D&D 5E Separating challenge and complexity in monster design

[Guest 6801328]

In discussions about 5e monsters, there are two major areas of criticism: most monsters are bags of hit points with few interesting actions, and there aren't enough variants that scale up low-level foes to challenge higher-level parties.

These two ideas are often conflated, or at least entangled with each other, but they're distinct things, and I think it's helpful to treat them as different dials if you want to be precise about the kind of changes you want.

If you were talking about me (which is possible because I've mentioned almost exactly these two things in the same post) I'm not conflating them at all: they are two separate things I'd like to see.

 

[GMMichael]

CR is affected by a relatively small handful of factors: AC, HP, attack bonus, DPR, and sometimes save DC. That's it. If all you want is to dial up the (calculable) challenge of a monster, those are the knobs you turn; nothing that doesn't impact those numbers will affect CR. That's one of the reasons class level and CR have such a counterintuitively wonky relationship; a 20th-level bard in studded leather, specializing in mostly buffs and enchantments, may have a lot of hit points, but she's probably not going to hit those other columns high enough to register as anything close to a CR 20 foe. It's weird, but that seems to be part of the design.

You might save yourself some heartache then if you come up with a better term for CR, since it sounds like a misnomer. People will throw the official term around, thinking they know what it means because they vaguely know the words involved, but have a very misguided, if not flat-out wrong, idea of what they're actually talking about. Like "democracy."

Champion Equivalent is pretty good, actually. But let's call a spade a spade. If the rating that we're looking at increases with AC, HP, AtkB, and DPR - well, those are the prime features of the MMO world's "tank," are they not? Just call it a Tank Rating, eliminate the confusion, and then go enjoy a good night's rest.

 

[ProgBard]

If you were talking about me (which is possible because I've mentioned almost exactly these two things in the same post) I'm not conflating them at all: they are two separate things I'd like to see.

Honestly, I wasn't talking about anyone in particular; this was a response to seeing a handful of threads about monster variants that hit many of the same notes, and this seemed like a potentially useful point to single out as part of the meta-conversation.

 

[Celebrim]

Interesting monsters at low levels are pretty easy. The party doesn't have a lot of resources themselves, and they spend a lot of time on the basics of team work. Simple but slightly weaker monsters than themselves, that must also rely on teamwork make for interesting and balanced challenges.

But as parties acquire more resources, monsters meant to challenge them need to develop complexity to remain challenges. One key reason for this is fog of war. At higher levels, if the party knows what it is facing and makes the perfect decisions when facing it, most everything goes down hard and fast. Having to experiment and figure out what the monster can do vastly increases the effective challenge involved (regardless of what the measure of challenge is).

As monsters begin to move into higher CR's, they need to develop responses for basic PC strategies. Most high CR monsters need either flight and a high movement rate, or a ranged attack. Otherwise they are too easy to kite or trap or just fly above and pepper with missile fire. Most need some sort of resistance to damage or other damage mitigation. If you don't have a lot of damage mitigation, you end up needing high burst damage which tends to be less fun and result in random deaths. Most need some sort of advantage in the action economy. Typically you want this to work in a way that it spreads the threat around, engaging multiple PC's without putting a beatdown on any one in specific. But if you don't have advantage in the action economy, you'll too easily lose to the PC party's typically huge advantage in actions per round and action stealing abilities. And you'll want at least some sort of attack that is always threatening - bypasses AC, save for half damage, magic missiles, etc. You want to be able to put consistent pressure on the party. And on top of that you need good perception abilities.

So think what that looks like - alternate attack modes, damage mitigation, action stealing or multiplying abilities, level invariant abilities, bonus actions, exceptional or supernatural perceptions. That's a lot of complexity just to get a minimally useful high CR monster.

And that's just the combat side of complexity. The most interesting sorts of monsters don't just suggest tactical scenarios, but have abilities that suggest their role in the universe as creatures of horror, intrigue, or living forces of nature. They have skills in combat affairs. They have spells or abilities that are useful out of combat. They have disguise capabilities, or evasion capabilities, or can make minions for themselves or perform other sorts of mischief. The more tools the PC's have, the more tools that an NPC needs to keep up.

