General Discussion and Sugestions

[oslecamo]

Osle, I'd like you to edit your first post here so Tortoise, Dire, is in the Animals Spoiler as Dire Tortoise. Just so all the animals are in the same place.

Fixed, thanks!

I must ask a few questions.

1. Why is there no Entropic creature template class? There's Vivacious but negative energy is discriminated? Is it because it's dark colored?

2. Ye guys have all fiends but no Kluchirir who is even stronger than balor, eh?

3. Finally, I just want to ask. Growth in classes like Giants where HD is mentioned use character level and racial HD, right? Not class level? And so if one were to gestalt two giant classes, the increases in size stack?

1. Because nobody requested it and I didn't even knew it existed.
2. See above. 
3. HD gained from class levels counts just as HD gained from monster class levels. In a gestalt guess they would stack since despite they basically being the same ability with the same exact name, there's a bit of variance. Like you can't stack two sources of sneak attack, but you can stack sneak attack with sudden strike.

(click to show/hide)

It's a super specialized build that can't do much else. Clumsy maneuverability is clumsy and with 24 HP average lacking actual DR, not exactly that durable either. And each party member throwing repair spells is one less party member attacking enemies.

Flying taxi at level four able to take you up faster than most methods can let you go horizontal is good. Delaying the setup until level five still has it quite potent, and gives access to significant offensive capacity alongside it. Religious Relic for Warforged Domain gives cooldown-based Domain access to repair spells.

Not as broken, but a lot of the stuff is kinda wonky, mechanically.

By level 5 casters start getting really pimped rides like the druid's better animal companions or a wizard's phantom steed. Not as good at this level maybe but a lot more expendable.

The idea, maybe. But the real deal is the extra work. 400+ races worth of work taking in account all the monster classes here.

You mentioned you have real life chores and work to do. So have I. Needing to come up with an original race for every monster here would take a lot of time I could invest in other stuff. In particular when there's a lot less flexibility in what I can put in a base race.

And look at that, my project's the one that's still running and offers a lot more options. Because I don't burn myself out trying to come up with minor extras that don't really offer anything valuable to actual play.

"minor extras" means not needing all those Body traits. "nothing valuable to actual play" means actually getting 20 levels in a non-Monster class. It's not actually that complicated, it's just moving the pure racial stuff that forces some weird mechanics into actual races. Like the standard of having the first level of these classes be considerably stronger than normal.

The work would be changing all those existing ones to have it happen, as it's entrenched into the design practices at this point. Which is largely fine, it's that one irremovable RHD is disruptive to certain character choices. Sometimes, you need 20 levels to pull something off.

There's no hard cap on leveling for D&D. If your game goes all the way to level 20, nothing stopping you from going to level 21.

That's why the spawn-creating monster classes here have caps on how many you can control around.

Says the guy who made a PRC which requires 666 controllable spawn for the third level...

Not simultaneously. Or actually controllable, you're free to let them run wild and it'll still count for the prc requirement.

Got plenty of people complaining over the years that they didn't want their monster characters to grow, but claiming utility reasons like going inside houses and tight corridors and whatnot. Although something else I did for that was the Deceivingly Innocent Form feat that allows any monster to take a mostly humanoid shape/size.

Lots of creatures have inherent shapeshifting for fitting in with humanoids, largely based on plot categorization. The requirements on Deceivingly Innocent Form are kinda... bad, though. Like, typical PCs won't get away with it, and they are rather weird on top of that. Granted, the retention of Literally All the monster abilities is worth it, but having a prerequisite that precludes being outright Good if you do it just to get that feat is nasty. I mean, depending on the morality system you apply to Alignment, eating creatures after killing them in a morally-neutral or Good way(Good being death of horrible people or defending innocents from being horribly tortured/murdered) can easily be Neutral, so there's that, but most DMs would be questioning it.

First, there's already some good creatures with bite primary attacks, like the blink dog and moon dog. The blink dog's combat flavor text even calls the ones they attack as "prey", so I would say that's pretty good evidence that eating evil doers in D&D isn't a bad of a thing.

Then you can always claim a monster character didn't know any better in their past and/or were starving at the time.

