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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6025494" data-attributes="member: 1465">I am totally uninterested in advancing monsters this way. I just don't care for bigger ogres or bigger whatever, so either way these rules above for me are mostly a wasted effort. The only time when I wanted some straight larger specimen for monsters, were the occasional ultra-giant vermin or dragon, both types of which had a range of size adequately covered in the first MM. But generally speaking I find scaled-up versions of monsters just boring and not worth my campaign preparation time. When the main purpose of this is dial the CR of an encounter, I can just go straight to picking a higher CR monster of a similar type (e.g. a hill giant instead of an advanced ogre).OTOH I want to be able to add class levels on monsters, at least humanoids. This allows me to do interesting things, for example:1- design a hierarchy (vertically diverse) of monsters of the same type: maybe an adventure against a tribe of Orcs where the guards at the entrance of their lairs are 2nd level, the elite guards inside are 4th level, and the boss is 6th level, but they are all Orcs with some shared core abilities2- design a band (horizontally diverse) of monsters of the same type: maybe an evil adventuring group of Drow that mirrors the good party of PC, each of them being a different class but they are all Drow and again share some abilities3- mix'n'match the racial abilities of a monster with the features of a class, to make for some diverse challenge: maybe you want to see how does a barbarian ogre or a wizard illithid works against the PCs (or even a barbarian illithid and a wizard ogre, if you're into kinky stuff)4- allow the monster to be played as a PC (although this is personally very low on my own priority list...)This has much, much higher priority in my games, because they help me build adventures and campaigns more, and keep the encounters diversified.Where eventually the problem lies is that:a) it takes a long time to design an NPC from scratch, especially at high levelsb) it doesn't work well when the base monster already has a high CRThere is no perfect solution for problem a) if you want to do the NPC exactly like a PC. But the point is that you don't have to do that... and the people who usually complain that 3e is too slow are the same people that claim that NPC absolutely need not be the same as PC. So just don't do that, just ignore anything that isn't related to combat (unless you also plan to use the NPC for something else), if you pretend to assign 30 different spells because technically the illithid wizard is entitled to, it's your fault. Unfortunately, the 3e books didn't really help gamers realize that, and kind of made it seem like they necessarily had to conform to full and detailed design. Something extra that can help is class advancement tables in the PHB (otherwise you have to add levels one by one, are you kiddding?) and sample humanoids with levels in the MM (obviously iconic, e.g. hobgoblin fighters at a few different levels,  certainly no need for hobgoblin paladins and druids).And for problem b) I think I'm going to re-state what I previously wrote in this thread: maybe it would be worth investigating a mechanic for swapping "monsters levels" with class levels so that if you had a base frost giant with 6HD, class levels would not be added on top of that but would replace racial HD on a 1-by-1 basis until level 6, and then continue adding class levels normally.</blockquote>

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