Realizing a preference: Simple Monsters, Complex Encounters

[PhoenixPhyre]

One common complaint I hear about D&D (5e especially, even more so with the new-style casters, but I heard it about 4e as well) is that monsters are "simple bags of HP".

Personally, I have come to strongly prefer, both as DM and as player, when encounter complexity comes not from the complexity of any given monster, but from things like
a) combinations of simple monsters
b) terrain (including dynamic terrain and environmental hazards)
c) objectives that aren't "you or us die first"
d) non-monster entities (whether traps or NPCs you may want to protect/attack that aren't really participating in combat directly)
e) allowance for witty repartee, wordplay, and even negotiation during battle. Monsters switching sides, allies stabbing you in the back, etc.

Simple monsters compose well. If each monster has one or two Big Things, the difficulty of running several of them with different-but-complementary Big Things is much less than if each monster is, itself, a whole pile of Big Things. Also, complex monsters often have abilities whose effect is strongly non-linear when combined with others, leading to high swinginess.

Simple monsters lend themselves to having multiple combatants. D&D-likes (including Pathfinder) live or die by action economy. Solo monsters, generally, just don't work. Not even when they have extra actions (5e's Legendary and Lair Actions). They may be great "cinematic" set-pieces...but they'll be crappy encounters, taken objectively. Boss + minions works way better, as does "small band". My experience and preference is for when the number of monsters is between 1 and 1.5x the party size.

Simple monsters mean that the variance between being "on my game" and "having a rough day" is way less. Complex monsters have a huge gap between the ceiling and floor of their effectiveness. Which can mean that if the DM's dice are hot and their tactics are on point...the party dies. But if they're having a bad day (either uncooperative dice or just not handling the pieces as well), that same fight may be a disappointing pushover.

Simple monsters mean that they get to show off their Cool Things more reliably. One aggravating thing is building this big fancy monster...and it being dogpiled and slaughtered before it gets to do half of its cool things. Because its cool things require setup, are combos, etc. If the monsters have One Big Thing (ok, maybe 2), then as long as they don't get nuked before they go, they'll get to do a Cool Thing.

Simple monsters can vastly decrease the run-time complexity of the game. Nothing slows things down like having to cross-reference materials. Or having to retcon a turn because XYZ ability needed PDQ effect up, but that doesn't happen until next turn. Or whatever.

These are preferences, not absolutes, to be sure. But something I've thought a bunch about recently.

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Note this doesn't mean PCs have to be simple. Because PCs and NPCs are asymmetric game elements.

And it doesn't mean that monsters can't have out of combat things or (in the fiction) other abilities. Basically, I think of a monster stat block as a limited subset of the monster's "full self". A limited interface, in programming terms. Just the parts that are directly going to come up when used like so. Heck, you could have a monster with several different stat blocks, depending on where and how they're encountered. One for Boss Dude at Home, with all his stuff. One for Boss Dude Caught with Pants Down (figuratively or literally[1]). Etc.

[1] I had a couple scenarios where the party was stealthy enough to catch the goblin boss (it was a low-level scenario) literally with his pants down, engaged in...exercises...with some less-than-entirely-willing companions. That didn't end up even being a fight--I just skipped straight to the "ok, what do you do with this poor sod" step. Which, in a couple of the cases, was "we hang him from the ceiling by his entrails, still alive". Odd that two different groups, with no repeat members, both came up with that almost unanimously, almost instantly. Teenagers can be so brutal...

[stoutstien]

Agreed. NPCs should be fairly simple and easy to take in both in set up and active use. Encounter complexity shouldn't come from hyper specific feature combos that take up 3 pages and reference a dozen others. I have the index card rule where if I can't fit it on a 3x5 then it needs a rethink.

[NichG]

I guess I tend to go the other way, though I also like and use several of those elements you mentioned: particularly having goals or outcomes that aren't just live or die (as well as using time pressures to make it so that 'kill everyone else' isn't actually a good instrumental goal towards achieving more complex aims).

My sort of standard 'boss encounter' template involves:

- Central threat entity of the fight with extra actions, defenses that might need to be taken down to make a kill stick, etc.
-- One 'direct target' action per round that leans towards being a serious and immediate threat to either a single target or cluster. Allows a save/defenses/etc, though this single action could be for instance a normal full attack sequence. There may be one or two of these available to the entity to choose between.
-- One 'battlefield manipulation' action per round that generally speaking does not permit a save. Could be summoning, buffing, debuffing, etc. There may be 1-4 of these for the entity to choose between, and they may have costs/cooldowns/conditions for usage. These are intended to throw kinks into any sort of plan by changing the parameters of the battle rather than to directly win the fight.
-- One reaction per round that could be a counterattack, counterspell, ability to infect anyone who attacks it, etc. Generally there's just the one, if the entity has it at all. Instead of being an action, this could just be a passive automatic side-effect like a creature whose blood causes spikes to grow from the soil.
-- Some kind of movement gimmick, with optional side-effect.
-- Some kind of passive field effect either near the entity or on the field which changes the core assumptions of navigating the scenario. Alternately, some extreme attribute of the entity which does the same. This could be an entity which it is impossible to voluntarily move away from while it remains conscious, an entity which may choose to act from any surface that reflects its image, an entity which is actually a trio of entities which each exist only for 1 out of every 3 rounds, etc.
-- Often, a gimmick defense like 'ignores the first source of damage each round' meaning that coordinated action is needed to get through.

- A handful of support loci which empower the central entity or which create some kind of tactical advantage in the environment. These may or may not be created by actions of the central entity. For very large central entities, these may be organs on its body or modules of its armor or whatever, actually integrated with the central thing.

- A handful of auxiliary threats which often will have some kind of reinforcement mechanic. These are individually easy to dispatch, and tend to be set such that they have a good chance to land damage or effects but such that the scale of individual damage or effect is ~1/3 to ~1/2 of a full hit by the central entity.

- (For late-campaign or arc-ending situations) a lieutenant or leader who can stand up to a few hits and runs interference for the central entity or tries to accomplish subgoals while the central entity rampages.

[Ionathus]

I couldn't agree more.

Even though I already knew a few tenets of combat design ("don't do 1 big solo baddie", "be careful with save-or-suck abilities") before I started reading it, The Monsters Know What They're Doing completely reshaped my approach to designing monster fights.

I love how Keith isolates what feature makes each monster unique (the goblin's Nimble Escape, the ankheg's Burrow speed, even the humble owl's Flyby) and then builds the creature's mindset and attack around that. Goblins don't just stand there and take potshots as the heroes charge at them: they take cover, run away, and play guerilla fights the entire time. It's a single, very simple feature, but played well it can make for an incredibly dynamic combat.

It doesn't matter how many cool flashy abilities I give a monster: if players fight it in a big empty rectangular room with no hazards, minions, hidey-holes, terrain, innocents-in-danger, traps, strategies, or personality, then the fight is going to be boring.

EDIT: Matt Colville's "Action-Oriented Monsters" also gave me some really good ideas about rethinking specific boss fights that I want to be iconic. The same principle applies there, too: keep it simple, stupid. If it's not simple, you won't remember/want to use it in the middle of your setpiece combat.

[kyoryu]

Yup. 100%.

Also I think a lot of the interest in combat should be about the stakes of the combat. A real fear of loss, and real consequences for loss, demonstrated by actually having players lose reasonably often, goes a long way to making things more interesting.

[Vahnavoi]

It's an understandable preference, because this is how virtually all long-lasting positional strategy games, such as Chess and its variants, work.