Iron Chef Monster Challenge I

[DeAnno]

Welcome contestants, judges, and random bystanders to the first Iron Chef Monster Challenge. In this challenge the contestants will build Monsters with a certain requirement as the "Secret Ingredient". There are a couple special rulings you should be aware of below, but Urpriest's Monstrous Monster Handbook (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=207928) might be a useful general resource for those looking to understand monsters a bit better.

Contestants: You will need to present your build at at least one of the following points: CR 5, 10, 15, 20, and a "sweet spot" that you feel is the high point of the build. Feel free to present as many of these as you like, and please give a rundown of the build's abilities and playability at all of the levels you didn't show. Note that many monstrous builds used in this challenge will not be playable at low levels, and you need not discuss or show the progression at levels below the CR of the base monster. The rules are as follows:

Menu: For most challenges, you will need to choose a monster that meets a certain requirement, such as having a specific type or subtype. Your Monster will be assumed to have 32 point buy and be assumed to be treated as a PC with level equal to the monster's CR in all important ways. This means that you should be no more or less averse to gear requirements than you would be in a normal Iron Chef competition, and that the monster should be able to deal with the types of challenges PCs of that level face (and create).

For the purposes of this challenge, monsters will be advanced in CR from levels 1 to 20, but there will be some special restrictions for advancing monsters, and I'll try to clear everything up as well as I can.

1) Gaining Monster Hit Dice: A monster which has HD in its advancement entry may gain monster HD as normal, gaining a number of HD per CR determined by table here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/improvingMonsters.htm#addingHitDice). If a monster's advancement entry tells you that it automatically gains size with Hit Dice, then this costs an additional 1 CR if the monster's new size is large or larger. Do not forget to apply the statistical changes given here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/improvingMonsters.htm#sizeIncreases) when a monster changes size. If your monster only has advancement: by character class, or advancement: -, it can not advance in this manner.

For example, consider the Tiger (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/tiger.htm). A Tiger would begin play at CR 4 with 6 HD. If we choose to give it HD for a few levels, it would have 9 HD at CR 5 (and gain a +1 ability increase for passing 8 HD) and 12 HD at CR 6 (gaining another +1 ability increase). If we advance Hit Dice again to 15, it also becomes huge and is now CR 8. In cases of a size increase like this, on the tables apply the Hit Dice increase to CR 7 and the size increase and accompanying statistical changes to CR 8.

2) Gaining Class Levels: Any monster with an intelligence score, regardless of its advancement entry, may gain class levels in this contest, but they are all considered to be "associated" and cost +1 CR per class level without exception. Monsters may multiclass as normal, and all their monster HD automatically count as favored classes. Gaining class levels does not move a Monster along its size advancement progression if it has one.

3) Applying Templates: Any monster which qualifies for a Template may apply it and increase its CR as normal. Templates which change size provoke statistical changes as normal, but do not require any extra CR spending for the size change (this is included in the template cost). All Lycanthropy is banned, since its RAW CR cost is proven to be entirely nonfunctional. Monster of Legend is banned for similar reasons.

4) All other methods for advancing monsters, including size increases not provoked by #1 or #2, and including adding special attacks or qualities of your choice, are banned for this competition.

5) No monster has to pay for an elite array. All monsters automatically get Point Buy 32 from the start, even Mindless ones.

6) Any of the monster's special abilities or qualities which explicitly key off racial Hit Dice or "character level" key off total Hit Dice instead, including saving throw DCs of Extraordinary and Supernatural abilities. If your monster has spell resistance which does not increase while raising the CR of your monster by method 1 or 2, raise it by 1. If your monster has Spell (or Psi) Like Abilties whose caster level does not increase while raising the CR of your monster by method 1 or 2, raise it by 1.

This ruleset in particular is up for debate in our preliminary phase. I tried to make it as universally fair to all monsters as possible while policing any abusable areas requiring excessive judgement calls.

