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Gamemastery Guide will cover this.
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You can look at the multiple versions of the monster to see what abilities are common between them and get an estimate of what the plain stats would be.
But my main complaint is with some of the new monster names. What the heck is an Alghollthu? Or a Xulgath? What was wrong with Aboleth or Troglodyte? For people used to the regular names from previous editions and other games, looking for the creatures in the PF2e Bestiary leads you to think they are not listed. If you want to ty the Skum to the Adoliths, you just mention it in their description and say they are often found together or working for them rather than creating a new group monster name for all of them.
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Monster feats are gone and were instead converted to abilities or included in the statblock because one of the most annoyint and time-consuming parts of running PF1 monsters was having to run around and look up every feat the monster has, check whether it's a feat that's automatically calculated into the statblock or something you need to mind yourself etc. etc.
Monsters with class levels are pretty much gone. PF2 monster design went the 5E D&D route of monsters divorced from player classes and working on their own set of rules. You don't build PF2 monsters by, say, leveling up a derro sorcerer, you take the target numbers and guidelines (available in the free excerpt from the upcoming GMG) and work from there, setting attacks/defences and abilities to match the intended level.
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Alghollthu is not a new name, or at least it's not new to 2e. I don't actually know when it was first introduced but a quick round of research shows that it appears as early as an article from the Ruins of Azlant AP (2017) called "Ecology of the Alghollthu" where 'aboleth' is described as a word meaning 'master' and refers specifically to one form of their anatomically divergent species. Not so much a renaming as an expansion of the existing lore. I can't claim to know exactly why this name first came up, but I would wager it has a lot to do with 'aboleth' having a term that does not incur copyright issues outside of OGL products and to better differentiate between D&D aboleths, since Paizo has greatly expanded on aboleth lore.
As for troglodytes, it's pretty simple. Xulgath is what the species calls themselves in their own civilization. Trog is the insulting descriptive name given most properly to the feral degenerate cave dwellers of their species.
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It is not apparent how to add ancestries or backgrounds or whether not at al nor whether one just adds a level of say fighter. I know the book states you can just adject stats but half the ease of making a fight adequate for whatever level party with whatever level monster there was, was t.he ability to add levels to the creature.The prior system the first bestiary had rules for upgrading and adding classes to monsters especially pointing out which monsters could be upgraded this way and which were better not. It also had advice for how this affected the CR of the encounter.
For whatever reason these rules in any form do not exist in the original bestiary. I don't find that helpful at all. I can make changes but it is more difficult to then adjudicate the real CR. I am not sure why this was done. Also there are no monster only feats at all such as fly by. Curious as to why they wnet this way?
There is a very different design philosophy for monsters this edition. There are no racial adjustments to stats and classes tacked on base monsters, because when you think of it that was a lot of extra steps to get to the end goal of a monster with abilities you wanted it to have. It required someone experienced enough to know what the "right" numbers were to make a fair and balanced monster in the end, and required a lot of fiddling. It also limited the possible abilities monsters could have in a lot of ways.
The new design paradigm is to skip all that fiddling with racial bonuses, and instead keep the end goal front and center. If you want the monster to have good reflex and poor will, you just give them that, based on their level. You make them unique with some special actions or abilities and it's basically done.
This makes adjusting monsters even easier, since there's no reverse engineering what is a monster ability versus a class ability anymore, and you don't have to worry about the numbers not lining up for your special custom monster. If you have a mage derro and you want to make a warrior derro, you adjust the saves, HP, attacks, etc, take away the spellcasting, and give it a couple warrior abilities like AoO and a special two action attack. After learning it the whole process takes like 5 minutes, it's massively easier than PF1.
I recommend you look at the Monster Building Guidelines which will be part of the upcoming GMG, to understand the new design process. Once you get a handle on it things are way easier for a GM who wants to make their own modifications.
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This means that the GM cannot easily upgrade the creature for higher levels or take the base creature and add a class
Take a look at the Monster and Hazard creation rules. They're a free PDF currently, until the Gamesmastery guide comes out. They tell you how to do all of that. It's very simple in 2e to do so once you know how.
Adding a class is a case of upping the underlying numbers (there's charts in the guide for this) then adding class feats and abilities from the class description as needed and appropriate.
As others have said the design philosophy is very different. It's top-down concept-led design, rather than bottom up formula-based design.
It's a lot faster than 1e monster creation and adaptation, which i'm very happy about after running a campaign to level 20 recently with a lot of modified enemies. OMG that was work. 2e streamlines it enormously. 2e monsters is vying for my favourite change to Pathfinder.