Or there's always the repentance card, plenty of goody two shoe heroes had darker pasts before turning on a new leaf.

There should probably be a Monstrous Morality subsection for stuff like this... Because there's probably quite a few monsters that have effects needing some morally-questionable things, and getting some suggestions on how to handle those things would be nice for DMs who give a shit about the alignment rules in depth.

A good idea, maybe I'll get some rough draft this weekend. Although you could probably say the same of spells. Charms and mind control and whatnot should raise a lot of ethical questions.

There's still a bunch of other things here to reply to but something now demands a bit more priority.

Referring to my mechanical blunders? Or something you're doing on a different sub-forum?

I meant the above replies I hadn't addressed yet.

Then you're missing the point. Fighter/barbarian are used in things like the monsterous spider because they're simple and not too strong-perfect for mass produced expendable mooks. Making the process more complicated and powerful is thus kinda against the whole point of mooks.

It'd add just one more step to the process of making the mook, that of choosing replacement levels. Which is kinda already an option, given the lack of wording against it. Designing it to not increase active play complexity would take some effort, but replacing Fighter bonus feats with static bonuses built to be generic monster-friendly improvements reduces complexity of the mook creation and makes playing them much more straightforward. Similarly, rendering stuff like Totem Barbarian, primary source of Pounce for Uberchargers, inaccessible reduces complexity of play and potential power at the same time.

For non-mook monster builds, that's what template classes are for. The Paragon in particular just happens to be the most popular piece of work here. Then the already mentioned Titanic Creature, Monster of Legend, Evolved Undead, Elder Eidolong, Half-Whatever, etc.

I fully understand that. But sometimes, you really want generic progression for broad categories to prevent extensive decision making. Because sometimes, people don't want to dig through all the creatures and templates to progress the thing they picked one for in the first place, so they want a clean, generic, progressing option for that thing. Like Poison.

Well I guess I can't exactly stop you if that's your motivation, but I'll ask to at least take in account what's already done.

Will do. Or at least try to do.

I have to admit you presented an interesting case and have some hope of it still seeing the light of day although you haven't posted anything for quite some time now. Ah well everybody gets suddenly busy now and then.

[Yasahiro]

Osle, I'd like you to edit your first post here so Tortoise, Dire, is in the Animals Spoiler as Dire Tortoise. Just so all the animals are in the same place.

Fixed, thanks!

I must ask a few questions.

1. Why is there no Entropic creature template class? There's Vivacious but negative energy is discriminated? Is it because it's dark colored?

2. Ye guys have all fiends but no Kluchirir who is even stronger than balor, eh?

3. Finally, I just want to ask. Growth in classes like Giants where HD is mentioned use character level and racial HD, right? Not class level? And so if one were to gestalt two giant classes, the increases in size stack?

1. Because nobody requested it and I didn't even knew it existed.
2. See above. 
3. HD gained from class levels counts just as HD gained from monster class levels. In a gestalt guess they would stack since despite they basically being the same ability with the same exact name, there's a bit of variance. Like you can't stack two sources of sneak attack, but you can stack sneak attack with sudden strike.

(click to show/hide)

It's a super specialized build that can't do much else. Clumsy maneuverability is clumsy and with 24 HP average lacking actual DR, not exactly that durable either. And each party member throwing repair spells is one less party member attacking enemies.

Flying taxi at level four able to take you up faster than most methods can let you go horizontal is good. Delaying the setup until level five still has it quite potent, and gives access to significant offensive capacity alongside it. Religious Relic for Warforged Domain gives cooldown-based Domain access to repair spells.

Not as broken, but a lot of the stuff is kinda wonky, mechanically.

By level 5 casters start getting really pimped rides like the druid's better animal companions or a wizard's phantom steed. Not as good at this level maybe but a lot more expendable.

The idea, maybe. But the real deal is the extra work. 400+ races worth of work taking in account all the monster classes here.

You mentioned you have real life chores and work to do. So have I. Needing to come up with an original race for every monster here would take a lot of time I could invest in other stuff. In particular when there's a lot less flexibility in what I can put in a base race.

And look at that, my project's the one that's still running and offers a lot more options. Because I don't burn myself out trying to come up with minor extras that don't really offer anything valuable to actual play.

