A few weeks ago, I posted an alternative method of building monsters and encounters based on the idea that instead of a challenge rating, monsters could have a tier of play, a general threat level, and an organizational structure. A monster like a goblin warrior might be a low threat, apprentice tier monster that appears in gangs, which means that you could just throw twice as many of them as there are players in your first or second level party and you’d be golden. Or you could do something more complex, like swap out two of the goblins for one hobgoblin warlord – a medium threat, apprentice tier monster that comes in groups. And then you could swap out one of the goblins for two giant rats – low threat, apprentice tier monsters that come in mobs. Or whatever.
Anyway, since I posted that, I’ve gotten A LOT of questions and feedback. Mostly, the feedback was good. People liked the system. Which is good. I like the system myself. I’ve been using it exclusively to build or reskin monsters for a while in my own game. And to build encounters. Of course, not all of the feedback was good. This IS the Internet. So I did get the usual slew of “this sucks” or “these numbers look off” or “this wouldn’t work in play” from people who are such incredible f$&%ing game design geniuses that they can assess game balance just by glancing at a table for one nanosecond and then express their brilliant deductions in a single, misspelled sentence with the word “sucks” in it. Uh-huh.
But I’ve also gotten questions. A lot of questions. Apparently, not everything about custom monster and encounter building was as clear and obvious as I thought it was. And, look, that’s a constant problem. The thing is, no matter how clear you think you’re being, you’re always hampered by the fact that you’re intimately familiar with anything you create. And if you’ve been using, testing, and tweaking that thing for a while, it’s totally second nature to you. So, I’m sorry if I confused some of you. And I’m sorry if I left some stuff out. Fear not. Angry is here to make it better. Because Angry always makes it better.
If there’s one thing that’s become clear to me, it’s that people like practical s$&%. They like exemplary s$&%. That is to say people like examples. So, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to clarify by way of example. Examples. Plural. First, I’m going to use my system to build some very simple custom monsters. That’s the article you’re reading right now. Second, I’m going to use my system with a bunch of other monsters to build some encounters to populate a dungeon with. That way, you can see everything in play.
And meanwhile, I’m also going to take the time to fill in a gap in people’s understanding of custom monster building that is more generally applicable. But that’s a whole other story. So, grab your crayons and construction paper. We’re going to make some monsters.
Monster Building the Angry Way
All right, kids, it’s arts and crafts time. We’re going to have some nice, practical fun today. We’re going to use the system I published a few weeks ago for custom monster building to make us some custom monsters. And then, in two weeks, we’re going to populate us a dungeon with some monster encounters using the same system. That way, hopefully, I can clear up a bunch of confusion that seems to have resulted from me rewriting the stupid, kludgey mess of D&D monster and encounter building into something that was supposed to be simpler. And it actually is. Once you understand it.
Now, if you don’t remember the article in question, that’s fine. You don’t have to. You just need to have access to this chart (click on it for a bigger version):
And you also need to remember three things. Remember that, under the Angry Monster and Encounter Building System, every monster has a tier, a threat level, and an organization system.
Tier defines the levels of play at which the monster is a good, fun challenge. The tiers are Apprentice (1st to 2nd level), Journeyman (3rd to 5th), Adventurer (6th to 8th), Veteran (9th to 11th), Champion (12th to 14th), Heroic (15th to 17th), and Legendary (19th level and above).
Threat is a vague measure of how dangerous the monster is compared to other monsters of its tier. And this is the first place where I confused some people. Threat is basically a vague, general little descriptor that’s useful as a way of focusing the design process and making sure the monster falls somewhere in the realm of playable. It’s not meant to be used as an encounter balancing tool or anything like that. It’s a way of assessing the design. And it comes in handy in two ways. First, it’s useful if you’re designing a monster and you decide that there’s a compelling reason for this particular monster to feel like a slightly bigger or smaller threat than other monsters. Like, for example, both stirges and giant rats might be apprentice tier monsters that appear in gangs, right? But giant rats are basically just vermin. They are just squeaky, greasy speedbumps meant to be cleared out of the basement of the inn during the first session of the campaign. They should be pretty pathetic. So, you might design them purposely to serve as a low threat.
Second, threat is useful because it tells you when your design is a little overloaded or underwhelming. So, you might start designing a creature that seems pretty good, but after you tweak the stats and add some special abilities, it might end up a much bigger threat than you initially intended. Or it might end up a little weaker than you thought. Threat gives you something to aim for. And most of the time, you should aim right for the middle of the road.
I’m going to mention right here that GMs have a tendency to overpower monsters and to aim for higher threats and higher levels of challenge because they forget that D&D is an attrition-based challenge model and that individual fights aren’t supposed to be particularly deadly or dangerous by themselves. They are just supposed to use up resources. The challenge of the game arises from whether the heroes can overcome multiple challenges or not. Which is why I say: aim for medium threat creatures almost all of the time and only deviate when you have a really compelling reason to do otherwise.
Finally, there’s organization. Organization reflects how monsters tend to group up. Monsters can be solo monsters, paired monsters, group monsters, gang monsters, or mob monsters. And there’s three different ways that organization can be useful. First, organization tells you how many of the same monsters will generally appear together. Solo monsters come alone. Pairs come in, well, pairs. Groups come in parties of three to six. Gangs come in parties of seven to twelve. And mobs show up in parties of more than thirteen, but usually in parties of fifteen to twenty-five.
Second, though, organization tells you roughly how the monsters’ numbers should compare to the PC party. Solo monsters confront the party alone. Paired monsters are generally outnumbered two to one. Group monsters fight in roughly equal numbers to the party. Gang monsters outnumber the party two to one. And mobs outnumber the party by three or four to one. So, if you have a three-person party, a good gang will have six monsters in it. And if you’ve got a six-person party, three monsters can make up a pair.
Third, because of the ways the numbers work out, you can actually use the organization numbers to swap creatures into and out of mixed parties. If you compare the organizations to a party of four PCs, you get this simple formula of 1 Solo Monster = 2 Paired Monsters = 4 Group Monsters = 8 Gang Monsters = 16 Mob Monsters. But THAT is an encounter building tool that I’ll talk more about in the next example article about building encounters.
Okay, so remember that under Angry’s system, every monster has a tier of play, a threat, an organization structure, and monster stats come off the table above. Now, how can we use those tools to build us some monsters?
Zombie Skin
Recently, I found myself needing some basic zombies for an adventure I was writing. You know, rotting corpses animated by necrotic magic from the Shadowfell and driven to shamble at adventures and beat them to paste? The problem is that the zombies in the Monster Manual are built the stupid, complicated way.
Yeah, I know. Zombies. What a dull example. Look, there’s a good reason to choose something simple and iconic and something that already exists in the Monster Manual. Good reasons. Plural. I never do anything without good reasons.
The first good reason is that we’re going to build zombies TWICE. THRICE, actually. Well, sort of. Because I want to provide an example of how to quickly reskin an existing monster using my system. And then I’ll provide an example of how to build a monster from the ground up. The second good reason is that I want to show you how to build a quick and simple, functional custom monster around a solid, well-thought-out concept. And it’s easiest to show that off with a monster that has some familiar tropes associated with it that we can all be on the same page about.
Let’s start simple, though. Let’s start by reskinning the Monster Manual. We’d do that because we want to use my encounter building tools to quickly populate a dungeon with a variety of fun encounters but the existing monsters aren’t designed around tiers and threats and s$&% like that.
Now, reskinning an existing monster is mostly just a matter of deciding how you want to build encounters with the monster, bringing the stats in line with that, and then evaluating the various traits and abilities to make sure the creature is at a manageable threat. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, this is the textbook version of the zombie from MM316.
