FIVEY: Abstract Monsters

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FIVEY uses brackets to place monsters in one of five categories: mooks, grunts, elites, lieutenants, and bosses. This makes it really easy and quick to come up with a monster and basically speak it into existence! You just need a bracket, a defense class, and some abilities.

Monster Brackets

Bracket HD GA D/A
Mook (M) 1 +1 2 (1d4)
Grunt (G) 2 +2 3 (1d6)
Elites (E) 4 +3 4 (1d8)
Lieutenants (L) 8 +4 5 (1d10)
Bosses (B) 16 +5 6 (1d12)

Your monster's bracket determines their hit dice (HD), their general ability stat (GA), and their average damage per action (D/A). Hit dice are used to determine or randomize their total hit points: you can roll that many d6s, or just multiply by 4 if you're in a rush. The general ability stat is the monster's base stat for stat checks or contests, which is doubled for tasks at which the monster is considered skilled.

Damage per action is basically self-explanatory, especially if you use the example damage formulas. However, you can get more creative than that. Extra-vicious or area-of-effect attacks can cost 2 actions, the former doubling the damage dealt and the latter targeting multiple opponents. Multi-attacks allow the user to spend 1 action on 2 attacks, so a boss might make two attacks with d6 damage instead of one attack with d12 damage.

There's only three options for defense class: light (12), medium (14), and heavy (16). Experience values are provided for monsters with even stronger defenses, but I think of them mostly as a difficulty slider. Whether experience points are rewarded for combat is a different question, but the below matrix is really just to gauge encounter difficulty for a party. Each allied participant contributes experience equal to 5 plus their level.

Monster Experience by Bracket & Defense Class

Defense Class
 M G E L B
12 4 8 12 16 20
14 5 10 15 20 25
16 6 12 18 24 30
18 8 16 24 32 40
20 10 20 30 40 50

And that's all there really is to it. You can also see how I applied this framework to write Roople the Dragon Queen! You can also check out the rules bible in its entirety, because there's a lot more already there than I've serialized via blog posts. Have some example monsters, albeit without specific abilities (I'll worry about it later):

Example Monsters

Name XP HD
 DC GA Feats
Bear 12 4 12 +3
Berserker 8 2 12 +2
Bugbear 15 4 14 +3
Commoner 4
 1 12 +1
Dragon, Infant 12 2 16 +2 Breath Attack; Flight
Dragon, Young 18 4 16 +3 Breath Attack; Flight
Dragon, Adult 24 8 16 +4 Breath Attack; Flight
Dragon, Elder 30 16 16 +5 Breath Attack; Flight
Ghoul 12 4 12 +3 Magical Resistance; Basic Necrology
Giant 25 16 14 +5 Giant Strength
Goblin 5 1 14 +1
Hobgoblin 10 2 14 +2
Ogre 15 4 14 +3
Orc 10 2 14 +2
Skeleton 4 1 12 +1 Hypocalcemia; Basic Necrology
Troll 20 8 14 +4 Regeneration
Vampire 30 16 16 +5 Magical Resistance; Misty Escape; Basic Necrology
Wraith 16 8 12 +4 Magical Resistance; Basic Necrology
Zombie 8 2 12 +2 Undead Fortitude; Basic Necrology

I've also used the scheme to quickly convert monsters for a game I plan to run (they're from a very-quite-bad adventure that has become an in-joke with my friends). See if you can guess which one, lmao. Sorry they're not nicely formatted, but it's all meant to be quick.

  • Kobold, Breaker: HD 1, DC 12, d6 sword / d4 sling
  • Kobold, Firetouch: HD 2, DC 12, d4 dagger / d6 fire bolt / d6 burning hands (conical AOE, 3 paces)
  • Ringleader: HD 4, DC 12, d8 warhammer
  • Union-buster: HD 1, DC 14, d6 mace / d10 crossbow / 2d6 charged mace attack (2 actions)
P.S. sorry been on my phone lately! Will be on my laptop tonight to reply to comments :) thank all y’all!

Comments

  1. JoshSeptember 12, 2023 at 6:06 AM

    Hell yeah. I do this with my Worm games, and find it very easy to pull a monster into existence from this sort of templating.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Simulated KnaveSeptember 12, 2023 at 6:52 PM

    Feels extremely Worlds Without Number. You are familiar with the works of Crawford?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Marcia B.September 13, 2023 at 1:27 PM

      only heard of it! (well, i skimmed it to make the giant excel sheet nine months ago, but it was basically in and out of my brain.)

      i think most D&Ds are approaching a singularity :P

      Delete

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