"minor extras" means not needing all those Body traits. "nothing valuable to actual play" means actually getting 20 levels in a non-Monster class. It's not actually that complicated, it's just moving the pure racial stuff that forces some weird mechanics into actual races. Like the standard of having the first level of these classes be considerably stronger than normal.

The work would be changing all those existing ones to have it happen, as it's entrenched into the design practices at this point. Which is largely fine, it's that one irremovable RHD is disruptive to certain character choices. Sometimes, you need 20 levels to pull something off.

There's no hard cap on leveling for D&D. If your game goes all the way to level 20, nothing stopping you from going to level 21.

That's why the spawn-creating monster classes here have caps on how many you can control around.

Says the guy who made a PRC which requires 666 controllable spawn for the third level...

Not simultaneously. Or actually controllable, you're free to let them run wild and it'll still count for the prc requirement.

Got plenty of people complaining over the years that they didn't want their monster characters to grow, but claiming utility reasons like going inside houses and tight corridors and whatnot. Although something else I did for that was the Deceivingly Innocent Form feat that allows any monster to take a mostly humanoid shape/size.

Lots of creatures have inherent shapeshifting for fitting in with humanoids, largely based on plot categorization. The requirements on Deceivingly Innocent Form are kinda... bad, though. Like, typical PCs won't get away with it, and they are rather weird on top of that. Granted, the retention of Literally All the monster abilities is worth it, but having a prerequisite that precludes being outright Good if you do it just to get that feat is nasty. I mean, depending on the morality system you apply to Alignment, eating creatures after killing them in a morally-neutral or Good way(Good being death of horrible people or defending innocents from being horribly tortured/murdered) can easily be Neutral, so there's that, but most DMs would be questioning it.

First, there's already some good creatures with bite primary attacks, like the blink dog and moon dog. The blink dog's combat flavor text even calls the ones they attack as "prey", so I would say that's pretty good evidence that eating evil doers in D&D isn't a bad of a thing.

Then you can always claim a monster character didn't know any better in their past and/or were starving at the time.

Or there's always the repentance card, plenty of goody two shoe heroes had darker pasts before turning on a new leaf.

There should probably be a Monstrous Morality subsection for stuff like this... Because there's probably quite a few monsters that have effects needing some morally-questionable things, and getting some suggestions on how to handle those things would be nice for DMs who give a shit about the alignment rules in depth.

A good idea, maybe I'll get some rough draft this weekend. Although you could probably say the same of spells. Charms and mind control and whatnot should raise a lot of ethical questions.

There's still a bunch of other things here to reply to but something now demands a bit more priority.

Referring to my mechanical blunders? Or something you're doing on a different sub-forum?

I meant the above replies I hadn't addressed yet.

Then you're missing the point. Fighter/barbarian are used in things like the monsterous spider because they're simple and not too strong-perfect for mass produced expendable mooks. Making the process more complicated and powerful is thus kinda against the whole point of mooks.

It'd add just one more step to the process of making the mook, that of choosing replacement levels. Which is kinda already an option, given the lack of wording against it. Designing it to not increase active play complexity would take some effort, but replacing Fighter bonus feats with static bonuses built to be generic monster-friendly improvements reduces complexity of the mook creation and makes playing them much more straightforward. Similarly, rendering stuff like Totem Barbarian, primary source of Pounce for Uberchargers, inaccessible reduces complexity of play and potential power at the same time.

For non-mook monster builds, that's what template classes are for. The Paragon in particular just happens to be the most popular piece of work here. Then the already mentioned Titanic Creature, Monster of Legend, Evolved Undead, Elder Eidolong, Half-Whatever, etc.

I fully understand that. But sometimes, you really want generic progression for broad categories to prevent extensive decision making. Because sometimes, people don't want to dig through all the creatures and templates to progress the thing they picked one for in the first place, so they want a clean, generic, progressing option for that thing. Like Poison.

Well I guess I can't exactly stop you if that's your motivation, but I'll ask to at least take in account what's already done.

Will do. Or at least try to do.

I have to admit you presented an interesting case and have some hope of it still seeing the light of day although you haven't posted anything for quite some time now. Ah well everybody gets suddenly busy now and then.