 

[CapnZapp]

In discussions about 5e monsters, there are two major areas of criticism: most monsters are bags of hit points with few interesting actions, and there aren't enough variants that scale up low-level foes to challenge higher-level parties.

These two ideas are often conflated, or at least entangled with each other, but they're distinct things, and I think it's helpful to treat them as different dials if you want to be precise about the kind of changes you want.

CR is affected by a relatively small handful of factors: AC, HP, attack bonus, DPR, and sometimes save DC. That's it. If all you want is to dial up the (calculable) challenge of a monster, those are the knobs you turn; nothing that doesn't impact those numbers will affect CR. That's one of the reasons class level and CR have such a counterintuitively wonky relationship; a 20th-level bard in studded leather, specializing in mostly buffs and enchantments, may have a lot of hit points, but she's probably not going to hit those other columns high enough to register as anything close to a CR 20 foe. It's weird, but that seems to be part of the design. But the upshot is that in practical terms, the simplest way to up the volume on the Challenge dial is to take a minion monster, give it a pile of hit dice, slap some heavy armor on it, increase its Str, and let it multiattack with a high-damage weapon.

But what a lot of folks who are interested in monster redesign talk about wanting are monsters that do more interesting things than hit you over and over again. The Monster Features table on pages 280-281 of the DMG isn't a bad place to start for this, either for selecting powers to graft onto another monster, inspiration for inventing new powers, or a baseline for porting powers from previous editions into 5e mechanics. But note how relatively few of those features directly affect CR. Unless the feature effectively means a mechanical increase on one of the aspects of CR calculation, it probably won't nudge the CR rating - even if it's a power like Charm or Etherealness that in practical terms makes a creature tougher to fight.

The independence of these two factors means that DMs who want to homebrew modified monsters should be clear about their goals: Do you want a higher-CR monster, a more complex monster, or both? Many of us are going to answer "both," but it's helpful to keep in mind that this means doing more than one kind of thing to the statblock.

The good news is that the MM seems to be full of CRs that were kind of handwaved, so the extent to which you're bound to the strict CR calculator in the DMG is more or less up to you. The bad news is that that's the only number-crunching quantifier of CR available, so if you don't want to kinda handwave the process, you don't have another yardstick to check your math. You may or may not care about this. Some folks do, and it's unfortunate that this puts them in a bind.

But at any rate, let's be precise about objectives when we discuss monster mods. Making a tougher creature is one thing. Making a creature more interesting and fun to run is another. Making one that hits both targets is yet a third, and the tools that do one thing won't necessarily do the other in tandem.

What you call "more interesting" actually is what's needed to make "more challenging".

It's not two separate things.

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[ProgBard]

But as parties acquire more resources, monsters meant to challenge them need to develop complexity to remain challenges. One key reason for this is fog of war. At higher levels, if the party knows what it is facing and makes the perfect decisions when facing it, most everything goes down hard and fast. Having to experiment and figure out what the monster can do vastly increases the effective challenge involved (regardless of what the measure of challenge is).

This is a good point, and true, with the caveat that I think it applies mostly to solo monsters.

Consider that a horde of plain-vanilla goblins can overwhelm the resources of even a high-level party. By the same token, a by-the-numbers boosted-CR goblin champion in plate with 15 HD won't last long on its own, but a couple-three of them could give the PCs a pretty hard time even without adding any features more interesting than multiattack. Both of those fights might be boring slogs (or they might not, depending on how you ran 'em), but they'd be at the very least a mathematically-sufficient "challenge."

Part of the issue, I think, is that the term challenge itself is pretty slippery even in this limited context, and it's easy to use it in ways that its meanings sort of slide into each other - one more way in which it's necessary to be clear about your design goals in this matter.

 

[Jer]

What you call "more interesting" actually is what's needed to make "more challenging".

It's not two separate things.

