Making Monsters

[JNAProductions]

-because the DMG rules are so bad I can't use the words needed to describe it here.

I recently used a few CR-appropiate monsters (four CR 2s against 3 level 4 PCs, for instance) built by adhering strictly to the monster creation rules.

They nearly died. In fact, they would've, seeing as how they had managed to half-kill one of the goons by the time they were seriously on the ropes. The Monk was using his Ki, the Sorcerer her spells, and the Ranger... Well, he used his basic skills. But they were still getting absolutely wrecked on a Medium encounter.

So, does anyone have a better monster creation system? Or did I just screw up royally?

[Joe the Rat]

What did you make? It could be something specific to the design that made them so dangerous.

And we are ruling out crappy dice luck, yes?

I'm curious where the breakdown occurred, so I can watch out for it myself.

[JNAProductions]

Frost Warriors (of the Eternal Frost). They had swords that dealt exactly the needed average damage, had the listed AC, attack bonus, etc. No special abilities. (Some of my homebrews had them, but not these guys.)

Nope. Normal dice rolling, nothing stuck out as great or horrible.

And that's a fair point. I've got an audio recording somewhere around here, but I fudged it pretty bad because, well, I screwed up. Not gonna give a TPK because I made a mistake.

[Kd7sov]

I don't guarantee that I understand the DMG instructions (or, for that matter, your explanation of what you did) any better than you do, so I could easily be entirely off-base, but when I run those numbers through the creating-encounters section on DMG 82...

A party of three level-four characters has easy/medium/hard/deadly thresholds of 375/750/1125/1500 XP. A single CR 2 monster is worth 450 XP; with four that totals 1800. With four monsters that's a x2 multiplier for gauging difficulty, bringing the total to 3600 XP - more than double the "Deadly" number. That may be your problem right there.

[JNAProductions]

Let me check my notes, because that doesn't-CR 1! They were CR 1!

I've currently lost my DMG and MM (bluh...) so I don't know how much XP that's worth, but does that add up better?

[Kd7sov]

CR 1 is 200 instead of 450, which would substantially reduce our resulting numbers... 4*CR1=800, 1600 for the difficulty estimate... still over 1500, and therefore in the "Deadly" range, but probably considerably more likely to be survivable without outlandish builds, tactics, or rolls.

It occurs to me, when you were setting up the encounter, did you forget the multiplier for having multiple monsters in the same encounter (x2 for 3-6)? If the monsters are CR 1, that would handily explain why I'm coming up with "Deadly" where you were expecting "Medium".

[JNAProductions]

1600 isn't in Deadly range, it's just past Hard. That still counts as hard.

And no, I remembered.

[Kd7sov]

For three characters at level 4? Level 4 is 125/250/375/500 per character; you'd need four characters for 1600 to be in the Hard range.

[JNAProductions]

Hm. That might've been my issue. God, the details are way too damn fuzzy.

I guess 70 HP just feels really high for CR 1, but it's by the DMG.

[jkat718]

*snip* I guess 70 HP just feels really high for CR 1, but it's by the DMG.

In 5e, monsters tend to have metric butt-tons of HP to throw around, to make up for their reduced ACs. This way, the PCs will get to hit (versus previous editions, where they had no chance/too much chance), but it will still take a while for the monster to go down, leading to fights being more fun.