Oh, so gestalt or multiclass with two giant classes amounts to Colossal++ at 20 HD. Got it right.

Well then I request Entropic and Kluchirir would ask for possible PRC that requires both Entropic and Vivacious but feel like it's might be too much to ask.

I DO want to ask for Jungle Giants, though!

Edit: Just now my brain realized there is specific topic for requests... Although it feels like it's underused or underviewed

[Versatility_Nut]

An idea that popped into my head because of an abysmally-designed class over on GiantITP is having a few Construct classes that have a short list of options at first level, then the rest of the class advances those abilities selected at first level. Fixed hardware, but advancing software.

The actual context was a lazily-overhauled Warlock being used to represent Mei from Overwatch. Now, there's a guy, theperfect25, who's done a bunch of 3.5 classes for Overwatch characters, themed on the characters rather than specifically representing the associated character. For example, Torbjiorn's turret having a bundle of support options and Reaper having a melee weapon available(even though the idea of fixed-weapon martials is something that pisses me off to no end...)

The ones I was thinking about were Orisa and Bastion. The actual character Bastion is literally malfunctioning, because it has a mind of its own. Bastion units are intended to be autonomous drones with no free will, managed by a central AI. This bit everyone in the ass when the super-AIs made to micromanage all the processing-intensive stuff decided to take over the world... At any rate, Bastion has an utterly fixed design with hardware, with no room for changing it outside of shenanigans with self-repair to non-standard blueprints. But altering software, like overriding fire governors for burst fire instead of rapid fire or forcing the "self repair" systems to weld on more armor plating and external weapons, offers significant customization options.

In Orisa's case, there's manipulating the barriers to have very different effects, like reducing its value as cover to make it deal Electricity damage to anything going through it, projectiles included. So physical, theoretically-Sunderable projectiles are incinerated on the way through... Manipulating the firing mechanism for the shield projector and shape means it can be used to directly improvise a Reinhardt shield to give one-way line of effect blocking. Of course, it can be more useful to use it with a Run and dealing damage to anything that "passes through" it to turn your Runs into supercharged Chain Lightnings. Overriding whatever forces only one of the four barrels to fire at a time means being able to do harsh burst fire instead of rapid fire, allowing for multiple attacks per Standard Action, thus leaving the Move Action open after a larger amount of damage. Full Attacks would take a hit in damage while in that firing mode, but sometimes mobility is worth lower DPR.

For Bastion, you get significantly less if you don't do shenanigans with the self-repair system. Fortunately, shenanigans with self-repair systems have enough of a gradient for them to be a major aspect of progression. At the most basic, there's nothing preventing the use of the self-repair systems for welding on more armor plating other than not having the firmware to do it. This means being able to use normal armor, probably gated behind a Craft check, in the same way Bardic Music is gated behind a Perform check. You need the ranks to do it, and some functions require an actual check, but most of the time it's just needing ranks. Altering the energy type of inbuilt weapons could be a use for magical weapons to deconstruct, while precise fire saturation could be used for reduced or even inverted Iterative Attack penalties, making attack spam workable. Some of the stuff that was used for Bastion in beta makes for lovely openings, like the access to an explosive drone that can be given a lot of weirdness with minor changes in construction.

First level picks basically amount to model type, like a Bastion being given an energy weapon instead of a machine gun and explosive cannon(how the hell do both fit?), or an OR series being given a different kind of projector in replacement of the Supercharger. A Bastion has much more shenanigans in this territory due to being a three-mode transformer with three different devices. The tank mode can carry a shield projector, or a healing zone, or a portal that summons bound Fiends straight from the front lines of the Blood War... What? It'd be a D&D Monster Class, getting the D&D cosmology involved is perfectly valid... The OR-series has a bit more than just replacing the buff of the Supercharger with a healing device or a shield projector. It can be debuffs, too, and the shield can be made into a single-target buffer or an auto-healer. Or a personal shield generator to protect a target. Or a plasma explosive, if you want a pure offensive option.

