The monsters in Flee, Mortals! are generally more complex than you tend to see in the core D&D books. One concept that they use is that these are "action-oriented creatures," giving boss monsters - whether they fill the "Solo" or Leader" role - lots of opportunities to do things. For any new DMs who brought out a big scary monster only to have them be able to use their action to attack twice and then die to a Rogue's critting sneak attack, these are meant to make an encounter more dynamic and interesting without necessarily just having the monster hold a ton of HP and deal a massive amount of damage.
I haven't had a chance to use any of these (actually, I did get to use the Orc boss when the book was in previews, but that was against a high-level single player, so not really the normal circumstances).
But not every monster is a boss monster. However, Flee, Mortals! (abbreviated to FM from here on) does another interesting thing, which is that every creature has a role, and these roles are reflected in the sort of abilities they can bring to the fight.
While other publications obviously don't have these roles listed, I think that they can be really useful for building encounters and especially when building homebrew monsters. For any creature you come up with, think about what particular thing it's trying to accomplish in combat, and make sure it has tools that allow it to do that (or at least try to do that).
Let's go through the roles, and then look at some example creatures' abilities that let them perform that role.
Ambushers:
Ambushers are sneaky creatures that can either hide, become invisible, or otherwise get out of sight, spending half their turns attacking and half slipping away. Ambushers usually have a relatively high bonus to Stealth, but also have means to help them hide again while in the middle of the fight.
For our first example, we can look at the Goblin Assassin, who has several features that aid with this. They can hide as a bonus action, and they can inflict a bleed effect on targets against who they have advantage. They can also summon magical darkness that they can see through, and don't provoke opportunity attacks when they run away from a creature, letting them slip in, backstab, and then get away.
Similarly, an Essence of Mist - a type of Air and Water elemental - can turn invisible, and can even potentially enter a creature's lungs to hide from its foes.
Artillery:
Simply put, Artillery creatures have ranged attacks. They're not meant to stand on the front lines, and try to dash or disengage to open distance between them and melee characters.
The Wobalas Demon, CR 10, has a weapon that can, by burning a resource, frighten the target, and a melee attack that can teleport the target away from them.
The Marble Stone Giant has its Greatsling as its main attack, and has a melee attack that can knock targets back, as well as a bonus action that lets them plant their feet to gain longer range and greater damage on their ranged attacks.
Brutes:
Brutes are the most straightforward monsters - they hit hard and have a lot of hit points. Typically melee fighters, Brutes tend to engage with multiple party members and demand to be dealt with due to their damage output, even while they're giving cover to more fragile creatures.
Zombies have a feature called Deadened Nerves, which is effectively a damage threshold (any damage of it or lower is negated) of 5, and can make a reaction attack when an attack is fully negated.
The Servok Builder is a huge mechanized construction engine with a big wrecking ball, which can potentially hit secondary targets after the first.
Controllers:
Controllers typically have some way to debuff others, often using complex mechanics that will restrain and restrict party members. The book has guidance here that a Controller should typically be protected by Brutes, Soldiers, Minions, and Skirmishers, and that the complexity of their actions tends to mean you shouldn't have more than one or two of these in a monster group.
Leaders and Support:
Leaders are one of the two categories for boss monsters - who have variants on the Legendary rules found in mainline D&D, like "villain actions" (similar to legendary actions). Support creatures have similar functionality, but don't have the powerful villain actions of a leader. Both types of creatures will have various ways to help other monsters attack or survive. Like Controllers, and maybe even more so, the book recommends not having more than one of these in an encounter, as their support abilities can get out of hand if they stack.
The Kobold Signifer can use an action to let allied kobolds close ranks (and benefit from the shared "Shield? Shield!" feature kobolds in this book get, which increases their AC when near allied kobolds by making a shield wall). They also have a once-a-day AoE heal.
Bloodlord Varrox, the named Hobgoblin villain, who has the leader category, has a bonus action that allows an ally to move and make a weapon attack, and some of his villain actions also help position his allies and bolster them with temp HP.
Minions:
Minions have special rules - they're designed to allow the party to face off against hordes of enemies without turning combat into an endless slog. Basically, five of these (or 10 at higher CRs) is the equivalent of a single normal monster, and any damage from a successful attack or a failed saving throw on their end is enough to kill them. People fighting with weapons can also overkill minions - despite potentially dying to 1 damage, they still have HP, but if you exceed that HP with a weapon attack and there's another minion within the reach of the original melee attack or in a line behind the target of a ranged weapon attack (and still within range) you can hit another, killing multiple minions in one attack. Minions can then also make group attacks, getting a bonus to hit when they attack as a group (of up to 5) and all dealing their damage collectively (which doesn't involve die rolls).
Minions can crowd the battlefield and create a barrier to more important targets like a Controller or Leader, and can often create problems for characters who are surrounded by them.
For example, the Rotting Zombie begins to slow and can even restrain a character if enough of them surround them.
