Talk:Monster Level Equivalency Theory (3.5e Other)

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Potential Difficulties

While I'm all about the MLET in general, there are a few things that need to be considered before a complete shift to such a design format was actually completed.

• Scaling spells work less well in an MLET setup. The easiest one to point at is any damaging spell ever. If you deal 1d6 per level against your level's worth of hit dice (plus bonuses), you're dealing basically the same percentage of damage with every casting, even levels after that spell was shiny and new, because their hit dice never outpace your damage growth. Which is nice for keeping the spell relevant if that's what you want, but doesn't really leave you a lot of room to make higher level spells of that type better without going right off the damage rails or being extremely wide AoEs. Discrete status condition effects, like sleep or dominate, don't have this problem because of their binary nature.
• Multiple attacks need to hit less, since their are fewer piles of hit points to chew through. Diminishing returns iterative attacks actually work better in this setup than tome style iteratives, unless you want to go off the damage rails again.

I'm not calling either of these bugs at this point, and they might wind up as features depending on goals, just pointing them out. It would be workable to just expect people to fight more creatures at higher levels, so all of that extra damage had places to go. Creature summons at an easy way to do that, but encounter structure changes may also be necessary. There's still an issue when you give these player style abilities to monsters though, for all the same reasons, but that is probably also solvable. - Tarkisflux 22:30, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

I was thinking that a way to maintain hit point totals would potentially be to have type HD size exist as a general guideline than a universally applicable rule. A creature intended to be particularly robust for its type can have a higher die size than normal (an example, while rather extenuating) is the tarrasque, which is given d20 HD to preserve a hit point total more reminiscent of the norm than only 20 HD would normally suggest. While this is not necessarily a foolproof solution, I think it is easier than readapting character's again. Added hit points in that manner is not a terribly difficult thing to do, and increasing the size of the die also has no other adverse effects on any of the monster's other stats. - TG Cid 23:13, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

That's a fairly good catch actually, but it only partially addresses the damage scaling faster than hit points problems I indicated above because it leaves every creature you don't want marked as tough. To keep hit points up you'd need to increase die size by some number of steps or provide con boost (which is probably workable but I hate for other reasons)/ toughness style per die boosts, and the magnitude of these would need to be based on the creature's CR. Something like "every creature between CR 6 and 10 gets +2 points per hit die" or whatever is the sort of thing you'd need to do to try to get the scalings back in line, and then you could make exceptions on top of that for especially resilient creatures. - Tarkisflux 23:32, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Edit - it looks like most of the LD creatures already do this actually, what with their increasingly large stats, so well done I guess. - Tarkisflux 00:13, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Barely paying attention here, but would a function of something like "a bonus to HP based on how their HD total relates to their size" be something to look into? As in, a huge creature gets a set bonus to just his HP for having a lot of HD and being huge, more so than he would if he were large. You'd end up with some kind of chart thing I guess for reference... just a thought. --Ganteka Future 01:27, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Two things I'd like to add here.

1. Character Wealth By Level was a bad implementation in DnD. There are balanced wealth variants. Looking at all three systems, and saying which don't work with this system and possibly creating a new balanced wealth system might be useful. And also, wouldn't monsters also need balanced wealth like this? We are in effect, nerfing the overwhelming numbers of monsters in favor of special abilities, so nerfing the overwhelming numbers of player characters would be useful (not to mention less bookwork).
2. Tome of Battle maneuvers do a set amount of damage. Since currently HPs don't scale exponentially with this design rule, we add more power to add nd6 points of damage maneuvers. And there are a lot of those in both core ToB and homebrew.

