Changing monster abilities / stats without influencing CR


Homebrew and House Rules


Let's assume I've got a level one party, and I'd like them to encounter a single challenging creature - CR2 sounds good.

I want the creature to be a vampire child, so I find something that sort of fits the bill, and change the flavour:

Let's choose a Dretch.

Now I'd like the abilities/details to be a little more in line with a blood-sucking creature of the night, so I do some direct substitutions:

Outsider Demon --> Humanoid Undead
DR 5/cold iron or good --> DR5/magic or silver.
Immune electricity, poison --> Undead immunity traits.
Resist acid 10, cold 10, fire 10 --> Resist cold 10, electricity 10.
1/day—cause fear (DC 11) --> 1/day—sleep (DC 11) (Dominate Person seems OP at CR2).

Would doing such trivialise, or make the fight much more difficult?

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Sleep would be totally inept for a CR 2 creature.
Changing DR 5/cold iron or good to magic or silver is a pretty significant change as it's much much easier to bypass the latter.

Also remember that's usually not a good idea to have solo monster encounters unless you want the fight to be short.


Hey Cyrad; thank you for your reply.

But sleep effectively takes someone out of the fight - isn't that always pretty potent? I see what you mean about magic being rather easy than 'good'; I suppose there's no reason I couldn't use silver or good.

Aye I've heard that it's sub-optimal to have fewer monsters, and most of the encounters I've prepared are 3-4 strong at a time. I just want something a little stronger as a one-off; it's mostly for a bit of flavour.


Keep in mind that sleep has a 1 round casting time. This is especially bad for solo monsters as all the PCs will have a chance to interrupt the poor vamp-dretch. Go for murderous command or charm person instead. If the vamp-dretch strikes from suprise, it could get a charm off without the -5 to the spell DC for being in combat.

For DR, against a level 1 party, magic or silver; cold iron or good; and DR/- are all about equivalent. Though DR 5 is hardly insurmountable.

Do note that if your party's damage dealers all deal damage as multiple small attacks, like archers or natural attackers, consider dropping some silver arrows or oils of magic fang.

Otherwise it looks fine!


Hi Knight Magenta,

That's great info, thank you; I hadn't noticed the case duration of sleep until you mentioned it. We've played a few games and sleep has always been cast as a standard action - I did think it seemed particularly overpowered... now I know why.

Murderous command and Charm seem like good alternatives, and fit in with the 'vampish mind control/charm' angle.

Thanks again!


I think these are pretty appropriate substations. A challenging rating value is a pretty broad range, so as long as the creature you end with is roughly as dangerous as what you started with, you should be fine.

I also agree with what others have said that this creature may not be very challenging. If your group defeats it too quickly, then you may want to give it enough extra hit points until it injures your group more, or make it explode into a cloud of bats, or something that makes the group earn the rewards and feel awesome for overcoming this creature.

I agree that Dominate Person is overpowered for vampires. I don't know how anyone could beat a group of vampires that uses every round dominating people. I prefer to use alternate vampire builds from 3rd party books.


Hi relativemass,

I guess I could sneakily add in the hp mid-fight, if it looks like it's going to be over too quickly. I'm keen to avoid fudging the dice to save people from an unfortunate end, but ensuring the fight isn't too simple doesn't seem so bad.

Out of curiosity, what sort of sources do you look at for alternative builds?

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