So, I've been thinking about some things for making more versatile but not necessarily more powerful monsters.
You rarely see a competent demon or dragon spellcaster since they have such a huge stack of their CR tied up in being a monster.
What if you advanced their spellcasting without adding more hit dice, saves, skills and such? Just class abilities (perhaps leaving out bloodlines in the case of sorcerers).
It seems like this is a reasonable way to have monsters that act in the same role as a humanoid caster would in an encounter without having to have a humanoid stuck into the encounter like an elephant in the room.
Has anyone done this and if so do you have an idea of good guidelines for appropriate CR for such additions?
Director of Narrative
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When doing something like that, the best thing would be to just build out a new critter. That is essentially what would be happening here. Then, to figure out the CR, you’ve entered into the part of monster creation that is more art than math. Since you’d be giving up the more mechanical aspects of CR calculation in favor of determining the strength and power of the casting abilities, there’s a lot more variables to look at when CR is involved.
Going this route, take the ideas you want to implement and find comparable critters in the Bestiary. Check their abilities against not only your new creation, but also the guidelines in the back of the book. Use the charts plus comparison in your estimation. If you have the time and resources, playtest the critter up against a few different groups and scenarios to find the balance.
The reason I suggest that you just build a new critter is that, while interesting and something I’ve considered before, just adding caster levels breaks the monster creation/advancement rules slightly, and once you do that, it’s far less of a headache to just build a new monster rather than cram some other rules together.
Edit: Oh yeah, plus, when you're building this new critter, you can come up with a cool background of why this particular 9th-level roper sorcerer was such a bad-ass magic-user.
