I bring this up in today's post, because with the new skill mechanics happening to share dice with the monster roll mechanics, it might be helpful to backport this kind of utility from the former, into the latter.
Circa 2018
As I go back and look at the baseline monster mechanics from the 2018 version, a couple things stand out. First, the basic guidelines for how to modify the 1d6/1d10 roll:
Untrained: Use the higher of the two results
Trained: Use the stacked value of the two results
ExpertiseMastery: Any 1s rolled can be treated as the maximum value on that die
Advantage: If the result is a tie, treat both dice as their maximum value
Disadvantage: Cancel out Advantage on the roll, or use the lower of the two results
However, going through the document a little farther, I noticed that the 'Untrained' expression is only used a couple times: for the damage output of Standard monsters, and for skills. Well, if we suppose that monster skill checks will now function in line with player skill checks, then we can remove this particular definition, and simply specify (as a function of the monsters themselves) that Standard monsters should roll both dice for damage, but only use the higher result.
The other thing that sticks out is the fact that minions function off of their own separate guidelines (albeit using the same shorthand and the same roll, and only for rolling skills):
Untrained: Use the d6 result
Trained: Use the lowest result
ExpertiseMastery: (unchanged) Any 1s rolled can be treated as the maximum value on that die
Advantage: Treat the check as a success, if the result is a tie
Disadvantage: Cancel out Advantage on the roll, or use the d10 result
Now, the intention with this is essentially to make minions worse than other monsters at skill checks; if an encounter budget gives the DM a handful of minions at the same cost of one Standard monster, this allows the monsters to effectively get, say, 5 grapple attempts for the price of one -- which potentially leads to dogpiling, and would just seem unfair to the players. I think my intial idea was to have them simply use "roll under, d6" as their mechanic, so I may yet go back to that. (I instead tried to incorporate the monster roll, in some form.)
Another idea I'd been recently considering, would be to have minions use a flat d20 for skill checks, as sort of a simple, no-nonsense solution. But the success rate starts off a little higher than that of 1d6+1d10, so it would have to be modified in some way to reduce that, thus losing any elegance in the process. One idea in relation to that, was to add the minion's number of Hit Dice (HD) to the DC, increasing it from 10; that produced a situation where lesser minions were better at skills than greater ones, which is counter-intuitive.
However, something else clicked in my head at that point: what if we use the minion's current HD as its skill ranks, and simply have minions (by default) roll the d10 with disadvantage? Since this would mean that minions would no longer use their HD as a 'target number', the cap on minion HD could also be raised a little bit (from 4 to 5, likely not much higher than that.) Alternatively, the cap could be lowered to 3, so that their skills ranks are in line with the player defaults.
It could probably be argued that minions don't need to be given a half-dozen different skill gradations (as they receive in the existing designs) and how keeping it that way would just create more things for the DM to keep track of. So it's helpful to be able to reduce some of the clutter. On the other hand, it may be important for distinguishing different types of minions from one another, such as lurkers vs. bruisers, for example. With that in mind, maybe the distinction could be that such enemies could "buy off" the disadvantage on the d10, for their signature skill(s).
The Biggest Problem
What I found to be a major stumbling block, was trying to figure out the monster interaction with "Positioning & Debilitating effects" which impose advantage or disadvantage, since monsters did not use d20 rolls. With the percentile roll paradigm in mind (springing forth from the new skill mechanics) it might make sense to simply have those modifiers applied only to the d10 roll, for monsters.
This would enable us to unify how Advantage modifies the roll, for all types of monsters (since the standard monster roll and minion monster roll in the old designs interact with Advantage effectively the same way, for skill checks.) It also means Advantage now functions the same as it does within the new skill check mechanics for PCs (which, as we've established, utilize the same dice rolls.)
This also frees up the design space of what happens if the roll is a tie. Ties could be used for adding special effects to attacks, or recharging abilities -- just as a couple of examples. Or the simple perk of "treat both dice as their maximum value" could be made the sole domain of specific monster types, such as Elites and/or Archenemies. As a side note, we could also have special triggers for when either the d6 or the d10 rolls its maximum value.
Drawing Conclusions
So effectively, what I think we've come up with is something like this:
Damage Rolls:
- advantage/disadvantage are applied to the d10 roll
- Mastery can be applied to both dice
- Special effect/recharge on a tie(?)
- Standard monsters use the higher roll as damage; minions and swarms do auto-damage (based on current HD)
Skill Checks:
- advantage/disadvantage are applied to the d10 roll
- Mastery can be applied to both dice
- Special effect/recharge on a tie(?)
- Minions have skill ranks equal to their current HD, but default to having disadvantage on the d10 roll (maybe with further disadvantage resulting in outright 'action denial' w/r/t using that skill)
When we compare these to each other, we can see that they almost completely overlap, with just a few exceptions for specific monster types. I much prefer this to the previous setup, where minions tried to use the same jargon, but with different mechanics. It also plays a lot nicer with the (admittedly more player-facing) core mechanics of the system.
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I've been working on mapping out the new subtype/specialist classes, in the background. So while writing actual mechanics for those will be a big process, I've mostly ironed out what's going where. That will likely be the topic of the next post, on April 24th.
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