D&D 5E The Glass Cannon or the Bag of Hit Points

[Celebrim]

I realized that earlier in this thread I'd promised an example of how to adapt monsters to be more suitable for facing high(er) level foes, using a real example from my campaign, and then I'd failed to follow up on that.

The real example is of an Akylosaurus. I'm using stats roughly equivalent to what is in the PRD, but the creature has additional extraordinary abilities that are designed specifically to address problems a creature of the supposed challenge rating might have in the action. Those abilities are:

Defensive Spikes (Ex):The edges of the Ankylosaurus’s body are lined with long bone spikes as thick as a man’s leg and as long as a sword. Likewise bone horns protect the ankylosaurus’s head. Whenever the ankylosaurus is subject to melee attack from an adjacent foe that misses, that melee attack draw’s an AoO. If the AoO hits, the anylosaurus’s spike inflicts 1d8+5 damage.

Protective Carapace (Ex): The majority of the ankylosaurus’s body is covered with a very hard and thick protective bone shell. The ankylosaurus gets a +4 circumstance bonus on Fort and Reflex saves against any energy spell with an area of effect, and acts in these circumstances as if it had evasion. Further, the Ankylosaurus gets an additional +4 deflection bonus to AC against missile attacks made from 15 or more feet away.

Tail Strike (Ex): The ankylosaurus's tail can deliver a powerful, stunning blow. A creature struck by this attack must make a DC 18 Fortitude save or be dazed for 1 round. If the strike is a critical hit and the target fails its save, it is instead stunned for 1d4 rounds. The save DC is Strength-based. Whenever the tail strike stuns a target, the ankylosaurus may follow up by making an additional attack against a second target, as if using the Cleave feat.

Trample (Ex): A ankylosaurus can choose to overrun any creature smaller than itself with a contested check. If successful, it does 2d8+8 damage and knocks the target prone. With a DC 18 reflex save, the target takes half damage and is not knocked prone. The target of the overrun may attempt an AoO, however if they do so they forgo a saving throw to resist the attack.

Defensive Spikes allow it to make an additional attack in response to an attempt to beat it down. Protective Carapace gives it significant resistance to typical ranged attacks that it can't respond to. Tail Strike is pretty much like the Paizo which correctly gives action stealing debuffs to its foes, but the addition of the 'follow up' attack allows it to deal more effectively with being outnumbered. Finally, the trample ability lets its spread out its attacks while again potentially stealing actions from its foes. As a brute foe with high strength, it has the ability to deal with high AC and thus maintain significant threat even against PC of higher level, particularly when matching them in numbers.

While the monster in question is using 3e rules, my suspicion is that in 5e similar sorts of enhancement make for a more interesting fight compared to, "Monster makes 1 attack; the party unloads full attacks; Repeat."

The main weakness of this creature is against an all flying party, which is capable of simply flying above the creature and wearing it down with attacks it can't respond to. But at CR 8, most parties it face won't yet have full flight and that's certainly true of 5e, and it's Protective Carapace ensures that many ranged attacks will fail, putting pressure on the part of the party still grounded. As a DM, you can control against this sort of win button by having the encounter have a roof of some sort, either a dense jungle canopy or else an actual cave or dungeon roof. But if this monster was to have much higher CR, you'd have to give it wings or a ranged attack in some fashion. This creature is an ideal candidate for something like a Half-Dragon template to fix its weak points if you intend to use it against high level parties.

The other weakness is it's low will save makes it vulnerable to will based save or suck. Some of this weakness can be addressed by judicious rearrangement of the feats - Iron Will rather than the largely unnecessary Great Fortitude, for example. An alternative or complementary approach is keeping Dinosaurs in the 'beast' category of 3.0 rather than making them have the more mentally vulnerable 'animal' category. In my own game, I've done this explaining it in game by the fact that dinosaurs are not natural animals, but the product of an ancient magical breeding program to produce more powerful war beasts, an explanation I find more logical than the real world origin given the relatively short histories of most fantasy worlds.

