Monsters and Armour...

[Zurai]

Your ability to go from "I don't understand these rules"

Cite.

to "these rules weren't intended to be used" is fascinating.

I am just repeating what has been said many times in this thread before you began trolling it.

 

[MeMeMeMe]

Regardless of whatever might have been said by one or two people, the people who you are responding to now are not saying that.

 

[hong]

Cite.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

I am just repeating what has been said many times in this thread before you began trolling it.

As long as we're having fun. Are we having fun?

 

[Zurai]

Regardless of whatever might have been said by one or two people, the people who you are responding to now are not saying that.

Yes, you are.

The system isn't meant to create finished, usable monsters.

Why should I go through 10 (or more, for elite/solo monsters) time-consuming steps to create a monster that isn't even halfway to complete when it's much faster and simpler to just copy an existing monster of the appropriate level and type and change its powers? Providing rules that do not provide the results that you yourself arrive at are obviously not intended to be used. It's providing half of a recipe and saying "You should be able to take it from there, just experiment!". It's a useless waste of space.

 

[hong]

You are perfectly able to create finished, usable monsters. You will just have to make some stuff up, after sketching the rough outline.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Comparisons to 1e and 2e are useless. This isn't 1e or 2e. It's a strawman - "look at this over here! At least you have it better than them!"

Devoting a section of the DMG to rules that aren't intended to be used - which is what you all are saying in this thread - is a waste of space and, therefor, a waste of my money. I dislike people wasting my money. I especially dislike people wasting my money while pretending to be helpful.

The point is the rules do not need to be more elaborate then they are.
They give you a monster that fits the overall design specs of a monster of their level. They don't intend and they can't give you more information. All the information that is relevant to balancing the monster for its level are there. Now you can flesh out the rest.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yes, you are.Why should I go through 10 (or more, for elite/solo monsters) time-consuming steps to create a monster that isn't even halfway to complete when it's much faster and simpler to just copy an existing monster of the appropriate level and type and change its powers? Providing rules that do not provide the results that you yourself arrive at are obviously not intended to be used. It's providing half of a recipe and saying "You should be able to take it from there, just experiment!". It's a useless waste of space.

You can do that, too. But if you don't find a good base-line monster, use the system as described. And if you want to check if your modifications are okay, use the guideline to check against.

 

[MeMeMeMe]

Yes, you are.Why should I go through 10 (or more, for elite/solo monsters) time-consuming steps to create a monster

Time consuming? You listed an example above that fcan't have taken you much more than a minute. With a spreadsheet and the formulas, you could do it in about two clicks.

that isn't even halfway to complete when it's much faster and simpler to just copy an existing monster of the appropriate level and type and change its powers?

As Mustrum Ridcully said, that's a perfectly valid way to go, but there might not be a similar creature.

Providing rules that do not provide the results that you yourself arrive at are obviously not intended to be used. It's providing half of a recipe and saying "You should be able to take it from there, just experiment!". It's a useless waste of space.

They are intended to be used. They are extremely useful.
But they are not the endpoint: they give you a starting point, then you decide: "Do I want this creature to be more agile than normal? Okay, I'll up it's REF by a point or tow, and maybe reduce its FORT to compensate: it's agile but not as hardy."

Once you have this starting point, and have made some modifications, you then need to look at similar monsters to ensure you haven't gone overboard, or to get ideas for powers.

So it's not as simple as "oh, this is an CR 10 Magic beast, plug that in, and all my statistics are determined." But even if it was, in D&D3, that's still not the endpoint. You then have to decide what powers it has - and there's no good guideline on that. Look at the difference between demons and devils, and orcs and goblins. Level aside, how do you decide how many powers the creature has? How do you decide3 what the base statistics of a creature are? So 3e is also incomplete.

In 4e, you have a few more choices to make, but they don't take long.
4e starts from the (correct) assumption: a 3e-style "plug in level and monster type, get combat ratings from a table, add class level or monster level increases" approach is flawed, because some combinations are more powerful or weaker than others. So, the monster designer is forced to take those things into account rather than relying on a simple set of tables.

(PS: I saw the YouYouYouYou quote and chuckled.)

 

[robertliguori]

You can do that, too. But if you don't find a good base-line monster, use the system as described. And if you want to check if your modifications are okay, use the guideline to check against.

More hard numbers (along the lines of average damage output, AC to HP to special defense proportions, a way of balancing forced movement versus extra damage versus various status conditions) and the like would be awesome. Numbers like attack bonus and damage per attack are useless if you don't know whether or not this monster is also, say, constantly invisible and phasing through walls. In order for The Math to work, we need to be able to look at monsters at a higher level than the 4E guidelines give us.

And if we had that higher level, we could create monsters easily. We could balance the higher movement speed of a goblin wolfrider versus its unmounted bretheren, and determine how much of a disadvantage it is for the wolfrider to lose its mount special abilities when bloodied (representing a blow taking out the mount).

Heck, given the balanced nature of the classes, we should be able to get this. There should be a fairly consistent range of average attack, damage, defense, and HP numbers for the various classes; we can derive these numbers, look at what values monsters need to interact properly with these values, and make our own table of average damage per round, expected number of attacks till bloodied/dead, and so on.

 

[FourthBear]

I don't see that the guidelines on page 184 are difficult to use:

Step 3 appears to start the issues. It has recommended values for the highest value of each pair and for the attribute the monster will be using for attacks. The values of the other modifiers are left up to the DM, since they will not be used for the calculation of defenses, as they are lower than the higher of the pair by definition. If you don't have any idea at all what kind of number you'd like here, just pick a number 2 points lower than the higher. If you don't like this, then you must have some different number in mind, in which case, use that.

Step 4 does involve using the Con score involved in the Step 3 to calculate hit points. Note that it makes very little difference to the overall hit point score, which is dominated by level and role number. Even if you picked Con as a lower pair out of a hat, it wouldn't make much difference to anything but Con based skill checks. If Con is the higher of the pair, you've already got your average starting point.

Step 6 refers to the average ability score. The average ability score refers to 13 + half level, as in the text in Step 3. The highest of the pair is always the one used to calculate Fort, Ref, and Will, so the lower of the pair doesn't matter for the calculations, just as it doesn't for PCs.