Don't Give Your Monsters Class Levels
Time and time again, I’ve seen posts all over about GMs asking for advice on how to build a monster with player rules. They want to create an NPC who might be a fighter or a druid or a wizard, and they fall back on the player facing rules of Dungeons & Dragons. There can be a variety of reasons why someone would do this; like the rules are much easier to digest for building a PC than it is to build a monster and for another reason, it fits the theme they are searching for… but it only leads to misery either for the players or the GM.
There are a ton of reasons as to why you shouldn’t build monsters with class levels, some are for flavor and others mechanical.
The Flavor Problem
One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is that monsters should be as unique as adventurers. I don’t like having adventurers with the same class in a party, and I don’t allow adventurers with the same subclass in a party. There are very few meaningful choices a player gets to make and two people playing the same subclass, or class, just make it so that neither feels very special.
Dungeons & Dragons assumes, at least for the past several editions, that player characters are unique and separate from the rest of the world. They aren’t the average peasant as they have exceptional abilities scores, hit points, and abilities. They are capable of taking on challenges that mere commoners are unable to and this takes the form of their class features. A ‘fighter’ class is not just any regular person who can fight, it is specific to the character and their place in the world. Anyone can pick up a sword, but not everyone is going to get second wind just because they are proficient at swordplay, instead that feature is what makes that character unique and special from others in the world.
The same goes for druids, clerics, sorcerers, or any other class. When a character takes that class, that is how they differentiate themselves from the world. If everyone in the world is contained within 13 classes, then characters aren’t unique or special. Instead, they are just part of the 7.69% of the population that has chosen that class - not so special anymore.
What Do Classes Mean to the World?
In your world, the people may or may not call someone a wizard just as they might or might not call someone a cleric. The common layperson may call anyone who can cast magic a wizard, ignorant of the fact that the person in question is actually a bard who relies on the magic of music, unlike a true wizard who relies on study. You shouldn’t shirk away from using class names to describe someone, especially generic ones like fighter or wizard, but a player shouldn’t automatically know what their abilities are.
Classes are merely a construct of us playing a role-playing game with a class system. It doesn’t exist in the Fiction of the world your players travel in, just as we don’t have ‘classes’ in our world. A soldier could be called a fighter, a musician might be called a bard, but in the real world and the fantasy world, there are no fundamental laws of the universe forcing someone to follow the very strict steps of a barbarian where they get rage followed by a primal path, and then an extra attack every 6 seconds. Instead, a NPC has their own unique path that they follow which is separate from the characters. Some NPCs are generic goblins that have little to separate themselves from others, while others are going to be powerful combatants full of abilities that players don’t have.
If you start giving monsters class levels though, they are no longer unique - at least in the eyes of the players. You not only erode the uniqueness of being a player, but also the uniqueness of your world and the monster. If everyone is forced down the same paths, all learning bardic inspiration as soon as they pick up an instrument, then it makes it so that individuals and the world itself, operate very clear rules, removing a lot of the magic of a fantasy game.
The Mechanical Problem
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2014 WotC
While I obviously don’t like the idea of monsters being given class levels, prominent role-playing games, including Dungeons & Dragons, have long had it so that monsters did get class levels. Frankly, the flavor problem of monsters getting class levels is a personal preference - what isn’t a personal preference, though, is that the mechanics of the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t support monsters with class levels.
Monsters, the creatures that are designed to encounter the players in combat, are built with the idea of combat and fighting… and pretty much nothing else. Very few monsters have any skills, which if taken at face value means that most people aren’t proficient in much, but that’s a complaint for another day. Monsters are only built for combat and built for combat where they are likely to be outnumbered.
Outnumbered
Monsters are designed with the idea that they are fighting multiple creatures at once, unlike players who are given a lot of single target abilities from their class. Monsters have to be able to reduce a lot of hit point pools, so many are given lots of extra attacks so they have the chance to target more than just a single creature at a time.
Take the Veteran statblock for an example. They get three attacks and they are only a CR 3 creature. Compare that to a Lv3 fighter, who only has a single attack (or two attacks if they are dual wielding). You can even look at the veteran’s 58 hit points, it would require a fighter with a +2 Constitution modifier to be 9th level before they were at the same point as the veteran. To top it off, the veteran doesn’t get anything unique or special to do in their statblock - they just hit two or three times a turn and then they are done. That would make for a pretty boring class for a player, but for a monster, it is fine because the GM is probably running a few monsters at a time and it keeps it simple.
The veteran’s abilities are designed for them to be outnumbered by giving them lots of hit points and a decent amount of damage to be shared across several creatures at once. The veteran can hold their own for a few rounds by themselves against a Lv3 party of adventurers, unlike a typical character. Even a Lv3 fighter wouldn’t be much of a challenge for a party of Lv1 adventurers simply because they have no real way of surviving for more than a few hits. They would have an average of 28 hit points and their damage output is the exact same as a Lv1 character.
When building a monster, think of ways that they can survive being outnumbered. This involves additional hit points and ways to hit more than a single creature each turn.
Damage & Spellcasting
Another aspect about monsters is that their damage, while high on paper, is meant to be spread out to the party every round. That means if the average damage for a monster at CR 10 is 63-68, it should be split among multiple characters. This could come in the form of a dragon’s breath that hits everyone with the area or it might be from a monster’s multiattack ability that allows them to make more than just a single attack against a single creature.