Pointing more towards D&D, stuff like Clockwork Horrors and Ruin Elementals, and various other fixed-though-variable composition Constructs, Elementals and Undead, can have options to expand the uses of the stuff they were initially made with. Some of the Alchemist Homunculi could be options... and I now realize most of those things haven't been given monster classes. Probably because balancing the things for Artificers becomes nigh impossible.

[Anomander]

There is a faq answer for growing, but if you get a monster class that makes you smaller, but want to keep your current size. What happens?

[oslecamo]

There is a faq answer for growing, but if you get a monster class that makes you smaller, but want to keep your current size. What happens?

Nothing, because the only monster class right now that reduces size is the Miniature creature. If you don't want to go smaller, you can just don't pick the prc whose main purpose is making you smaller.

[oslecamo]

An idea that popped into my head because of an abysmally-designed class over on GiantITP is having a few Construct classes that have a short list of options at first level, then the rest of the class advances those abilities selected at first level. Fixed hardware, but advancing software.

The actual context was a lazily-overhauled Warlock being used to represent Mei from Overwatch. Now, there's a guy, theperfect25, who's done a bunch of 3.5 classes for Overwatch characters, themed on the characters rather than specifically representing the associated character. For example, Torbjiorn's turret having a bundle of support options and Reaper having a melee weapon available(even though the idea of fixed-weapon martials is something that pisses me off to no end...)

Overwatch is a game I don't play, but some monster classes like the centaur follows the "short list of options at first level, then the rest of the class advances those abilities selected at first level" design pattern. It's a perfectly valid way of doing things.

[Versatility_Nut]

Overwatch is a game I don't play, but some monster classes like the centaur follows the "short list of options at first level, then the rest of the class advances those abilities selected at first level" design pattern. It's a perfectly valid way of doing things.

Yea, it does model subspecies pretty well... Temptation to make a Drider PRC that runs with this idea for spider-type selection is pretty strong, as is making a few Monstrous Spider AFCs that makes the Hunter/Weaver seperation more pronounced by removing access to certain tricks, and adds a dedicated "broodmother" option to the blatant focus. Two focuses could work for that, given that there's some spiders that actively hunt using thrown web to catch and reel in prey, while there's sedentary spiders that don't actually have much use for webs outside setting up their home and instead rely on stupidly powerful poison to actually accomplish things.

Edit: As an aside, I've been thinking about what to do for other Crysmal substitution levels. What to swap for Artificer and Wilder, as those are the two main things I'm thinking of as "natural" progressions beyond the existing setup. Wilder gives much better blasting potential, Artificer is fluffery and feat use access. Of course, I'd need a decent Psionic Artificer overhaul for that...

[Versatility_Nut]

I do apoligise for the double post(even though it's been almost a week), but I'm kind working out some of the basics of AFCs and/or substitution levels for various "simple" classes for use with stuff like the Monstrous Spider's spawning. At a glance, these are the things I'm considering:

Rogue: Swap Sneak Attack with ability DC increases, removing extra rolls and boosting reliability of something that typically has issues at higher levels, even with the 10+1/2 HD baseline.
Fighter: Automatic improvement to Natural Attacks based on the Weapon Focus tree, with flat numbers where multipliers would be. Also flat improvements to critical range and Con damage.
Barbarian: Shift Rage to be more like Power Attack/Shock Trooper, with the scaling being how much you get per AC lost and having the maximum penalty to AC be based on Con or HD.

Basically, cut out the various extra rolls, daily uses, option lists and so on.

---

Also, more on possible Crysmal substitution levels:

(Psionic) Artificer: Likely to homebrew the class used to be a proper Psionic Artificer, alongside some additional Psionic constructs, making Astral Construct more versatile to compete with Summon Monster and generally making Psionics better compete with Magic in this corner of the game. Alternative features centering on making the WBL-mancer playstyle more viable, cutting out the Homunculus access for a set of abnormal Psionic constructs of similar fluff on the basic version of the class and swapping that for an improved version of the Crysmal Crafting feat I whipped up. Item recharge, too. Basically, dump everything into massive Djore, Drilbuu and Psicrown power.

Wilder: Probably going to be a rather heavily blaster focused version of the class, probably altering Wild Surge to have a different, less long-term punishing, backlash effect while changing it from over-augment to discount. And obviously use Crysmal levels for some Manifesting progression. 3/4 BAB does make it lightly gish, but the Gish role is clearly occupied by Psychic Warrior already. Maybe shift to buff/debuff focus, so that it could gish if wanted.