Kitchen: All Official 3.5e rulebooks are allowed, including Dragon Magazine Compendium but disincluding the rest of Dragon Magazine. Unearthed Arcana is allowed, but Item Familiars and fully alternate rule systems are banned. Using unupdated 3e material is allowed but may be frowned upon by the judges, especially in cases where it has effects "unphysical" for 3.5e (Such as DR 25/+3 and similar).

Cooking Time: Right now I forsee this competetion having the following phases, though if there is much conflict on the rules or a dearth of submissions there may be delays
Rules Discussion Ends: August 30th 11:59 PM GMT: Rules & Viability discussion, especially concerning CR rules and the viability of the secret ingredient
Build Submission Deadline: September 13th 11:59 PM GMT: Contestants must submit their builds via private message to DeAnno by this time.
Judging Deadline: September 27th 11:59 PM GMT: Anyone who is not a contestant may judge. Judges must post their scores to this thread by this time.

Judging: Judging will be based on the following criteria, with each build rated from 1 (very poor) to 5 (exemplary) in each area: Originality, Power, Elegance, Use of Monstrous Ingredient. In all categories, judges may wish to be more lenient towards slow starts than they normally would be in the cases of base monsters unplayable below their CR.

Originality has a special added dimension in this contest. While a base monster with very high CR may have many features to increase its UoMI score, it will probably receive low originality scores due to it being difficult to customize with few "free" levels left.

Power level is up to you. Cheese is acceptable, but should be kept to a sane level unless you're showcasing a new TO build you've discovered. In the words of one of my predecessors, a little cheddar can be nice, but avoid the mature Gruyere unless you're making a cheese fondue.

Elegance could bear a little elaboration. It basically measures how skillfully you put your build together, and whether you sacrificed flavor for power. We're cooking here - if your dish doesn't taste good, it doesn't matter how well-presented it is. Use of flaws is an automatic loss of one point per flaw in this category. Other things that will cause lost points here are excessive multiclassing, and classes that don't fit the concept - using Cloistered Cleric in a front-line melee fighter, for example, will lose you points.

UoMI is obviously a little different from the similar category in normal Iron Chef. Here the judges measure how well you used the abilities of whatever Monster you chose, and how Monstrous the build feels in general. Tacking 18 levels of Wizard and PRCs onto a CR 2 monster might be pretty powerful, but you're really much more of a wizard than a monster, and you should do poorly in this category because of that.

Presentation: Builds will be posted anonymously, in order to avoid the potential of bias towards a particular competitor. For this reason, please don't put your name in the build, as I'm likely to miss it when reviewing the entries!

Due to concerns about standardizing entry format, I'd like everyone to try to use part of the following table for their entry. Start the table at the CR of your base monster, and delete all levels less than that from the table (you are not required to create any sort of monster progression). For example, the table for a Mind Flayer (CR 8 with 8 HD) with 12 class levels would only show levels from CR 8 to CR 20.


NAME OF ENTRY
{table=head]CR|Advancement Type|Base Attack Bonus|Fort Save|Ref Save|Will Save|Skills|Feats|Features

1st|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

2nd|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

3rd|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

4th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

5th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

6th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

7th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

8th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

9th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

10th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

11th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

12th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

13th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

14th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

15th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

16th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

17th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

18th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

19th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities

20th|New Advancement|
+x|
+x|
+x|
+x|Skills|New Feats|New Abilities[/table]

Code: I don't know how to force it to not make the BB code into a table, if someone posts/messages me I'll put it here.



For entries with spellcasting, use the following table for Spells per day and Spells Known. (Spells Known only if necessary, i.e. Sorcerer or Bard, but not Wizard or Warmage)


Spells per day/Spells Known
{table=head]CR|0lvl|1st|2nd|3rd|4th|5th|6th|7th|8th|9th

1st|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

2nd|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

3rd|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

4th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

5th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

6th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

7th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

8th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

9th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

10th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

11th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

12th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

13th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

14th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

15th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

16th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

17th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

18th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

19th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

20th|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-[/table]

Code: I don't know how to force it to not make the BB code into a table, if someone posts/messages me I'll put it here.