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PF1 system sucked. It told you that these are all CR 6 encounters:
dwarf fighter 7 TWFing with Dex 12 using two improvised weapons (barstools), Endurance, Diehard, Great Fortitude (tuff barroom battler dorf, such cool idea!)
human fighter 7 with STR 18, greatsword, Power Attack, Furious Focus, Weapon Focus (greatsword)
elf rogue 3/monk 2/cleric 2 with a, eh, doesn't matter really :P
lizardman ranger 6 with a longbow and a mix of sensible and silly feats
centaur sorcerer 3
one single lonely vanilla seugathi
The cherished "freedom to build anything" complexity resulted in the same CR of encounters of such wild difference in what challenges did they pose that it wasn't even funny. And the game didn't even inform you of that, instead stealth-assuming that you'll spend enough of your life on CharOp boards to tell apart which of the above is laughable, which is so-so, which is adequate to what CR 6 was supposed to be and which one is zomgwtfbbq OP and should be handled with care.
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but it is terrible for planned encounters in an adventure
It seems to be working fine in the published Adventures.
let's face it the "on the fly" thing is guessing and you usually ended up with fights that were either TPKs or way to easy for final boss fights.
You're not guessing in the dark, there's number ranges to bounce within.
The system in 1e where I can add levels which means I can add feats meant I could make encounters with creatures customized to challenge my characters. For instance, suppose a party member played a multiclassed fighter / rogue build built around improved trip feat. He took combat reflexes to get multiple AOCs and maximized the trip potential with feats and weapons. The character wades in attacks, trips the creature and gets an AOC to attack and trip them again when they stand up. He used a weapon with reach to make the five foot crawl first not "effective. As a GM I can whine the rules are "cheesy" and I guess house rule them out or I can consider the characters reputation and prior fights getting to the ear of the enemy. So in the final encounter there is say a dwarf with spells that add bonuses to not be tripped added on to him who is the bodyguard for the boss to protect against the trip rogue and maybe a ninja with prone fighting and kip up and even improved trip themselves that is hired specifically to seek the character out and take him out before he wades through his minions.
Did the feats and spells add new abilities and tactics for the most part or were they number boosters. Reactions/AoOs work differently in P2 but you can still have an enemy built around them.
I say this as someone who did not like the new system and wasn't looking forward to it because I really did not like Starfinder's, but it's different enough/improved upon of Starfinder's.
So far it hasn't made me rub my temples in ache, but I also haven't been super thorough yet. Yet.
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Published adventures have the encounter already detailed for you and supposedly someone game tested it to determine if the encounters really did meet the expectations for the party level suggested.
And? If you don't trust the guidelines then it's moot point, in first or second edition.
If I have a long term villain which the party has been chasing for several adventures the ability to take a stock template and upgrade it systematically with exactly what I want the villain to do while keeping the power levels equal to the party is really helpful.
And you can do that in P2 as well.
PS: AS to CR's I can't say as I never used them as GM. I always gave out experience based on two things.
… XP earned was a secondary outcome of the Challenge Rating system. First and foremost it was to gauge difficulty.
If the party had an encounter with a cloud giant and killed it first round before it got initiative I awarded less eeps for that then say the party being ambushed by goblins and having half the party go down and them barely avoiding a TPK.
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I did keep the relative power of the creature in mind
You just stated you didn't use CR.
as players want eeps for taking out a cloud giant but I always gave more experience for fights that were in fact difficult as played out for the party regardless of the power level of the monsters as I felt this made players learn more.
This is a playstyle thing that has nothing to do with the monster building rules, for either edition.
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To illustrate the problem with class levels on monsters: consider if you wanted to have a fire giant spell caster as a 11th level opponent. In PF1, it was CR 10, so if you slapped a level of sorcerer on it you got... a fire giant with a couple 1st level spells and a CL of 1. It's stats don't meaningfully change and its spells aren't relevant to use against a high level party. Getting relevant spells would jack up the giants other stats, even factoring in half BAB and such.
In PF2, if you want to make a fire giant spell caster a level 11 challenge, you adjust its stats to that of an 11th level magical striker from that of a 10th level brute. That might mean a few stats go up, but a couple probably go down. More importantly, you can give it level appropriate spells.
By comparison, adding fighter levels to a fire giant in PF1 is not dissimilar to PF2, but that's because the class and monster goals were already aligned.
AS to the "it is easier" argument I disagree.
