In preparing for an upcoming D&D 4e campaign I hope to run starting next week, of which I have talked about before, one of the major things I do is prepare monsters. There will be one player in the game who is a friend of mine and therefore familiar with my style. He will recognize some of the critters I am recycling for this upcoming game. I’ve always made my own custom monsters and overwhelmingly used them instead of monster manual creatures, many of which I either have no emotional attachment to, find stupid or boring, or a combination of them. I believe the only classic D&D monster I use with any consistency are dragons and aboleths. The rest I either use thoughtlessly and sparingly or none at all.
This is helped a lot by how easy it is to write a 4e monster. I can almost literally just do whatever I want and it will still come out playable.
When statting 4e creatures, I came to the conclusion that I really didn’t need to write down the ability scores at all. I actually got this idea from seeing the 4e game day monster cards. They had no ability scores listed. This may be Wootsie being a bunch of paranoid twats more than anything and for some arcane reason not wanting you to know the ability scores before the actual book comes out, but the fact is, you don’t even need it for much of anything. The monster’s other stuff can function entirely independent from them and does so by default.
I looked at other places where I could slash off bits of the monster I didn’t need.
The entire bottom box seemed a prime candidate. Look at what’s there:
Alignment – I wish this didn’t exist. And it my games, it sure as hell fucking doesn’t. Slashed.
Languages – This doesn’t take too much space, but still. Slashed.
Skills – We’ll get to that in a moment. Slashed.
Ability Scores – Laughter, grinning, guffaws. Slashed.
What to do about ability checks and skill checks? I decided to just separate skills and abilities into 3 categories for monsters: Mental, Physical and Social. Assign bonuses equal to 1/2 monster level + the modifier for a typical ability score from that level. Then I would add pluses or minuses depending on how I felt about the monster’s ability in that general area, and circumstantial bonuses of +2 or +4 to certain tasks (such as skills). This saves me the trouble of fiddling about for what trained skill or untrained skill or whatever the monster has – instead I just look at what it’s doing, check my category bonus, and go from there.
As an example, one of my classic monsters, the Hollow Claw:
| Hollow Claw Level 5 Skirmisher Medium Shadow Humanoid (Undead) XP200 |
| Initiative 8; Perception +6; Darkvision HP 60, Bld 30, Srg 15 AC 19/F 17/R 18/W 17 Speed 6, Climb 6 Physical +6, Social +3, Mental +2; Does not speak |
| [MB] Claw (Standard; At Will) Melee 1; +10 vs AC; 1d10+4 damage and the Hollow Claw shifts one square. [S] Draining Shadow (Free Action; 5-6) [S] Dark Leap (Move Action; At Will) |
Works for me. If the monster has exceptional Stealth or some other potent mundane skill-use, I would write something like (+5 Stlh) next to Physical. Otherwise these are just ability bonuses. Monsters tend to have very few trained skills anyway.
I would be willing to do NPCs this way too.
Makes total sense! I used to find making 3.x monsters a very tortuous process but 4e is so much easier.
Another good post. And the swearing helps. I am serious. I am currently slashing alignment from my games actually (as you stated above your dislike of the concept) and replacing them with certain variants to still give some guideline for RPing.
Alignment: because you can’t trust those players to play their characters themselves.
After spending so much time making monsters for tri-stat, I’m enjoying just pulling stuff from the MM and changing power types and fluff.
Bitching About Alignment: Because you’ve never played a White Wolf game where you actually have to roll dice for this shit instead of getting vague guidelines to pay lip service to.
I remove alignment and alignment-like mechanics in all of my games.
That Hollow Claw is a great critter too. The attractiveness of it’s Draining Shadows attack seems to suggest an almost Lurker-esque approach to battle, using maneuverability to make a sudden attack against a back-line PC and then trying to stay incognito on the edge of the battle until his nasty power recharges. I like the fusion of monster roles. Since you say he is a ‘classic’ monster, by that you mean you’ve used it before… 3.5 or 4e?
If 3.5, it’d be entertaining to see the side-by-side of the stat sheets. …Or actually not, I’d probably get bored and lose interest in reading the 3.5 sheet somewhere around the “Challenge Rating/Hit Dice” segment.
I do like the look of Virtues in Scion. But I haven’t gotten the chance to play it because my friend who owns it is a wuss. Maybe next year.
But mostly it’s that my first D&D game involved a lot of the DM saying, “You can’t do that. It’s against your alignment.”
I tried to avoid reading the monster stat block since I assume I’ll be killing it soon.
@Swordgleam -
Heh, my answer has always just been “You can do that, but it might affect your alignment.”
In my games, alignment is there, but it reflects actions, it doesn’t dictate them.
And if some of my players find it helpful as a guide, I won’t stop them.