Area of effects typically involves lower damage that affects a large area, while single-focused damage affects only a single target. AoE damage is less per character, but when you combine the total damage to the party, it is much higher - which is the trade-off every monster must decide on - do they deal lots of damage to a single creature or a little bit of damage to a lot of creatures?
This even infects a monster’s spells and what spells are given to them by the designers of the game. A CR 12 archmage has had their spells carefully curated because some spells are just too powerful (a problem that irks me to this day). An archmage has access to 9th-level spell slots, but their highest-level spell slots are taken up with a bunch of non-damage spells because then the archmage would be too powerful for their CR 12 designation. Their most powerful damage spell, cone of cold, is at 5th level (one level below what Lv12 characters have access to) and deals 36 (8d8) damage to an area. You can heighten that spell to 9th level for 54 (12d8) damage, but you can only do that once and even the 8th level spell for the archmage is already removed from play since the stat block informs you that they cast mind blank on themselves before a fight.
As for their 9th level spell, it is time stop which has some good uses in combat, but isn’t the best spell to use when you are outnumbered by a bunch of creatures (unless you are running away) - instead, that would be meteor swarm which is also a 9th level spell. One might think it is fine to simply swap spells, but it isn’t. Meteor swarm deals an average of 140 (40d6) damage to a huge area, which is almost three times as much damage as a 9th level cone of cold will do. A 12th level fighter isn’t going to have 140 hit points unless they take something like the toughness feat, instead, they are going to have 136 hit points with a +5 Constitution modifier (assuming that they are taking the average instead of rolling).
What this means is that an archmage’s spells have been carefully selected so that instead of dropping everyone in the party with a single spell, they instead only deal a very specific amount of damage, somewhere in the range of 75 to 80 damage each round. Even a frighteningly powerful monster like the lich doesn’t have any massive damage spells to use as their 9th level slot has power word kill. Their strongest damage-oriented spell is finger of death which only deals an average of 61 damage to a single creature.
Monsters are not meant to deal the high amounts of damage that a character deals, instead they have very specific amounts of damage based on their challenge rating. This even goes into what spells they can actually cast as not all spells are created equal, not even within the same spell level.
Hit Points
Hit points are all that separate a monster from death, without them, they’d end up like every character I’ve tried to play… dead.
Monsters have bloated hit points, at least compared to the players, and that is because players can deal way more damage than a monster is supposed to deal. Players are free to cast chain lightning, meteor swarm, or anything else they have access to while also coming up with crazy combinations that explode their damage. The system was designed for players to deal lots of damage and the only counter against that is just giving monsters lots of health.
But how much health? There are conflicting sources that can make figuring out hit points very difficult.
In fact, if we look at the Dungeon Master’s Guide for guidance on monster hit points, you can see that a CR 2 monster is supposed to have up to 100 hit points which… well, that’s not true in the least. A typical CR 2 monster is going to have between 30 and 50 hit points, with most on the lower end of that scale. There are tons of different conflicting figures between the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual, which is probably why so many people would prefer to just build a monster using class levels presented in the Player’s Handbook since the rules are way more straightforward. But you can’t do that. A monster needs to be able to survive for about 3 rounds of getting hit in the face over and over, which means, at the very baseline, they need about two to three times as many hit points as a player character based on what role they have in the combat.
Take, for example, a level 2 fighter - they probably have 20 hit points with a +2 constitution modifier. A CR 2 monster that occupies a similar role (get hit and hit back) is going to need 40 to 60 hit points to stay in the fight long enough in that role to make the combat even worth doing. The berserker has 67 hit points, but the ankheg only has 39 hit points. How do you know when one should have more hit points and another should have less? Well, get ready for the most unhelpful advice I can offer you.
Do what feels right.
Look around at the other monsters and then pick a number that feels about right for your own monster based on those. Don’t just pile on an extra 100 hit points just cause, but do so because your monster’s damage output is a bit lower than other monsters or because they have a super low AC. If you give a monster a higher AC than normal, then remove some of their hit points so that it isn’t just a slog of missing and barely ticking down their hit points when the players do hit. Unfortunately, the rules provided for monster creation really fall down when it comes to hit points and it requires you to just do what feels right - and if all else fails, take the average hit points of your party and multiply it by two or three (depending on if they are a tank or not) and go with that result. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll get you close enough to where you need to be.
Don’t Use Class Levels
In essence, when designing a monster - don’t use class levels. Don’t pile on ability after ability onto a monster, because they only have a few rounds to live anyway. There is no point in memorizing everything a level 20 druid can do when you are only going to use three spell slots and some wildshapes to boost their hit points. Instead, when you build a monster and you want it to be druid-flavor, look over the class and create abilities that give the flavor of a druid. A druid doesn’t need the restrictions put in place by wildshape, instead, they could just transform into a t-rex because they can or an eagle because you want them to have the ability to fly.
Monsters are built differently from player characters and should be as unique as the characters themselves. The world you are running your players should be magical and weird, and if you constrain everything to fit into the 13 classes available to players, you not only make the world that much smaller, but you also lessen the uniqueness of characters as now anyone in the world can be one and have those abilities.
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