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)