--Havvy 06:18, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Quite a few maneuvers already deal insufficient damage to be truly effective, most of the ones from Stone Dragon in particular. So it's not like this would even be creating a need where there isn't one previously. - TG Cid 16:43, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

A comment on the bit about powerful monsters needing more hp. For some of the stronger, boss-style monsters I've actually given them a special quality of something like "Tough As Nails: The Boogiewoogie recieves an extra +10 hp per HD." for whenever I needed something with large amounts of hp, without pushing it's Fort save into the stratosphere with a high Con. So far it's worked for me, I just slap that one when required. -- 65.167.16.55 02:46, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Packing on hit points works for some monsters (all the Liber Demonica demon lords have maximum hit points, for example, and Juiblex and the Tarrasque have altered Hit Dice from their usual type). To a point, that can be necessary to maintain equivalent hit point totals with lower Hit Dice without ramping up Constitution by an unacceptable amount. But just packing on hit points doesn't fix everything, especially in Wizard-level games where save-or-dies are the gold standard. That said, I agree that that's one boost that a great deal of monsters need in games where characters can throw down the damage. - TG Cid 04:10, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Regarding one of Tarkis's earlier concerns about scaling spells, the SRD doesn't have a set rule for monsters that their caster level is equal to HD. If this was the case, high-HD creatures with SLA's would obviously have a huge edge. In light of this, I think defining that as a set rule as part of MLET would be advantageous in that it will not lead to disparities between a creature's Hit Dice and caster level. - TG Cid 04:22, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Quibble, Su scale with HD, SLAs are based on spells and act accordingly, aka a Color Spray spell is always gonna be DC 11+Whatever. The Su and things like Poison are the issue though, those are 10 + 1/2 + Whatever. There is one thing though, in that the powers of the Su don't always scale. The Poison will always do 1d8, the Breath Weapon 6d6, etc, save exceptions like, well, dragons. Onto CL, rules are a bit fuzzy. If it's "CL is equal to HD", that seems obvious that would scale, but if it's like a dyrad with actual spellcasting, that won't advance unless she takes levels in whatever spellcasting class she has inherently (which I believe is druidic casting for dyrads). -- Eiji-kun 11:54, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

The SRD Dryad has spell-likes, but even if this was not the case a hardline rule allowing for monster HD to count as levels in a spellcasting class (for the spell advancement only, not other class features) wouldn't be too difficult. Using the same hypothetical example, something like "a dryad casts spells as a druid with a charater level equal her CR, and this stacks with any normal druid spellcasting so she doesn't have two separate spell lists" would go a long way in helping to actually make a creature sensibly close to their CR if you consider full cating to be a CR-equivocal parameter (that is, one level of casting equals 1 fair point of Challenge Rating).

Regarding the scaling of supernatural abilities, one of the reasons for making actual new monsters instead of simply adjusting Hit Dice would also be to ensure that such problems get corrected. If the damage is static, no amount of advancement is going to make the creature's abilities scale for an increased CR. That has to change. Also, I personally believe that spell-like abilities should have a default DC of 10 + 1/2 HD + modifier so that they also scale with Challenge Rating and don't create unnecessary issues if a creature has an ability that would normally be beyond its CR. Making the DC uniform also reduces the amount of bookchecking needed, since DC's are for the most part the same. I would likely only support the normal spell modifiers when they are applied to actual spells rather than spell-like abilities. - TG Cid 17:55, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

So, "SLA and SU damage should not be static." We can't change the SLA DC since that *is* a variant rule. Annoying, but it is there. "Caster Level of a monster equals its hit die." sounds fair. Dealing with hit points is a challenge though... --Havvy 06:26, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

FFd20 Anyone?

Just a question regarding what is going on here, but aren't you guys simply talking about levels of monster? It isn't that hard to set up, especially if monster powers are set up with something like the Blue Magic system out of the Final Fantasy games. If that is all that is going on here, it takes only a few minutes to download the PDFs for Final Fantasy d20, and a little extra paper work to add SRD monster abilities to the Blue Magic list.--Change=Chaos. Period. SC 18:20, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't see the correlation between FFd20 and this at all. We haven't been discussing blue magic; this is about how to make the whole concept of Challenge Rating less borked by establishing a hardline rule concerning the ratio of Hit Dice to Challenge Rating. Please explain how Final Fantasy d20 and Blue Magic is at all applicable to this conversation. - TG Cid 18:29, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

