What's a good standarized format to write monster stat blocks? Is there some sort of tool? I need to write many for PF2 conversions.Uh, you mean you don't normally look at other creatures of the same type to identify key traits and adapt as necessary, such as if you were to make a Marai Rakshasa or some sort of river serpent like the Goldpebble?
(yes, I have about 20 or 30 monster statblocks in my work folder at any point in time, just ask - there's more of them in the GitHub database but they're not all mine)
edit: the Marai uses the Sniper guidelines, while Goldpebble is set as a Soldier but with a few oddities here and there.
The links use Kyle’s monster tool, all you need to do is remove the file code. If you need a hand for conversions, you’re always welcome to join A Series of Dice-Based Events and hop into one of the conversion groups, there’s plenty of good resources.
Building monsters now is a bunch of easy to swallow numbers and cool abilities instead of... Well this guy has 48 con because if not my party will one hit kill him...
This all day long! In P1 you start with HD, then add bab, then adjust stats and then feat etc etc etc and in the end the monster either has half a dozen "racial bonuses" so that the numbers are even close to what the table suggests or it is so unbalanced that it will hit every PC 100% of the time but goes down in one round of concentrated fire.
P2 monster building is a ton easier. I am converting and old AP and it is super easy to throw together a monster. I grab the tables so I know every stat is between X and Y. It takes like 5 minutes. Now I can spend my time on actually inventing cool abilities, but AGAIN the tables help me to balance it so it is fun and cool but not so strong as to destroy my low level PCs.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Agreed, no reason to spend 30 minutes writing broken code and 15 fixing it when I can just spend 5 minutes writing stats and 40 amping up the cool.
After going getting the Bestiary I was able to make several monsters just by looking at several monsters around the CR level I wanted to make the new monsters at. When Paizo released the creature creation PDF, my numbers were spot on for the CR levels I had them at.
As far as Demons. I would have just look at the Sin spawns and Demons to see what the Sin abilities would have been.
The Creature Creation section of the GMG just puts all the numbers in one place so you don't have to research via the Bestiary. Combine that with http://monster.pf2.tools helps a lot to make beasties :)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This thread reminds me that I need to go make Granfaloon for PF2. It's a task that was really daunting for PF1, but I like my odds better here.
| 13 people marked this as a favorite. |
Are you just supposed to make something up? If so, what is the point of the book in the first place? Why not just [make up] everything about a creature and save yourself the money?
...
You're okay with that? Fascinating. I at least expect some examples to inspire creativity. Having absolutely nothing to work from is completely useless.
The criteria that goes into giving the unique, idiosyncratic, cool, suprising, exciting abilities to the various monsters are for some reason kept under wraps at Paizo HQ.
In contrast, being able to create a level 7 creature with low hit points (so 86 hp) and high strike damage (so 2d10+9) feels entirely generic.
I can already reskin abilities that exist, so I'm not talking about those: a list of them would be nice but isn't what I'm talking about. What I was talking about is a list of NEW abilities to build off of and use as a base to reskin to make your own. Existing abilities was already included in the reskin sidebar I talked about.
Whenever the folks at Paizo are spending their time writing a bunch of "unique, idiosyncratic, cool, surprising, exciting abilities" or "NEW abilities" you can bet they're showing up in their monsters, where they belong.
There's not a conspiracy to protect a trade secret here. They've literally done on-stream monsters on the official Paizo Twitch channel, and Mark Seifter and Linda Zayas-Palmer have done them on Arcane Mark.
This dude was made on the Paizo stream based on the art, community votes for themed abilities, and appropriate choices from the GMG guidelines.
I'd link to one of the Arcane Mark build a monster workshops that started after the GMG monster rules were first released, but it looks like they've dropped off Twitch and not yet made it to YouTube.
But here's the general technique:
It's literally thinking of cool ideas and then making them into rules that are reasonably balanced. The part of that specific to Pathfinder 2 they put into the book. For the rest - there are plenty of books on creative writing, but a tried and true method is to take two unrelated/dissimilar things as inspiration and mash them into one. Like the sin-themed demons, and being annoyed at noise - bam, R0b0tBadgr put together a bunch of those ideas into a cool thing. Or owlbears, or turtle ducks, or sharkshasas, or whatever.
No one's saying being creative is easy for everyone, but the folks at Paizo have spent a bunch of their non-work time presenting these types of design exercises, and that's just insanely cool of them.
The idea that they have some secret magic formula which says that this unwritten ability would be perfect for varying monster themes or whatever is just silly. And the approach suggested by others of picking abilities from a list is the opposite of the point of having monsters with unique, thematic abilities. Do you guys want a chart listing a point value listing "Throwing your head" as 2 points and "tree stride, but between piles of garbage instead of trees" as 1 point? Those kinds of things always have the challenge of potentially undervaluing abilities that have complementary uses when combined, or overvaluing others. It's much more helpful to have the sort of guidelines provided in the GMG, spelling out "here's where your numbers typically want to sit for varying types of monsters."
There are certainly a collection of straightforward/classic abilities that might be generally found among certain types of monsters, and they get a whole glossary in the Bestiary. The GMG rules are there for making sure that when someone builds a monster, the basic elements are predictable and solid. This leaves room for the unique and creative parts of the monster to shine without everyone remembering it as "that time they TPK'ed because the monster's AC was 4 higher than it should have been."