As a side note, you might notice the lower save DCs if you compare the creature to the PRD. This is the side effect of another house rule that tends to increase the odds of making a saving across the board in my game. In my game, spell level doesn't increase DC and most HD doesn't increase the save DC of a monster's abilities. The only things that really matter are ability scores and feats. This tends to control 'save or suck' in both directions, and is another reason why in my game the fairly low Will save isn't absolutely crippling against an equivalent level party of PCs. 5e, with its bounded accuracy, works in a fairly similar way, in addition to largely gimping save or suck across the board, so the 5e equivalent monster has the same sort of protection built in.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The main weakness of this creature is against an all flying party, which is capable of simply flying above the creature and wearing it down with attacks it can't respond to. But at CR 8, most parties it face won't yet have full flight and that's certainly true of 5e, and it's Protective Carapace ensures that many ranged attacks will fail, putting pressure on the part of the party still grounded. As a DM, you can control against this sort of win button by having the encounter have a roof of some sort, either a dense jungle canopy or else an actual cave or dungeon roof. But if this monster was to have much higher CR, you'd have to give it wings or a ranged attack in some fashion. This creature is an ideal candidate for something like a Half-Dragon template to fix its weak points if you intend to use it against high level parties.

TLDR; in 5E, mobility is built in from low levels. You don't have to be a high-level all-flying party to trivialize this encounter.

1.) It doesn't need to be an all-flying party. One flying party member is sufficient. The other PCs can just wait out of range until the thing is dead. Sure, it will take a little bit longer in game time than if it weren't resistant, but it's still toast. I wouldn't even bother playing this out unless I were trying to make the players nervous, I'd just say, "Okay, Oorr the Aarakocra solves the problem. Mark 20 arrows off your inventory and take 5000 XP. Inside the stomach of the dead Ankyllosaurus you find..."

(Oorr is weak in some situations, but this time he gets to feel like a rock star. If I wanted to spend more time on the fight and make him nervous about the outcome, it would have a cave or something to retreat into for total cover, or the option of shooting spikes out of its tail like a manticore. Also, I might consider having Oorr roll twenty attacks, because players like rolling dice and knowing how tough the thing really was. My players last session spent five or ten minutes of real time and two hours of game time attacking a gemstone door with 1200 rounds' worth of attacks and damaged it significantly, not quite enough to break it down, before something chased them away. I think they had more fun with that precise calculation based on their abilities than they would have if I'd just guesstimated "okay, after two hours it falls down." It certainly made the point to them that directly tunnelling through this particular dungeon, while physically possible, was also unfeasible unless they find better tools.)

2.) It doesn't need to be a flying party at all. Flying is just one way to keep out of reach for long enough to kill it with ranged weapons. In many situations, simply having the party mounted on horses will suffice. If they're on foot due to an inaccessible/bad location, Cunning Action, Expeditious Retreat, Mobile, and/or Longstrider can either keep the beast at range indefinitely or at least slow its closing rate down enough that it can't close before it dies. At least in this case though you can set things up so that it is driving the party towards a bad location like a sinkhole, a bulette's hunting territory, a cliff edge, or another ankyllosaurus. Even if it's not driving them towards any such thing, you can describe the scene in such a way that the players are afraid it might be doing so, which is almost as good.

 

[Celebrim]

TLDR; in 5E, mobility is built in from low levels. You don't have to be a high-level all-flying party to trivialize this encounter.

Sure, and a properly built 1e/3e party of 1st level characters can probably kite an Ankylosaurus successfully on horseback as well, particularly if the encounter occurs in open terrain. But in my experience, that degree of mobility is rare and requires an agreement to coordinate strategies by the players involved in the same way a stealth based party requires.

However, kiting a foe on the ground in 3e is extremely difficult, because even if you are capable of double moving and making a ranged attack faster than the monster can charge, the Aklyosaurus I've described has a counter - take the run action, overrun, and use the Trample extraordinary ability. This means you need to be able to move 120' and attack to avoid overrun while still threatening the foe. Not many characters can do that. Even without the Trample ability I've written here, taking the run action to overrun a foe still allows a large sized creature to build an area of threat around a foe that prevents them from moving without taking an AoO.

I'm not that familiar with 5e, but if anyone is on the ground I would presume similar strategies are available that allow you to move more than your usual rate and still attack. If not and kiting is really as simple as you claim, this is an even bigger blindness to the capabilities of PC's than is present in 3e and as a 5e DM you should move to correct the oversight.