Now, six things affect the mechanical balance of a monster in D&D 5E. Those are the creature’s armor class, hit points, attack bonuses, saving throw DCs, damage, and traits and special abilities. So, those are the things we need to assess and possibly change to bring the monster in line with the Angry system. So, we need to look at this stuff:
But before we look at any of it, we also need to figure out what our goal is for the zombie. How are we going to use it in encounters? Zombies are generally a low-level threat. They are something that heroes deal with pretty early in their adventuring career. So, it makes sense to make them Apprentice Tier monsters. And there’s no compelling reason to make zombies especially powerful or especially weak. They’re just normal monsters. They aren’t vermin like rats and they aren’t boss monster types or powerful movers and shakers. They are just workaday monsters that the party cuts through in crypts. So they are Medium Threat creatures.
As for their organization, well, zombies are rarely encountered in small numbers. They tend to outnumber whoever they are fighting. So, they should have the party outnumbered. And, while you could make the argument for mobs of three or four zombies for each PC, D&D really isn’t a zombie apocalypse type world. While zombies do generally have the party outnumbered, I see them as coming in waves of two-zombies-to-one-PC. I also prefer that because I want the zombies to be more durable. One of the classic features of zombies is that they take a hit or two and keep shambling forward. I don’t see them as cannon fodder that should be dropped in one hit. It’s okay for PCs to mow through kobolds or rats, but zombies should take a few hits to take down. So, my zombies are going to be organized into Gangs. Two zombies for each PC or roughly seven to twelve zombies in an encounter.
Now that we’ve decided we’re building apprentice tier, medium threat zombies that come in gangs, we need to decide what to do with their basic stats: armor class, hit points, attack bonus, and damage. Zombies don’t have any abilities that grant saving throws, so we can ignore that. For now. Each one of those stats can be rated Average, Good, or Poor.
If you look at the table, you’ll notice that Average is noted with a +0, Good is noted with a +1, and Poor is noted with a -1. Those numbers allow you to assess the effect the stat has on the monster’s threat. If you add up all the things that affect a monster’s threat, it’ll tell you how dangerous the monster is. Generally, a monster is viable if its total threat is anywhere from -3 to +3. The sweet spot for medium threat is -1 to +1. +2 or +3 makes it a high threat. And -3 to -2 makes it a low threat.
You could make a medium threat monster simply by using just medium stats across the board. But it’s nice to introduce a little variation to the stats. The variation isn’t much – a complaint I’ve heard from WAY too many people who are missing the f$&%ing point of monster building and I will address that below when we make some scratch-built, bespoke zombies – the variation isn’t much, but it’s nice.
Zombies are slow and clumsy, but they’re durable and they hit hard. That’s how I see them anyway. So, that suggests to me that they should have poor AC (-1) and poor attack rolls (-1), but good hit points (+1) and deal good damage (+1). That gives them a perfect +0 threat rating. But…
If we look at the zombie stat block, we’ll notice one obvious thing and one more subtle thing. The obvious thing is that they have this ability called Undead Fortitude. Basically, when they get killed, they get to roll a saving throw to not die. That’s a neat zombie ability. And it definitely makes zombies more threatening. After all, hit points are a measure of how many rounds a monster lives for. Being able to make saving throws to live for more rounds is basically having more hit points.
Now, the stupid system in the DMG tells you to figure out the final CR based on an effective increase in the hit points of the creature which affects it’s defensive CR and is based on the tier of play and I got bored even typing that out. Because holy f$&% is that unnecessary and does it assume a level of f$&%ing precision in this s$&% that just doesn’t exist. My system, on the other hand, is just a matter of saying “as long as the ability seems reasonable, just eyeball that f$&%er.” Or, put another way, “if something increases the monster’s damage or staying power, assume its worth +1 threat and call it a day.”
Undead Fortitude increases the zombie’s threat by +1, for a total threat of +1, which still makes it a nice, medium threat creature.
The subtle thing to note is that zombies don’t just have poor armor classes, they have terrible armor classes. They are almost impossible to miss. And that really plays into the whole clumsy, slow, shambling monster thing. So, we should give the zombie an AC that is even lower than a Poor AC. A Very Poor AC.
Now, you might notice that the difference between a Poor, Medium, and Good AC is two points a step. So, logically, if we want to drop the AC from Poor to Very Poor, we could probably shave two points off and assume the threat drops another point. If that seems like I’m just making s$&% up as I go and pulling s$&% out of my a$&, well, that’s exactly the f$&%ing point. It’s not like I’m picking numbers at random. I’m just making my best guesses. It’ll work fine.
Now, we can just read the stats off the table and fill in the changes. A poor AC is 11, but a very poor AC is 9. A gang monster with good HP has 16 hit points. A poor attack is +2. And a gang monster who deals good damage does about 5 damage a round. And, when we account for the very poor AC and Undead Fortitude, our reskinned zombie has a threat of +0.
Honestly, though, when I look at those numbers, I feel like the poor attack bonus is a bit too low. Zombies are slow and clumsy, sure, but they really shouldn’t whiff more often than any other monster. When they hit, they hit hard, but they don’t miss a lot. So, it’s probably fine to give them an average attack bonus of +4. That brings their threat to +1, which is still in line with a medium threat.
Again, I’m just going with my gut. Because that’s how you do this s$&%.
Ultimately, here’s what our reskinned zombie looks like.
And if I didn’t take the time to type out 2,000 words explaining how I got there, it would have taken me five minutes with a red marker to do it.
Oh, and if you need a dice code for the hit points and damage, you can use 2d8 + 6 for the hit points and 1d8 + 1 for the damage. Easy.
Bespoke Zombies
Reskinning is quick and easy. It’s basically just reading s$&% off my table and writing it in with a red pen over the crappy stat block in the Monster Manual. But suppose you want to get a little fancier. Suppose you want to build a monster from scratch. One that does things a little differently from the one in the Monster Manual. One that’s a little bit more interesting and well-designed. One that’s more than just a shambling punching bag that punches back.
See, one of the problems with SOME – but not ALL – of the monsters in the Monster Manual is that they’re kind of dull. They don’t really do anything interesting. Or they’re interesting in the wrong way. The boring way. Take the zombies, for instance. They basically just move and attack. Move and attack. That’s all they do. And their attack is just a punch. And it just does damage. They take the same action every round. Meanwhile, their other defining traits are a really low armor class and that Undead Fortitude thing.
Now, the low AC thing isn’t actually interesting because numbers aren’t interesting. I’m sorry. They just aren’t. Especially numbers that the players can’t see. Which is why when people complain that there’s not enough numerical variation in my table to create interesting monsters, my response is “no s$&%, they’re just numbers.” Statistical variation alone doesn’t make anything interesting. Hell, most players don’t notice the differences between the stats most of the time. Not unless they are really played up. If you want to make a monster interesting, you have to do something more than fiddle with the numbers.
Most GMs, when they make custom monsters, they try to make things more interesting with interesting attacks. And lots of monsters in the Monster Manual have interesting attacks and a variety of different actions. And that DOES make them more interesting. But only a little bit. Because that’s the wrong kind of interesting.
What DOES make a monster interesting is when a monster’s actions or traits or statistics force the players to do something differently. To change up what they are doing. Either because the thing they are doing isn’t very effective or because there’s a thing they could do that would be more effective. Something else that makes a monster interesting is when its actions give the players a choice. When the players can choose between counteracting the monster’s strategy, for example, or just dealing damage and taking the hit.
Undead fortitude is actually kind of an interesting case. The idea of a creature that might not die when it dies is pretty cool. But undead fortitude misses the mark a bit because it’s mostly just a random thing that happens. The monster makes a saving throw and, if it succeeds, it doesn’t die when it dies. Unless the damage was from a critical hit. Or from radiant damage.
Now, that radiant damage thing IS a nice touch. Because that does represent a choice the players can make to counteract the monster’s ability. If they can deal radiant damage. That’s along the right lines. But, by itself, it’s kind of a small thing.
See? See why I said the zombie would make an interesting discussion even though it’s a pretty plain monster? The zombie is basically just a shambling, single attack with a feature that is ALMOST interesting. I figured since I’m building a monster from scratch anyway, I’d take an opportunity to tell you how to make it interesting.
Who’s Your Daddy; What Does He Do?
Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip
Whenever I make a monster, I like to start off by figuring out conceptually what the hell I’m actually trying to make. And I do that in three steps. First, I try to figure out what the monster actually is. How does it fight? How does it feel to fight it? And what’s the best way to fight it? Second, I figure out how I’m going to build encounters with the monster. And third, I try to figure out where its statistics should basically fall. So, let’s start by figuring out what a zombie actually is. What it should feel like.
Zombies are shambling, animated corpses. They tend to attack in numbers. We’ve covered that already. But let’s talk about how it feels to fight a zombie and how a zombie should fight.
When you’re fighting a zombie, you’ve basically got this thing coming at you and no matter how much you hit it, it just doesn’t stop coming. Shoot or hack at a zombie as much as you want, they just feel unstoppable. It’s like fighting a glacier. Especially when you’re fighting a mass of them. Because in the time it takes you to take one down, all the rest have gotten dangerously close. And that’s really the problem. One zombie, by itself, is bad, but you do not want to be surrounded by zombies. Zombies are overwhelming. Again, like a glacier.
Zombies are unsophisticated creatures. They are not tactical. They are not clever. They are not fast. They just shamble, surround, and attack. Except they don’t attack. Zombies don’t actually really fight at all. What they do is eat. Zombies are driven to consume living flesh. That’s all they do. They just eat. They eat you whether you’re alive or dead. I don’t know who the f$&% decided that zombies slam and punch, but they are dead wrong. No. Zombies just try to get hold of you, pull you close, and take a bite out of you. And once you’re overwhelmed by zombies, they all just belly up to the you buffet and start chowing down.
Our goal is to capture some of that when we create our zombie. And to do with it something other than numbers. Because, look, a lot of hit points just aren’t going to do it. Numbers aren’t interesting.
A Rockin’ Baseline
Now that we’ve established a good understanding of what our monster is, how it feels to fight it, and how it fights, we need to figure out the mechanical stuff that the Angry system requires. Honestly, though, we’ve already kind of done that. Everything I said above still stands: zombies are low-level creatures, they are normal monsters that pose a medium threat, and they should outnumber the heroes two-to-one. They are apprentice tier, medium threat monsters that come in gangs. They have poor AC, good HP, a medium attack bonus, and they deal good damage.
However, because we don’t know quite what we’re going to do with the zombie yet, we need to also consider its saving throw DC. The saving throw DC is the DC required for a PC to save against any attacks the monster might make that allow a saving throw. Effectively, the saving throw DC is the equivalent of the attack bonus for abilities that use saving throws instead of attack rolls.
Something I didn’t explain very well previously is that, when you’re figuring out the threat of the monster, you don’t consider BOTH the attack bonus and the saving throw. You just consider whichever one is better. If I made a monster that had both a good attack bonus and a good saving throw DC, it would only increase the threat by +1. And if the monster has a good attack bonus and a poor saving throw DC, that would also increase the threat by +1. They don’t balance out.
Sorry I wasn’t clearer about that.
With the concept spelled out and the baseline stats chosen, we’re ready to build the monster. Now, we just have to figure out how to express all of that crap in a stat block.
How Organization Defines Everything
At this stage, it’s now time to do the fun creative s$&%. It’s time to make the monster to suit the stuff you came up with above. But as you do, there is something very important to keep in mind: the organization of the monster. That’s the single most important thing you have to consider when building the stat block. And this is super important.
See, the organization type tells you both how many of the same monster the GM might end up running at one time and how many other, different monsters the monster you’re building might be grouped with. A solo monster is almost always going to be the only monster the GM has to run. A gang monster or mob monster is going to be a face in the crowd. One among very many.
Why is that important? Well, it’s important because it tells you something about how complex you should make the monster. A solo monster can be pretty complex; it can have a lot of options every round. The GM can remember what most of those options are from round to round so that he can make decisions for the monster more quickly. But imagine if the GM has five or ten or twenty monsters on the field and each one has three different attacks. And imagine if some of those options are expendable. Or have recharge rolls.
In general, the bigger the group, the fewer choices you want each monster to have, the less complex you want the monsters’ actions to be, and the less bookkeeping you want for each monster. Remember, just having a lot of monsters moving around the battlefield makes a battle more dynamic and interesting. Those monsters don’t have to be particularly complex on top of that.
The other thing to keep in mind is that monsters that appear in smaller groups – or alone – need to be more self-sufficient. They need several tools or options so they can implement more complex strategies. Monsters that appear in large groups don’t need as many options because they can work together. But they should have abilities that allow them to work together.
And honestly, that’s really what that whole “who’s your daddy, what does he do” is really about. It’s about strategy. The concept of designing monsters around strategies was one of the most tragic things to get tossed into the book-burning pyres with the 4E rulebooks and I could write an entire f$&% article just about the different types of monster strategies to design around. But I doubt anyone would want that kind of thing.
Anyway…
The point is to keep one eye on the organization of the monster you’re building at all times. Match the monster’s complexity and strategy to the size of the group it’s going to appear in.
Undead Fortitude 2.0
I like to make sure that every monster I build has one good, solid trait that really defines the monster and drives home some major aspect of what that monster is about. And, usually, one trait is enough for most monsters. Unless they are solo monsters, of course. And I try to match the complexity of the trait to the size of the monster’s party. Mobs and gangs need simple traits, passive things that don’t require a lot of tracking or resolution time. Paired monsters and groups can have more complex traits. And this is where I run into a problem. Because Undead Fortitude is actually a really neat trait. Honestly, it’s one of my favorite traits in the Monster Manual. It really perfectly captures the basic idea of a foe that just won’t drop.
The problem is, I’m going to have eight or ten or twelve zombies running – well, shambling – around the battlefield. And each one of them is going to get at least one chance to save to not die. And if they get lucky, they might get several chances to not die. There’s no limit to the number of times Undead Fortitude can save a zombie’s bacon.
Now, making a bunch of saving throws is not a BIG deal. But what is a big deal is the fact that the DC for the saving throw is complicated. I mean, “the DC is equal to 5 + the damage taken” may not SEEM that complicated, but it is the sort of thing that a GM has to glance at every so often. And, as someone who is a fan of zombies and uses them in his game a lot, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to ask “wait, how much damage did you do again?” because you’re doing the saving throw AFTER you’ve already compared the damage done to the zombie’s current hit points and that current hit point number is the one that sticks in your head. The damage done only remains in your head long enough for you to say “yes, that number he just said is bigger than 6, the zombie’s current hit points.”
So, I am a big fan of undead fortitude. But I am not a big fan of how it’s implemented. So, what I’ve done is make it a Constitution saving throw (DC 10). Why DC 10? Well, because 10 is a really easy number to keep in your head. And because most classes with normal builds have an average damage output of between 3 and 7 per round at first and second level, which would make the DC for undead fortitude fall between 8 and 12 by the book.
Undead fortitude is a little more complicated than a trait I’d like to see on a gang monster, but it works so well with the zombie concept that I can’t ignore it.
The One-Two Punch
As mentioned above, the one trait is usually where I try to capture most of “what it feels like to fight the monster.” Which means that I have to capture the “how the monster fights” in the creature’s actions. The trouble is that I’m dealing with a gang of monsters here. And that means I really don’t want them to have too many options. Hell, ideally, I don’t want them to have any options. I want them to fight in a pretty straightforward way so the game doesn’t get bogged down with me making strategic choices for ten different creatures every round.
One trick I sometimes use for monsters like this is what I call the one-two punch. That means the monster has some sort of combo-style attack. The first attack somehow sets up the second. If it’s a solo creature, the creature might have a weak attack that debuffs the target and makes it vulnerable to the second attack somehow. If it’s a creature that comes in a group, the creature might have a weak attack that allows its fellow creatures to make stronger attacks. And the one-two punch works especially well if there’s something the PCs can do to interrupt the sequence at the cost of taking an action.
The nice thing about the one-two punch is that it’s a great way of giving monsters two different attacks without giving them a choice. Basically, one attack is clearly the GOOD attack. But it can only be used conditionally. The monster will always use the GOOD attack when it can. If it can’t, its only option is to set up the good attack.
