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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5970049" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure how important your particular example is, but if you wanted to build a monster that correlated somewhat with the class role "striker" you might well build it as a brute (if you want it to feel like a barbarian), a lurker (if you want it to feel like an assassin), a skirmisher (if you want it to feel like a rogue), a controller (if you want it to feel like an avenger) or artillery (if you want it to feel like a sorcerer).A monster that can act as both a brute and a controller looks to me like a higher level controller (that will get its hp and damage up!), but maybe I'm missing something.The fire mephit in the arctic is interesting - the 4e approach to this would probably be simply to restat it, rather than to overlay a "weakened by arctic frost" template which would have the same end result.Again, I'm not sure how much weight I should be giving to the actual example. The first two 4e MMs had sample tactics which discussed this sort of thing, but I can't say I've paid a lot of attention to those sections - generally I've relied on the stat blocks, together with the monster's obvious colour, to speak for themselves.Isn't this about encounter design? If you want an encounter without artillery, then can't you build it that way? Or if you want one with rock-throwing ogres and giants, build that one intead.Is it widely argued that 4e monsters are bland? That would strike me as being at odds with my own experience, but I'm happy to hear the case made out. At this point I'm not sure that I'm seeing monster roles at all. But I'm also not sure whether or not it's being asserted that 4e can't do this. I mean, the goblin skirmishers in the 4e MM have both melee and ranged attacks, and the 4e terrain, hazard and terrain power rules make it fairly straightforward to adjudicate landslides and the like.But if you're saying the game will be better if monsters have more uniform statblocks, and all the work is done by them exploiting numbers plus the terrain around them, I think I want to see some evidence for that. Because it is somewhat contrary to my own experience.I'm not sure how you envisage a "base ogre" (what is a "base human" in 3E or 4e?) - but maybe it's a 6th level brute? But as to attributing where abilities come from - maybe your 10th level ogre brute is taller and heavier than your 6th level one. Or maybe it got trained at the brute academy. I don't see that those sorts of explanations have to be very intimately related to the mechanical build process.</blockquote>

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