mcdm

Making a Monster

Added 2023-08-03 23:35:57 +0000 UTC

Hey Awesome Patrons!

It is I, your Lead Game Designer James Introcaso, here to discuss monsters in the MCDM RPG. Monsters have been on all our minds, since we just delivered the PDF of Flee, Mortals! The MCDM Monster Book to folks on Monday and on Tuesday we started our BackerKit campaign to make the hardcover of Where Evil Lives: The MCDM Book of Boss Battles. With Flee, Mortals! delivered, I’ve turned more of my attention to the MCDM RPG and these last few days have been all about the creatures.

Let’s take a look at a look at our basic unit of goblin, the goblin warrior and talk about where many of the different stats come from:

Now keep in mind this is a prototype stat block that, at this point, only I’ve used as the Director. There are almost certainly better ways to present this information, which we’ll discover as we show this to more folks and work with graphic designers. Some (or all) this information could also change, so we’re not spending a ton of time on the presentation yet.

Role

If you have seen any of the Flee, Mortals monsters, including those in the preview packet, then you already know how creature roles work. Every Director-controlled creature in our game has a role that helps define how to use them in combat. Currently, these roles have no rules directly tied to them. They’re useful guidelines that help the Director understand how to deploy the creature in combat and help game designers like me figure out what abilities and statistics the creature should have. It's up to the designer to keep the role in mind and make sure the monster has a cool ability or two that fits the role. Ambushers strike from hidden positions, artillery stay out of melee and rain down ranged attacks, and brutes hit hard and can take a lot of punishment. Our warrior is a skirmisher, which means they mix it up in melee and have a lot of mobility.

There are also some special roles in the MCDM RPG (which you’ll recognize from Flee, Mortals! and other RPGs):

Minions: Minion creatures are weaker than average. They attack in droves and go down quickly. If you want the heroes to fight a horde of zombies, reach for minions!
Leaders: Leader creatures are tougher than average and enhance the abilities of their allies. A necromancer who grants extra actions and movement to the undead they control is a leader!
Solo: Solo creatures are meant to battle a whole party of heroes on their own or with just one or two allies. Dragons are classic solo creatures.
Retainers: Retainers are sidekicks who are controlled in combat by the players. They’re not as strong as heroes, so they don’t overshadow the party, and they’re simple to run.
Companions: Companions are pets who adventure alongside the heroes and are controlled by the players. A companion could be a friendly hellhound, basilisk, or ooze!

Level

Just like player characters, all creatures have a level. Creature level is important in encounter building. If you want to create a combat encounter that the heroes will likely survive but also provide them with a decent challenge (we call a medium difficulty encounter), then you want to make an encounter with one enemy creature of the heroes’ level per hero in the party. So if you’ve got five 1st-level heroes in a party, a medium difficulty encounter would have five 1st-level enemy goblins. For purposes of encounter-building, leaders count as two creatures of their level, solos count as six creatures of their level, and six minions count as one creature of their level.

Level is also important for figuring out trivial, easy, hard, and extreme difficulty encounters, but that’s another blog post (for when we’ve figured it out and done a little more testing).

Health

Unlike heroes, other creatures don’t have Stamina. They just have Health because it’s easier for the Director to track and only heroes having Stamina gives them a special advantage. They are the stars of the show after all!

To calculate the Health of the warrior, I did a little math. Based on a lot of internal testing, I think the sweet spot for fun and balance is to have this goblin warrior stick around until they have been attacked about four times. Because the dice are fickle, this means the goblin could very likely go down in three Attacks (enough of a challenge to make the creature worthwhile) or five Attacks (still fast enough to not become a slog). That seems pretty good, though further testing will reveal if I’m right about that being the fun sweet spot.

In our game, most Attacks from a 1st-level hero deal 2d6 + 3 damage. A result of 7 is the most common on 2d6, so that means your median damage for an attack unmodified by Banes, Boons, or other penalties and bonuses is 10. Our goblin has an Armor defense of 5, which means the median Attack of 10 deals 5 damage to the warrior. Four Attacks that each deal 5 damage is a total of 20 damage.

However, clever players (which is most of them) figure out how to play the game and get a lot more damage than your basic Attack. Plus, we give them resources to do cool stuff, including get bonuses on damage. Heck, a hero could just wield a Brutal weapon and beat the median. So, we want to give our warrior a little bit of an edge to help them stick around and differentiate them from other critters. So we add the goblin’s Endurance score to their health, for a total of 22. This still might be too low, but it’s worked out pretty well in internal testing so far.