If the whole party isn't flying, presumably the monster can still give chase successfully. So long as the monster can threaten even 1 PC, he threatens the whole party. Indeed, since the isolated PC now is subject to all the punishment, the threat may go up if everyone decides to evade other than the one dwarf fighter in heavy armor that can't fly. In general, kiting a foe is only viable if everyone can. Otherwise, it's a only strategy that glass cannons can use to stay off the front lines. Yes, a flying party member maybe can solo non-flying creatures. But just as a stealth based character can evade them, this doesn't help much unless everyone can. It's viable for a party to go all in on a complimentary strategy, but in my experience its rare and if the game is balanced and there is no one best strategy for every foe presumably it works out in the long run.

In any event, even if you are correct in your assessment, it doesn't change my overall thesis, which is that neither the 'big bag of hit points' nor the 'glass cannon' strategy is sufficient if you want to challenge high level PC's successfully and that too many monsters of every edition are poorly designed for providing a challenge given the capabilities available to PC's.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

However, kiting a foe on the ground in 3e is extremely difficult, because even if you are capable of double moving and making a ranged attack faster than the monster can charge, the Aklyosaurus I've described has a counter - take the run action, overrun, and use the Trample extraordinary ability. This means you need to be able to move 120' and attack to avoid overrun while still threatening the foe. Not many characters can do that. Even without the Trample ability I've written here, taking the run action to overrun a foe still allows a large sized creature to build an area of threat around a foe that prevents them from moving without taking an AoO.

I'm not familiar with 3E, but I'm a bit confused why a monster with a 30' move requires 120' of move-attack in order to avoid trampling. If I ported your ankyllosaurus to 5E in a straightforward way, it sounds like it would be a monster which has 30' movement but can also Dash for an extra 30' as an action (like all monsters) and then trample for its bonus action. Since a 60 gp riding horse allows PCs to move 120' in a round (see Controlling a Mount on PHB 198), even a 1st level PC can stay out of range of the ankyllosaurus while making regular attacks on it via longbow or cantrip. This would be true even if you doubled the thing's movement rate to 60' (thus letting it threaten a full 120' per your paragraph above).

I'm not that familiar with 5e, but if anyone is on the ground I would presume similar strategies are available that allow you to move more than your usual rate and still attack. If not and kiting is really as simple as you claim, this is an even bigger blindness to the capabilities of PC's than is present in 3e and as a 5e DM you should move to correct the oversight.

Yes, kiting really is that simple in 5E. I'm not sure why it's not more popular. I think players tend to find it boring for some reason, or maybe the game is just so easy that it doesn't seem necessary. Or maybe it's an artifact of playing with combat grids.

I don't know that I'd want to correct the oversight, as a DM, because there are cool consequences for the gameworld. It explains why human beings are still alive as a species, for example: because they have longbows and all those trolls/bulettes/owlbears out there do not. But humans cannot effectively venture into constrained spaces like dungeons where longbows do not work, or the trolls/bulettes/owlbears will kill them. So the monsters have their space and the humans have theirs, and it's a pretty stable equilibrium except for the few dangerous idiots who like to spelunk dungeons and bring back treasure at the risk of their lives.

If the whole party isn't flying, presumably the monster can still give chase successfully. So long as the monster can threaten even 1 PC, he threatens the whole party. Indeed, since the isolated PC now is subject to all the punishment, the threat may go up if everyone decides to evade other than the one dwarf fighter in heavy armor that can't fly. In general, kiting a foe is only viable if everyone can. Otherwise, it's a only strategy that glass cannons can use to stay off the front lines.

Kiting consists of holding the range open while attacking. PCs who cannot kite can still Dash. The only time kiting makes certain PCs vulnerable is when the PCs are actually slower than the monsters, so they wind up taking opportunity attacks every round as they try to flee. This is one reason I never play dwarves, gnomes or halflings--because they can't run away! (Even that's not really true if you have someone who can cast Longstrider to boost your movement to 35' instead of 25', but it still makes me uncomfortable to be utterly reliant on a spell for strategic retreat capability. And you'd still get munched by anything with 40' movement, instead of keeping pace.) But in the general case, PCs who are faster than the monsters can kite the monsters to death while PCs who are as fast as the monsters Dash away as quickly as the monsters Dash towards them.

