Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
I was thinking more if its lower. Then you have to reverse engineer the creature to figure out how many skill points it actually has in each skill so you can know how far you can drop each particular one
That's only a problem if you're using the monster as an enemy. As a player, you just recalculate your Int score and calculate the skill points and choose feats that way. And as an enemy, you very rarely alter its stats in a way that asks you to recalculate everything.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
It works better from all three perspectives. It makes more sense from a gamist perspective both for the reasons above, and because it makes the game more symmetrical; you no longer have these wierd pseudo-classes that most PCs and NPCs are locked out of, and now all your monsters are built in the same way as PC races, with a bulleted list of bonuses and penalties. It makes more sense from simulationist and narrativist perspectives because it makes the monsters less needlessly formulaic; the skills, feats, saves etc can be assigned independently and you no longer have nonsense like creatures having a higher base reflex save essentially just for being really big
"All your monsters are built the same way PC races are". WHAT? That is the whole point of having the racial hit dice system. Monsters are literally created the same way PCs are, with just a "racial class" instead of just being a pile of bonuses. So what if it's a glorified NPC class? NPCs are more simply useable because they have NPC classes. A great warrior is a Warrior 10. I don't want to give fighter feats, or rage, or stances and maneuvers to every single guy the PCs cross. Monsters are basically NPCs with bonuses on top of their NPC class. They can be affected by ability damage, or negative energy, they can make skill checks, their abilities have DC adapted to their level, and above all they can be advanced. Let's say I want a powerful mimic. I'm not saying "I increase its HP bonus from 52 to 146, its attack bonus from +9 to +18, I basically double its saves, and increase its Adhesive DC by let's say 6, I give it more reach and increase its size, and let's go for 3 more feats. What the hell is its CR now?" I'm saying "I increase it to 15 RHD. Aberration RHD are worth 1/4 CR and the size increase is one more. It should be a good CR 7 monster now". The RHD system provides a great way for DMs to improve monsters while keeping offense and defense in line with each other, it allows for things that affect PCs to affect monsters proportionally. Bear's endurance gives more HP to a lv20 character than to a level 1 one. Why shouldn't it give more HP to a pit fiend than to a goblin? That's what the RHD abstraction is meant to represent. How well a creature can resist Sleep, or Holy Word. How many skills and how high they can get.
Now, it's not impossible to advance monsters even without RHD. In 5e, RHD are way less important, and most everything is based on CR, but you can advance monster on the nose by just increasing its DPR, AC and HP. It's not bad, but not nearly as streamlined as 3.5, which prides itself on enabling the DM and players to do almost anything they want without homerule. It's also much easier for WotC to design monsters that way. "It's an Outsider with the Evil subtype, 3 RHD and 14/12/10/4/12/6 for its ability scores and Spot, Listen, Sense Motive, Bluff, Concentration as its class skills" is easier to imagine than "It's an Outsider with the Evil subtype,14/12/10/4/12/6 for its ability scores, +5 to its attacks, +7 to Spot, +7 to Listen, +7 to Sense Motive, +4 to Bluff, +6 to Concentration, +3/+4/+4 as its saves, 17 HP, having two feats, gaining 6 HP from a bear's endurance, gaining nothing from Tenser's Transformation, and dying if it gets 3 negative levels". The numbers are more modular, but it's really superfluous compared to just having the RHD system.
And if I want to play as a monster character, I prefer to know how all these numbers are calculated, how many points I can put in any single skill at most and how these evolve. I prefer to have a few bullet points and a number of RHD than a giant pile of numbers that I would have to adjust on my character sheet and couldn't find again after a few levels. In my opinion, the RHD system is the best thing to ever come out of 3.5, and this idea that monsters and PCs are exactly the same - with both of them having types, HD, class/racial features, and circumstancial bonuses instead of one having class levels and the other having just numbers like in 4e - is what made playing monsters so attractive and basically gave birth to this thread and the original one.