For other systems (Psionics, ToB, Incarnum, etc.) keep track of PP/maneuvers/essentia separately, preferably in a nice neat list.

Speculation: Due to the nature of a rules & viability discussion, a limited amount of speculation is allowed in the discussion period, but avoid using specific monsters which will be allowed in this competition as examples and try to speak in general terms. After the preliminary discussion period, please avoid speculation.

Leadership is banned; we're producing a meal, not a seven-course banquet for the Lords of the Nine.

Our proposed theme for the Iron Chef Monster Challenge I is The Blood War, and we will accept any creature with the Baatezu, Tanar'ri, Obyrith, Loumara, or Yugoloth Subtype.

Anyone interested in competing or judging feel free to chime in and let us know.

EDIT: Rules Finalized, Cooking period has begun!

[Groverfield]

1)Perhaps the monsters should be balanced by CR, not by ECL? This would free up a lot of templates to make the monsters more monster...y... [Making CR and LAdj kinda doesn't work, look at vampire template as to why.]
1)(again) Maybe just have the showcase at CR 20 or so: There's quite a few monsters that won't have 5 or 10 enteries, and a few that wouldn't have 15.

2)Theme might be a bit too broad... there's only so many types and subtypes. Perhaps since you're doing it this way, you could separate the Demon and Devil into Challenge Ia and Ib before pitting them against each other to determine the winner of the Blood Wars.

I think I'll be joining this, not sure if as a contestant or a judge, but this looks interesting, and having a source on record of a number of modified creatures by CR would be handy

[DeAnno]

1)Perhaps the monsters should be balanced by CR, not by ECL? This would free up a lot of templates to make the monsters more monster...y... [Making CR and LAdj kinda doesn't work, look at vampire template as to why.]


I'm not sure what you're getting at here. A Vampire has a CR of +2, and doesn't provide HD, so it would be covered by rule #2. Its LA of +8 is replaced by +2, and this is what you use to determine ECL. Therefore a Vampire Human Wizard 18 would be ECL 20 for the purposes of this ruleset. Was your concern the +8 LA, or is it something I'm not getting?

[Groverfield]

I'm just saying that it would be simpler to call it by CR, as by the same example, a Vampire Human Wizard is CR20, due to a rule in the DMG where CR for player race player class is equal to its class levels, and NPC class levels are either -1 or -2 CR from its NPC class levels, can't remember.

Also, it'll be a lot simpler to people who didn't read or forgot rule #2 to just know to go by CR if we call it CR

Edit: Also, maybe instead of "EL 5, EL10, EL15" entries, maybe you could have three generic minions of about those CRs?

[DeAnno]

The problem with going by the pure CR of a monster is that its wackily ridiculously broken in numerous specific cases. Did you know you can add 4 Undead HD for the price of 1 CR? Or that a Hill Giant with 12 HD is CR 7? Or that a Were-Battletitan for CR +6 gives you 36 Hit Dice?

I've actually played "monster campaigns" before where it was based purely on CR, and I've seen by experiment that builds which amass silly amounts of HD using CR tricks are extremely broken in the hands of a competent player, due to intelligent Feat choice, HD scaling of effects, and general huge numbers.

[Groverfield]

They would be broken as players, yes, but I figured that since it's a monster challenge, then it would be a bit different, which it is in the CR system. Of the three examples you gave, the only one that I thought was ridiculous was the were-battletitan. You could still do more rulings based off of specifically lycanthropy, as that seems to be the only thing affected.

