Mike Mearls Games
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It Came from the Swamp!
🕑 Added 2024-09-12 14:00:11 +0000 UTCIn my Wednesday game, the characters tangled with a group of frog humanoids and this fun little champion (champion = a creature worth two characters in a fight). A few things I tried with this design.
Bigger Damage: My math for creatures in my 4e-style encounter building system has been a little off. I tweaked the model to assume that a creature typically has two actions to attack during an encounter. For the third action, it is either dead to focused fire or it spent a round not attacking. I may have to tweak things on a per category basis, but already the damage numbers feel a bit better.
Death Effects: Some monsters have an effect that triggers when they die. Usually, that effect is extra damage. I've never been a fan of effects like that. In this case, I wanted to toss out a condition that would be tricky to remove as a way to complicate life for players who focus fire on the biggest monster. This frog might die, but a blown save might give its smaller minions a chance to wreak havoc on the pinned character.
Off-Turn Choices. I am not a fan of reactions in D&D. My experience is that they slow down the game significantly. They clutter up the action, and they also distract from the person who is taking their turn. Worst of all, they require the DM to rewind the action or pause as a player ponders their use of a reaction. The choice on the successful save is there to give players something to do on a monster's turn that is impactful and fun in a contained, interesting way.
As an aside, I've moved all of my 5e games over to my new monster system and have been happy with it. Prep has been easy, and the results in play have been solid barring the low damage. Once I have some confidence in the math, I am going to post the raw numbers and a guide for how to use them to create monsters.
Comments
Mike Mearls
I love how you used reactions to capture the feel of averting your eyes. Cool idea.
Swiss Calavera
Something I have really liked in seeing your more complicated monster blocks has been the asymmetry in the game design that you have been bringing to the forefront. I think it is something a lot of DMs start intuiting after a while of running the game, but I see very little discussion of modifying the DM side of the game with actual awareness of that asymmetry. The change to Fort/Will/Reflex being one of the more obvious options someone could implement. Your mention of not being a fan of reactions makes me think of a recent ability I used that basically marked players with line of sight to an object at the start of each round unless they used their reaction to "avoid looking," which I think is more satisfying and player agency driven than, "if you avert your eyes you have disadvantage." Interested to see more, I have just been using your multi-initiative statblock as a simple block for my entire DM side of an encounter cause it functions as a simple monster initiative tracker and I can just keep individual health pools tracked separate as usual. It has been really eye opening viewing my entire side of an encounter as a single block of chopped up HP from a single pool, and combined DPR, and I think these simpler Mook/Trooper/Champion designations will make that math a lot easier to apply.