Armor

Just like heroes, creatures have an Armor defense that is calculated the same way as it is for a hero. Our goblin warrior has an Agility score of 3, so that’s their base Armor. Then we add 1 to that because the warrior wears light armor and another 1 because they wield a shortsword, which has the Deflect 1 trait. BAM! 5 Armor.

Size

A creature’s size is how many squares it takes up on a gridded map. Our standard unit of goblin’s size is 1.

Weight

Every creature (and object) in the game has a statistic called weight, which defines how easy they are to pick up and toss around. It makes it easy to know if you can pick up your goblin friend wearing spiked armor and hurl them at a giant. It’s also good for some other stuff. Goblins are weight 3. Humans are weight 4. Hakaan are weight 5.

Speed

How many squares can you move in a single maneuver? That’s your speed! Goblins in our game have a climb speed because they have long arms and opposable toes! Sweet. Goblins have a base walk and climb speed of 8, but the warrior wears light armor, which reduces that by 1 for a total of 7.

Forced Move Modifier

When someone tries to Knockback, Pull, or Slide a creature, the target applies their forced move modifier to the number of squares they’re moved. Our goblin has a −1 forced move modifier because they wear light armor. Armor is one of the common ways to have a forced move modifier, but some creatures have them just because they’re big, mighty, or weird!

Characteristic Scores and Defenses

Every creature has the same characteristic scores and defenses that a hero does. A characteristic’s score is added to Attacks and Tests and used to determine some other rules (like how far you can jump without needing to roll a Test). A characteristic’s defense works just like Armor, reducing incoming damage from Attacks. While many Attacks target a creature’s Armor defense, some target other defenses. For instance, a conduit hero can blast out a beam of holy light by making an Angelfire Attack. This Magic Attack targets a creature’s Agility defense instead of Armor. Most defenses are calculated by adding by simply adding 2 to the characteristic’s score, but every creature has at least one defense that is higher and has a 4 added to the score instead. Agility is our warrior’s best defense! Watchout conduits!

Skills

Heroes have skills and so does our warrior. Well, they have skill—Stealth! This means the goblin gets a +1 bonus to Tests when the Stealth skill applies. The skill rules note that Stealth typically applies to Agility Tests, but it’s separated out here because the goblin could use Stealth with a Presence Test to slip into a crowded marketplace and act like they belong there or they might use Stealth with a Reason Test to determine the best place to hide in a room. Whatever the characteristic used, if Stealth applies, the warrior gets a +1 bonus to the roll.

Creature Features

Our goblin warrior has two features that don’t require any actions or resources to activate. The first is Crafty. You might recognize the name. This is a trait all goblins in Flee, Mortals! have. In 5e, it allows goblins to move without provoking opportunity attacks. In our game, we want dynamic combat, so most creatures can’t make opportunity attacks (and those who can are very special—like higher level tacticians). In a game without many opportunity attacks, Crafty needs a change to be worthwhile, and it still needs to be iconic for goblins.

Goblins iconically attack in droves, so what if we give them good reasons to gang up against one foe? What if they get an extra Boon on attacks against Overwhelmed enemies? (Overwhelmed means a creature is adjacent to three or more foes and those foes gain a Boon die on attacks against the creature.) That’s cool and gobbotastic. That’s the new Crafty. (Boons and Banes are d4s instead of d3s by the way.)

Our goblin is also wielding a shortsword, which is a light weapon. That means it takes four enemies to overwhelm them! We note that on the sheet as well. Light weapons are great for skirmishers. As they run in and out of the fray, they are more difficult to overwhelm.

Basic Attack Breakdown

Every creature has a Basic Attack. In our warrior’s case, it’s swinging a shortsword. When the warrior makes this Basic Attack on their turn, they get an added benefit, which is that they can move 3 squares before or after making the attack. Skirmishers gonna skirmish!

Why the “on their turn” clarification? Well because the warrior has allies, like the leader Queen Bargnot, who can allow them to make Basic Attacks outside of their turn. When the warrior makes an attack outside of their turn, they’re just dealing damage and not also moving around. This limitation is true of all Basic Attacks. It prevents a lot of spamming of effects, since many Basic Attacks have “on turn” riders that are fun once a round, but can be a complicated headache and unbalance the odds out of the heroes’ favor if they show up more often.

Enemy Power

Enemy powers cost Enemy Points (temporary name that we’re riffing on new ideas for internally). You build up Enemy Points throughout a combat. Most non-minion creatures have at least one way to spend Enemy Points. In the case of the warrior, it lets them move twice their speed in one maneuver. This helps them hit and run, and it’s an important power, because they don’t have any ranged attacks.