Hey Hivemind!! I am about to run a OP gestalt game and it will be heavy undead, monster, and demon/devil enemies. I am trying to create a template that I can add to most undead to make them more difficult.
+12 Strength and Dexterity, +6 hit points per HD
+4 Channel Resistance
+1d6 cold damage
+2 Natural Armor
+10ft Enhancement to all speeds
Explodes for 1d6 negative energy per 2 HD
I just want to know what kind of increase to CR this would do to any undead.
depends on what you want out of your game. Do you want insanely fast character growth on top of everything else? Then increase the CR. Do you just want a fair-er fight between your PCs and the poor sods they're going to kick around? Then keep the CR the same with the adjustments.
For a normal game however, that's kind of like adding the advanced template 3 or 4 times though. Or you could look at the suggested CR chart in the Bestiary and just adjust their CR accordingly; that's an 8 point swing to AC, 9 or so points on average of damage, 6 to hit, a bunch of hitpoints and then a special on-death effect (I'd maybe give it a +1 CR increase at 6 hit die and above, +2 at 18ish, maybe)
Just for reference, in our OP Gestalt/Mythic games, I build things and typically shed 2 to 3 points of CR to account for the power difference of the characters, which keeps them from leveling too fast and allows for more enemies in a fight, which I think is always preferable.
I do want fast lvling :) we are going to use the fast xp gaining and eventually they will have mythic as well. but eventually they will be powerful enough to get swarmed by these. so right now though you would say that this would be a +4CR to a single skelly?
I don't know. You're messing so much with the game's basic foundation already, why not mess with it a bit more? CR is barely a useful tool in the first place. I'd just figure out how many encounters you want your players to resolve before they gain a level, and then make each encounter worth an appropriate amount of XP (if you want them to level in about 10 encounters and they need 15,000xp to gain a level, then just say each encounter is worth 1,500xp, give or take depending on how big/hard a given encounter is compared to the others).
It's pretty clear that gestalt and mythic games throw so much out the window, so I don't see a point in trying to use the remnants of a system I've already broken. Just find something similar that works and go with it. And keep it simple, unless you love tedium.
Still trying to keep away to see how DIFFICULT a monster would be.. i know from experience that gestalt adds about 1.5 to the average party level.
not tedium.. just showing how powerful this necromancer big bad is..
i still want to know how strong this potentially make a single undead monster, because even if i were to use just stronger undead, there will be a time where i will run out of undead in the beastiary and need to amp up the power anyway...
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I just don't see how such a drastic template would work in terms of CR.
Slap this on a standard zombie. That's a +10 slam (1d6+13+1d6 cold) but...it still has 2HD and is perpetually staggered.
A lvl1 party could easily defeat this guy if they were even remotely willing to play smart and carefully, so all those crazy boosts would just...not matter at all. But then, if anything went even a little wrong, this thing would one-shot everyone at the table. That's probably the reason HD, ability scores and the like are all somewhat tied together.
If you're set on assigning a CR adjustment to something this big and unwieldy, I think yukongil has the right of it. +1 to 2 for 1HD to XHD, +3 or something for HD above X.
I'd at least make some adjustments so it's more like fiendish/celestial, and the bonuses scale with the HD.
Perfect!! thanks!!!
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Instead of adding templates to undead you might want to use undead templates. Things like ghosts, vampires and liches are usually the most powerful forms of undead. For minions use things like skeletal champions, vampire spawns, and zombie lords.
I am currently running a high level mythic campaign focused on undead. The Anitpaladin skeletal champions were a real challenge for the party.
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Download the Combat Manager app to your laptop/computer. It lets you choose any monster/NPC you want, adjust their stats/CR, add whatever templates you want, all with a couple clicks of a button. Like, in less than 30 seconds, you can take a normal, unmodified CR8 Human Fighter, add templates like Vampire, half-dragon, half-celestial, and half-fiend templates, then boost their HD and make this guy into a CR21. It auto-populates all their stats, SLA's, spells (if any), and abilities, so then copy paste it to an Excel or Word Document, and presto, instant BBEG. It's literally 30 seconds.
