delericho said:
Oh, I sincerely hope not. A monster's appearance should play an integral part in the determination of its stats. Appearance, powers, and even such things as ecology and social structures should all be a part of a holistic design process that makes a monster what it is.
Otherwise, there's a terrible danger that they just become playing pieces on a board, and then we really are in WoW territory.
IMO, of course.
Well, I am not sure if this causes more or less worries, but the post quoted above regarding to the familiarity with the structure of the monster rules is part of a larger blog post that also includes a description of few encounters. (If I don't mix the posts up
)
Basically, the blogger did use only the tables and knew "I want them to fight spiders, and spiders use webs to capture or hodl foes". So he used the standard numbers expected for monsters of that level and gave them a special ability suiting their purpose.
So, the scenario itself required a certain range of numbers. But the "flavor" of the monsters (Spiders) did lead to a specific selection of special abilities (Entangling Webs), and that's what made the whole encounter (and the monster) unique (well, as unique as fighting monstrous spiders can be. Personally, there isn't much special about them, so the way the encounter was created in a running game sounds pretty cool to me)
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From what I understood, monsters will have a "level" and "XP". The level indicates against which type of characters you can reasonable use these monsters, and the XP determines, how many of them you can throw at the characters (and how much they get afterward, but who cares about that?
)
This probably means that attacks, skills and saving throws (or defenses) are determined by level, but hitpoints and damage abilities or amount of actions available for the monster each round might be guided by the XP they grant.
At least that's the way I see it. You need to ensure your monsters can hit the characters and can be hit by characters abilities. To vary how many you can use, you need to determine how much a hit hurts the characters and how much a hit hurts them.
In 3.x, CR determines both aspects - how hard is the monster to hit, how easy can hit you, and how much damage does it to you. A monster that is easy to hit but deals a lot of damage is harder to balance in a 3.x system, and adding numbers always required you to reduce attack, hitpoints, damage and defenses of each individual monster, which can easily lead to less then exciting battles, since the monsters never hit and are feel outclassed by the PCs. Okay if used to show the PCs how good they are, but can get boring if used to often.
