FourthBear
First Post
It seems to be there will be several ways you can customize monsters in 4e. Note that I'm not using hypothetical language below because it makes for clumsy writing. I don't have any special knowledge of the actual system.
1) The DM uses the guidelines in the DMG or MM and adjusts the numbers and special abilities as seen fit. The guidelines recommend the range of values for a type of monster (e.g. 9th level elite bruiser) and its recommended that you fiddle with them within that range. There will be a section that gives guidance on what kind of special abilities (movement, attacks, defenses and miscellaneous) are appropriate for an opponent of that level. There will be discussions on what kind of power builds are problematic. The advantages are obvious: speed of design and no built-in restrictions that cause the final result to drift away from the DM's concept. It also will presumably grant more time deciding on the more memorable special abilities and less time calculating things like skill points and making sure you've got the exact right number of feats.
2) The DM uses the Monster Manual examples as a starting point and adds class levels to the monster. This should be possible as it is in 3e, assuming that class levels are primarily additive in nature. The issues with this are manifold: the class levels in the PH advance statistics in many ways beyond class abilities, so you will be adding hit dice, attack bonuses, skills, feats, talents and many other features. It also requires a fair amount of work, about the same as in 3e. This will also result in monsters with high starting base levels to be problematic to add class levels to, since they already have large built in values to be added to. It probably won't be *hard* to add 10 levels of cleric onto a 10th level Giant, but you're going to get a result that won't be anywhere near 10th level in challenge.
3) The DM uses the Monster Manual and works to "trade in" monster levels for class levels. The process would involve recalculating all of the appropriate stats for the monster with some lower level (consulting the guideline tables). So you might decide to recalculate the 10th level giant as a 1st level opponent. Then you go about the process in step 2 of adding class levels as appropriate. So you would end up roughly with a 1st level giant/10th level cleric. This will be even more effort than option 2 (it would be even more so if you tried the same thing in 3e by substracting hit dice and all of the abilities related to those hit dice).
4) If the monster has the right type and level of ability, you can simply swap it one for one with another option. So if a monster has an appropriate feat, you could trade it in for a Cleric trading feat. However, this depends on that monster having as many things to trade as you want to add, which is probably unlikely if you want to add full class abilities.
In the end, I suspect that option 1 is still the best option. The difficulty is that unless we restrict hit dice (for previous editions) or monster levels (in 4e) to closely match the levels in the PC generation process (which will greatly complilcate the creation of all future monsters), trading out levels is unlikely to do a good job of resulting a good final result. For myself, the question is a pragmatic one: how much result do I get for how much effort. If we look at the above methods, I feel reasonably confident that for most monster builds, the difference in play between using option 1 and the other options will be small. And, frankly, I think most of those differences will be detrimental to the final result (unneeded options bloating the stat block, accidental synergies leading to numbers that are outside the reasonable challenge range and such).
1) The DM uses the guidelines in the DMG or MM and adjusts the numbers and special abilities as seen fit. The guidelines recommend the range of values for a type of monster (e.g. 9th level elite bruiser) and its recommended that you fiddle with them within that range. There will be a section that gives guidance on what kind of special abilities (movement, attacks, defenses and miscellaneous) are appropriate for an opponent of that level. There will be discussions on what kind of power builds are problematic. The advantages are obvious: speed of design and no built-in restrictions that cause the final result to drift away from the DM's concept. It also will presumably grant more time deciding on the more memorable special abilities and less time calculating things like skill points and making sure you've got the exact right number of feats.
2) The DM uses the Monster Manual examples as a starting point and adds class levels to the monster. This should be possible as it is in 3e, assuming that class levels are primarily additive in nature. The issues with this are manifold: the class levels in the PH advance statistics in many ways beyond class abilities, so you will be adding hit dice, attack bonuses, skills, feats, talents and many other features. It also requires a fair amount of work, about the same as in 3e. This will also result in monsters with high starting base levels to be problematic to add class levels to, since they already have large built in values to be added to. It probably won't be *hard* to add 10 levels of cleric onto a 10th level Giant, but you're going to get a result that won't be anywhere near 10th level in challenge.
3) The DM uses the Monster Manual and works to "trade in" monster levels for class levels. The process would involve recalculating all of the appropriate stats for the monster with some lower level (consulting the guideline tables). So you might decide to recalculate the 10th level giant as a 1st level opponent. Then you go about the process in step 2 of adding class levels as appropriate. So you would end up roughly with a 1st level giant/10th level cleric. This will be even more effort than option 2 (it would be even more so if you tried the same thing in 3e by substracting hit dice and all of the abilities related to those hit dice).
4) If the monster has the right type and level of ability, you can simply swap it one for one with another option. So if a monster has an appropriate feat, you could trade it in for a Cleric trading feat. However, this depends on that monster having as many things to trade as you want to add, which is probably unlikely if you want to add full class abilities.
In the end, I suspect that option 1 is still the best option. The difficulty is that unless we restrict hit dice (for previous editions) or monster levels (in 4e) to closely match the levels in the PC generation process (which will greatly complilcate the creation of all future monsters), trading out levels is unlikely to do a good job of resulting a good final result. For myself, the question is a pragmatic one: how much result do I get for how much effort. If we look at the above methods, I feel reasonably confident that for most monster builds, the difference in play between using option 1 and the other options will be small. And, frankly, I think most of those differences will be detrimental to the final result (unneeded options bloating the stat block, accidental synergies leading to numbers that are outside the reasonable challenge range and such).
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