Representing Wardens as Monsters

[GLewisHargrave]

In my campaign, I've been trying to use humanoid monsters for the most part, and part of this, is manipulating character abilities more appropriate for monsters. One I've tried is the warden, and I actually had a chance to try it out last night. It seemed to work pretty well.

I created a half-orc soldier as a regular monster. I gave him a basic attack to mark and an ability like thorn strike to pull. To really give him the warden flavor, I also gave him a form power similar to Killer's Laughter form. This would last the entire battle and give him the defense bonuses, the combat advantage advantage, and an encounter attack. To balance this, I made it a recharge and start the battle uncharged.

It worked even better because in the second battle I used these monsters, the PCs were stuck behind a wall of wolves. As they tried to push through these foes, the half-orcs had a chance to charge this ability, and when they had charged it, the wolves could trip up their opponents easily.

 

[malcolm_n]

Pretty cool. Would you maybe post a stat-block for your creation? I'd be interested to see these in action, myself.

That said, using the rules in the DMG (and maybe the DM2? I don't have it, so I'm not sure), you would pretty much create the creature like you did, and adding the class to it makes it elite. It should usually get the warden marking each round, the defenses and the class feature powers. Since monsters don't usually have "second wind" I'd turn it's class feature to happen when it is first bloodied.

The end result would probably be a bit stronger than what you made, but would fall in line with the book creation methods for the class, not that it's required to do so.