In 1e if you wanted to just quickly for instance make tougher orcs you just adjusted hit points, saves, attacks or damage accordingly on the fly and kind of gauged the power level yourself. This is what the bestiary says to do in 2e.
It actually isn't. 2e gives you very explicit numbers to use based on the role the creature is supposed to fill in combat.
on the fly" thing is guessing and you usually ended up with fights that were either TPKs or way to easy for final boss fights.
This was true for PF1, but not PF2. PF2 is much better balanced so you actually CAN predict how powerful a party of X level is, and therefore actually make appropriate monsters for your desired difficulty. I've made monsters on the fly before-- it is preeeetty easy if you can pick a similar creature to use as a starting point.
The system in 1e where I can add levels which means I can add feats meant I could make encounters with creatures customized to challenge my characters. For instance, suppose a party member played a multiclassed fighter / rogue build built around improved trip feat. He took combat reflexes to get multiple AOCs and maximized the trip potential with feats and weapons. The character wades in attacks, trips the creature and gets an AOC to attack and trip them again when they stand up. He used a weapon with reach to make the five foot crawl first not "effective. As a GM I can whine the rules are "cheesy" and I guess house rule them out or I can consider the characters reputation and prior fights getting to the ear of the enemy. So in the final encounter there is say a dwarf with spells that add bonuses to not be tripped added on to him who is the bodyguard for the boss to protect against the trip rogue and maybe a ninja with prone fighting and kip up and even improved trip themselves that is hired specifically to seek the character out and take him out before he wades through his minions
Setting aside that the player can't build the same level of auto trip lock shenanigans that even made this necessary... You can add abilities all you want to creatures. They can even be class abilities if you want. They just don't HAVE to be.
Part of why they made figuring out target numbers so easy is so that you can spend more time thinking of cool active abilities that are actually interesting.
This means that the GM cannot easily upgrade the creature for higher levels or take the base creature and add a class
Take a look at the Monster and Hazard creation rules. They're a free PDF currently, until the Gamesmastery guide comes out. They tell you how to do all of that. It's very simple in 2e to do so once you know how.
Adding a class is a case of upping the underlying numbers (there's charts in the guide for this) then adding class feats and abilities from the class description as needed and appropriate.
As others have said the design philosophy is very different. It's top-down concept-led design, rather than bottom up formula-based design.
It's a lot faster than 1e monster creation and adaptation, which i'm very happy about after running a campaign to level 20 recently with a lot of modified enemies. OMG that was work. 2e streamlines it enormously. 2e monsters is vying for my favourite change to Pathfinder.
Thank you all for your responses.
I am glad they will come out with a system for this in the Game Masters handbook. I hope it provides what I want. If it does wat you state here then I can work with it.
only
AS to the "it is easier" argument I disagree.In 1e if you wanted to just quickly for instance make tougher orcs you just adjusted hit points, saves, attacks or damage accordingly on the fly and kind of gauged the power level yourself. This is what the bestiary says to do in 2e. To me that is OK for a quick random monster encounter you have two minutes to set up for the party but it is terrible for planned encounters in an adventure because let's face it the "on the fly" thing is guessing and you usually ended up with fights that were either TPKs or way to easy for final boss fights.
The system in 1e where I can add levels which means I can add feats meant I could make encounters with creatures customized to challenge my characters. For instance, suppose a party member played a multiclassed fighter / rogue build built...
I think this is partly what Yossarian meant by a change in design philosophy. since everything in first was more or less a variation on a class or could have a class there was not a lot of difference adding in a creature with say trip vs giving a level of a class to a creature to give it trip. The core philosophy on monsters (in my opinion) is now to use monsters to tailor the encounter how you like vs tailoring each individual monster. Since their abilities are now quite varied and unique having been separated from the feat system.
As you mentioned the monster book has some short hand rules for upping or decreasing the power of a creature on the fly, mostly by adding 2 to all the things and upping damage the actual core book suggestions recommend adding creatures above making any one creature more powerful. Doing so can add a lot of tactical changes to combat now that creatures powers and abilities are a lot more varied. In looking at it that way it ends up being a lot easier to lay out an adventure ahead of time by populating it with the creature mix that will challenge your players vs having to write up class levels, adding hp, feats, weapon bonuses etc.
I realize that doesn't really help your customization problem and I hope the GM book will get you what you need but I also hope that helps with the view point some of us are coming from that feel 2nd edition is simpler when dealing with monsters/encounters. Also keep in mind there is nothing from stopping you taking base monster stats and just using those instead of choosing a race and background during character creation. Just be aware that may make things a bit more difficult than intended on occasion. My 2 cents. Hope you find a good solution and your group has a good long lived campaign! And please do share if you do settle on a solution you like. Others may feel the same as you and would appreciate using it themselves!