Now, you might notice that my whole spiel about how zombies fight lends itself perfectly to this one-two punch approach. One zombie tries to grab a living thing. If it gets a hold, that zombie and all the other zombies start eating.
So, zombies have two attacks. They have a weak grab attack. And they have a stronger bite attack that can only be used on a grabbed foe. And this doubles as a teamwork strategy. The zombies want to swarm and surround because once any of them lands a grab, they all start eating. If the PCs can break up the zombie horde so each PC is fighting one zombie, the zombies have to alternate between grabs and bites. That lends itself to a strategy. A simple one, sure. But a strategy nonetheless.
The grab-and-bite strategy also lends itself to another choice. Once a PC is grabbed, that PC could decide that breaking out of the grab is more important than making an attack. That’s not going to be a frequent choice because of the way the action economy works, but it is actually sometimes the best choice.
Pobody’s Nerfect
Now, in theory, we have everything we need to put some numbers down on paper and make a stat block. But I have a problem. For several reasons that I won’t go into right now, I have this tendency to play A LOT with vulnerabilities, resistances, and immunities. I like the elemental rock-paper-scissors feeling of certain types of RPGs like Final Fantasy and Pokemon where if spellcasters match their attacks to their enemy types, they have an advantage, and if they ignore what they know about enemy types, they are not nearly as effective. And like those games, I have a whole bunch of rules in my head about what types of creatures and what races have what resistances. Hell, I even have a handful of special traits I apply to certain types of creatures to give certain damage types special effects.
So, look, in my world, all undead are resistant – but not immune – to necrotic damage and undead can’t be exhausted or poisoned. Mindless creatures can’t be charmed and are immune to psychic damage. And undead are vulnerable to radiant and fire damage. Except flaming undead like flameskulls and fire skeletons. The thing is, I know that those things are all easily overlooked and forgotten. Vulnerabilities and resistances are often forgotten by GMs. And the only reason I don’t forget them so often – and I still do sometimes – is because they are part of the logic of my world and thus are pretty well ingrained in my brain. In short, it’s not great design to load up a creature with so many of those things. But I do it anyway.
Meanwhile, the argument that “resistances and vulnerabilities and immunities upset poor players because the rapier guy can’t hurt skeletons and he should be able to because feelings” is a completely bulls$&% argument made by wrong people who are bad. And also the argument that it encourages players to carry around a golf bag full of weapons if an occasional creature can’t be dealt with effectively using someone’s favorite weapon is an argument FOR encumbrance, not one AGAINST resistances. So those people are also wrong and dumb.
But I will say this: vulnerabilities and resistances encourage spellcasters to switch up their spells and they reward players who invest in skills that let them know things about monsters as well as players who pay attention and remember things about the world. There ARE benefits.
Anyway…
… Then, Finish Drawing the Horse
And then we, you know, make the whole monster:
I know, I know. I should have more to say at this point. But, the thing is, there really isn’t a whole lot to say about filling out the numbers in the stat block. I mean, I already explained how I took the numbers from my table. I already explained how I worked out the threat of the creature. And, in the end, the zombie I designed is pretty much the same as the one from the book. Except that the Undead Fortitude thing is cleaned up to read more easily and to resolve more quickly.
Well, I guess I should point out that I quickly generated that stat block using Tetra Cube’s web-based D&D Stat Block Generator.
I guess I could also explain my logic behind the damage output thing. You’ll notice that the zombie is supposed to have a damage output of 5 damage per round. But an individual zombie will only have an average damage of 3 damage per round if you use the logic in the DMG. Actually, if you really follow the book logic exactly, it’ll either have an average damage of 2 per round or 4 per round depending on whether you assume a grabbed creature will escape or not. And that’s the problem with trying to apply a standard rule.
See, it’s silly to consider how much damage one zombie will do on its own because zombies will never show up alone. The zombies will show up in numbers. At worst, if the zombies spread out, there will be two zombies for every PC. In round one, one zombie will grab each PC and the other will bite that PC. In the second round, all of the zombies will bite. Each PC will take 11 damage, an average of 5 per round. And if the zombies don’t spread out, well, the more zombies that swarm one PC, the fewer zombies that will be forced to use the grab. Once one zombie has a PC grabbed, the rest of the zombies will just start biting him.
And that’s a key point: the DMG tells you to figure out damage based on the average damage output of a single creature over three rounds. But, sometimes, that’s not the right way to do it. A solo creature’s one-two punch can just be averaged over two rounds. And creatures that appear in groups need to be evaluated as part of a group.
I mean, you ARE supposed to design them as part of a f$&%ing group. At least if you’re not designing them the stupid way.
Right on man! This system is really flexible and easy to implement. I’ve been using it to reskin a dungeon 「The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan」for level 5 adventurers for a party of people at level 10. You took 4 pages of insanity from the dmg and condensed it into a grid I can keep in the dice tupperware. Happy New Years! Keep up the excellent work!
” I could write an entire f$&% article just about the different types of monster strategies to design around. But I doubt anyone would want that kind of thing.”
There is at least one person who would be interested in that kind of thing. (It’s me)
Ditto!
I agree, I would love to read this. It sounds like it would be very helpful as a new DM who still struggles with running interesting combats.
I would also be very interested in that article.
For the love of all that is unholy, please write this article
me too
Yep, I’d definitely be interested in that as well!
Also very interested.
So do I
I second this, the monster strategies from 4e’s stat blocks is one of the few things I miss from it in 5e. I feel like they got scrapped because people felt forced to use battle mats, but the recent article on maps was a pretty good exploration of how to provide strategic combat without getting bogged down in the minutia of the grid.
Please write this article! Especially about 4E!
That would be an awesome article. It’s already been touched on here so an expansion on that would be great to read.
I’d absolutely love it. So that makes at least four of us.
I would be interested too.
After a sentence like that I basically assume it’s coming up.
I would also very much love to see an article about this
I’ll…8th that request. Inspiration is good!
Can I 9th?
Jumping on the bandwagon too. Also, that stat block generator link is a godsend – I’ve only been able to find generators that are far too restrictive until now.
Same here, I usually create strategies before actually making the monsters, and an article about them would be great.
As a favor to everyone in this thread, I highly recommend “themonstersknow.com” It is a fantastic resource of Fifth edition monster tactics for the creatures in the Monster Manual (with some occasional stat alterations).
After you’ve read a few of the articles that he has written you start to get a feel for how he makes the decisions for his articles; in some cases, he even states explicitly how his thought processes work in a general, systematic way. Lots of powerful tools in that website if you try to find the system behind the advice!
A bit late to the party, but I also would love to see it
While I would also like to hear Angry’s $0.02 on this, may I suggest for those looking for monster tactics and psychology take a look at “The Monsters Know What They’re Doing” by Keith Ammann? It’s available on Kindle, and has been helpful to me both in homebrew and published adventure prep.
Yet another request for that article.
There are dozens of us! DOZENS!
> The concept of designing monsters around strategies was one of the most tragic things to get tossed into the book-burning pyres with the 4E rulebooks and I could write an entire f$&% article just about the different types of monster strategies to design around. But I doubt anyone would want that kind of thing.
Actually, I do want this! Please consider writhing the article
I wish I had a helpful pdf like that for Exalted 3rd edition. I can use the rest of the monster building advice about complexity and theme at least.
This is the best article I’ve red in a while about D&D! Holy molly, I’ve learned a lot in the span of 15 minutes! 😀 You’re amazing, man!
For those of you wondering:
The reason zombies punch instead of bite is because using the wider tiers that TSR designers followed, zombies and ghouls reliably coexist in one encounter. So to better differentiate them they decided to use a different, more weird pulp version of the zombie that’s an inferior flesh golem. Its also why they’re one of the few undead called out as “when you kill the necromancer the zombies just sort of stand around instead of attacking”.
Yes, what Angry wants to do with George Romero-style zombies (low-level undead horrors that swarm you and start munching) is closer to TSR ghouls than D&D zombies.
