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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5971135" data-attributes="member: 42582">But role is not all that defines a 4e monster and its abilities. You can't read its abilities of its role except in a pretty general sense (brutes are low defence, high damage; soldiers are high defence and melee control; skirmishers are mobile; artillery attack at range; controllers are high control, either ranged, melee or both).Its traits and powers are what define its character and abilities.Who is using role as a class, in the sense of defining abilities? And which brutes can't do enough things?I'm not sure what range of monsters you have in mind, but the last brute I used was the Nightwalker (MM p 197). It has a ranged finger of death attack, as well as a vicious aura and at-will minor action AoE. Before that, I used a Troll (levelled up and outwards to a 13th level solo), which has regeneration and vicous melee attacks. Before that, I used a (levelled-up) Skeletal Tomb Guardian (MM p 235), which has multiple melee attacks and also punishes anyone adjacent who shifts.Then there's the wide variety of gnoll brutes that I've used. Even within the MM (and the best gnolls are in the MM2) there is the Demonic Scourge and the Marauder - two very different brutes.First, is your concern too little diversity, or too much?Second, is this particular comment based on actual play experience, or theory? I mean, the ogres in the MM are not very different. They are Large, with reach, and big melee attacks. They mostly wear hide armour and carry clubs. The only one with a ranged attack carries javelins. The only elite one carries a flail rather than a club, and in the picture on p 198 is fairly clearly the biggest, toughest ogre. How is it that your players don't know what it is that their PCs are facing when they encounter these things?Is this a real complaint? And are you sure ogres are the right example? I mean, there are only five examples in the MM, and two are minions, obviously for use against different levels of PC. So to answer your question, you use the Ogre Savage if the PCs are 6th to 8th level, a group of Thugs if the PCs are 9th to (say) 13th level, and a group of Bludgeoneers if the PCs are (say) 14th to 17th level. (At upper paragon, the game assumes that the PCs don't meet ogres anymore.)If you want a solitary ogre that will provide an interesting encounter for a group of 12th level PCs then you'll have to build itself (I'd start from the Warhulk as a base), just like I built the solo troll I mentioned above. Luckily the DMG has pretty good advice on how to do this.Actually, in post 150 I said "any but the warhulk would seem pretty typical to me" ie the warhulk is the only one in the MM that I think is atypical.Because "brute" on its own doesn't tell you what your powers are. These have to be supplied by the GM, or (in WotC's ideal world) read out of a monster manual that you've bought from them. Powers, not role, are the primary source of a 4e monster's abilities. (In 3E, knowing that a monster has giant levels doesn't tell you its abilities either. You have to assign it feats, and gear, and spend its skill points. If it is a new monster you also have to assign it racial abilities - for monsters like unicorns, or pixies, or demons, that decision about racial abilities is where most of the design work takes place.)PC race is a tool for the players to use in building their PCs. Ideally, all the PCs races are balanced against one another, and provide equally viable yet different vehicles for engaging the gameworld via play.4e monster design assumes that a GM building a monster is doing something different. It assumes that you already know what you want your ogre to look like (roughly, big, tough and stupid) and gives you tools to correlate basic monster stats to a power level. If you want your barbarian to be a shaman, take the 8th level skirmisher ogre in the MM and give it the "conjure spirit" and "healing spirit powers" - and maybe reskin its javelin attack as an assault from the primal spirits. Job done. There's nothing more to understand about what it means to tack on barbarian or shaman to an ogre. The only question is "Will it play like a barbarian?" - an ogre savage probably will - or "Will it play like a shaman?" - I think my rough-and-ready shaman probably will.Warhulk isn't a class - the ogre warhulk isn't an ogre that took a class. Nor is blackblade a class - it's a memorable label for a skulking goblin."Taking a class" is part of PC building. The warhulk could be a trained combatant, or a mad thing blessed by Vaprak. It's backstory is not, to any signficant degree, a part of, or reflected in, its stats. The blackblade could be a trained assassin, or it could be something like the goblin version of Gollum, a self-taught hater of all fair and beautiful things. (It's not true of all 4e monsters that their backstory is not reflected in their stats. But I think it's fairly obviously true of the Ogre Warhulk and the Goblin Blackblade.)The game expects that, if this needs to be known in play, the GM will