Homebrew monster I made, looking for feedback

[Charles Gouraud]

Here's the monster I made,called a Striped Smiler. I was inspired by a beanie baby I saw, and just decided to go for it.

[DM-DR]

I think you have under rated this in CR. Personally, I think this should be a hard CR 9 or an easy CR 10 (based on the extra abilities).

Refer to the Monster Creation Rules. This should help you narrow in the stats and adjust the monster to the challenge rating you are seeking.

It is a very creative monster, and I think it just needs some final tweaking to place it in an appropriate CR category.

[Charles Gouraud]

I looked at the page you suggested, and I don't think that the CR discrepancy was as wide as you think. What I did was I ticked down the natural armor by 2, took off pounce, and reduced the resistance gained from the active element. I think that the increased HP and accuracy is balanced by the fact that it deals a lot less damage on a hit than is suggested for the CR.

[DM-DR]

The changes help, but I think you are looking now at the CR 8.

Compare the Base attack bonus (Yours at +10) and average damage per round (39.5 on full attack, some elemental) to other base monsters within the CR 7-9 range. I know there are some that seem really out of place.

One thing you have to consider is a variable elemental resistance and variable elemental attack is a bit more difficult than a single straight up resistance/attack for players.

If a party of four level 4 characters were to meet this as an epic encounter (boss fight) where it is a CR 7, things will end pretty badly for them.

A Party of four level 5 characters facing this as a CR 8 might not consider it exactly a hard Epic encounter, but it would still be appropriately taxing on their resources.

(I'm only looking at a "normal" party, not min-maxed characters and meta-gaming).

In any case, pinning down the CR of a monster can be tricky, and play-testing can help here. It is still a great concept and a monster I would very likely toss at a party over a large APL range.

[Charles Gouraud]

Well, it being CR 8 puts it in the CR range I wanted, so thank you very much for your feedback :) If you have a game you feel that this creature would slot inside of, I'd love to hear how it goes.

I would love to hear your feedback, if any, on the flavor side of things, because I like how those came out. Basically what happened is I drew a pic of what I envisioned, and saw that it looked draconic, so I added the "how to make" part.

[Drejk]

Slams in general should be primary attacks (unless you have a very good reason for making them secondary) with attack bonus of +16 and dealing 1d8+7 points of damage (and when writing damage dice for attacks you should always put a number of dice before d, even if it is "1").

You don't have to give it Improved Natural Attack feats - while creating a monster you set their natural attack damage dice, the values listed in the table in Universal Monster Rules are only the suggestion and default value. The Improved Natural Attack feats should be primarily to discern individual specimens from others of their kind.

[Charles Gouraud]

Drejk wrote:

Slams in general should be primary attacks (unless you have a very good reason for making them secondary) with attack bonus of +16 and dealing 1d8+7 points of damage (and when writing damage dice for attacks you should always put a number of dice before d, even if it is "1").

You don't have to give it Improved Natural Attack feats - while creating a monster you set their natural attack damage dice, the values listed in the table in Universal Monster Rules are only the suggestion and default value. The Improved Natural Attack feats should be primarily to discern individual specimens from others of their kind.

I didn't realize either of those, and thought that if a creature had 1 primary attack, its other attacks were considered secondary. I lowered its strength mod by 1 to adjust for the increase in damage. Now to adjust feats...

[Gark the Goblin]

Yeah a monster can have several primary attacks - e.g. the eagle.