Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ColonelHardisson" data-source="post: 258668" data-attributes="member: 363">I understand what you're saying, and agree to an extent. I will add, though, that WotC's addition of guidelines for advancing monsters brought with it an implicit suggestion to customize to one's heart's content. At least it seemed that way to me. Especially after 20 years of TSR's often draconian attitude about house rules vs. what was "official."I guess what I'm getting at is this - a lot of the methods given for advancing/customizing monsters in WotC's MM are not very far off from methods that DMs I've known, as well as myself, used to accomplish the same thing way back when. It was just exceedingly cool to see a lot of things we'd done as house rules in the 1e/2e eras make their way into the actual rules. I hesitate to call them rules, though, because 3e's attitude about house vs. official rules is so different than what we were used to with TSR. Your last sentence that I've quoted is dead-on accurate. But, I think creating new monsters is extremely easy now, easier even than in the past. What the 3e MM (and that article available online now, including at the Creature Catalog) helps a DM to do is to create new monsters that are quick and self-consistent. This is because it is shown that one doesn't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel everytime one creates a new monster. For example, I wanted a tough Faerie Knight for an Arthurian campaign world. Rather than sit and hammer it out from scratch, I simply looked through the MM, found a monster with abilities similar to what I wanted (in this case, the Ogre Mage), added a template (half fiend), and added levels of fighter. Voila! A whole new monster that I'd bet would pass muster as a new creation.In the end, I do actually agree with you and SableWyvern on this point - people should look at the rules - especially the MM - as guidelines rather than commandments. Use the "rules" when they work to your advantage, but don't become straitjacketed by them.</blockquote>

Verification