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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5971541" data-attributes="member: 54877">Start with the monster core and then skin with roles works ok until you run into the problem that 4E was trying to solve with roles in the first place. It's most obvious when you consider adding caster class levels to monsters in 3E. Adding 1 or 2 levels of sorcerer or cleric or wizard or druid isn't a big enough deal to matter much what monster you do it to, once you get past CR 3 or 4, but adding 6+ levels is. You start with something like a mind flayer, 6 levels of caster is significant. You start with a hill giant, it isn't chicken feed, but nothing compared to what 6+ levels of barbarian would do. At that point, the meaning of "level" has gotten really fuzzy--thus the wonky adjustment math that grew up around this issue. What a lot of people wanted was either:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I'm making a hill giant barbarian or hill giant druid. How many levels do I need to get him to do what I want? Then what is the real CR?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I'm making a hlll giant barbarian or hill giant druid of CR N. How many levels do I add to get that?</li> </ul>Where in this example, "CR" means the real number that can be compared to other CRs and work, not the formula in 3E that often broke down under such manipulation. At some point in the first forumulation, you reached a point where "druid" became more important than whatever the hill giant brought to the table, and this might not be where you were going with druid when you started there. Obviously, the caster level issues had a lot to do with this, because if all you really wanted was a hill giant that could do a handful of druid-like spells of 2nd and 3rd level, but that were challenging to opponents of a hill giant, you had to reach a bit. Presumably, you could get to somewhere similar with a 1E/3E/4E mix, perhaps with something like "role" in a slightly different context, and as the middle step out of three. That is, you start with 1E monster. Then you apply an 4E-ish role (if needed) to establish a new baseline, maybe as simple as "dvine caster". Then on top of that you add, as per 3E, whatever cleric, druid, etc. levels you need.  In my example above, you go to manipulate your hill giant. He's already ready for barbarian stuff. So you don't need a role and/or it already has a "brute" default role. Ergo, tacking on barbarian levels has an expected effect. Then you decide to make a druidic shaman. You take the same base hill giant and assign "divine caster" role. This changes the base creature, possibly moving power up or down (depending upon whether you retain its full "brute" strength). Now with this divine caster hill giant, you can slap on as many druid levels as makes sense.  That won't match 4E in fast to build monsters, but it would address that 3E problem of getting real numbers for challenges that work and mean something.</blockquote>

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