But what Angry has given us here lets us build monsters to their purpose. You want D&D zombies–basically lobotomized Frankensteins, big slow clumsy brutes.
(Apologies, Angry, if I run the monster-creation process wrong. But you get to see how the average idiot misunderstands what you’re doing, so you’re welcome.)
We want an Apprentice Tier monster, average, gang, so we start with HP 13, AC 13, +4 to hit, damage 3.
We want them tough-but-clumsy–bump up the HP to 16, drop the AC to 11, +2 to hit, damage 5. (Quality adjustment net +0–HP +1, AC -1, to hit -1, damage +1)
Convert static values to dice ranges, HP 15 (2d8+6). Slam attack d8+1. The to-hit doesn’t follow the rules of calculating melee attack bonus, but if you don’t tell anyone, I won’t either.
Bam, you’ve got your hanna-barbera Frankenstein zombies.
I think that there is room for more than one flavor of zombie as well…the “all flesh must be eaten” variety has certainly come to almost completely dominate current media, but there is also the “nearly mindless automaton that fledgling necromancers/voodoo houngans/dabbling Mythos spellcasters can create that carry, push or pull things” variety that seemed fairly common way back in my day.
Hence the value of reskinning/bespoke creation with a cool chart and basic guidelines. We can all have our preferred flavor of zombies instead of getting stuck with neopolitan.
I’d like to see the all dead flesh is re-animated and is intent on destroying all living flesh style of zombie. Cut it’s arm off then the hand still crawls toward you. Cut it’s head off and the body still shambles toward you, the severed head still capable of biting. Mangle a swarm of them and you essentially have an unkillable flesh “ooze” / gibbering mouther on your hands. You basically have to successfully turn undead or burn it.
How would I combine groups of different organizational structure? Suppose my players have been fighting gangs of zombies, but now they’ve finally tracked down the Necromancer. He’s got zombies with him, but I want him to be a tough fight, so I don’t want to use the ‘gang’ stats for him.
Would I use ‘pair’ stats and fill the other pair slot in the encounter with zombies?
There’s some coverage about combining different groups of monsters in Angry’s earlier article that sets out the rough system. In essence, you’ve got that right: use a pair stat. One half of the pair is taken up by the Necromancer. The other half is taken up by your zombies. If 2 Paired Monsters = 4 Group Monsters = 8 Gang Monsters = 16 Mob Monsters, then 1 half pair = 2 Group = 4 Gang = 8 Mobs. And indeed you might consider making these zombies statted as Group or Gang monsters since they’re the Necromancer’s bodyguards, i.e. because they’re closer to his General Aura Of Awfulness, they’re stronger than the average zombie.
To build on this a little, it is helpful to think in terms of “slots” as Angry mentioned in one of the earlier articles in this series. Start with one enemy slot per PC, and treat Solos as 4-slot monsters, Pairs as 2-slot, Party as 1, Gang as 1/2 (or 2 per slot), and Mob as 1/4 (or 4 per slot).
Brilliant article.
I applied this method a few weeks back, designing different types of goblins and hobgoblins (journeyman tier) for the castle in the starter set. First fight against 7 of them took an hour and a half and I thought I’d mastered it. Got great responses too! Now with the second zombie example I see I still have much to learn.
I see that, when reskinning standard monsters, you just change the numbers and that’s fine obviously. How much effort would you put into making the stats for monsters designed from scratch work out? Ie make a creature not proficient with a weapon to reduce attack bonus or give him a “crude spear” for -1 damage.
Unless you plan on sharing the stat block, nobody is going to know the monster had -1 damage, let alone if it came from a shoddy weapon or lower Str.
If you have a clear reason ahead of time use it, but don’t worry about justifying every tweak. Use that time to make something else better instead.
The shoddy spear would come in if a player decides to pick it up and throw it, or provides a handle for narration and gives the monster flavour. Especially if the players encounter it more often during a campaign. I agree it’s not a necessity though, thanks.
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Why does the grab attach use an attack roll vs a grapple check?
I get that it also does one damage, which is hard to key into a grapple, but 1 damage seems not worth the switch away from the standard grapple rules.
Or is it that the normal athletics vs (athletics OR acrobatics) is just too slow to run at the table for a gang monster?
Also, I really like your two monsters in one body, and have started to use the animated armour elementals as bossfights in my campaign, but I must have overtuned it. Does it work the same as before, where you can just stack up a pair of pair monsters in one body? But having two actions per round really seemed to hurt.
(It caused my players to grab the macguffin and run, as the paladin got knocked out. But maybe this is just because they were low on spells after getting hurt? I have no idea how to actually balance the resource attrition part. Boss after only 1 or 2 encounters? Smite for 50 dmg. Boss after 4/5 encounters? RUN AWAY!)
I’ve been working on a “Paragon Solo” monster mashing two Pairs into one as well, and what I’ve done is spread the “average damage per round” number across the multiple actions available to the Paragon monster. It’s a “blighted dryad” that has a Fey Form and a Giant Scorpion Form and uses the Paragon Fury trait, so in the scorpion form it only deals half of the average damage in any single action, but gets two turns per combat round so the damage reaches the expected average per round of combat. Also, the added mobility combined with Tree Stride makes the boss very difficult to surround and pound until it’s dead.
So, maybe you were dealing twice as much damage per round than this system suggests you should be doing?
Regarding the “hit causes grapple” question, most monsters that intend to grapple do so as an attack with “grappled” as an added effect on a successful hit. Look at Giant Scorpion, Vine Blight, or almost any other creature in the Monster Manual that has a grapple effect.
You’re probably correct about it being slower to do a skill contest rather than an effect added to a successful attack roll, though!
My main issue with this method of monster building is that I have to figure out if an intellect devourer is a pair or group monster (along with a bazillion other monsters), but then again, I’m lazy and dumb. But that’s it, the rest is incredible. You could further customize your zombies to make a Hunter-type, with less HP but a pounce attack, or one of those fat zombies, with more HP but less chance to hit?
How are you figuring out saving throw bonuses?
“…GMs have a tendency to overpower monsters and to aim for higher threats and higher levels of challenge because they forget that D&D is an attrition-based challenge model and that individual fights aren’t supposed to be particularly deadly or dangerous by themselves.”
I’d say GMs overpower single encounters because they have fallen into the “one fight per adventuring day” rut. Perhaps if their combats were quicker and their table time better managed.
Also, I think a lot of GMs (like me) don’t like the narrative constraints implied by the attrition model, and it’s more intuitive to crank up fight difficulty than hack the long rest system or even chose a more appropriate rule system.
On a side note, I’m pretty sure a large number of GMs out there would have an easier time if the were using a system better suited to the game they want to run. A lot of people see DnD as the default option to run any kind of game (and well, it sure isn’t WotC that will tell them it isn’t), and it seems it reflects in a lot of problems people have with the game.
It’s understandable, because managing the attrition aspect is one of the most difficult parts of adventure design. The 15-minute-workday is D&D’s biggest long-standing balance problem, and there’s nothing more terrifying than having your attrition-based adventure cut to pieces because the PCs decided to rest unexpectedly. As DM, you always need to have some excuse why they can’t rest when you don’t want them to, and doing that constantly can be very tiring. All it takes is one long rest to totally shatter the pacing of an attrition-based adventure.
Even experienced DMs have difficulty handling rest management honestly, including AngryGM, his article on how to handle rests was by far his most disappointing, since it just amounted to basically saying give up and let them rest. Though I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised since the 15-minute-workday has classically been a D&D problem that designers and GMs alike try to shove under the carpet and secretly pray no group ever tries to abuse.
The key for me is having consequences on my mind. You long rest? Then the bad guys you beat up and ran also get to recover HP, recruit allies. You long rest? Then the bad guy’s scouts move in and find a prime ambush site. You long rest? The bad guy harasses you throughout the night, ruining your long rest into a short rest.
There is a military tactic called H&I fires. We’d fire at the enemy just to keep them awake, make them move, tire them out. Weather can do this. Add a survival roll DC10 or so to see if the time spent taking a long rest is effective. Failure means that time only gave the benefits of a short rest.