---

While I'm at it with this post, there's some things I'd like to bring up regarding the current standard for the monster classes. A lot of these monster classes have some pretty nice things come out of hit dice advancement. For example, Worgs become Large at 7 HD and have full BAB the whole way there. A three or four level Worg class that gets growth at the last level would make a lot of sense, because it then becomes usable as a mount for a standard-size character. Quite a few of the Medium Animals and Magical Beasts are effective mounts once you give them a few more HD.

Maybe solve this issue by having one of those acquirable templates literally everyone puts on their mount whenever possible as a PRC that gives a size increase and Ideal Cohort. Something to solve this awkward situation where you have so many Medium Animals and Magical Beasts that would be absolutely amazing mounts if only they were Large.

[oslecamo]

I do apoligise for the double post(even though it's been almost a week), but I'm kind working out some of the basics of AFCs and/or substitution levels for various "simple" classes for use with stuff like the Monstrous Spider's spawning. At a glance, these are the things I'm considering:

Rogue: Swap Sneak Attack with ability DC increases, removing extra rolls and boosting reliability of something that typically has issues at higher levels, even with the 10+1/2 HD baseline.
Fighter: Automatic improvement to Natural Attacks based on the Weapon Focus tree, with flat numbers where multipliers would be. Also flat improvements to critical range and Con damage.
Barbarian: Shift Rage to be more like Power Attack/Shock Trooper, with the scaling being how much you get per AC lost and having the maximum penalty to AC be based on Con or HD.

Basically, cut out the various extra rolls, daily uses, option lists and so on.

Rogue isn't really one of the options for monster minion levels, in particular it brings a lot of extra baggage in the form of buckets of skill points and whatnot.

Poison with two different damage types isn't exactly simplifying things. Extra rolls, extra things to keep track of. Also thematically bad since D&D monstrous spiders would like the targets still healthy and juicy for eating. Why not just slap the flat bonuses acf in the fighter? It's kinda the main stick of that class.

Power Attack/Shock Trooper by any other name means it stacks with power Attack/Shock Trooper and also means even more work on the form of needing to re-calculate things every round.

While I'm at it with this post, there's some things I'd like to bring up regarding the current standard for the monster classes. A lot of these monster classes have some pretty nice things come out of hit dice advancement. For example, Worgs become Large at 7 HD and have full BAB the whole way there. A three or four level Worg class that gets growth at the last level would make a lot of sense, because it then becomes usable as a mount for a standard-size character. Quite a few of the Medium Animals and Magical Beasts are effective mounts once you give them a few more HD.

Maybe solve this issue by having one of those acquirable templates literally everyone puts on their mount whenever possible as a PRC that gives a size increase and Ideal Cohort. Something to solve this awkward situation where you have so many Medium Animals and Magical Beasts that would be absolutely amazing mounts if only they were Large.

If a class is meant to be a glorified pet, then it already gets Ideal Cohort by default. For getting bigger, that's literally the whole reason of existence for Titanic Creature.

[Raineh Daze]

Also thematically bad since spiders would like the targets still healthy and juicy for eating.

Well, no, they'd rather that your insides were already a pre-digested soup. That's what their venom does.

[oslecamo]

I stand corrected, D&D monstrous spiders want their victims still healthy and juicy for eating, dealing Str damage. It's also not thematic if the smaller minion's poison ends more deadly than the mother's.

[Versatility_Nut]

Rogue isn't really one of the options for monster minion levels, in particular it brings a lot of extra baggage in the form of buckets of skill points and whatnot.

...How I forgot about the bloated to hell and back skill points of Rogue, I'm not sure. Pretty big reason to avoid using Rogue at all, if it's avoidable.

Poison with two different damage types isn't exactly simplifying things. Extra rolls, extra things to keep track of. Also thematically bad since spiders would like the targets still healthy and juicy for eating. Why not just slap the flat bonuses acf in the fighter? It's kinda the main stick of that class.