Blaming a shadowy conspiracy for your own shortcomings is a time-honoured tradition of humanity, after all.
Challenge: make it into an NPC ability.
There are no guidelines.(Level 1)
|
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
Blaming a shadowy conspiracy for your own shortcomings is a time-honoured tradition of humanity, after all.Challenge: make it into an NPC ability.
There are no guidelines.(Level 1)
REACTION - Trigger: you are hit by an attack or fail a saving throw
Effect: choose a creature other than the one that hit you or used the effect that you failed to save against. You blame this other creature for your misfortunes. Until the end of your next turn, you and your allies get a +1 status bonus to hit the blamed creature. This bonus increases to +2 if the blamed creature has concealment or is in an area of low light.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Blaming a shadowy conspiracy for your own shortcomings is a time-honoured tradition of humanity, after all.Challenge: make it into an NPC ability.
There are no guidelines.(Level 1)
REACTION - Trigger: you are hit by an attack or fail a saving throw
Effect: choose a creature other than the one that hit you or used the effect that you failed to save against. You blame this other creature for your misfortunes. Until the end of your next turn, you and your allies get a +1 status bonus to hit the blamed creature. This bonus increases to +2 if the blamed creature has concealment or is in an area of low light.
I like how you can blame any creature and how party's Rogue (or other stealthy sneaksie) are a prime target :D
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
This makes me want to create a thread where one can spitball stupid monster ideas and people work on making them into monsters... we should start something like this
This makes me want to create a thread where one can spitball stupid monster ideas and people work on making them into monsters... we should start something like this
Yeah, it should be vastly much more healthier when compared to ranting or moaning about heartbreaks felt upon official design decisions which sailed long ago...
Then the next recurring question would be, "Which level is the most thematically appropriate for Effect X?"
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Can confirm as a freelancer of multiple PF1 monsters, the "monster builder" document was a macro'd excel file where you can turn on/off things already in the monster types listed in bestiary, a lot of "hp/saves/AC should be around X for creatures of Y level" and the pages with special attacks, abilities, SLAs and so forth only had colored blocks where you typed out the cool things you wanted your monster to do.
So, in essence, pretty much the same as now, but without the handy excel file to collect it all up and format it for you.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Then I’m not really sure what you’re arguing.
Not arguing so much as confirming that there's no "...secret magic formula..." for "...unique, idiosyncratic, cool, surprising, exciting abilities..."
The only 'formulae' is the same target range of numbers and blanket creature type abilities that they released and printed in the book.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Aye, when I wrote my PF1 monsters I was using Hero Lab to generate and tweak the numbers. By contrast, the PF2 monsters I've written, I was easily able to assemble in MSWord. Either way, you need a solid grasp of how the action rules work for the game, and creativity enough to come up with cool and engaging abilities for them.
Regardless of how one feels about the rest of 4e, it did interesting monsters that fit into a variety of roles very well; if you need inspiration, maybe track down some 4e Monster Manuals on the cheap and pillage them for inspiration. ^_^
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Aye, when I wrote my PF1 monsters I was using Hero Lab to generate and tweak the numbers. By contrast, the PF2 monsters I've written, I was easily able to assemble in MSWord. Either way, you need a solid grasp of how the action rules work for the game, and creativity enough to come up with cool and engaging abilities for them.
Regardless of how one feels about the rest of 4e, it did interesting monsters that fit into a variety of roles very well; if you need inspiration, maybe track down some 4e Monster Manuals on the cheap and pillage them for inspiration. ^_^
Madness and heresy!
hides the 4e MM| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Useless? They are the best thing in the new GM Guide imho. And one of the best things about the new edition.
Faster to make, much faster. Cleaner and quicker in play. Get the monster you want.
Having homebrewed up to level 20 in 1st edition and experienced encounters that take a day to design and build, i'm personally thrilled with the new monster creation rules.
Just my 2c.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm converting an older AP. While writing up an encounter last night I initially said to use one of the NPCs in the gallery, but I didn't think it really fit with the character. So I decided to make him from scratch. It took all of 10 minutes. Just open up the book, write down in order table 1, table 2, etc. then pop open Archives of Nethys to pilfer a couple Ranger feats and... DONE.
It was SOOO easy. None of this, does he have enough feats to pay all of his feat tax prereques, no worrying about his stats being too low to TWF. etc. etc. etc.
The more I convert the more I REALLY appreciate how well designed P2 is. I'm talking about the underlying chassis for the whole system. It does so much of the work for you that you don't have to spend hours making sure your math works properly or the numbers add up, or writing dumb "X monster gets a racial bonus to Y ability b/c I can't make the math work so I'm fudging it" abilities. What this means is that I can now devote the time instead making up cool encounters or interesting stories instead.
One of the biggest limiting factors in adventures is word count. I want to make the castle bigger, but I only have 64 pages. Something as simple as not printing all the "invisible" feats and racial skill bonuses on a stat block saves tons of words that can instead be used fleshing out the encounters. This is even more true for high level monsters that would often take up a full column and a half, god forbid it have some kind of new or interesting ability, or be a spell caster!
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