"For characters and most NPCs, their level is equal to their hit dice is equal to their CR." That is the standard you are trying to meet, no? Most of this is easily solved by having monster levels, which is the logical conclusion points of the above conversation so far. However, the other problem, special ability scaling, also has a logical conclusion point- powers by level. The easy way to do this is to set up something like Blue Magic, where various monster powers have a power level and monster have a maximum power level by their monster level and type. Again, I thought this was obvious, so I guess I'm sorry for not saying anything earlier.--Change=Chaos. Period. SC 18:40, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

The problem I see with that is the typical concept of monster advancement as the SRD put it has essentially been discarded. Without those kinds of additional abilities, a creature of a given CR is irreconcilable with a higher-CR encounter unless you simply put in more of them (and this only works up to a point). Monster classes offer a different form of advancement, but are built so that you have to essentially use them from the ground up instead of adding them onto previously existing creatures. This comes with its own problems, since using monster classes requires you to create the monster yourself rather than having a convenient, modular monster. As such, the end result has typically been that monsters of a typical CR remain at their CR unless they possess the ability to take character levels. While this imposes a limit to monster usage based the CR-appropriateness of the encounter, it also establishes and acknowledges that simply packing Hit Dice onto a creature doesn't raise its CR. Whatever abilities it has are developed for the CR at which it is encountered, and can still be reconciled with character levels because they scale with Callenge Rating. - TG Cid 18:56, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Monsters tend to be static, this is true, but especially with a level system they don't have to be. Take an alpha wolf- the wolf leader. Lets say that a standard wolf is a level two animal. If monsters use the same advancement rate characters do, adult wolves start the game with 1,000 XP (maybe 1rst level wolves are pups, but that is beside the point). This alpha wolf is of course going to be more powerful than the others, for he is the leader and possibly killed the previous leader. That alone implies he has gotten XP on little wolf adventures, and thus might be a higher level. But that is just the beginning. For example, did you know that many animals do not die of old age the way we do? Many just keep growing until they can no longer sustain their mass. Prehaps animals can keep leveling until they reach Dire staus, and the truly ancient and powerful can reach epic Legendary status. And this is just animals that never multiclass. Imagine that same alpha who has been hunting Displacer Beasts. What if he multiclasses into magical beast? The ingame reason could be over exposure to magical meat, or maybe magic is something anything can learn. Stuff to think about.--Change=Chaos. Period. SC 19:15, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

This is a design for 3.5e changing things minimally by restricting design choices to let monster abilities shine over the numerics behind those abilities and to ease in quality monster creation. Adding in new tables would make this a variant rule instead of a guideline or theory. --Havvy 00:51, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Seeing as how the entire point of the theory is that the SRD is "wrong" in regards to monster creation, I think we past guidline land way the hell and back ago, and are now firmly in variant land.--Change=Chaos. Period. SC 01:05, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

But nothing here may change what the SRD says. It is for creating new monsters, but since nothing new is added, it is by definition, a guideline. Yes, you can make variants with it, and that has been done with many creatures, but other creatures can also be created, like the Avicularia. Minimal changes with maximal results means you aren't redoing every class out there for this to work. That is beneficial to most people, since most people want to continue using classes without changing them too much. --Havvy 02:10, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Say what you will, but I can smell the revolution of these discussions and the upheaval to be catlyzed by these so-called guidelines. Guidelines they may have once been, but they are evolving into something way better. My only regret is that htere is no author mentioned as the father of this infant revolution, but as many of the players will agree, some of the greatest heros (and villains) come from such a beginning.--Change=Chaos. Period. SC 04:09, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I originally created the article, but anybody may edit it. The idea is not mine originally, but rather a codification of what some users were already doing. The "revolution" had already been going on unstated, so I stated it, to help others whom want to help. --The preceding comment was left unsigned by Havvy by accident on 04:20, 7 March 2011 (UTC)