If I was going to sub out some of the existing monsters for ones of equal CR, what are the pitfalls to watch for? I want to do this to add variety, to change the flavor, and to make it my own to some degree.
Careful with seugathi, and a few others that punch well above their CR. Also, there are some monsters whose CR ratings depend heavily on a certain level of equipment/type of spell load in the party. Anything incorporeal, for example.
Also, aquatic monsters are almost always way stronger than they should be.
Or rather, no one is going to prepare for underwater combat, and you'll wipe them.
Different monsters produce different encounters, especially at mid-levels (in my experience, low levels have too few options to vary much, while high levels give PCs too many options to overcome challenges in a linear fashion). Swap a gibbering mouther for a phase spider. Instead of a fast-paced frenzy of different abilities (grapple! Blood drain! Spittle! Confusion! Crap, Engulf!), you get a slow, potentially even annoying (if done wrong) combat where the PCs must watch and wait for the attacker to make their next move.
For the same reason, beware of the terrains themselves. A gang of allips become a lot more dangerous in a maze with thin walls they can move through with impunity.
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This is all sort of stuff the guys above me have said, but I sort of want to make a little guide of it, so I will:
Modifying an encounter is a great deal of fun and can really help a campaign. It allows you to add your own flavor to a particular scene, build enemies more suited to your group, and patch up less inspiring aspects of larger adventures. Yet, encounter modifying, like encounter building, often contains issues that need to be addressed. Consider the following:
- How Prepared is your group? Whenever exchanging a monster for another one, consider how capable your group is of defeating it. Consider for a moment the Rakshasa, a CR 10 monster. The Rakshasa isn't too much of a warrior, but does contain DR 15/good and piercing as well as 25 SR. If your group doesn't have a way to get past those defenses in your toolkit, you're looking at a very difficult fight. Keep in mind this works both ways: A Rakshasa only fights as a 7th level sorcerer and deals a surprisingly small amount of damage. He might not be able to fight the group any more than they're able to fight him.
- What's the monster's style/role? You might have gotten annoyed at me with my Rakshasa example. "But Shimnimnim," you'd begin. "Rakshasa aren't meant to fight the party directly! They're all about subterfuge!" And to that I'd say "sure maybe I don't know" because I back down hella fast when opposed. The point I'm trying to make is that you need to know what a monster does. That CR (if we assume it works, which we will even though it doesn't) is based on the idea that the monster is in circumstances that work for it. This is especially true in encounters with multiple units. If you take a fight with one high level bard/fighter and six low level barbarians, and you switch it to be one high level barbarian and six low level bard/fighters, you'll find that encounter suddenly is a lot easier and also what is going on why is everyone singing.
- Where are you? This is actually sort of easy to miss: Location is everything in encounter design. In an open room, an animate dream might be a CR 8 encounter. But let's say the party is fighting on a staircase, and that staircase is collapsing below them! The animate dream's confusion and deep slumber spells can suddenly cause a PC death in a single round! Its incorporeal aspect makes it immune to the environment! It is, in short, no longer a CR 8 encounter. A simpler example is the dire eagle in an underwater fight. Keep in mind how the environment will work against both the party and the enemies, and work from there.
- Beware templates/class levels Whenever applying a template to a monster to change its power level, take a good look at the monster. Did you make it any weaker or stronger? Young template is a pretty notable version of this: while animals and the like will feel their strength drop substantially, magic using monsters will be virtually unaffected. Be wary here.
- Does it really need to change? This one is sort of unrelated, but I often find when I'm reworking encounters that I went overboard, got too excited, until eventually the whole thing was coming down. The quality of a change goes down when you feel obligated to do it. Remember that every change you make is made for the better of your game, and don't try to force it.
Anyway that's all I got for now. I might come back to this one.
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This is all sort of stuff the guys above me have said, but I sort of want to make a little guide of it, so I will:
<<good stuff deleted>>
Nicely put, Shimnimnim. One other thing to keep in mind is that you should have a way out handy in case you screw up and hit the party with something that they're woefully unprepared for. The converse is *not* true--if the change turns out to make the fight really easy, don't try to punch it up just to give them a challenge. (Save that for the next encounter(s)!)