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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 3788876" data-attributes="member: 5143">Yeah, my thought is that it doesn't make sense to have all the adjectives to every monster.  A Beholder may never be a Brute, for instance.However, they can apply them to some of the creatures it DOES make perfect sense to apply them to.I think that originally they started with a very generic system:  Figure out what the appropriate stats would be for creatures 1-30.  Then figure out what changes from the norm at each level make a creature a "Stalker" or a "Brute", etc.  Are stalkers more Dexterous, have better attack bonuses and lower ACs as well as special abilities that allow them to hide and move around better?Then you apply those changes to the base stats.  Then you apply changes on an individual creature level.  So, if you have a standard stalker made up for level 1.  If this is a Kobold Stalker, then you want to emphasis their size and agility more than even normal stalkers, give him 1 more bonus to hit and 2 more dexterity and 4 more to their move silently.  Then apply the standard abilities of a kobold to it.  Now put it into the Monster Manual under Kobold along with the other Kobolds you've made.I get the impression that they keep throwing around language they use in the office when creating creatures that won't end up actually getting put in the monster manual.  I think that they are using an internal chart of numbers for the "generic monster stats".  There's been one mention of the formula used to calculate that chart being changed due to playtesting and then the numbers needing to be plugged back into every creature but that it was easy since they didn't have to change anything about the creatures except the numbers.I get the impression that we will get the end result of the final tweaking on each monster and we will be told "This monster is a stalker, so it's job is to sneak up and attack people from behind."  However, I doubt we'll actually be told "To make a stalker, take these numbers and apply these modifiers to it."  I think this is because there is at least a small step near the end where the designers basically say "What changes do I need to make to the default stats at the end to make this more...like a kobold and less like a generic set of stats."  And since this final step will be simply made up by the individual designer, there won't be a chart or anything they can point us to.They keep saying how they managed to fit 300 creatures into 288 pages worth of monster manual.  Assuming a good 30 pages of description about how to use monsters and such, it means their stat block is very small to fit that many monsters in about 250 pages.  I think a decent number of them will be monster variants, so they only have to list "Kobold abilities" once followed by 5 or so kobold types to save space.</blockquote>

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