Some Donjon thoughts on monsters.

[anonymouse]

1: Fully-statted monsters - such as presented in the sample adventure, or the Monster Pak - are useless unless you enforce the following:

A: Players must be allowed to peruse and dig through the monsters are their leisure. Ideally, you'd have a DM copy and a copy passed around between players for browsing.

B: Any time a player wants to introduce a monster, it must be something from the available monsters -- no on-the-fly stuff.

-OR-

2: Monsters (peasants, et cetera) need some kind of special rule set. I'd take a page from Shadowrun 2nd edition, and give a dice scale for monsters. Any time they want to do something, they roll their alloted dice (so maybe level 3 monsters always have 6 dice to roll for anything).

I kind of favour 2, simply because most of the abilities for statted up stuff are never used; there's simply not enough phases in a flurry to use anything but hurt-stuff attacks.

Maybe there's a 1.5 in there somewhere, with monsters/targets getting a stat template of less traits and abilities and such, but wider scope.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Michael,

I use fully-statted monsters, and replace abilities - but never, ever numbers - to match what I want. So, for example, I take the Death Knight, because I want a level 5 creature with a good offensive ability and an item-destroying ability. Let's say a player said that, hmm, an Acid Troll approached. Smite Vigorously at 6 can stay, and Undead Flesh is just renamed to Regenerating Flesh. Destroy Metal Weapons is wrong - let's replace it with Destroy Wood and Leather, which is specialized enough for a supporting ability. Animate Skeletons and Zombies is the only one that doesn't fit well, so I nix it and add something colorful like Etch Stone.

I do switch attributes around, of course. In the Death Knight -> Acid Troll conversion, though, I don't have to.

[Catalyst]

Me too, what Clinton said. Sometimes I'll juggle some numbers around, though, a die here or there.

I wouldn't be nearly as good at creating nasties on the fly in Donjon if I didn't have a passle of pre-made examples available to "mutate" and the excellent examples of ability usage given with pre-made critters.

[anonymouse]

Clinton,

That's actually what I've been doing. It just seems like it'd be better to somehow structure that into something.. I'm missing the word I'm looking for. But rather than ad-hoc it all the time (well, here's a level 5 who's pretty close..) just stat up generic-y stuff.