I don't know if it was intentional or not, but thanks for letting me giggle at the prospect of a 78HD wolf skeleton being a challenge for a level 20 party

[DeAnno]

It's possible I just have Were-Battletitans dancing in my eyes (if you hadn't guessed, Were-Battletitans were prominently involved in one of the Monster Campaigns I played in), but I fear that a general lack of good controls on HD escalation means there is other similar stuff hidden all around in a bunch of sourcebooks just waiting to cause problems. That's most of the reason I don't want to get into specific bans: the list could grow quite long.

If other playgrounders also feel we should damn the torpedoes and go full CR away, that is indeed a viable option: I just warn that it's a dangerous one.

[Groverfield]

The mention of a template adding hit dice is unique to lycanthropy, so might as well call it out on it. I honestly say damn the torpedoes, Optimizers should know that tricks like that cost elegance, and if repeated, cost originality.

Then again, I'm only one vote, and definitely not a good representation of GitP in the least bit.

[Olo Demonsbane]

So long as the above rules stay the same, I'll definitely whip something up. Gotta love the Blood War :smallbiggrin:

EDIT: Oh, though if we're doing straight CR, I have even more delicious nastiness to whip up...

[Runestar]

I don't understand the class table. What if we start with a fairly powerful monster? Are we supposed to break it down into lv-by-lv?

I think your rules are reasonable, but much too convoluted. It took me a few readings to understand what you were trying to drive at. You could simply say to treat all ECL as equal to the monster's cr (since there is really no case of a monster's ECL ever being lower than its cr), and call out lycanthrophy as a specific exception to the rule.

So for the first challenge, the monster must have the evil subtype? Cuz there is a ritual in Savage Species which can bestow an alignment subtype on any creature for a gold cost. :smalltongue:

[DeAnno]

Hmm, thanks for the heads up about the ritual, maybe it could be specifically limited to Devils and Demons? I'll do some research on racial subtypes demons have and see how much they cover.

EDIT: As far as I can tell, Devils only have one unique subtype (as is fitting), Baatezu. Demons have Tanar'ri, Obyrith, and Loumara, though the Tanar'ri seem to be the principle involved party on that side of the Blood War. Restricting us to this eliminates some low CR creatures, some sub-10 Int creatures, a variety of things that aren't Outsiders, and possibly some other stuff. Does this seem like the way to go? Should we further restrict it to just Baatezu and Tanar'ri?

As for rules convolution, it's definitely a concern, and if no one knows of anything similar to Lycanthropy that's going to cause ridiculousness, we could go with pure CR and just ban Lycanthropy alone (though I'm not sure how you could even get it on a real demon/devil, but I don't want to tempt the playground to try.)

Sorry about the table, what I was thinking is that you start the table at the CR/fake ECL of the base monster, and only do a table for levels above that. I'll do some editing to reflect that in the above post.

Also, it seems sort of obvious to me that taking something like a CR 16 monster and adding 4 levels would be low in originality since its still very similar to the monster, so I'll add in some language about that. Do you think we should have a soft guideline for base monster CR? I was thinking CR 5-11 would make for the most interesting builds, but if anyone has thoughts about that feel free to share those too.

[Runestar]

You are right to ban lycanthropy. It has already been done, where the half-troll template is added (changing the outsider's type to giant), making it a valid choice for were-whatever.

I guess one issue with using low cr monsters is that their abilities don't tend to scale well into higher lvs. Take a dretch for example. Its SLAs quickly become useless, so all you really have going for you are its 2 outsider HD and demon traits. How is this really any different from starting as a human fighter2?

I do have a few ideas floating around (like that bearded devil blackguard from an earlier thread), but the main problem I see is that they don't really do anything to bring out the uniqueness/flavour of the base monster.

I could be mistaken though. Maybe I will play around for a while and see what I can throw up. Been a while since I last tinkered with monsters. :smalltongue:

[Runestar]

Just a few thoughts...