Not really. You can make a monster "more challenging" by doing what ProgBard said - increasing its AC, increasing its hp, increasing its attack bonus, increasing its saves and increasing its DPR. This causes the monster to take more combat rounds to kill and the pain it puts onto the PCs and, if you crank those knobs high enough, increases the probability that one or more of the PCs will get killed. That's all it really takes to make a monster more challenging for the PCs to kill. You can absolutely make a monster "more challenging" without making it any more interesting at all - it likely leads to a boring fight for the DM as it means that the creature stays in the fight long after wearing out the interesting tactics that you can use with it, but it definitely will eat up PC resources - which is what the Challenge Rating basically means.

I would take it a step further and suggest that what makes a monster "more challenging" in this respect is anything that lengthens the number of rounds it stays in combat (both increasing AC, saves and hp do this, though so does regeneration, effects that let it blink, etc.) or anything that increases the damage it does to the PCs (both increasing its attack bonus and increasing its damage on a hit do this, but so do things like giving it an area attack or an effect that does ongoing damage). This can come from a straight boost in stats as above, but also from adding powers to the monster.

So if you're talking about making a monster "more interesting" by adding fiddly bits to its power list there are different results that can happen. One is that you can make a monster "more interesting" while keeping its challenge at the same level by adding fiddly bits that make it cooler without actually changing how long it stays in combat or how much damage it effectively deals per round. An evil witch who has a firebolt attack and an evil eye attack that are both ranged attacks that do 2d8 damage on a hit - with one being fire damage that does ongoing damage and the other being psychic damage that gives the victim an AC penalty - are going to a) add to the complexity of the creature at the table, b) make it seem more interesting to the players because what the heck is going on there and c) is pretty much the same challenge as an evil witch that only has the firebolt attack as far as the amount of damage its actually laying out.

OTOH - you can also make a monster "more interesting" by giving it powers that boost its ability to stay alive for more combat rounds or that increase the average damage its going to lay out over the party per round or both. Give that firebolt spewing witch flight instead of an evil eye and now she's going to avoid more attacks (on average) and so stay in the fight longer and do more total damage. Make that fire attack an area effect instead and now she's dealing out more damage in a single round (spread over more characters of course). Give her a resistance to fire damage and depending on your PCs tactics and capabilities she might live a few extra rounds as the wizard wastes a fireball on her. And so on.

They really are as ProgBard points out two different axes at play here. I think that most folks who want "more challenging" creatures are saying that they want things in the quadrant of "more challenging and more interesting" (which is exactly what ProgBard also says above) but it's worth being clear about. If you have a boring CR 3 creature that you want to make more interesting but keep it at CR 3 there are ways to do that that without increasing the challenge that the monster sets out for the PCs.

(I also think that the advice in the DMG about CRs is off on this - things like Etherealness absolutely increase the length of time that a monster can avoid damage and re-position itself tactically to do more damage than "normal" and so should increase its challenge. Of course a lot depends on what kind of monster it is - etherealness is going to be more beneficial to a sneaky monster than to a brute - but that just comes back to my thoughts on CR trying to carry too much information in one number).

 

[iserith]

I think something that gets overlooked in discussions about monsters' toughness or complexity (as it relates to how interesting or fun to run they are) is that an engaging challenge isn't about just the monster in my view. That's just one ingredient. We have to also think about objectives and environment, the latter of which can adjust the difficulty of the challenge higher or lower. So while it's easy to criticize a monster for being a "bag of hit points" with nothing interesting going for them, it leaves out some critical parts of building an engaging challenge as I see it. And notably, the guidelines on XP and CR do include notes on how this affects difficulty.

 

[Celebrim]

I think something that gets overlooked in discussions about monsters' toughness or complexity (as it relates to how interesting or fun to run they are) is that an engaging challenge isn't about just the monster in my view. That's just one ingredient. We have to also think about objectives and environment, the latter of which can adjust the difficulty of the challenge higher or lower. So while it's easy to criticize a monster for being a "bag of hit points" with nothing interesting going for them, it leaves out some critical parts of building an engaging challenge as I see it. And notably, the guidelines on XP and CR do include notes on how this affects difficulty.

