It Came from the Swamp!

In my Wednesday game, the characters tangled with a group of frog humanoids and this fun little champion (champion = a creature worth two characters in a fight). A few things I tried with this design.

Bigger Damage: My math for creatures in my 4e-style encounter building system has been a little off. I tweaked the model to assume that a creature typically has two actions to attack during an encounter. For the third action, it is either dead to focused fire or it spent a round not attacking. I may have to tweak things on a per category basis, but already the damage numbers feel a bit better.

Death Effects: Some monsters have an effect that triggers when they die. Usually, that effect is extra damage. I've never been a fan of effects like that. In this case, I wanted to toss out a condition that would be tricky to remove as a way to complicate life for players who focus fire on the biggest monster. This frog might die, but a blown save might give its smaller minions a chance to wreak havoc on the pinned character.

Off-Turn Choices. I am not a fan of reactions in D&D. My experience is that they slow down the game significantly. They clutter up the action, and they also distract from the person who is taking their turn. Worst of all, they require the DM to rewind the action or pause as a player ponders their use of a reaction. The choice on the successful save is there to give players something to do on a monster's turn that is impactful and fun in a contained, interesting way.

As an aside, I've moved all of my 5e games over to my new monster system and have been happy with it. Prep has been easy, and the results in play have been solid barring the low damage. Once I have some confidence in the math, I am going to post the raw numbers and a guide for how to use them to create monsters.