In any event, even if you are correct in your assessment, it doesn't change my overall thesis, which is that neither the 'big bag of hit points' nor the 'glass cannon' strategy is sufficient if you want to challenge high level PC's successfully and that too many monsters of every edition are poorly designed for providing a challenge given the capabilities available to PC's.

Agreed there. Apologies for the tangent, but I found your post interesting and wanted to respond.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm not familiar with 3E, but I'm a bit confused why a monster with a 30' move requires 120' of move-attack in order to avoid trampling.

Because in 3e, a monster has 4 movement options - a normal move followed by an attack, double move with no attack, a double move in a straight line followed by an attack (a charge), and a x4 move in a straight line with no attack (a run). However, it is legal to use the overrun maneuver during a run action, and the trample ability in the description specifically occurs during an overrun.

You are correct that kiting on horseback is a very powerful strategy that can yield absolute advantage if you can pull it off. Being twice as fast as something with care leaves you basically immune to attack even in 3e. However, it's a strategy that requires a huge amount of patience and not an insignificant amount of room (plus Ride skill and lots of ammo and probably some feats). It would appear kiting generally is more potent in 5e because creatures can't use a Run action to catch up, and otherwise have fewer movement and combat maneuver options (exactly which are missing I'm not quite clear) meaning that many monsters are easily kited even without a mount.

As for why it is worth correcting, one reason is kiting can be used against the PC's, which means that the range of viable PC's is actually reduced IMO. There has always been a tendency for D&D to favor ranged weapons, and this would appear to make that tendency worse. Another reason is that it's just rather uninteresting, as it again reduces the range of viable foes for higher level characters and further constrains encounter design.

It explains why human beings are still alive as a species, for example

Whereas, the ability to become defacto superheroes/demigods, the ability to wield awesome magic, the patronage of the gods, and the general formidability of human armies is in sufficient?

But in the general case, PCs who are faster than the monsters can kite the monsters to death while PCs who are as fast as the monsters Dash away as quickly as the monsters Dash towards them.

It would appear there are no charge actions in 5e?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Responding out of order:

It would appear there are no charge actions in 5e?

There's a Charger feat, but it doesn't work the way you've described 3E as working. It allows you to Dash at full speed (i.e. double speed, not quadruple) and still make a single attack. There aren't any RAW ways of running faster than double speed. The really ironic thing is that 5E monster design considers mobility to be a "free" gimme--a monster with 10' move and the same monster with 100' move have exactly the same CR. You gain no extra XP for defeating the superfast one even though doing so is much more difficult.

Coming from AD&D I find this somewhat disturbing but so far I've just lived with it instead of inventing a system for sprinting via Strength checks.

It would appear kiting generally is more potent in 5e because creatures can't use a Run action to catch up, and otherwise have fewer movement and combat maneuver options (exactly which are missing I'm not quite clear) meaning that many monsters are easily kited even without a mount.

Yes. It's a glaring weakness of the 5E MM, although as I mentioned above you could crank up the speeds on MM monsters by 10x across the board, and it would still be completely RAW legal with no CR adjustments required. I've considered doing so for dragons at least, just because the idea of a dragon which flies at a top speed of 18 mph boggles my mind. 5E monsters are slooooow. Again, I haven't actually done anything about it yet.

As for why it is worth correcting, one reason is kiting can be used against the PC's, which means that the range of viable PC's is actually reduced IMO. There has always been a tendency for D&D to favor ranged weapons, and this would appear to make that tendency worse. Another reason is that it's just rather uninteresting, as it again reduces the range of viable foes for higher level characters and further constrains encounter design.

Meh. I don't agree. My players love melee for some reason and hardly ever kite the whole party, even though I know they know how (I gave them allosaur cavalry mounts early on the campaign and they kited some Blue Slaads to death). Even though I completely ignore DMG encounter building guidelines, and throw humongous quadruple-Deadly encounters at them as often as I throw them Easy encounters like a pair of hobgoblins on horses, the PCs hardly ever die unless they've split off from the party. It therefore doesn't look to me like the range of "viable" builds has been reduced at all.

Let me put it this way: if you can kite the enemy, it really ceases to matter if your PC is "optimized" for the situation or not. A wizard using a longbow without proficiency and a barbarian chucking javelins from long range will both kill that ankyllosaur from horseback if it occurs to them to do so. This suits me fine since I'm more interested in supporting a wide range of potential player choices than PC builds.

