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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 5132100" data-attributes="member: 15470">Hmm; I wasn't saying it wouldn't be, full stop - I was saying that I'm not sure that it would be worth it. I certainly don't want to discourage TS from going down the path. I'd started thinking of a similar path from the observation that, for a lot of Monster Manual monsters, if I build them exactly as statted, they come up with different hit points and defenses. I've been asking myself, "Why is that?"There's three possible answers:1. The game designers weren't using automated tools, and different designers "eyeballed" monsters of the same role and level differently.2. The game designers used automated tools, and thereafter carefully adjusted the monsters based on playtesting. 3. The game designers didn't have a good grip on the math. The work TS is doing would be aimed at 1 and 3 - but what if the discrepancies are built in from 2? .. And the fact that player character power creep invariably leads to monster power creep. I guess what I'm saying is, in the end, its going to come down to the DM's ability to gauge the difficulty of a monster and its appropriateness to the class, or to adjust same via playtesting ... ... So I'm not sure that the value created via the standardization concept is worth the effort it will take TS or somebody to complete it. Perhaps the value is much higher for less-experienced DM's: certainly the first time I went to create a 4e monster, I found the instructions woefully inadequate for figuring out if my monster was "balanced", etc .. but once I had my feet wet, it came pretty naturally and my findings were that variations in monster difficulty within a given level/role simply added "flavor" to fighting them. As in your quote - "stirges suck" - in older versions, especially, they were a pretty low level creature (hit points, defenses, etc) with a "Monopoly effect" such that once they got the upper hand in a fight, they would be runaway winners. Once a player knew that, it added a lot of tension to fighting them: you needed to keep them from tipping past the balance point ... and that's what made them "feel" more "dangerous" than their actual level. The same thing applies here: DPR, HP, defenses, etc, don't need to be the same for every creature of the same role and same level: a creature can be harder to kill but less likely to injure you, or deal a boatload of damage while going down easily, or do minimal damage but apply debilitating status effects ... all viable builds for a monster of the same role and level ...... and I'm just not sure how you'd "standardize" that, to be honest.</blockquote>

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