Mike Mearls Games
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Monster Design Update
🕑 Added 2024-10-04 15:02:42 +0000 UTCHello everyone!
I've been regularly running three (or more!) games a week, testing out the new approach to monsters and some of the new subclasses. A few notes on things before we get back to our regular schedule of new monsters and other goodies:
The math behind the monsters is shaping up well. I've run mooks, troopers, and champions multiple times and have a good feel for their hit points and defenses.
Bosses are proving a bit more troublesome. Right now, their hit points vary between "glass sculpture" and "impenetrable block of granite". Since they have to absorb so many actions, any error is magnified a lot. The good news is that I feel like I'm getting closer. The last one I used made it to the third round.
I'm finding that automatic damage, or effects on misses or failed saves, are a key part of my monster design. When the DM whiffs, the drama and excitement at the table goes flat. The big monster did something and... nothing happened.
Expanding on that final point, in play I'm finding a few things:
Small amounts of automatic damage go a long way, as they naturally pile up toward the end of the fight. I had a psionic monster that did automatic psychic damage to enemies within 10 feet once per turn when it took damage. That started small, but ended up dropping two PCs.
Non-damage effects can also be a lot of fun, such as forced movement on a miss or added terrain features. For instance, a creature that spits acid might create a small pool adjacent to a target if it misses.
I have a lot of thoughts on terrain, but the biggest one is that dynamic terrain has the biggest impact on play. My last boss fight featured pools of acid that slowly expanded. That created a narrative across the three rounds of the encounter. Combined with a big encounter area, space and movement became critical points in play.
One final note on making bigger maps:
I bought a graph notebook from Daiso with 8 mm squares, and I love it. I'm using 30-foot squares for my main dungeon map, and that has helped me focus on making big, interesting encounter areas. I use lines for corridors, boxes for rooms, then create a more detailed map (5 foot squares) for encounter areas. Since 30 feet lines up nicely with movement, it also makes it much easier to track movement and the range of light sources and darkvision.
I'll have some more monster next week, including rules for encounter building and my system for Villainous Inspiration, the sinister counterpart to D&D 5.5's Heroic Inspiration.
Comments
Mike Mearls
I love that weapon mastery, to the point that I'm adjusting the hit points of mooks to let fighters drop weak foes even on a miss.
Eagle Henhawk
Speaking of automatic damage, the new Weapon Mastery system gives us an easy way to implement it with the Graze property. On a miss, deal damage equal to the relevant stat modifier. It’ll be interesting to see if Weapon Masteries get included in Monster stat blocks, but we can always lift them for boss encounters.
Mike Mearls
Great point! I think I'm going to mark auto damage as a must-have element for any boss.
Thomas Dunn
Automatic damage can help lower a monster's damage variance a lot, making the outcome more consistent. Higher levels of variance can make easier encounters fun and unpredictable, but boss monsters need at least a certain level of consistency to feel narratively satisfying in most cases. This is why I'd recommend looking at the standard deviation of a boss monster's DPR relative to their average. I'm not sure what the magic ratio should be, but somewhere around 0.4 is probably a good place to start looking.