Hill Giant Flunkies can force characters to make a Strength save or be knocked prone when they end their turn within ten feet of two or more of them.
Skirmishers:
Skirmishers are masters of mobility, getting in and striking before retreating. While somewhat similar in role to Ambushers, they're less about hiding from the party and more about getting their hit in and then getting out of range of reprisal.
The Vampire, for example, can use a bonus action to move its speed without drawing opportunity attacks, and has a recharge ability that lets it pass through other creatures, inflicting necrotic damage.
The Lizardfolk Terrorsaur has a reaction that lets them move up to half their speed after they take damage from an attack, which also might help them get their Running Start to then use their flying speed.
Soldiers:
Soldiers, like Brutes, are front-line creatures, but while the Brute just tries to become a big problem for the party by putting out a lot of damage and soaking a lot of hits, the Soldier tends to be there to lock creatures down, preventing them from reaching the more fragile and vulnerable creatures.
The Orc Rampart can impose disadvantage on a character's attacks if they hit with both parts of their multiattack, and can step in to take the blow intended for another using a reaction if they're close enough.
Human Knaves have multiple ways to knock a target prone after landing an attack, and then can use a bonus action called "Stay Down" to reduce a prone character's movement to 0 for a turn - making it impossible for them to stand up.
Solo:
Solo monsters, then, are designed to be fought on their own. Most of these are the named "villain" stat blocks (though you can, of course, re-skin them). They try to use ever movement advantage they have, and focus down problematic party members, while also trying to hit as many characters in AoE effects as they can.
Because a solo creature needs to take on a whole party, they get a lot of multi-part actions, bonus actions, reactions, villain actions, and other ways to make up for the fact that they're just one thing fighting a whole bunch of other things.
Putting it all together:
Aside from the solo monster, who basically is there to be fought on its own (though I think you could have a lower-CR solo monster fight with a bunch of minions) the point of these categories is to allow you to build dynamic encounters with interesting tactical decisions for both you and the party.
Some classes excel at taking down different types of monsters. A Brute can take a lot of punishment, but might be susceptible to mind-affecting crowd control magic. Support creatures can make other monsters deadlier, but might not be able to withstand a frontal assault on their own.
While a diverse group of monsters will of course give you, as the DM, some tactical options, it'll also present some interesting decisions for the party - do they focus down that Support or Controller monster while they take a big assault from the Brutes? Or do they wear down the defenses so that the Controller doesn't have the damage to overwhelm them after the majority of the monsters are taken out?
Minions in particular give hard-hitting melee fighters a chance to feel epic, carving down waves of foes, while the ranged damage dealers might pick off artillery and a spellcaster can try to lock down an individual like a Support or Controller creature.
If we wanted to make a dynamic encounter for 1st level characters, for example, and we want it to be a Standard-difficulty encounter (which, for 1st level, is actually the same as an easy one) we could have four CR 1/8 creatures.
To cut down on complexity, we're only going to have two roles, and two types of creature. We could have some deep dark cave with two Stirges and two Skitterlings - the latter being little flying rat-bug-things.
The skitterings are skirmishers, which use their 60 foot flying speed and flyby to attack and retreat without fear, and can potentially blind targets after doing a single point of damage. The Striges can then latch onto targets and potentially poison and then daze the targets (daze being a new condition that forces the creature to choose action, bonus action, or movement, but only one on their turn). The stirges can make it harder for the party to go after the skitterlings, while the skitterlings can attack with relative impunity, though ranged characters can focus down the skitterlings while melee folk take out the stirges.
For a higher-level encounter, let's say we want the party to have to fight the revelers at some vampiric court. We'll say our party is fairly high-level, 15 or so. For a standard encounter, with four player characters, we're looking at a total CR of 26. We could just use two Vampires, but instead, let's say this is some loner vampire who holds the souls of the noble family she slaughtered in an unending profane feast. So, we have our vampire, who is a skirmisher and can dart around the battlefield, but she's turned the slain Baron into a Wraith (Controller), and the Baron's house staff have been transformed into Ghoul Cravers (Minions) and his two children all turned into Wights (Soldiers).
Thus, the room has our vampire, a wraith, inflicting fear and the dazed condition, then the wights imposing disadvantage on attacks and stepping in to guard their father and the vampire, the ghouls locking down people in place, while the vampire is flitting around, striking at vulnerable targets.
Thus, it creates an incentive to get past the minions and soldiers, deal with the Wraith, and then focus attention on the vampire, who's likely been able to do some nasty things to the party before it can be properly dealt with.
FM has some chapters for individual monsters, but most are grouped around types of monster like Kobolds or Goblins and such, and each section has a pretty good variety of creatures designed to play these different roles.
Even without these official labels, I'd definitely start looking at other monster stat blocks and thinking about what role they could play in an encounter. Bearing these roles in mind when doing a homebrew monster is also probably going to help a lot with the design, and it'll help you figure out what monsters to either take from existing books to fight alongside it, or to figure out what other monsters could be created to support this one's concept.
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