Not another Poison damage type, more like Wounding where it's a flat amount of Con damage. And this isn't just for the Spiders, really, it's for all such things. Including the eventual . Monk has so many abilities to track that can't be purely ignored(save bonuses, extra health, fiddly uses-per-day) that using that to progress a Natural Attack spam monster runs into overcomplication fairly quickly.

Power Attack/Shock Trooper by any other name means it stacks with power Attack/Shock Trooper and also means even more work on the form of needing to re-calculate things every round.

Some number-crunching on the penalties to make it harshly unlikely to get away with stacking mostly works around the issue with stacking, and the stacking issue is largely a problem for when it's in use by players. The round-to-round recalculation is kinda silly coming from the guy who gives 7 or so choices from a list including 15 or more options, several being unlimited repicks, for a CR 5 creature that's only going to see 5 rounds of combat.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it'd be better making better generic progression PRCs, like just a general-use poison improvement option, or flight tricks for keeping flying enemies annoying past 7th level(yes, Fly comes in at 5th level, but the slots are only enough for the whole party at 7th and above)

And again, the more I think about it, the more I want to set to work overhauling a lot of the basic monsters to be more realistically usable as monsters. As-is, they just have too many options among them for serious use as NPCs or as just actual monsters, unless you're using a premade setup. And none of the threads have example builds, so DMs wanting to use these classes for their monsters have to make all those choices themselves. They're very much making the appearance of being made for PC use, is what I'm saying, and this poses a problem due to the fact that they're supposed to be used for monsters.

If a class is meant to be a glorified pet, then it already gets Ideal Cohort by default. For getting bigger, that's literally the whole reason of existence for Titanic Creature.

The thing is that a lot of the Ideal Cohort monsters cap out at Medium. Because their Large size is in the HD progression the vast majority of these classes ignore. A Worg Cohort can't be a mount to a Medium player without either crazy penalties or burning a feat. Same for a lot of the other Magical Beats and Animals with the Ideal Cohort feature. And then there's the kickass Animals and Magical Beasts that don't have Ideal Cohort, cap out at Medium, and have stuff really, really useful for being a mount. Whether it's flight, being able to avoid getting splattered, having a burrow speed to just lolnope being in line of effect of any hazards or having lots of Charge assistance, there's quite a few Medium-sized quadropeds that'd be kickass mounts, and a lot of the existing kickass mounts have the problem of only reaching Large size when you give them two or three more hit dice.

[ketaro]

And again, the more I think about it, the more I want to set to work overhauling a lot of the basic monsters to be more realistically usable as monsters. As-is, they just have too many options among them for serious use as NPCs or as just actual monsters, unless you're using a premade setup. And none of the threads have example builds, so DMs wanting to use these classes for their monsters have to make all those choices themselves. They're very much making the appearance of being made for PC use, is what I'm saying, and this poses a problem due to the fact that they're supposed to be used for monsters.

Hey VN, I'm pretty sure we've said before that, yes, Oslecamo's Improved Monster Classes are intended for PC (player) use first and everything else second. It's pretty straight-forwardly said so in the Introduction & FAQ thread in this subforum...

[Raineh Daze]

They're very much making the appearance of being made for PC use, is what I'm saying, and this poses a problem due to the fact that they're supposed to be used for monsters.

As said, the point of monster classes is to be used for PC's. For monsters, you honestly don't need classes or even hitdice. Sure, they're a nice thing to use to quickly generate something or to create premade stats, but you just need the numbers and abilities to be roughly in the right area for a party.

The point of monster classes is explicitly to let people play monster races without getting 10 racial hitddice that give fuck all and then +5 LA before they start getting anything but a tiny generic bag of monster abilities and some weird and random stat bonuses.

[TC X0 Lt 0X]

Eh I've used these monster classes for NPCs quite a few times, it works out pretty well as is. There are a few issues here and there for sure, but I still definitely prefer it over pulling monsters from the books for customization alone (and since I usually do this for e6 I can further customize with feats in any number I want).

That all said monster classes should first and foremost be made for PC use. If the designers want to add additional features making monsters more suited for NPC use AFTER accomplishing to make the monster a suitable class for PCs then I'm all for it. Hell, I think it should be common practice if we had some base guidelines to follow (replacing what we get out of core and terrible CR), though I don't know how viable that would be to integrate with monster classes. People don't always have time (or a desire for that matter) to do that though, and it shouldn't be expected.

