Monster Math -- Part 3: Standards & Elites

Standard Monsters

When building an encounter, your standard monster should have about the same HP as a PC would; this gives us a range between 24 and 32. However, in terms of budgeting, we should use two standard monsters per one PC; as such, we can adjust the HP of standard monsters up or down. For example, you could have one monster with 20 HP and another with 36 HP to account for the encounter budget value of one PC.

Standard monsters will use the "monster roll" of 1d6+1d10 for damage, but this damage can be split across two "attacks" i.e. triggering two separate Defense rolls from the PC target. Standard monsters also use 1d6+1d10 for all of their rolls.

As touched on in a previous post, we can customize different monsters by applying bonuses or penalties to different rolls (skill checks, initiative checks, damage, and opportunity attacks.) This is how our monsters will primarily set themselves apart from one another.


Elite Monsters

An elite monster should have double the HP of one PC. Elites gain Advantage on damage rolls; this functions similarly to the "double roll and stack" rule, except that both dice can be treated as maximum value. While it shouldn't be necessary, the DM can choose to "pull punches" and only maximize one (or neither) of the dice.

Elite monsters cannot be Intimidated unless they are Bloodied. In addition, they do not take extra damage from attacks that are critical successes; these types of successes against Elites can still be "banked" for Advantage later in the same encounter.

Generally, DMs should use more than one elite monster in an encounter (if they are going to use them at all); PCs will often focus on the biggest, baddest enemy, so sometimes it's a good idea to make it harder to prioritize a single target. An elite monster uses the encounter budget value of one PC.

I wanted to give elite monsters a few more perks, so as a special rule, they do not roll for initiative. Instead, they simply act on the highest initiative rolled for the monsters, by the DM. This also serves to set a limit on elites in terms of encounter budgeting; there must be at least one non-elite monster in every encounter group (to roll initiative for any elites in the encounter.)


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Next post should be up on June 25th, where I hope to touch on Solo encounters, as well as polish up some of the monster rules a bit more.