Designing 4ever: Challenging Combat & Monster Design
Estimated read time: about 14 minutes
Project 4ever’s first four classes are out for playtesting! In the Playtesting Packet (available on our Discord), we’ve got a ton of content, including a few dozen monster stat blocks!
So it’s time for this blog to start addressing the other side of the coin, some toys for Dungeon Masters rather than just for players.
I’m going to start this discussion off by addressing a couple of philosophical questions, with the goal of explaining where we stand on these issues and how they affect our design methods. If you’d rather skip directly to what we’re doing for Project 4ever, feel free to jump to the “Hit Dice, Damage Dice, & Roles” section.
Balanced vs. Unbalanced Combat
There’s a lot of debate on this topic, with people I highly respect on both sides. Not to go too much into it all, but here’s a quick rundown of what I think.
Story should come first. In other words, combat should serve the story. Otherwise it’s just numbers.
Combat should be fun—for everyone. The DM is a player too and deserves some fun.
Challenging combat can be fun. If you don’t like combat at all, I’m afraid Project 4ever probably isn’t where you want to be.
How do I know what’s challenging for my players? It helps to have a system underneath it all that enables DMs to knowingly set the challenge of an encounter.
Combat, like everything else in the game, should serve the story. If the story says there are only two goblin minions guarding the door, that’s the story; it’s probably not going to be a huge, intricate combat, and maybe won’t result in any combat at all. And that’s okay. There’s probably no need to take that scenario and scale it up to ten or twelve goblin warriors just to give the players a challenge at every step of the journey.
Maybe not every combat has to be an extremely deadly encounter. Variety is the spice of life, after all. But at some point the story introduces the main conflict, and the characters need to resolve it. Whatever the situation, the stakes should be high. The odds should not be in the players’ favor. And for the sake of the story and the drama, resolving the conflict shouldn’t be “too easy”.
The problem is that base 5e’s CR system is notoriously difficult to understand and use. So should we rely on it in encounter and monster design for Project 4ever?
We’ll come back to that.
CR vs. Level
The actual underlying question here is, “Should PCs and monsters be the same?”
In 3.X, monsters were built the same way player characters were, with levels, classes, races, skills, feats, everything. They used the exact same systems. This made balancing encounters against the PCs fairly straightforward number-crunching.
In 4e, monsters were built differently from player characters. Their underlying math is not the same. But still, the systems correlate to each other well enough that balancing encounters is once again just a point of having an XP budget and spending it how you want.
5e’s CR system is very different from the levels of player characters. As opposed to the tight encounter math of 3.X and 4e, 5e uses broad definitions of the different levels of challenge—and I’m not convinced that anybody quite understands all of its nuances. Smarter brains than mine have given their best.
Still, there are advantages to the “loose” math of the 5e’s CR system. For Project 4ever, we’re going to work within the parameters of 5e’s CR as best we can and try to make sense of it so that it’s useful for DMs and players to maximize fun at the table.
And we’re going to do that primarily through three aspects of monster design.
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Hit Dice, Damage Dice, & Roles
These three things don’t have all the answers, but for me they are key elements that help to give Project 4ever monsters a skeleton to build on (pun intended).
Hit Dice
We could just arbitrarily assign numbers for Hit Points of any given CR, but I actually dislike that approach when we have Hit Dice right there.
Now, if you were to take every published 5e monster of a given CR, you’d see that their number of Hit Dice is all over the place. There are reasons for that, all about Offensive CR and Defensive CR and how they balance out, but they’re unsatisfying to me. I’m okay with a range of Hit Points, but if I want to build a monster of a given CR, I’d really like to know how many Hit Dice it should have.
So I did an experiment.
I started with CR 0 as being 0 Hit Dice, just one single Hit Point. From there, CR 1/8 had one Hit Die. CR 1/4 had two (think of base 5e’s Goblin stat block and it’s 2d6 Hit Dice). CR 1/2 had three. And on down the line, to CR 1 and all the way to CR 30, adding one Hit Die each time.
For those following along with the math, that ended up with 33 Hit Dice at CR 30. To see how my assumptions compared to 5e’s 2014 Monster Manual, I looked at the obvious CR 30 example, the Tarrasque. Sure enough, it had 33 Hit Dice. That was encouraging, at least.
Granted, there is much more that goes into a monster’s Hit Points. There’s the size of the Hit Dice (whether they’re d4s or up to d20s), and there’s the monster’s Constitution modifier, which is added to every Hit Die. Both have drastic effects on the monster’s Hit Point maximum, especially as you get into higher CRs. But it was a starting point for me.
Luckily, the size of a monster’s Hit Dice is easy to determine—it just correlates to the monster’s Size category: Small creatures use d6s, Medium use d8s, Large use d10s, etc.
Constitution modifiers were more complicated for me, because as stated earlier I didn’t want to be arbitrary. But fortune strikes again, because the 4e monsters I wanted to convert over to Project 4ever already had Constitution scores. Pulling the modifiers from those was easy, and it turns out that point for point the difference in ability scores between 4e and 5e is astoundingly a non-issue; they compare just fine. Well enough for this purpose, at least.
And so there it is. My experimental chart works remarkably well for determining what the Hit Points of a monster of a given CR should be, without any arbitrary decisions on my part. If I need a CR 5 monster, I know it should have 8 Hit Dice, of the ones appropriate for its Size category. And then for the Constitution modifier, I can find the 4e version of the monster and use its ability score, then apply the modifier to each of the Hit Dice. So far it has worked like a dream.