I’m not saying the survival roll is always appropriate, but taking a long rest beside a trail in the woods in the rain without shelter or proper camoflage will make for a miserable ‘rest.’
Yeah, there’s stuff you can do as a DM, but as of yet, I’ve never seen any Dungeon masters guide or supplement really handle this topic in a satisfactory way. Most of the time it’s not talked about at all. You see a lot of talk about how many encounters per day a group should have, but few or no suggestions to how to keep them to that schedule.
A game literally built around attrition really needs to provide a lot of ideas for how you can make that attrition stick. Personally I feel it should probably warrant it’s own chapter in itself just on that topic. Even as a GM with over a decade of experience and knowledge of multiple RPG systems, I find it the single-most difficult topic to handle. And really from reading blogs like this one from other experienced GMs, I can see that I’m far from alone. Most other GMs seem to just be praying like hell their PCs never learn about the 15 minute workday. It’s especially an issue for GMs like myself who want to feature challenging encounters.
You’re not wrong.
I’d say having an honest and frank discussion with the players before the adventure even starts is probably the best option. Explain that you have “built the adventure based on a certain number of encounters per long rest” (which doesn’t necessarily mean _combat_ encounters), and ask them point-blank not to rest unless the party decides that they are in over their heads, or if they feel like they have overextended. I believe that most groups will choose to place their faith in your ability to plan against the attrition model, unless the crit hits the fan and what should have been an easy or moderate encounter ends up taking a larger bite out of their resources.
P.S.: If I’ve learned anything from this blog, it’s that Angry has certain strong opinions regarding the 5E DMG 😛
I was really disappointed to not see an additional rest option in the large rules revision UA they released for 5e not too long ago. A lot of changes characters used to only be able to make at very remote intervals got shortened and having the week long rest outside gritty realism would’ve been the perfect place to put these.
I find the regular long rest = full restore too powerful for players (and gritty realism too weak), and I will be doing long rest = 1 spell level slot per level instead, as well as regaining 1/4 HP and HD.
Stuff like sorcery points and Ki points come back as stated, so those resources become comparatively more plentiful.
What I like about this is that even when you long rest every day (which is not inconceivable), you only regain a subset of your resources. That means that while nothing is really happening, things occur as normal. You sleep, get any small expenses back, and start your next day fresh. But the moment something bigger happens, say you’re clearing a dungeon and you face a big threat inside, you won’t just be back to full power. Instead over the course of multiple tougher days you’ll gradually wear down, until you start at about 1/3 of your spell slots and hp, at which point it becomes mechanically clear that you have to slog back to town and take a week off.
The main advantage of this system is that it allows the ‘adventuring day’ to become a much more extended ‘adventuring sortie’. Random encounters keep people from recovering in more dangerous environments, and the strength of random encounters relative to the players might mean just getting through an environment is a challenge all on its own, or so trivial you can clearly skip them.
It also means that taking away the long rest one night will reverberate much longer, because a single long rest after a string of restless nights will not reset the players resources nearly as much. Conversely, suddenly getting hit with a restless night won’t hamper already tired out players as much as it would under fast resting rules, so the threat of losing current resources to procure a safe long rest zone will be more incentive to back off.
I’m doing something like this in my current DnD campaign, because I faced the same problem. What I found a decent solution was to make short rests take 8 hours (so they had the same constraints of PHB long rests), and scrap long rests.
However, this is no small task, because you then have to break down all the abilities relying on long rest and rebuild them so characters get partial recovery each short rest. Most notably, you have to re-balance hit dice (I still haven’t found a good way to do it after six months), but also spell slots and inspiration dice. For those last two, I had to rewrite chunks of core class mechanics, and I’m still playtesting it.
So, there is no easy way to take down full recovery on long rests in 5e: it’s at the core of the system. That’s also why I’m testing new systems I wouldn’t have to hack as much.
I’m glad that works for you. I like the short rest just fine, so I intend to keep that in the game. A short breather can do wonders for your ability to function, and I like the way that becomes less potent when your pool of hit dice depletes. I also don’t intend to run players ragged with so many encounters per day that I will have to worry about short rests being ‘per encounter’ . I’m fine with those abilities recharging at that rate.
I find the separation of long rests into a ‘daily rest’ and a ‘minivacation’ to be easy enough. It seems like your insistence on eradicating the short rest is what is really causing you trouble, and indeed the separation of short and long rests is embedded into 5e’s core.
“because they forget that D&D is an attrition-based challenge model and that individual fights aren’t supposed to be particularly deadly or dangerous by themselves.”
D&D may be designed as an attrition-based game, but it isn’t a good onel. Because it forces you to either let the players take a quick nap whenever the players want, destroying the attrition model entirely, or it makes you forcibly pry the rest button from the player’s hands.
Think about that for a second. Mearls and Crawford made a feature so broken that once players figure out how to use it properly the DM has to step in and prevent them from doing so.
And then, just to stick it to us, they made it an integral part of the resource system that governs the entire game.
So no, I haven’t forgotten that D&D is SUPPOSED to be an attrition-based game. I’ve just realized that the attrition-based model the game is designed for is in some situations WORSE than the admittedly flawed One Big Fight option.
Great article, as always, Angry. After reading it, a related thought occurred to me and I wanna know what you think.
Hit point pools. This is a mechanic I’m borrowing from the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games, but I think it could be just as effective in 5e, especially when using your group organizations.
The mechanic would be that whenever you have a group of at least four enemies (or at least five, or six, or a party, or gang, etc) that use the same stat block and aren’t “named” or unique, you add their hit points together to create an “HP Pool.” Any damage that one of the creatures from that group would take is then subtracted from the pool. Then, when the pool has taken an amount of damage equal to one enemy’s HP, the enemy that’s taking the damage dies (or is unconscious if you want to try to spare them). And of course any healing on the enemy adds to the pool.
The main benefit of this mechanic is that you don’t have to track each enemy’s hit points, eliminating the very distracting and almost useless situation where a PC asks “which one looks the most damaged?” I’ve seen that quite a bit in my games, dunno about you. It’s also less bookkeeping for the DM: you don’t have to have to check how much HP zombie A has left, oh but the PC meant zombie B, so add that damage back to A and subtract it from B.
The main drawback I can think of is you might have to make special rules for certain monsters, like Angry Brand Zombies. A gang of eight would have 120 HP and each time that pool is reduced by 15, you make the hard to kill roll. Now this part requires a fair amount of suspension of realism, because the PCs won’t necessarily be able to focus down one zombie at a time. If the zombie saves and you’re using minis, you can just put a token on that zombie to show that that particular one has one HP left and the next save it fails kills it. Or, if you’re not using minis, you can put a circle mark under the HP pool; then the next time any of the zombies takes damage, you subtract the total from the HP pool and make another save. If it fails it dies and you cross out the circle; if it saves, you have another zombie with a “phantom” hit point and another circle. At worst, if the PCs are real unlucky, you have six zombies that’ll each die the next time they don’t save.
And that’s my essay. Thoughts?
I really like this idea, thank you. Together with Angry’s new monster creation system that allows for interesting monsters instead of walking collections of numbers no one cares about, I think this will allow for a lot more immersion.
To be fair the standard system allows for more interesting monsters too, it’s just that calculating challenge ratings isn’t great.
The Angry GM made an article several years ago addressing this idea. He based it off of the minions mechanic in 4th edition, but it allows minions to have more than one hitpoint.
https://theangrygm.com/more-grist-for-the-mill-minion-groups-in-dd-5e/
Angry’s version doesn’t address the issue of keeping track of each individual creature’s hit points, but it does seem to make running large groups of small creatures easier in a couple ways. He also makes some reasonable arguments against hit point pools, so I denounce my original comment and suggest people check out that article too.
Then the question is how to combine the two. The Horde of Zombie Shamblers assumes four minions to a group. And their stat block is still pretty close to the new Angry Brand Zombies, so could you rename it to Horde of Zombie Shamblers, four shamblers with 15 HP each, the Minion trait, and four actions per turn? And using the organization rule, a party of four PCs would face two Hordes, totalling eight shamblers?