PF1 system sucked. It told you that these are all CR 6 encounters:
dwarf fighter 7 TWFing with Dex 12 using two improvised weapons (barstools), Endurance, Diehard, Great Fortitude (tuff barroom battler dorf, such cool idea!)
human fighter 7 with STR 18, greatsword, Power Attack, Furious Focus, Weapon Focus (greatsword)
elf rogue 3/monk 2/cleric 2 with a, eh, doesn't matter really :P
lizardman ranger 6 with a longbow and a mix of sensible and silly feats
centaur sorcerer 3
one single lonely vanilla seugathiThe cherished "freedom to build anything" complexity resulted in the same CR of encounters of such wild difference in what challenges did they pose that it wasn't even funny. And the game didn't even inform you of that, instead stealth-assuming that you'll spend enough of your life on CharOp boards to tell apart which of the above is laughable, which is so-so, which is adequate to what CR 6 was supposed to be and which one is zomgwtfbbq OP and should be handled with care.
This became blightingly obvious to me the day I tried to advance an animal by 6 levels using the monster rules, back in 3.5.
Thankfully I recognised the issue before I tpkd my party, and promptly never followed bottom-up monster rules again.
On the other hand, in pf2, it took me 20 minutes to build a lv13 Otyugh, and it works.
Aha, I know exactly which level 13 otyugh you built. For others watching at home, it's the only otyugh to appear in both an Adventure Path and the Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild (and no, it's not Hats).
Lemme guess, you also took regular otyugh tresholds, set correspondant values for lv13, reduced ac and hit rates, increased hp and damage, made it supersized and called it a day? :P
(Yeah ok plus some detailing but y’know it’s just so mindnumbingly straightforward)
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Yes, and I added some extra abilities / twists on old playtest abilities as well, like making an enormous wave of effluent and some others, but ultimately they didn't fight.
Yeah he’s more interesting for the non-fighting part than for the fighting one. One day I’ll have to tell you what I did with Iovinus. Also took just a few minutes, I started using this tool to format them and I can pop out a fully colourised and formatted statblock in a blink :)
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RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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I do miss the class/level notation in NPC stat blocks. It's a very good shorthand for quickly recognizing what the NPC is expected to be able to do, and at least in the most recent AP it seems to be gone. Even knowing someone is built off a "martial" or "caster" chassis would be useful.
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I do miss the class/level notation in NPC stat blocks. It's a very good shorthand for quickly recognizing what the NPC is expected to be able to do, and at least in the most recent AP it seems to be gone. Even knowing someone is built off a "martial" or "caster" chassis would be useful.
I could see the addition of monster specific traits that tell you generally what a monster is supposed to be being useful. Would allow you to select monsters at a glance instead of having to look through their stat block to know what it is they are good at. Something like a "Melee" and "Ranged" or "Caster" trait. Not necessary but useful for the GM trying to throw together an impromptu battle.
Then again it is usually pretty easy to tell at first glance as it is. Lower AC tends to be a caster/ ranged sort of monster. Higher AC tends to be melee or frontline sort. Spell casting is also usually a dead giveaway.
I am glad they will come out with a system for this in the Game Masters handbook. I hope it provides what I want. If it does wat you state here then I can work with it.
Nowhere in here did you indicate you found and read the rules from the GameMastery Guide that were released for free for anyone to use right now, and it's not prominent on the website, so here's the actual link for it again (BellyBeard linked them earlier): GMG Monster and Hazard Creation section
They're pretty solid and are much more functional than the rules you liked in 1E's Bestiary. If you want some examples of actually building a monster from scratch using these rules, Mark Seifter and Linda Zayas-Palmer have done a few "build a monster" workshops on their Arcane Mark Twitch channel, which should be archived on YouTube.
People have also made a few tools to make using these rules easier.
I only ran across them a couple of days ago and haven't personally used them:
Kyle Pulver's Monster Builder webapp
DoggieBert's Monster Builder google sheet
I'm a little late to the party, but hopefully this is helpful.
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These are both AMAZING tools, but just a small heads up - Doggie Bert's Monster builder is now on version 1.2.
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These are both AMAZING tools, but just a small heads up - Doggie Bert's Monster builder is now on version 1.2.
Need permission to view that one
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I've goofed up and linked my own copy of the file instead of the original - use this one instead!