1) How would you handle monsters with innate spellcasting higher than their cr? Say if I were to switch the alignment of a planetar to evil, that would give me a cr16 outsider with cleric17 spellcasting. Then simply tack on 4 lvs of cleric? Ghaeles and trumpet archons also face a similar issue.

2) There are some evil-aligned outsiders without any subtypes, such as rakshasas, which I feel could be quite fitting.

Ideas? :smalltongue:

Update: Remembered this article. Is this roughly what you had in mind? :smallsmile:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fc/20060707a

[DeAnno]

That article was close to my original thoughts, but the more I think about it CR is just a more standard measure and the contest would probably be more educational and applicable if we kept to that (I've revised the topic). In general, that's the type of thing I hope we see here, except in a more creative, optimized way.

As for monsters with huge spellcasting progressions one above their CR, they're quite powerful options, but also quite obvious and rather lacking in originality, so I'm hoping that it isn't too attractive an idea. I'm reluctant to introduce rules specifically to deal with it, as that's sending us down a dark path.

I would like to see Rakshasas in the competition too, but it's demonstrated that you can get the Evil Subtype easily and becoming an Outsider isn't very hard either. We could ban the ritual and hope nothing goes wrong, but I've changed over to the racial subtypes for now (I could easily be convinced to go the other way.)

[Olo Demonsbane]

A) CR system looks good.

B) Have my character's basic build and background.

C) Ban Monster of Legend. Scarily good template from MM2. +5 natural armor, +10 Str, +6 Dex, +10 Con, +2 Int, +2 Wis, +4 Cha, 5th level cleric casting, 2 free feats, +3 on all saves, and 2 of a number of good special qualities, like continuous haste or continuous spell turning. Probably plus a couple of other things that I forgot. For +2 CR. It's stupid good for a melee monster or one focusing on divine spellcasting.

[Groverfield]

An evil outsider and a lycanthrope mate, you get a half-demon (outsider ... not evil subtype, but might as well, and there's other ways to gain the evil subtype) with inherant lycanthropy as a race instead of affliction...

Edit: I think I will be a contestant in this... [evil grin]

[Urpriest]

My handbook is mentioned! Yay!

[DeAnno]

Looking through monster manuals, I am more and more convinced there are plenty of options if we stick to the five "evil outsider" racial subtypes. If anyone knows of any more similar racial subtypes I've missed, feel free to inform me in the thread or by PM.

Do note that as of now all submissions will require having one of the listed racial subtypes; simply having the Evil subtype is not sufficient.

[Olo Demonsbane]

6) All monster effects which scale with either total HD or Racial/Monster HD simply scale with total HD. This includes Spell Resistance, save DCs of Supernatural abilties, caster level of SLAs, and similar (but not full spellcasting progressions). This rule is to prevent excessive nitpicking and to help monsters emphasize their uniqueness.

This needs a bit more clarification. Say, if I had a monster with CR 8, 12 HD, SLAs at a CL of 10, and 20 SR. What would his total CL and SR be at 20th level?

[DeAnno]

Hmm, that rule definitely made more sense in my head with the ECL system than it does with CR. I've been looking around trying to find a pattern to how SR and CL scale, and its been pretty... odd. A lot of cases of SR specify X + Class Levels, and a few cases specify X + HD, but most HD cases are capped, so I'm not sure what's fair/RAW. Since SR is theoretically supposed to be based on CR, I'm inclined to say that SR should increase at a rate of 1/CR. Input here is appreciated.

CLs of SLAs seem to be even more random, sometimes based on HD and sometimes not. 1/CR scaling is probably most reasonable and fair, but this is another very ill defined issue. Anyone with any ideas of how to solve these matters should chime in.

EDIT: I went and rewrote #6 in what I thought was the most RAI-like manner possible. If anyone thinks I gaffed, your input is appreciated.

[Olo Demonsbane]

Looks good to me. Are we starting the actual challenge now? :smallsmile:

[DeAnno]

Yep. Hopefully we didn't miss anything horribly destructive! (In a bad way)