Tactics are the intersection of weapons and terrain. Leaving terrain out of the environment by having all combat occur in a de facto arena with a flat floor and not obstacles, and an opponent that doesn't in any way interface with the terrain naturally simplifies the encounter. Conversely, if the opponent can interface with the terrain without losing actions or otherwise incurring disadvantage, and you cannot, this vastly increases the difficulty of the encounter.

However, again, this tends to favor complexity and particularly the sort of complexity that doesn't seem to be immediately focused on combat ability. Can a monster balance without paying a penalty? Can it climb particularly well? How far can the monster leap? Does it have movement modes that the party might not have? Does it lack environmental dependencies that the party may have? Does it have modes of perception that the party might lack? All of these effect tactics.

And all of those things allow a monster to punch above its weight as the party level increases without upping hard stats like AC, HD, etc. provided you move the monster into an environment it is perfectly suited for (and the party is not).

 

[Celebrim]

One is that you can make a monster "more interesting" while keeping its challenge at the same level by adding fiddly bits that make it cooler without actually changing how long it stays in combat or how much damage it effectively deals per round. An evil witch who has a firebolt attack and an evil eye attack that are both ranged attacks that do 2d8 damage on a hit - with one being fire damage that does ongoing damage and the other being psychic damage that gives the victim an AC penalty - are going to a) add to the complexity of the creature at the table, b) make it seem more interesting to the players because what the heck is going on there and c) is pretty much the same challenge as an evil witch that only has the firebolt attack as far as the amount of damage its actually laying out.

It would appear we need a better defined definition of 'challenge'. For example, there is one way in which the evil eye attack is vastly more challenging than the firebolt attack - it's stealthy. If your are playing a more simulationist sort of game, then the details and fluff matter. The witch can use her evil eye attack without making noise or light, and without a line of fire connecting her to the target and making her the clear source of the attack. Other questions are raised. Does the witch need to make eye contact? If she does, then blindfolding yourself makes you immune to the attack (it becomes a 'gaze' attack, with appropriate conditions thereof). If she does not, then a party might find themselves suddenly subject to psychic damage from an unknown source as they investigate a room of paintings (the witch having cleverly hid herself in secret panel behind one of the paintings, and is viewing them throw only a tiny aperture - horror movie style. This later case might be a vastly more interesting encounter than a witch shooting firebolts at the party in an 30x40 room with no terrain, and it allows the witch to punch above her weight because in the situation the real challenge is not overcoming the witch's AC and eroding her hit points. The real challenge is figuring out what the heck is going on. The witch might only go done in a moment to the party she is harassing, but she remains a challenge - all because we added some 'meaningless' fluff about an evil eye attack.

Moreover, the witch who also gained the evil eye attack may now silently murder victims without any evidence of her crime. This suggests the witch in the role of villain in a story of intrigue, where the real challenge again is not stick a sword in the villain, but determining exactly who the real villain is. Again, this makes the witch more 'interesting', even though the detail added seems 'fiddly'. This is why the details matter. Suddenly it's interesting if 'witches' are proficient in Bluff, Insight, and so forth. It matters if the witch has spell powers that aid perception or obfuscation. It matters because initially you might be interacting with the witch in a non-combat role and the witches non-combat abilities will be the biggest determinate in how that activity goes.

OTOH - you can also make a monster "more interesting" by giving it powers that boost its ability to stay alive for more combat rounds or that increase the average damage its going to lay out over the party per round or both. Give that firebolt spewing witch flight instead of an evil eye and now she's going to avoid more attacks (on average) and so stay in the fight longer and do more total damage.

As I've tried to show, although flight is an example of complexity in that it is a mode of movement that the party may lack and so opens up tactics for the witch, that's not necessarily the case. The witch with the evil eye attack using peepholes in the walls of the haunted house might actually stay 'in the fight' longer and do more total damage, simply because the evil eye doesn't illuminate the darkness and point an arrow to her saying, "Witch this way."