In the dungeon master's guide, there is a table with a guideline for making new monsters, and the general idea for what the stats of a monster should be depending on challenge rating. I have a few new monsters I'm trying to make, and I have been doing a lot of comparing of creatures in the monster manual, and doing math to try and find decent averages per point of certain stats.
My main wonder is about the hit points and the damage per round. If a monster has a challenge rating of 5, does that mean it has a MAX, or an AVERAGE of 131-145 hitpoints, and 33-38 damage per round?
and once I know this information, I should be able to use it to calculate the damage the monster's attacks would do, to fall within this max/average. Like if it's an average, I can say "This monster can deal about 36 damage per round on average. Which means if it has multiattack, each of those two attacks should be able to deal 18 damage on average." Right?
The other thing I have been doing, is keeping track of almost a dozen monsters to compare its main 6 stats to, so I can say "it's stronger/weaker than this" and that'll give me the stat modifiers, which will be added to attacks/damage/AC/DC. I also figured it would be easier to find the challenge rating after I decided fully on their abilities/numbers, instead of picking a number without knowing much and trying to stay within that box.
The monster I'm making is formidable on its own, but it normally hunts/fights in groups of 3 on average. However they're semi-civilized, so they'll only really fight the party if they piss them off or confront them stupidly.
Will probably ask a few more questions after initial responses until I get a good sense of making monsters, then I'll go ahead and gather up what I have and post about it in homebrew, and get further questions about the overall design/story of the monster race.
Yes, the damage output in the CR table of monsters is the average per round. If the monster has multiattack, then you need to sum the average output of all the attacks to get the overall damage output.
Okay, and is the damage dice of attacks also dependent on the size of the monster? Like I saw that Large monsters use d10 hitdice, and Medium monsters use d8.
So would a Claw attack by a medium monster be one dice size lower than a large monster? or should I not worry about that and focus only on staying in that damage average per round?
So would a Claw attack by a medium monster be one dice size lower than a large monster? or should I not worry about that and focus only on staying in that damage average per round?
One way to determine damage dice of the attacks of your monsters is to use existing monsters as a comparison point - such as comparing the claws of the monster you are making to the claws of a similarly-sized dragon (or other claw-having monster that seems more similar to your creature).
But there is no reason to go that route over the route of assigning whatever you want that happens to get the average you are looking for - so do whichever you prefer; monster building isn't such a precise process as to not be able to do it however you feel like.
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In the dungeon master's guide, there is a table with a guideline for making new monsters, and the general idea for what the stats of a monster should be depending on challenge rating. I have a few new monsters I'm trying to make, and I have been doing a lot of comparing of creatures in the monster manual, and doing math to try and find decent averages per point of certain stats.
My main wonder is about the hit points and the damage per round. If a monster has a challenge rating of 5, does that mean it has a MAX, or an AVERAGE of 131-145 hitpoints, and 33-38 damage per round?
and once I know this information, I should be able to use it to calculate the damage the monster's attacks would do, to fall within this max/average.
Like if it's an average, I can say "This monster can deal about 36 damage per round on average. Which means if it has multiattack, each of those two attacks should be able to deal 18 damage on average." Right?
The other thing I have been doing, is keeping track of almost a dozen monsters to compare its main 6 stats to, so I can say "it's stronger/weaker than this" and that'll give me the stat modifiers, which will be added to attacks/damage/AC/DC. I also figured it would be easier to find the challenge rating after I decided fully on their abilities/numbers, instead of picking a number without knowing much and trying to stay within that box.
The monster I'm making is formidable on its own, but it normally hunts/fights in groups of 3 on average. However they're semi-civilized, so they'll only really fight the party if they piss them off or confront them stupidly.
Will probably ask a few more questions after initial responses until I get a good sense of making monsters, then I'll go ahead and gather up what I have and post about it in homebrew, and get further questions about the overall design/story of the monster race.
Yes, the damage output in the CR table of monsters is the average per round. If the monster has multiattack, then you need to sum the average output of all the attacks to get the overall damage output.
Okay, and is the damage dice of attacks also dependent on the size of the monster? Like I saw that Large monsters use d10 hitdice, and Medium monsters use d8.
So would a Claw attack by a medium monster be one dice size lower than a large monster? or should I not worry about that and focus only on staying in that damage average per round?