NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voss" data-source="post: 4106479" data-attributes="member: 57593">Well, a few thoughts.  One, the team abilities are really built into the new monsters, if the kobolds are any example.   Between shifty and the mob attack on so many of them, I can't see running them without a large degree of teamwork and cooperation among the monsters.  Same with the hobgoblins.On the other side, the healing surges, and the... player friendly death rules give you a fair amount of 'stretch' in how hard you can hit the party.  As long as you don't load up the XP values too high, its seems like the encounter system shouldn't produce TPKs without a serious run of bad luck.  And then even if does, most of the party won't be quite dead and can be captured.  Whether thats good or bad on its own depends on the situation, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't have to dumb down the monsters to give the PCs a fighting chance AND a reasonable challenge.  On the other hand, some of your questions are quite specific.If the monster is built right, his abilities should reflect his Int and his combat options.A raging dumb hellbeast should run up and attack, and his abilities should help him run up and attack, but not any more than that.Yep.  Well, maybe not perfectly.  But they would reasonably know each others fighting style unless they've just met.  Uh, no?  At least not without special abilities of some sort.  Dumbing them down is bad, but so is giving them god level omniscience. Really depends on the monster.  A summoned devil under the command of a pit fiend?  Sure.  A skeleton commanded by a cleric?  Yep.  A self-aware and free willed entity?  Probably not, barring unusual circumstances. Actively?  No.  But the kobolds are clever enough to take advantage of flanking opportunities that come up, though the rats wouldn't be, necessarily.  In this case, the rats should probably be attacking the kobolds too, by the way, and inadvertently helping the PCs at times, depending on how rabid rats would act, and not what benefits the kobolds.</blockquote>

Verification