[Archon]

Eh I've used these monster classes for NPCs quite a few times, it works out pretty well as is. There are a few issues here and there for sure, but I still definitely prefer it over pulling monsters from the books for customization alone (and since I usually do this for e6 I can further customize with feats in any number I want).

That all said monster classes should first and foremost be made for PC use. If the designers want to add additional features making monsters more suited for NPC use AFTER accomplishing to make the monster a suitable class for PCs then I'm all for it. Hell, I think it should be common practice if we had some base guidelines to follow (replacing what we get out of core and terrible CR), though I don't know how viable that would be to integrate with monster classes. People don't always have time (or a desire for that matter) to do that though, and it shouldn't be expected.

You could take a leaf out of 5e's book here, with its quick build guidelines. Write a paragraph of "to make a quick default build, use these attributes, take this feat and these choices. That makes it good at x and y." That would make it interesting. In general I think its good to have a summery of the basic intended build of a class at the top of it. Makes life simpler, and building quicker, especially for a one-off you don't want to memorise.

And of course these should be for PC use. That's the whole point of having classes and not stat-blocks.

Also, I like the idea of useing these classes for e6. I think that would work quite well.

[Versatility_Nut]

...Sorry about the wording, what I was getting at is that these classes appear made for PCs with no regard to the use of them as monsters, due to the complexity involved. This is a problem because the monsters will be massively underwhelming compared to the PC equivalents if you use the MM forms, but would be nonsensically overcomplicated if you use these classes. They are covered in the level of choice-making common to Pathfinder spellcasters, which is actually bad class design in general unless you're very good at preventing trap options.

[Raineh Daze]

...Sorry about the wording, what I was getting at is that these classes appear made for PCs with no regard to the use of them as monsters, due to the complexity involved. This is a problem because the monsters will be massively underwhelming compared to the PC equivalents if you use the MM forms, but would be nonsensically overcomplicated if you use these classes. They are covered in the level of choice-making common to Pathfinder spellcasters, which is actually bad class design in general unless you're very good at preventing trap options.

If you want to make monsters, you don't need to follow the rules. They're more what you'd call... guidelines.

[oslecamo]

...Sorry about the wording, what I was getting at is that these classes appear made for PCs with no regard to the use of them as monsters, due to the complexity involved. This is a problem because the monsters will be massively underwhelming compared to the PC equivalents if you use the MM forms, but would be nonsensically overcomplicated if you use these classes. They are covered in the level of choice-making common to Pathfinder spellcasters, which is actually bad class design in general unless you're very good at preventing trap options.

Says the person adding manifesting to 100% of their monster classes and wanting to add acfs like there's no tomorrow. 

Either way I'm not against extra monster versions (chimera's got two in the index and everything), so if you want to do simplified versions of something sure go ahead. Adding extra options isn't even in the guidelines anyway.

[Versatility_Nut]

If you want to make monsters, you don't need to follow the rules. They're more what you'd call... guidelines.

It's that not every DM has the time or will to be making full statblocks and they're liable to face players expecting similar capabilities between their monster characters and the monsters faced by the party. A dozen Small Monstrous Spiders is a reasonable encounter for a level 5 or so party, but literally cannot be done here because the Monstrous Spider class starts at Medium and, if it was, there'd almost certainly be two or three options to make. God help them if they want a Colossal Broodmother, because that's making statblocks with all those choices each time another Monstrous Spider is spawned and the spawned Swarms have 55 extra HP. Each.

And that's not to mention the problematic situation of mid-combat spawns making the CR rules utterly bizarre because you've got a CR 11 creature spawning CR 7 creatures and CR 1 Swarms, all with significantly enhanced capabilities beyond their normal statblock. Four of those CR 7 spawned spiders should be the same challenge rating as the one that spawned them, and this takes an amount of time that can actually happen in a fight.

In general, the big problem with it all is that a lot of stuff doesn't play nice with encounter design and designing the classes purely for PCs causes problems when the players expect to be facing similarly-versatile opponents.