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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6116722" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's possible.  In theory at least though, the 3.5 monster building system was intended to produce reliable results and to encourage creativity.  It took a leap of imagination for me to realize in 1e that I could create a 18HD manticore.  In 3e, not only is that 'obvious', but its also obvious what happens when you make the manticore the size of an elephant.  And it is meaningful to change the creatures size in that way, in a way that it wasn't necessarily in 1e.   What this means is that 3e gives the DM a construction kit, should he choose to use it, that has at its end result (ideally, but of course in practice never perfectly) a stat block that can be judged in terms of challenge and reward, and from which it is possible to answer any mechanical question about the monster, and which is meaningfully different from other similar monsters.What is maybe less obvious is that 1e also had this sort of construction kit approach, but since the toolkit was much less robust you didn't achieve the same results.  In 1e, the designer basically only chose a HD, and selected some attack forms, and you were done.  You also could judge this creation in terms of challenge and reward, albiet with more subjectiveness, but notably mechanical questions about the monster were left open.  What was the chance of a cat 'hiding in shadows'?  How high could it jump?  These questions can be left open because they don't come up often, but if our model is the 1e model, if they do come up we then have to engage in a further step of subcreation - figuring out what the reasonable answer is for this monster in a way that is appropriate for its challenge and color.Taking that one further, you can do the same thing in 3e.  You can just select a HD, monster type, a few attacks and eyeball some modifiers and be done.  It's always possible to retroactively justify all of that using the tool kit if it comes up because there are so many fudge factors built into the system.   And like 1e, you can fill in the details about jumping and hiding and so forth if and when they come up.   The thing about 3e is that it simply provides the framework for doing all the work before hand without leaving open questions.  In otherwords, it attempts to be comprehensive.  And that is I think on the whole a good thing, but it can be and often was misused.Well, what do you mean by that?  Do you mean, "What is the chance that this monster can forge a copy of a famous painter's work?"   That is strictly speaking part of the monsters 'stats'.  It's just a stat that for most monsters is irrelevant and for many can be assumed to be zero.  A comprehensive framework lets you answer those questions.  I think it more likely that what you really mean is, "I need just the stats that are likely to come up in play, where there is a 95% chance that the only thing I need to know about the monster is how it performs in a straight up combat."I'm not sure if I agree with that completely, but I do agree that maybe what we need is more than one toolkit.  We need a toolkit like 3e provides, but we also need a more generic toolkit for making more generic enemies on the fly the way that 4e had at its core generic 'lurkers', 'soldiers', and the like.  These generic enemies would require fleshing out to make them interesting, but it should be hard to have a list of generic abilities to pick from.<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?272495-Help-me-stat-out-Tharizdun" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?272495-Help-me-stat-out-Tharizdun</a>Sadly the pretty graphically rich stat block that someone worked up from the rough ideas no longer appears in the thread.I think it is possible to obtain that result.  It's also possible that an NPC built with PC class abilities will make for an epic fight.  (I've done it.)  However, even in 3e, building a monster with PC classes was just one separate possibility in the tool kit.   You could take a manticore and add 5 levels of fighter to it, or you could just up its HD by 5.  Or you could add a template.  Or you could tweak it at a more basic level, shifting attributes around or granting it unique abilities.For me, the ideal solution to the 3e toolkit would have been electronic.  So far as I know, a good one never came out, at least not one with the features I wanted.  And now that I'm thinking about creating the 'monster manual' of my game, I may just have to do that.   For 5e, I'd like to see a 'basic' and 'advanced' monster builder.  The advanced one would work a lot like 3e, and the basic one would work a lot like 4e.  The problem with the 4e one is that it wasn't compatible with the 3e one.  Presumably, a 5e system could bring the two into a large degree of harmony.  Not that I'm interested in 5e.  At this point, if I wanted a 'basic' monster builder, I'd write my own.</blockquote>

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