While the previous post was really more about survival horror video games, it inspired some notions about TTRPG monster design.
As readers are likely aware, I've been poring over the rulebooks for Draw Steel, and would love to actually run it (and maybe even play it as a PC) sometime.
I'm really intrigued by the way that Solo monsters work in it.
In D&D, at least in 5E, individual monsters really struggle to be impactful fights. Especially at low levels, monsters' damage output means they have to be quick to kill.
I often find that D&D at low levels, especially level 1 itself, struggles to feel cool. Campaigns I've been in where the players start at level 1 have nearly always leveled up after just one session, regardless of how much XP we've earned or whether we've truly hit a good plot milestone.
The intent, then, was to create a monster that could feel epic and cool at level 1, giving the party a truly climactic boss fight, but would also be unlikely to result in a TPK.
The first, central key: drastically reduce the damage that the monster does on a hit.
Why do we do this? Because it allows us to keep the monster alive far longer.
As a caveat, this hasn't gone through any testing whatsoever - it's based on my own amateur math and assumptions. But let me break it down:
Our monster does not roll damage dice, and in fact only does 2 damage (1 piercing and 1 poison) on a hit, and a critical hit only adds 1 additional piercing damage. That means that even a level 1 Wizard with a modest +2 to Con is going to be able to take 4 regular hits from this thing before they go down.
(Note that we add in the poison damage because we don't want a Barbarian to take zero damage if they're raging. Ought this to be some other damage type? Perhaps. A raging Dwarf Barbarian will reduce both of those to zero. I believe that Force might be the only damage type that no playable species gets resistance to, though perhaps Thunder as well? Poison was chosen for thematic purposes, which we'll get to later.)
It still has a +5 to hit, because I think a reasonable average AC for a 1st level character is 16, and this means that they'll be hitting about 50% of the time.
The monster does have multiattack - we want to smooth out that damage output and try to get at least a little closer to that average.
The next idea: low AC, very high HP.
The monster only has an AC of 13, meaning that level 1 characters with a +5 to hit are going to likely hit most of the time with their attacks, though with a reasonable 35% chance to miss (close to a third).
The thing's HP, though, is 100.
A party of four with two martial characters and two spellcasters might do, roughly, 1d10+3 and 1d10 damage with weapon attacks and cantrips, respectively. If my math was correct, that means that if each of them attack each round, it'll take them around 5 rounds to take the monster down.
That may seem like an insanely long battle, but remember that at level 1, players really don't have that many options for what to do in a fight, meaning that the fight will go faster than a 5-round combat at, say, level 10, or even level 3. Admittedly, this could use some playtesting - I imagine there will be instances where players try out other strategies that cause the fight to drag on longer than intended. 80 might be a more reasonable max HP.
Next: we're getting a bit more radical (and for sure cribbing from Draw Steel):
Less controversially (I say as if anyone else has glimpsed this to have a controversy over it,) but still somewhat radical: the monster's attacks will knock enemies back 10 feet, hit or miss. And they can knock back up to three creatures within 5 feet of them.
The intent here is that, by adding some unavoidable forced movement into the fight, the monster is going to prevent things from getting locked down. The forced movement carries no damage with it (unless there's uneven terrain and cliffs to knock people off of) and so the intent here is to let this monster be slippery. While that might make it hard for the Fighter or Paladin to keep it off of the Sorcerer, the low damage of its attacks means that it's not actually the end of the world if the monster spends a turn hitting the squishy caster.
Here's the more radical thing, again stolen directly from Draw Steel:
The monster gets two turns per round. The way we do this is that it has a second initiative that is 10 lower than its primary initiative. Admittedly, in edge cases, this could allow it to go twice in a row if the party all roll their initiative very close to one another.
Now, why do this instead of just giving them legendary actions? Indeed, Draw Steel actually has something akin to legendary actions in the form of Villain actions, a trio of abilities that a Solo Monster gets to use each once per encounter and from all of them only once per round. We could just let it make its attack as a legendary action, and then give it some other limited ability to use for their third legendary action. To me the key is to increase the movement during the fight - giving the monster both its regular movement and its vine-yank ability. Admittedly, this might be something one could do with legendary actions.
Its damage output is balanced around the idea that it will get two of these turns - two attacks per turn, two turns per round, and about a 50% chance to hit, and 2 damage on a hit, means it's only putting out roughly 4 damage per round on average.
Note that this does mean it is designed to knock a party member out - if it takes them 5 rounds to bring it down and it's doing 4 damage per round, it can knock out a Sorcerer or Wizard in two of those rounds if left to its devices. But that's in a white room, target-dummy situation.
The party will need to employ some strategy to protect their more vulnerable members. Something as simple as a weapon with the Sap mastery or a spell that can frighten or poison it will help a lot. Grappling is, admittedly, probably not going to be very good on it given that it can knock its grappler back, which might be something we revisit in the design.
However, one of the hidden benefits to the players by having its attacks do a knockback is that, if the monster has used all of its movement to get to a PC, being knocked back is almost like a free disengage.
To keep up with the theme of rearranging the battlefield, the monster has a bonus action that can either pull targets closer to them, or use the same ability to pull itself toward large objects and creatures.
So: let's talk about lore:
My concept here is that this is a gnarled construct of wood, meat, and twine called a Gnarlblight. Most typically created by Green Hags, it's potentially the servant of any dark sylvan corruptor, like a green dragon.
These are beings of horror and folklore, prowling the misty, mossy woods, and giving villagers a good reason to stay out of those dark, tenebrous forests.
I imagine something like a party's first quest taking them deep into the woods to deal with something like this - maybe it's responsible for the death of a village's best hunter, or it's been killing farm animals. Or maybe, it's an utter mystery encountered while the party is traversing a dark and shaded wood en route to something unrelated.
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