Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 2337360" data-attributes="member: 1465">It can be pretty tough to play a monster well if it has many abilities. Players should understand that they have much more time to focus on their PC (even if they play more at once) than a DM to consider every monsters options.As a DM, I confess that I very often "downplay" monsters. It happens that I forget an ability which the monster should have known it was a must to use in a circumstance (but to be honest, I forget the same with my PCs as well...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> I don't have guidelines, but you could just write down on a little square of cardboard a short list of KEY actions for the monster, but not all of the possibilities. For instance, in the case of the Salamander the list could be:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Longspear 3 attacks + tail slap (grab)*</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Constrict if grappling</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fireball</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Wall of fire</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Summon fire elemental</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Dispel magic (if targetted by a spell)</li> </ul>*can power-attack and cleaveSome obvious options (e.g. flee if seriously damaged) don't need to be on the list to be remembered. Other attacks of the salamander can just be forgotten (Burning Hands, Flame Sphere).Then you could decide to put yourself numbers on the list items. A Salamander may like to fireball until someone gets close, another may start with the summon.You may also remove some options from the list just because. E.g. just remove the Wall of Fire if the party isn't very big, as it's almost always best to use a Fireball in that case.</blockquote>

Verification