so that they "get it".  You will be able to adjust on the fly and just eyeball it during play if you need to with FAR more accuracy if you understand the key concepts in how monsters change as their size and levels and hit dice are increased under Pathfinder RPG.  Many GMs try to eyeball CR advancement during play by just bulking up monsters on the fly and then do not award appropriate XP to characters after the fact. They either overestimate or underestimate the CR -- or forget about something else that ought to have been increased when the to hit/ damage was increased or the hit points are bulked up.   Usually this doesn't matter for a combat encounter -- but often it can.  That's why it's better to know how monsters are put together rather than just deleting one value and substituting another ad hoc.</blockquote>

Verification