I ran a 2-year Evil Gestalt campaign a couple years ago, and Combat Manager was a godsend. You can't really throw normal CR monsters at a party full of Gestalts, but you also can't have them fight something that's 7 CR's above their APL either. So what I did was take monsters/NPC's that were appropriate CR and boost their CR via HD using Combat Manager. So while my party was lvl 8, I would choose lvl 8-9 NPC's and boost them to CR11-12, rather than throwing actual CR12 monsters at them.
It worked great and saved me countless hours of prep work.
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Well, the Half-Dragon is a +2 and gives +8 strength and otherwise lesser abilities. The Half-Fiend goes from +1 to +3 and it's Smite starts out weak, but will outscale your template at high HD.
So probably a +3, maybe more.
If we put it on a ghoul, we create a critter with the following stats: 25Hp 22AC +9/+9/+9(d6+d6+7+paralysis DC13)[average 42damage]
This results in a creature with an insanely squishy HP pool, but way to high damage and AC. Guaranteed to slaughter a low level hero in melee, but way easier to kill by a spellcaster.
It probably will not help you and result in way more unbalanced monsters, than just grabbing something of a higher CR.
I think the easiest way to beef up monsters for an overly strong party would just be to multiply monster HP by 1,5-2,0. This would make the battles less rockettag and allow the critters to pull off their gimmick before getting flattened while not messing up any of the system's math by unbalancing the ratios beetween Attack and AC, Saves and DCs etc.
You can still use a beastie somewhat above the party.
Download the Combat Manager app to your laptop/computer. It lets you choose any monster/NPC you want, adjust their stats/CR, add whatever templates you want, all with a couple clicks of a button. Like, in less than 30 seconds, you can take a normal, unmodified CR8 Human Fighter, add templates like Vampire, half-dragon, half-celestial, and half-fiend templates, then boost their HD and make this guy into a CR21. It auto-populates all their stats, SLA's, spells (if any), and abilities, so then copy paste it to an Excel or Word Document, and presto, instant BBEG. It's literally 30 seconds.
I ran a 2-year Evil Gestalt campaign a couple years ago, and Combat Manager was a godsend. You can't really throw normal CR monsters at a party full of Gestalts, but you also can't have them fight something that's 7 CR's above their APL either. So what I did was take monsters/NPC's that were appropriate CR and boost their CR via HD using Combat Manager. So while my party was lvl 8, I would choose lvl 8-9 NPC's and boost them to CR11-12, rather than throwing actual CR12 monsters at them.
It worked great and saved me countless hours of prep work.
Tell me more!! is it free, can i print my monsters, is compatible for tablets so i can build on the go?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Tell me more!! is it free, can i print my monsters, is compatible for tablets so i can build on the go?Download the Combat Manager app to your laptop/computer. It lets you choose any monster/NPC you want, adjust their stats/CR, add whatever templates you want, all with a couple clicks of a button. Like, in less than 30 seconds, you can take a normal, unmodified CR8 Human Fighter, add templates like Vampire, half-dragon, half-celestial, and half-fiend templates, then boost their HD and make this guy into a CR21. It auto-populates all their stats, SLA's, spells (if any), and abilities, so then copy paste it to an Excel or Word Document, and presto, instant BBEG. It's literally 30 seconds.
I ran a 2-year Evil Gestalt campaign a couple years ago, and Combat Manager was a godsend. You can't really throw normal CR monsters at a party full of Gestalts, but you also can't have them fight something that's 7 CR's above their APL either. So what I did was take monsters/NPC's that were appropriate CR and boost their CR via HD using Combat Manager. So while my party was lvl 8, I would choose lvl 8-9 NPC's and boost them to CR11-12, rather than throwing actual CR12 monsters at them.
It worked great and saved me countless hours of prep work.
Yes it's free, Yes you can print your monsters (copy/paste to word or excel), and yes you can use it on tablet or laptop!