I may be waaaay early on this, but can I request that when it's Bestiary-writing time, Paizo takes a good hard look at monster advancement? In particular, monsters whose 'shtick' is spell-like abilities.
I'm right now trying to advance up some interesting aboleths to CR13ish for my Savage Tide game. I can advance one up to be a more effective bruiser by increasing its hit dice simply enough, but if I want to emphasise the magical abiliites then my only real option is pumping in the spellcaster levels. But these operate completely independently of the critter's natural SLAs, which gives two sets of numbers to take care of - not to mention that at the levels I'm operating, nobody's afraid of the DC17 SLAs anyway, and there's no obvious way too boost them.
Perhaps some sort of template for boosting an SLA-driven monster's natural abilities might be in order? Or some attention to this issue in the monster advancement rules?
Good point, its hard to really advance monsters as anything but a tank in the current rules.
Perhaps some sort of template for boosting an SLA-driven monster's natural abilities might be in order? Or some attention to this issue in the monster advancement rules?
This certainly could use some additional work in the Bestiary, but I would always increase at least the caster level of SLA's - either level by HD or a proportion if they were very different totals. And SR by CR increase if not otherwise specified. Also you can use Magic Rating and add levels in a caster. While they wouldn't meld well with the SLA's, they'd up the caster level and provide more generic/selectable abilities.
SD Spoiler:
Years ago I noticed this problem (with beholders, at the time), and invented this houserule (my players don't even know I do it):
As I add HD of any kind (advancement HD, class HD, etc.) to a monster, each time its BAB goes up, I increase the DCs of its SLA's by the same amount.
Then I noticed the flaw in my houserule. I could add 8 levels of fighter to a beholder, or 8 levels of wizard, and the beholder's eye rays got much dadlier with the fighter levels because fighters get more BAB.
That didn't seem fair.
The other flaw was that good-BAB class levels really jacked the save DCs way through the roof. Too much!
That's when I decided to tie it to the "good" Saving Throw progression.
(note: I had already houseruled a change to this this progression, setting it at 1,1,2,2,3,3, ... 10,10 at 20th level.
Which (if you don't want to change your Saving Throw progression) just means I simply added 1/2 the number of levels or HD, rounded up, to the SLA DCs
So if the beholder gets 8 levels of wizard or fighter or monk (LOL), or just advances 8 HD, I would be adding 4 to all his SLAs.
This has worked wonderfully well over the years.
I just recently release the Monster Advancer and I must say that this is something that I came up against in development. If you think about this from a complexity standpoint progression of spell-like abilities would have just been another complicated piece of an already too-complicated puzzle. Creatures could take quite a bit of time to increase in power before we even start talking about spells or other abilities.
This is something that I hope to address once I have the vast majority of most requested features into the Advancer. To create a program that does all the work of advancement opens doors that the print medium just doesn't allow. Creatures that have spell-like abilities should go beyond just progressing in power with those...they should gain new ones depending on their HD. A Hag with 20HD should have more spell-like abilities and tricks up her sleeve than the base one...but again creating a progression of that type just isn't easy in print. Once I have a prototype for these new hyper-advanced creatures I will let everyone know but I would love to hear some people's ideas of what sorts of powers creatures should and could gain as they gain HD...with a program and some standard systems we could do anything and do it easily.
Cool, I look forward to it!