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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7012972" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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