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Matt James
Freelance Game Designer
The only thing that concerns me is the added complexity to the game. Especially in paragon and epic tiers, which you acknowledge to be slowed down by additional complexity, it's one more thing I have to track if it's done on the fly. If it isn't done on the fly, it's even more prep time, which I often don't have to spend. Regardless, though, this is excellent advice for people that publish adventures. If you're taking the time to publish an adventure, you certainly can spend a few more minutes on this kind of addition and subtraction.
I can't imagine prep time would be more than a few moments per monster. Again, at the very least this article should inspire people to think about how adjust their monsters and challenges.
I adjust on the fly and I like to take elements from other monsters and apply them say when the monster first gets bloodied. I even lower defenses sometimes depending on the bloodied value of the monster. Did that last session and it threw off a lot of the number crunchers. They tried to argue "against" it and I did one of those looks at an imaginary camera and then my dice reacted to the comment with 3 natural 20's in a row! I think that stopped them.
Although the Attacks & Defenses scale together in 4E, the quality of the toys the players have to play with change significantly over the tiers. The most significant is that change between Heroic and Paragon - yes, you finally have a full complement of powers, but the addition of rider effects to action point usage (through paragon paths) does have a major effect on how the game feels.The line between Paragon and Epic is a lot more blurry, and it has only become more blurry as time goes on. Epic level is the one area that good design is really required for, but given it's the least popular level of play, it's somewhat trapped in a vicious cycle.The biggest problem pre-Essentials monsters had in D&D was that they had too high ACs and two low attacks & damage. You want both monsters and PCs to be able to hit enough, especially when being used out-of-level. If I send my PCs against a monster of APL+3, they must be able to hit it. With elite soldiers, they had trouble hitting an APL monster, and a APL+3 was pretty much impossible. Likewise, if the PCs are against an APL-3 monster, it needs to be able to hit them... and inflict enough damage to threaten them.In AD&D, damage and defenses didn't scale very quickly, whilst attacks and hitpoints scaled up fairly well. Thus, a higher-level fighter would hit more often, but would need to hit more times to down the foe. In the original edition of the game, a monster's Hit Dice was pretty much how many blows it would take to kill (d6 HP per die, d6 damage per strike). This got corrupted as the game went on; 4E uses something very different.In 3E, scaling was completely corrupted by the insane method of creating monsters (Pathfinder has done its best to give some system to this), and then was too steep in any case. 4E actually paid attention to scaling, but the original version got it wrong.The range of monster levels compared to PC levels that were fun to fight is very, very narrow in 3E. It's less narrow in 4E, but some types (soldiers) aren't that great. More attention needs to be taken on looking at the range of levels that can be fought, rather than just the APL monsters.
I like to work in a mix so that my players are kept on their toes. I like using adjustments and tweaks like this, but will usually let on to the players by describing a scrawny or perhaps exceptionally brutish monster of their type. Templates are another great way to keep players guessing what a monster can do.MerricB in response to epic being the least popular tier of play that is probably somewhat due to players and DM's playing one game for that long. Also I know a lot of players who hate starting at higher level and the time commitment to getting to those epic levels is just too much. I think the power is popular in the epic tier it is just a long journey.
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