Damage Dice
I knew going in that I would prefer monsters in Project 4ever to make one big attack, rather than several smaller attacks. It takes up less table time, especially if the attacks inflict any conditions or other rider effects. But how much damage should a monster deal with its big attack?
Here’s what I’ve figured out. I went back to that handy chart I created for monster CR and Hit Dice and made a new column for Damage Dice. Monsters from CR 1/8 through CR 1/2 deal one Damage Die. If it’s a weapon attack, they add their appropriate ability score modifier to the damage. Then, starting at CR 1 and for every odd-numbered CR afterwards, I add another damage die. So a CR 1 rolls two damage dice, a CR 3 rolls three, and a CR 5 rolls four, etc.
Again, we have the complication of the size of the damage die. But actually, that’s just determined by the story, right? If the goblin has a Shortbow, you use d6s. If the orc has a Greataxe, you use d12s. Easy.
To be clear here, this method I’ve been creating does sometimes have wide swings for Hit Points and damage output. But that’s something inherent to the CR system anyways, and at least I can show my work; it’s not arbitrary.
Monster Roles
Ah, and here’s where things get interesting! Monster Roles tweak the numbers of Hit Dice and Damage Dice.
So just like 4e’s character classes each has a role, every monster has one too. They’re entirely different from the character class roles, though in a couple of places they share names. Knowing a monster’s role helps you to know how to use it effectively in combat, even if you’re unfamiliar with the monster’s exact mechanics.
Let’s get into them!
Artillery
These guys hit hard from the monsters’ back row, using powerful ranged attacks to deal damage to the party. In general their defenses and hit points are pretty squishy. Think of a hobgoblin archer looking for a vulnerable target to riddle with arrows. To reflect all this, Artillery monsters get plus 1 Damage Die, and minus 1 Hit Die.
Brute
The name says it all. These guys have one real purpose, and that is to hit hard on the front line. They tend to have more hit points than other monsters, though lower defenses than, say, a Soldier. An ogre would be a classic example of a Brute. These guys get plus 1 Damage Die, and plus 1 Hit Die.
(Note: Wouldn’t this just change the monster’s CR to a higher one? I’m glad you asked! But no, not necessarily. There are other factors in play, that I might get to. Basically it has to do with Proficiency Bonus and ability score ceilings.)
Controller
Here’s one that could be a little confusing, since there’s also a character class role called Controller. While the player version is usually somewhat vulnerable, these monsters are able to hold their own in combat just fine. They tend to focus on inflicting debilitating conditions on the player characters, and often have access to attacks or abilities that affect entire areas. A goblin hexer, for example, can choke up line of sight on the battlefield, punish enemy movement, and even strike a player character blind from range. Controllers don’t have any modifications to their Hit Dice or Damage Dice.
Lurker
As far as names for monster roles go, “Lurker” is such an evocative one. I love it. Anyway, these are monsters that might not attack every round, sometimes hiding or turning invisible instead of attacking. But when they do strike, it hurts bad. They sometimes have trickier mechanics to master in order to use well at the table, but they’re also a lot of fun for the DM. We don’t have many Lurkers yet in the Playtest Packet, but think of something like an imp, magically concealing itself before striking with its poisoned tail. Similar to Artillery, Lurkers get plus 1 Damage Die and minus 1 Hit Die.
Skirmisher
This might be the most common monster role. These are guys who are quick and make the most of moving around on the battlefield. They often get bonuses to attack or damage just for moving a certain distance on their turn, or as an extra reward for getting into a good flanking position. A good example in the Playtest Packet is the gray wolf, which can knock enemies prone when it has an Edge on the attack roll. Skirmishers deal the normal number of Damage Dice for the CR, unless they satisfy some mobility or advantage requirements. Then they can deal 1 extra Damage Die. Their Hit Dice are normal for their CR.
Soldier
These monsters are the tanks. They don’t necessarily deal the most damage, but they have high defenses and can lock player characters down - something that could be a quick death sentence for an errant Rogue or Wizard. Often they can Mark their targets, just like Defenders on the players’ side. Take a look at the kobold dragonshield to see how they might do that. These guys have normal Hit Dice and Damage Dice for their CR, but they often have higher AC—most often determined by their equipment, such as Heavy Armor and/or a Heavy Shield.
To sum all that up with Roles and various dice, here’s a handy little table:
So there we have the needed pieces to create the basics of monsters for Project 4ever, some design principles by which to know how to fill in some essential parts of the stat blocks. For everything else, I’ve been using 4e monsters to fill in the blanks, and then updating the various traits and abilities with Project 4ever wording and rules.
In general, this has resulted in monsters that fall within the wide parameters of the 5e CR system, but also the specific monsters tend to occupy a CR one or several levels higher than the 5e version. For example, in base 5e an ogre is a CR 2, but in Project 4ever, the ogre is a CR 5. For me, it’s elevated the ogre to the threat it should be, as the base 5e ogre never feels like much of a threat except at the lowest levels of play, and that’s just because the player characters have so few Hit Points, rather than the ogre being particularly threatening.
There are other things we’re doing with monster design that we’ll have to get into in another article, maybe one that has to do with Bounded Accuracy. And maybe another that actually talks about the cool abilities the monsters get! But these are the basic building blocks for us.
Wrapping it Up
Well, that’s a big part of how the sausage is made. Thanks for joining us on that wild ride! I expect to do at least another couple articles on the topic of monster design in the future, so don’t forget to check back every so often.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to reach out! We’ve got the comments section below, but also the Unraveled Archives Discord server. That’s really the best place to find us and interact, especially if you’d like to help us with playtesting all of this 4ever material.
And that’s all! Until the next one, happy gaming! And we’ll see you in the Archives.
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