make it up. It's a sneaky goblin. It hates bright and beautiful things. It enjoys inflicting pain. It probably kidnaps children when it gets the chance. There are some 4e monsters that I think can be tricky to bring to life in a story sense, but neither the OGre Warhulk nor the Goblin Blackblade seems to me to be an instance (the two instances that stick out in my mind of the many 4e monsters that I've used are the Pact Hag and the Chained Cambion - both from MM3, which of the various 4e monster books is the one that pushes hardest in linking mechanics to concepts, I think).I don't need a blackblade class. The only monster with the blackblade notation is that goblin. But if I wanted to create a Bugbear Blackblade then it wouldn't be very hard - trivial, in fact, to add 6 levels onto the goblin blackblade, and replace its "goblin tactics" power with the bugbear "predatory eye" power. Or even easier, just double the bonus damage for attacking with combat advantage.They don't have any mechanical meaning. They're not meant to. They give you a unique identifier for each monster, which is handy for reference and indexing. They're also, in most cases at least, descriptive of what the monster does. An Ogre Savage attacks things savagely. An Ogre Thug is a thuggish minion type. An Ogre Bludgeoneer bludgeons things.Choosing a class as a player is, primarily, choosing the mechanical and thematic vehicle via which you will engage the game. It seems to me a very different task from building a monster, which isn't about any such thing.Huh? If you placed a ogre rogue in a 3E game, presumably you would have to explain how a dumb, lumbering monster became a nimble thief. Whatever story you would tell, you can tell the same story for your MM ogre with better reflexes.There is no new class for a rockthrowing ogre in any meaningful sense. Monsters don't have classes in the way that PCs do (as in, preset patterns of development that specify a suite of abilities and stats). They have roles, which set some basic mathematical parameters. This mathematics is intended to maintain mechanically predictable and reliable encounters. Hence the fact that a skirmisher or artillery monster with a given number of hit points is higher level, because (everything else being equal) attacking the PCs at range makes you stronger than attacking in melee. (And level is just a number that reflects toughness.)My use of "reliable and predictable" is deliberate. Of course, you can do calculations that tell you that a monster who hits 1 time in 10 for 120 average damage is as dangerous as a monster who hits 2 times in three for 18 average damage (12 average damage per attack in either case). But 4e takes for granted that that sort of swinginess does not make for interesting play. Hence its preference for smoothing the numbers to maintain a certain play experience.As I said upthread, if you're not interested in that, then the 4e monster building rules are probably of no real use to you.But as for the explanation: what is there too explain? These ogres here have X hp. These other ones have Y hp. Just like some giants in Against the Giants have more hit points than others. Some 10th level fighters have more hp than others (in AD&D, at least, where hit points are rolled). I'm not seeing the issue.I don't quite follow this, because "striker" is a PC role, not a monster role. Do you mean "skirmisher"?Anyway, you won't find a giant in 3E with high reflex either. Both 4e and 3E buy into the trope that "big, dumb, lumbering" creatures aren't very nimble. Which probably is inherent to the meaning of "lumbering".And just looking at the first brute I ever used, the Goblin skullcleaver: AC 16, Fortitude 15, Reflex 14, Will 12. That Reflex is not particularly low at all. A page or two back, the Bugbear Warrior has AC 18, Fortitude 17, Reflex 15, Will 14. Again, that Reflex is not all that low. It's true that brutes tend to have comparatively higher Fort (in some cases higher than AC) but that seems to be part of the whole big, tough schtick.Correct. I don't understand the rationale behind the 3E monster building rules. Monster type is treated as if it were a class, except it plays none of the useful functions of a class - it does not model an ingame vocation, nor does it provide a metagame framework within the constraints of which a player engages the game. So what are "giant levels", "dragon levels" etc for?What is the point of giving dragons more hp per point of saving throw, but fewer hp perpoint of BAB, than giants? AD&D made much more sense to me - monsters are measured in HD, which are a uniform d8 (with some very rare and ignorable exceptions), and attacks and (typically) saves correlate directly to HD. In AD&D, HD are a rough-and-ready measure of a monster's toughness. In 3E the "monster levels" that replace them don't serve any obviously useful purpose at all, given how varied across monster types are the attributes of any given HD (and that's even before monster stats, which can change attack bonuses, saves and hp radically, are factored in).</blockquote>

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