The ABZs are slightly tougher and hit harder, but they also have two big vulnerabilities that the old shamblers don’t, so it kinda balances out.
If you needed an earlier D&D edition analogue for this concept, Legion Devils (Merregon) out of the Fiendish Codex II from 3rd edition do something very similar – albeit in their case, they just fight on and fight on until the hit point pool hits 0, at which point they *all* collapse and die at once.
I really love putting vulnerabilities and resistances on my creatures and the rock-paper-scissors thing. Would you care to share more, or is that all of it? Especially interested in rocky/stoney creatures
Can someone explain to me how the final zombie build averages 5 damage per round? I’m sure I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what. (I know I’m wrong, because Angry never is)
By my logic, you have 2 zombies per PC. On round 1, zombie 1 grapples and zombie 2 bites for 6 damage total. On round 2, both zombies bite for 10 damage total. That’s 16 damage for the two rounds together. Divide by 2 rounds to get 8. I don’t think we’re dividing by the 2 zombies, since we’re expecting 2 per PC, but if we are, then you get 4. Can someone explain where I’m being stupid here? Does Angry’s math account for a miss chance? I didn’t think it was meant to.
Remember that the average of a single roll of the die is half the maximum plus .5. 1d6+3 totals out to 6.5 on average. Together they make 11.
Round 1
1 damage + 6.5 damage. 7.5 total.
Round 2.
6.5+6.5 damage. 11 total.
18.5/2= 9.25
9.25/2= 4.625
Rounded up is 5 dpr per zombie.
You want the damage output to still hit the target of about 5 per zombie, because the math was already done to balance the damage output for a 2 for 1.
My personal solution to tracking undead fortitude was to let the zombie auto save the first time they drop to 0 (and knock off 1/3 their hp to keep them balanced-ish). This way I don’t have to keep numbers in my head I just take the damage delt and roll the save right away. I like the idea that harder hits are more likely to but the zombie down for good, but I don’t know if there is any appreciable difference between the two ways.
It is also worth stating that having a clear image of how the monster works also lends itself to adjudicating edge cases easier. The better idea you have for the fiction the clearer the resolutions will be.
For example, zombies are mindless so it someone tries to intimidate the zombies there aren’t going to react. You don’t need to put that in the stat block because you know the creature well enough to make the call.
Oh wow, I literally reskinned the Zombie for a game I ran over the holidays and came across the same dilemma: Very cool concept, but too effort/focus consuming to be run as is.
I went the opposite direction, where instead of resolving immediately, I really like the zombies going down and getting back up sometime later. I employed a ‘double tap’ idea where if the zombie goes down due to a relatively weak attack (or piercing damage), it will just always get back up after staying down one round (during which any additional attack on them would finish them off completely). The players picked up on this pretty quick and there weren’t enough zombies to swarm the them, but it made the zombies a far bigger action sink than they would’ve otherwise been, which worked great for the squishy necromancer casting spells from above.
“Remember, just having a lot of monsters moving around the battlefield makes a battle more dynamic and interesting.”
This sentence hits on something that is incredibly important to keep in mind, which is that what we’re trying to do with our system is organically create interesting situations for players. What you want is a fight where just defaulting to “I attack the closest creature”, or “we all focus fire on the obvious priority” are not good ideas. Action economy makes this more difficult, but lots of monster abilities create room for this. Changing terrain, restraining movement, disruptable multi round setups, these all force reassessments from the players.
Finally, an important part is also to make sure player characters have a chance to step back and process what is happening to them. If players are getting hammered hard without a clear way to strike back, they tend to panic (which is great if that’s the intended response). Surviving initial errors is a fundamental part of success through trial and error.
I ran these zombies vs my low level players in a marsh. DC 10 Con Save is insane – they just wouldn’t go down and my party was light on fire/radience – the cleric kept casting sacred flame and the zombies kept rolling too well on their saves. The fighter, injured from a previous fight, was swarmed and went down. Rogue got grabbed but the cleric blasted them off him with Thunderwave – his last spell slot. The rogue asked if he could decapitate the zombie – I said sure, but -5 to hit. That concession allowed them to finally put the zombies down. I’d only sent three of them.
Overall, I think they worked well. It encouraged all the right thinking. “What are these weak to?” was a question that came up, and an NPC was able to clue them in to fire/radiant. The rogue had to think creatively, because sneak attack for massive damage wasn’t useful against a creature that revives regardless on a 7+. No-one ever took an action to escape a grapple, but I think they would have done if they had been grabbed again. I would maybe adjust the Con save of Undead Fortitude to DC12 if I ran them again, particularly if I was going to outnumber them. Or I would start them further away from the party and shambling slowly forward so that they could get a sense that these things were hard to kill.
TLDR: 9/10 would send these shambling undead horrors at my players again, and love the wider concept of this design approach too. Will be using.
Given that most melee lvl 1 characters attack at 1d8+3 (8avg) in 5e, a DC of (5+8) or12 seems more appropriate. The rogue has it even worse, as they’re probably at an average of 15 for the old DC.
Another option is to lower the Con score of the zombie so that it goes to +0. That way the 10 of the DC is the only number to keep into account and the chance drops to 55%.
But maybe instead of increasing the DC (I like that it happens 70% of the time), stating that this can only occur when the zombie goes from above 1 hp to zero would also be a good solution.
I’ve been enjoying your articles but I have to get this off my chest, because it’s really been bugging me:
The singular they uses the same grammatical rules as the singular you, as does the singular we (royal we).
You are = They are = We are
Yourself = Themself = Ourself
Using the term “someone” and then “themselves” is improper. It should be themself.
This isn’t something taught in schools because schools don’t care, but if you don’t do this properly it can cause confusion to the reader, especially when you are referring to both an individual and a group in the same sentence.
You know… if it really DID cause confusion, I’d have had tons of people asking me what the hell I meant when I chose to use the colloquial and conversational tone instead of choosing to follow the exact rules that even the grammar Nazis in school don’t teach because no one f$&%ing talks that way. The point of all writing is to communicate clearly to the largest number of people possible. And it turns out, based on my twelve years of doing this without ever being asked once about these grammatical rules, that I have been doing just that. And I must be doing something right because people manage to read five to six thousand words of this crap every week.
See, people like you are so busy flexing their grammar nitpicking that they forget that there is a feedback loop in terms of grammar rules because the rules are DEscriptive, not PREscriptive. Same with f$&%ing dictionaries. And grammar rules are actually secondary to clarity and style.
And, actually, I find it amazing that THIS is the thing that bugs you but you’ve never commented on the half-dozen times in every article when I start a paragraph or sentence with the contraction “there’s” when I mean “there are.” So, you have an oddly specific sense of what subject-verb agreements actually bother you. And that is also something that manages to not confuse people. Go figure.
If this really does bug you, I suggest you stop reading my blog now before you give yourself an aneurysm.
I’m really happy to have found this article (well, actually your older article which finally led me here) just after I decided to run the “Kingmaker” Campaign for my group (as soon as the current DM gets done with Storm King’s Thunder), which implies porting it from Pathfinder to 5e.
I’ll try doing it with your system which looks a lot less work than doing it the old fashioned way.
I’ve been wondering one thing, though:
Is there a rule of thumb or guideline that lets me throw lower-tier (or higher tier) monsters at my players in your system and still have an interesting encounter?
Let’s say they fought a bunch of your zombies at level 2 and think they’ve ended the threat. Now, at level 4, they return to the town and find it in ruins overrun with zombies.
Should I
a) rebuild the Zombies with the statistics for a Journeyman Mob?
b) keep the stats as is and just move them one group size higher, so an Apprentice Group monster becomes a Journeyman Mob?
c) Do something in-between?
Obviously, I’d like to do b), as it’s both, the least time consuming and best shows the players “hey, these are the exact same monsters you fought earlier”.
