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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6682627" data-attributes="member: 4937">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 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.</blockquote>

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