User blog:Dragokar62/Greyfeather Monsters

Greyfeather Monsters

I’ve played D&D for a long time. 40 years now. I began in 1st Edition and played all of the editions with the exception of 4th Edition. I probably would’ve played that one, too, if I had known anyone who was playing at the time, but with the appearance of 5th Edition, I found a group again and picked it up. A lot can be said about each edition and how it handled various things, but the one thing that none of them ever did was handle some of the monsters correctly. At least not to my way of thinking. To that end, I created my own rules about certain types of creatures to fit into my game world, throwing out what TSR and Wizards of the Coast said and doing it my way. It made a huge difference. For the most part, I use the Monster Manual as it is written with 99% of the monsters in there, but it’s that 1% that I changed and this is where I’ll discuss what I did to make those monsters fit more into my game world.

Humanoid Creatures

Creatures such as orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, gnolls and kobolds are easy fodder for an adventuring group of lower levels. They can be quite difficult then, but later on, around the mid-level range, they become a nuisance. Too low level to do much damage to a mid-level party and too easy to kill. Not only that, they don’t offer enough experience points to make them worth killing. Yes, I could just add more of them to make them more difficult to deal with, but then the combat takes hours to complete and it’s still the same song and dance.

What I did was give them levels of experience to go with their usual abilities. If you ran into an orc, you could count on around 15 hit points, a low AC and they might hit for 7 or 8 points of damage. For a lower level group, that’s a challenge, but for a mid-level range group, they shrug that off. Easy to hit, easy to kill, no real challenge. Now imagine meeting a patrol of orcs and realizing they have 45 hit points, 16 AC and they hit for 3d6 plus Strength modifier each time. To do this, I gave them levels, just like PCs. An 8th level party meeting a patrol of 8th level orc warriors is now a challenge. Of course, the experience points are higher, as they are now CR 6 (2,300 xp per kill) and they might even have a magic item on them. But it also accomplishes something else, it makes the players think before rushing to attack them.

If you look at the type of existence that humanoid creatures live, it makes sense that they would gain levels. They raid villages and ambush merchants on the road. They wage war with other tribes. They experience similar things that the PCs do, therefore, they should gain experience levels, too. In those raids, they might come across a magic item or two and eventually learn how to use it, giving the PCs some loot other than some copper to take from them after a battle. They can steal the armor off of some of their victims and wear that, increasing their AC and making them harder to hit, and they can find weapons, even magical ones, to hit harder with.

This doesn’t just apply to orcs in Greyfeather. Like I said, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, gnolls and kobolds can be this way, too, and it’s not easy to tell when you encounter them. Seeing them in chainmail would probably be a big clue, but otherwise, you never know just how capable they are until you start the fight. By then, it’s too late.

Dragons

Even during the crunchy 1st Edition days, I always felt that they undersold dragons. They gave them plenty of health and plenty of damage to hand out to heroes who felt they had to “slay a dragon” to be a true hero, but it didn’t seem realistic to me. An ancient dragon is of Gargantuan size, meaning, they are freaking huge! Their heads can sometimes be 50’ above the floor, their bodies nearly 200’ long from nose to tail. They weigh more than two tons in some cases, though weighing them was never done, I just use that based on their sheer size. The biggest fear from all dragon’s was their breath weapon, but as players got wiser to the tactics of dragons, they began to look for those shortcuts to protect themselves and then the fear of the dragon was gone. I felt that was ridiculous.

Fast forward to 5th Edition D&D and a trip through the Monster Manual and it almost looks like they nerfed dragons yet again. The Ancient Red Dragon only as an AC of 22. Yet a Totem Warrior Barbarian with maximum Dex and Con, and a set of Bracers of Defense can match them. Hmmm, doesn’t sound right to me. I’ll readily agree they gave them enough hit points (576), or if you’re like me and give them maximum hit points like I do my players (812, which is more like it), but when it comes to their AC, I’m stumped. A dragon’s scales are not made of a sheet of metal, they are overlapping, near metal plates, sometimes the size of the character themselves. To me, this should be much tougher than hitting a paladin in plate armor. As a rule, I tend to add 5 or so to the AC of an Ancient Dragon to make this more believable. But that doesn’t mean I do that with all of them. Some can go much higher than 5 above the book. This is how I rule it.