And yes, it does reduce the range of viable foes for high- or low-level PCs, but again that doesn't strike me as a problem because it doesn't reduce the range of interesting situations a PC can find himself in. Aesthetically I'm just fine with e.g. beholders being terrifying indoors and easy meat on the wide-open grasslands. And I'm just fine with the idea that being ambushed by Phase Spiders in a dark forest is a life-threatening situations, but burning the forest to the ground over a period of days or weeks while Mongol horse archers cover you from a distance is perfectly safe. I want to support intelligent strategy on the part of my PCs/players. I'm happy to kill them with overpowered encounters until they start fighting smarter, and my biggest surprise to this point has been that they're not that easy to kill even when the players are just goofing around.

Whereas, the ability to become defacto superheroes/demigods, the ability to wield awesome magic, the patronage of the gods, and the general formidability of human armies is in sufficient?

Yeah, no, not really. My campaign has no actual gods (they destroy dramatic tension) or very many high-level friendly NPCs except for the one who died in a military disaster right as the campaign started (same reason), and the kingdom's army of longbow troops was destroyed at the same time the NPC except for a few hundred that the PCs managed to rally and save. Even that army wouldn't have been sufficient to keep the humans alive the kingdom if ranged weaponry weren't so powerful in 5E. Consider how easy it would be for a single vampire to create an army of 600 vampire spawns or for a single Death Slaad to spawn an infestation of hundreds of Red and Blue Slaads. 8000 human troops could never stop either of those forces if they were restricted to melee combat--only longbows make it possible, and longbows only work due to the combination of bounded accuracy + removing virtually all "immune to weapons below +X" monsters from the game.

And "awesome magic" in 5E isn't all that awesome either. Your average 16th level wizard would have trouble defeating a modest battalion of 800 hobgoblins. Magic in 5E doesn't have the grand scope it used to have in AD&D; it's now mostly tactical, with some exceptions such as Planar Binding and True Polymorph.

 

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION]: You may be the first person who is really depressing me about 5e. I mean, I already though the 5e MM was far and away the worst of the core 3 books, but... yeah, maybe it's just as well I'm only 2/3rds of the way through a 10 year campaign in 3.X rules.

Let me put it this way: if you can kite the enemy, it really ceases to matter if your PC is "optimized" for the situation or not. A wizard using a longbow without proficiency and a barbarian chucking javelins from long range will both kill that ankylosaur from horseback if it occurs to them to do so.

Both will likely run out of ammunition long before they do significant damage to a 3e Anklysaurus, much less under my 3.0 house rules. Double moving they have a -4 to hit penalty with missile from horseback and -8 to hit if they have to have the mount run to obtain distance, against a target that has AC 22 RAW (and 26 versus ranged attacks if using my variant). Throw in the wizard with a -4 penalty with the longbow, and you are talking effectively a 34 AC. One shot in 20 is going to hit. The wizard is going to need to expend like 250 arrows chasing this thing around and running from it (and more like 350 if using my house rules). The javelin armed barbarian on a mount at close range is probably not much better off in terms of chances to hit (maybe +10 to hit bonus), and no one carries around more than 6 or so javelins.

Once you are out of ammo, you are no longer kiting, you are running away with style. Personally, I'm all for monsters like oozes and zombies being kited as an effective strategy. I'm all for players building characters with kiting as a strength and focus of play. But if it is trivially easy, then it trivializes the game.

Plus, if they insisted on kiting the thing through a typical jungle environment, I'd move to more of a chase style simulation, and insist on ride checks to stay in control of the mount, jump roots and gullies, and reflex saves to dodge low hanging branches and other potential obstacles. This chase after all could easily last a mile or more.

As for gods destroying dramatic tension, I never noticed that impact on the Iliad or the Odyssey or on the tale of Theseus or Perseus - nor my own games for that matter, where the background presence of the meddlesome gods adds I think considerable epic scope and drama. There is nothing drama destroying about sailing through a divine hurricane while a 120' tall giant crowned in lightning bolts summons waves to try to wreck you. As for high level NPCs, I'm inclined to agree but it was the PC's I was most thinking of.

I've never had a problem make the human armies suitably believably butt kicking so that you wonder how they stay alive. I don't have a lot of high level NPC's, but I don't have armies of 0th level fighters either.