I quickly ran the math for the Zombie example and it looks like most stats seem fine, staying within half a quality step, except for health, which lands at three steps above “good”, i.e. +4 threat. So overall, it goes from a medium threat monster (+1) to a high threat one (+3), if we do fractional threat steps.
So since I have neither experience with your method nor with DMing 5e (only DMed 3.5 and pathfinder many years ago and played 5e recently), my questions basically are:
– Is this still a workable monster/encounter or are the extremes in both directions (AC really low and HP extremely high) a problem?
– Is this generalizable or was this merely a happy accident and the statistics usually match up way worse, forcing a complete rebuild?
– Is there any other neat trick to avoid having to do a complete rebuild when moving a monster up/down a tier?
You can always do as you say, put them in a different size group, but lower the hp to an appropriate level. The system is meant to be flexible and sometimes it’s OK to just adapt the numbers on the fly and/or eyeball them.
A big advantage of gangs and mobs is that the individual does not contribute as much to the total, and thus it is easier to modify the numbers (also on the fly).
If the stats suggest to you that doubling from the gang to the mob would be too much, then maybe lower their number by 1 or 2. If it suggests an underwhelming encounter, consider upping the number of foes a little.
A bigger factor than numbers though, will be if the players control over the terms of engagement. If they can enforce a funnel, the mob is toast. If the mob can swarm and separate the players, the players will be in for the fight of their lives.
I play mostly Pathfinder, and I started looking at how to apply the same basic spreadsheet to the PF system. It’s a bit tricksy, though, since PF doesn’t follow quite the same Tiers-to-levels structure as D&D.
Roughly, it seems like PF is designed to provide a power jump/new tier every three levels (for most classes), but then Paizo fiddles around with shifting the jumps for different levels and tries to smooth out the progression so the jumps aren’t quite so drastic.
Still, it could be done with some more work. You’d have to figure out what the PF equivalent is for the proficiency (or maybe have to add several more important numbers (CMB/CMD, etc.))
So, you have options, is what I’m saying. You could port the AP to 5E, or you could adjust the Angry Bestiary System(TM) to PF.
My two cents: I’d say that using the zombies as-is in a mob vs. a gang at Level 4 would make them a +1 or +2 threat Mob monster (and thus, a Hard to Deadly Encounter at 4-per-PC). Their HP will be very high for a Journeyman Mob, their damage output is at the top end of a Journeyman Mob, but their AC is abysmal and their accuracy is a little lower than normal for monsters at that tier.
Sharkjack’s suggestion of fiddling with the number of zombies in the encounter would be the best way to maximize what you’re looking to do with option b).
Are you still using Morale, Angry? I don’t see a spot for it on the stat blocks. Though I assume it would be N/A for zombies anyway.
For those that haven’t seen Angry’s take on morale, you can find it here: https://theangrygm.com/flesh-is-willing-spirit-failed/
You’re right that Morale is N/A for zombies. (“In addition, there are some monsters that never check morale. Mindless undead, for example.” – Morale article.)
I think there’s no designated, set-aside space in the stat block for Morale save information yet because it looks like Angry is, for the time being at least, doing his stat blocks in 5e style. We’ll probably have to wait for Morale notes (like “Morale: Wisdom save DC 12 or Panic”) in the Angry RPG.
I was thinking the very same thing yesterday. If yes, do you compensate for the reduction in effective hp you describe in the morale article?
Love this practical example, Angry. Very excited to use this system overall.
You touched on a very interesting point that I have been debating and pondering recently with your short rabbit trail into Vulnerabilities and Resistances. Really, it comes down to the purpose of damage types.
I’m fairly new to 5e, but from what I can tell, there is no mechanism to explicitly provide players with information about the monster’s vulnerability/immunity/resistance, except trial and error.
Certainly for some monsters (the creepy thing haunting the cabin that no one has ever seen and lived), trial and error is a completely valid methodology. But once monsters become more mundane, it becomes a bit confusing why the characters wouldn’t know that a zombie is vulnerable to fire and radiant damage.
So I guess my question is do you determine if knowledge of those resistances or weaknesses is public knowledge (zombies + fire), known by some kind of knowledge check (say a medusa turning you to stone), or completely unknown (the first ever basilisk to ever be encountered in the world), or do you simply live with the shortcomings that trial and error has? If you do determine some of those things, do you have a system beyond ‘this seems to make sense’?
If not, I wonder if the knowledge could somehow mechanically hook into this system. Solo’s would have limited or no knowledge available, whereas groups or mobs would have more information readily available.
I really love this concept! I just have one question for Angry; looking at the Journeyman difficulty, it seems like higher damage pairs and all solos deal enough damage to down most level 3 players in one hit. Is this intentional, and was this how it played out in your playtests? I’m curious whether I’m missing something. Your Journeyman statblocks seem more powerful than I would expect even a 4th level party to be able to handle, judging from the monster building guidelines in the DMG at least.
Remember that this isn’t “average damage per hit” but rather “average damage per combat round.” Also, you can give monsters Multiattack to reduce the raw damage per hit so they aren’t killing in one hit, and multiple hits means that high AC and actions like Dodge can help to mitigate this damage a bit by making each individual attack less likely to hit.
Briefly looking over the other tiers of play, it looks like the Solo monsters are supposed to have incredibly dangerous damage output when at the lowest level of the tier, and it’s probably because Solo monsters only get 1 action per round compared to the party’s 4 – 6. If you are worried about one-shotting PCs, you can go with a Pair of tough monsters, or try combining this system with Angry’s Paragon monster concept in “Building Boss Fights (D&D 5E Edition)” articles under the “Hack Your F$&%ing Game” menu, above.
How do I use this table with different party sizes? Say 1-6 PCs.
Maybe I should clarify, I understand how I can use the table for <4 players per party. For instance if I have a solo PC, I will use a party monster as a solo encounter.
What if I have a party of 6 players though and I want to create a solo monster?
Since the solo monster is adjusted for a 4 player party, would I just multiply the solo stats x1.5 to get a viable solo monster for 6 PCs?
The original article talks about the “Organization” more.
For smaller or larger parties, I’d suggest the following ROUGH numbers:
The PC’s should outnumber “Solo” monsters 4:1.
The PC’s should outnumber “Pair” monsters 2:1.
The “party” of PCs should face a roughly equal number of “Party” monsters. (i.e. 1:1)
The PC’s should be outnumbered by “Gang” monsters 1:2.
The PC’s should be outnumbered by “Mob” monsters 1:4.
Of course, there’s a lot of flexibility to throw more or less monsters at the PCs. I’d be especially careful with only 1 PC as there’s little room for error. One bad roll of the dice could spell TPK.
So how would I create a solo monster for a 6 PC party?
I would handle this by making a Paragon monster using Angry’s rules in “Building Boss Fights (D&D 5E Edition)” under the “Hack Your F$&%ing Game” menu, above. I’d also recommend reading the 4E Edition articles (at least the first two) to familiarize yourself with the “Boss Monster in Three Stages” concept that Angry explains in those articles.
I would build three separate Pair monsters to represent three separate stages that the boss transitions between during the fight, then compile them into a single Paragon monster with maybe some interesting Paragon actions similar to the Legendary actions or Lair actions that the WotC books give to their bosses.
My only caution is that when the boss has multiple turns per combat round that you make sure that all damage dealt during all turns adds up to the “average damage per round” portion of the table in this article. Unless you want to really crush the party, anyway 😛
That’s certainly a viable way to do it. But I don’t always want to create a complex boss monster. Sometimes it just need the numbers for a tough solo monster for my 6-7 PC party.
What if I just multiplied the 4 player solo monster stats by 1.5, would that work?
Also one thing to notice here is, that AngryGM states, that he has adjusted the stats of the party / group / mob organizations to higher values, based on the assumption of a 4 PC party that can single out monsters and kill them before they deal full damage.
Therefore I think, if I take 1 PC and match him vs a “party organization” (1:1 ratio) monster (1 monster vs the PC) that these damage adjustments are less likely to be valid, because the “party” encounter actually is a “single” encounter now.