Then I look at their breath weapon and I shake my head. Now don’t get me wrong, 26d6 fire breath isn’t a small amount, but it’s the intensity of it that bothers me. A dragon inhales to prepare, then exhales sheets of flame at a humanoid at its feet, yet they can just stand there and take it? Yeah, not thinking so. The average human, expelling air from the lungs at a normal rate, is near 1,000 miles per hour. That’s science. So a gargantuan creature, expelling air from their lungs to ignite the flames that will fry you and doing so forcefully? That’s going to knock you down. Roll Strength at a super high DC or be knocked back about 50’. This is how I rule it.

Also, the way they set up the damage of this amazingly powerful breath weapon is way too weak for me. You have to make a Dexterity save to take half damage. And why is that? An Ancient Red Dragon expels its breath out in a cone that is 90’ long (which harkens back to the speed at which its traveling, thank you, Science), but it doesn’t mention how wide the cone is at the base. To my way of looking at it, it should be around 30’. If you are close to this at the beginning of your turn, sure, you can avoid most of it, so that makes sense, but the further you are from the dragon, the less room for error you have, therefore, the DC should be higher to avoid it. This is how I rule it.

So we’ve had our Physics lesson, now it’s time to discuss the sheer power of the dragon’s breath. I’ve had players hide behind shields, thinking that would protect them. Based on the rules of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, they could do that and only take a fraction of the damage the breath handed out. The same rules apply here. Cover equals less damage. But in looking at this more realistically (which I do and that’s my prerogative), this cover would act as a sail to knock you flying across a room, tumbling horribly and making you even more susceptible to the fire damage. This is how I rule it.

And finally, just how hot is it? Well, this is another area I felt that Wizards of the Coast, and in the beginning, TSR, failed the dragon. To my way of viewing it, it should be just as hot as the fires of Hell, due to the origins of the fire. If not, it’s just like Burning Hands and that doesn’t fit to me. I believe that an Ancient Red Dragon, breathing fire, should have the same abilities as a Wizard with Elemental Adept feat. Immunity becomes resistance, Resistance becomes normal damage, all due to the origins of the fire. This is how I rule it.

Now I just talked about Red Dragons here, but this applies to all dragons of Ancient age. I only include the Ancient age because if I made all dragons this way, killing one would be way too difficult until much higher levels and this isn’t realistic, either. It would also make surviving an encounter with any dragon a near party wipe. That being said, what I did to account for this without completely re-writing the Monster Manual for dragons, I just changed the age categories slightly from what they have in the Monster Manual. The first three listings for dragons remain as they were written (Wyrmling, Young and Adult). Those make sense and make for a good battle. But the Ancient in the book has now been reduced to being a Mature Adult Dragon, and this is what is in the book. My Ancient dragons will have a monster listing all their own and only I will have a copy of that. This is how I rule it.



<p style="text-align:center;">Other Monsters

There are other monsters that can be "beefed up" to be used in individual situations and I'll address this here. In looking at the Monster Manual, there are very few mid-range undead creatures that can be used. In fact, unless you throw a Vampire or a Lich as the party, there is little that can provide a challenge even at higher levels. To combat this, I beef up my monsters a little, maybe give them a little backstory to show why they are tougher than their Monster Manual counterparts. Sometimes, I lean on the old gaming method of "named mobs" or "elite mobs" to show why they are tougher.

When I beef them up, I might add some AC to them, I definitely add hit points, I change their CR by giving them some additional abilities that help them deal with a higher level party and I give them a special ability to put the party on their heels. I try to stick with the main thrust of what the Monster Manual was going for, I just make it tougher. With undead, you want their abilities to be similar to the ones in the book, but raise the DC's or add more damage to them to show their increased CR. You can mix this and match this as you go, as well, maybe borrowing some abilities from other like monsters and giving it to them (you might need to balance the damage output if you do). This also keeps the monsters "unique" to the players, which can keep metagamers on their toes (another favorite hobby of mine).

<p style="text-align: center;">Summary

<p style="text-align: left;">Those are really the only changes that I made to the monsters in Greyfeather from what is listed in the Monster Manual. I have created my own monsters that I use from time-to-time, but those aren’t anything that would require a mention here. When I use those created ones, I’ll make sure to give the players a run down on their arcana history. So when you encounter a humanoid or a dragon in Greyfeather, it might be a good idea to pay close attention to how you handle it. It might save your life.