As for vampires, they are fairly helpless during the day and low level vampire spawns are a lot bigger of a problem when you have no gods and so no clerics. There are plenty of temples with dedicated wings of undead hunters to make sure that doesn't happen, and its just a lot easier for a vampire to stay alive if they remain more covert. Otherwise, you end up with a tidal wave of paladins and other church assets. Vampire Spawn after all rise 1d4 days after a burial - assuming they weren't beheaded and had there mouth stuffed with holy wafers or any number of other "we aren't stupid, we know vampires are real" precautions.

Likewise, I've never understood how anyone thought it reasonable for a planar invasion - like say Slaad - to happen and not assume that there can't be Planar invasions of Archons or Eladrin as well. Of course the mightier sort of planar beings are generally vastly more powerful than the inhabitants of the mortal world, but if one of these beings can meddle about on the prime I see no reason why they all can't. As such, Slaad, Modrons, Demons, Devils, Archons, and Eladrin would seem to keep each other in check. Otherwise, if you think that it's simply a matter of devils can't invade because humans would kick them out instead of some sort of cosmic balance, just how do you explain what the humans are supposed to do against 180,000 devils that can also use ranged weapons as well as fireballs and so forth? Besides which, I resist the notion that Slaad are evil beings that would want to destroy the world anyway, and I resist the reskinning of Death Slaad as CE.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION]: You may be the first person who is really depressing me about 5e. I mean, I already though the 5e MM was far and away the worst of the core 3 books, but... yeah, maybe it's just as well I'm only 2/3rds of the way through a 10 year campaign in 3.X rules.

... Besides which, I resist the notion that Slaad are evil beings that would want to destroy the world anyway, and I resist the reskinning of Death Slaad as CE.

Well, I'm not glad to depress you but I'm glad to provide unique information. None of the people who write for WotC seem to have any real idea how far 500' is, or rather how close. Better you learn now than later what to expect from 5E. The good news is that the system is relatively friendly to house rules and variants, so if I wanted to import rules for sprinting to make kiting harder and more dynamic, I could do that. I've already done so for spell research, initiative, and 4X-style economic development.

I agree about Slaads. They are dangerous, like grizzly bears, but my players have learned that they are as likely to chew bark or sing to you as to attack with murderous intent. One Grey Slaad even imitated a paladin and joined them on their quest, to "slay evil" as he put it, though his grasp of good vs. evil was obviously pretty fuzzy and had more to do with trappings than substance. But he tried, cause that was his self-imposed mission.

Death Slaads are the exception though, for me. They are actively malicious.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yes, kiting really is that simple in 5E. I'm not sure why it's not more popular. I think players tend to find it boring for some reason, or maybe the game is just so easy that it doesn't seem necessary. Or maybe it's an artifact of playing with combat grids.

One of the supposed issues with using a grid or map, for that matter, is there's a psychological barrier at the edge of the map, the action supposedly stays on the map (in some cases, a DM might just rule enemies leaving the map have escaped). By that logic, TotM is ideal for kiting. But, yeah, boring or anti-climactic seems like a plausible reason it's ignored. So is the usual cat-hearding issue, that everyone has to do it. Though, you're right, it is just that easy in 5e, until the DM decides to make it harder somehow, like uncooperatively varied terrain, or a monster that does have some kind of charge ability - or just gets so mad it suddenly gains one. ;>

As for why it is worth correcting, one reason is kiting can be used against the PC's, which means that the range of viable PC's is actually reduced IMO. There has always been a tendency for D&D to favor ranged weapons, and this would appear to make that tendency worse. Another reason is that it's just rather uninteresting, as it again reduces the range of viable foes for higher level characters and further constrains encounter design.

Yep. Easy-win strategies tend to be boring strategies. If you want let players get away with one, just hand-wave and move on to something more interesting. Viability of monsters doesn't matter, because you can always make up more viable monsters. Relative PC viability can be a problem, but you usually just have to mix things up enough to give him his moment to shine now and then.

It would appear there are no charge actions in 5e?

No generally available charge option, no. Nothing stops you from giving a monster one, though. So if you want a monster to be able to move 4x speed and trample, it can, because you say so. It doesn't even have to take any penalties for 'running,' unless you decide to give it some.