I was playing with the idea of having some sort of reasoning behind the appearance of the monsters when portals open on the board. Giving portals a set group of monsters to pick from as certain monsters come from specific dimentions. Are there enough different monsters to make this work, and would it work even then?

EDIT: Sorry for misspelling Categorizing. I wish it was possible to change...

I think the easiest and most thematic rule to do this would be to draw a monster with the symbol matching the gate. However, there are a number of issues you'd need to address:

1. Monsters will be matched up with their gates, so removing monsters from the board can be reduced to simply closing the gate they emerged from. In other words, monsters will be banished far too often.
2. Crescent monsters (Earth-origin) do not have a corresponding gate, so how will you get them onto the board? All monsters in a surge? Only the monster from the surging gate? Draw until you get a crescent OR a symbol that matches the gate? What about "a monster appears" encounters? Which monster will you use? What about "a monster appears" when you're in an other world?
3. You'll notice that there is a particularly troubling lack of star and triangle monsters in the base game, so this may highly limit the utility of this variant.

I've tried this before and found that I was more comfortable just drawing monsters from a common cup as normal.

I was thinking more along having monsters from the dimension they belong in coming through. Following the Lovecraftian cosmic "rules", so to speak. A dream-creature would not exist in the abyss, would it?

Aren't the gate symbols random? Or is the gate symbol the same on all of the dreamworld ones and so on?

Not totally random. In the expansions, the "new" dimensions reuse the symbol for some of the base game other worlds.

For a chart, look at:

http://www.arkhamhorrorwiki.com/Dimensional_symbol

Ah. So they are already categorized in that way then. If I had the game I would have seen it

So, yes, the game would get easier then. Humf... It just strikes me as odd that every creature exist in every dimension. It seems wrong to me...

Thematically, you are right. However, as Tibs alluded to, this idea does not fit into the framework of the rules without significant modification. Plus, it makes the game a lot more predictable, which is not necessarily a good thing. Saying "I'm heading into the City of the Great Race and it only has four different types of monsters, all of which are dangerous, but none of them is particularly hard to evade, so, I'll boost my Sneak and just avoid them if one comes up...." sounds awfully metagame-y to me and not terribly fun.

Monsters can already appear as a result of an encounter or mythos card, and in that case, the monster is not tied to a particular otherworld or gate (you do not have to be anywhere near a gate for this to happen). What monster should you pick then?

I believe this topic has come up before, and that the conclusion tends to be that it sounds great and flavorful, but it totally does not fit well with the rules as written and would introduce some problems that aren't very easy to solve.

Well, to answer the challenge; Monsters appearing in Arkham randomly from encounters and mythos cards would be totally random as our world is like a bar where all monsters come to drink blood and beer. And, yes, it is metagame to have a strategy when entering a dimension, but would you bring fire to defeat the devil in hell? I don't like it when people metagame based on rules though. A metagamer is a problem no mater how many or few loopholes there are.

I do agree with the rules problem and I won't be stubborn about this. Good to know the topic has been explored.

Thanks for the quick answers

I wouldn't say you are being stubborn at all. I'm not trying to discourage you from pursuing this -- just stating what I've seen from reading posts here. If you can find a way to make it work for you and others, I applaud you! I can't speak for Tibs, but I think our replies are just intended to convey that such a change is not as simple as it would first appear, and why that's the case.

I agree with your point about being prepared when entering another dimension, but I think in the case of Arkham, the game is built around chaos. The unpredictable nature of the mythos is one of the quintessential qualities that makes the game what it is. I guess a part of me doesn't WANT to be able to prepare for what is to come. Oddly enough, going into things with a plan, yet knowing it could all blow up a turn or two later is what makes the game challenging and fun for me. Your experience may be different.

Arkham is a fantastically deep and strategic game, and many players only scratch the surface of this. Don't stop questioning things or trying to invent new houserules or other changes to the game. Make the game your own and play how you like. The designers have given you a rich framework to do this with and it would be a shame not to take advantage of it. Make some changes and playtest it and see how you like it, then adjust. If you find something you like, post it here for all to enjoy!

Of course I'm going to try it out as soon as I get the game. No worries there. But I thought the monsters weren't divided into specific groups when I toyed with the idea. I'm, back to the drawing board now that I know they are. My end goal is to make the game harder, not easier But before that I need to get the game and I am unsure of what to get. I created another thread for that issue though.

In an easier way, just draw a table saying "when I close hex gates, I can remove from the board triangle monsters" and so on, creating different relationships so that closing a gate won't remove the monsters you just spawned from it

I just got an idea to solve the closing the gate they emerged from problem: The monsters get a chance to survive it.

Each monster that emerged from a gate getting closed rolls a dice.

Maybe they have an increased chance of staying based on the distance from the portal. Or the awareness or toughness adds an increased chance. I'm going to ponder on this in bed.

Night.

Edit: Ninjaed

It's not just the gate closing thing that's the issue. The random monster draw helps to keep too many monsters of the same symbol from being on the board at once. This does a few things:

1. When a gate is closed, it prevents a massive number of monsters from being returned to the cup, as said earlier.

2. If you spawn a lot of monsters of the same type, it gets boring because you see the same couple of monsters spawning over and over again. That will exhaust the supply of those monsters pretty quickly. Then what?

3. Some symbols have much tougher monsters associated with them. It's undesirable to get a bunch of the same nasty monsters on the board at once as they can be hard to clear out. A random mix helps prevent this and makes things less swingy. If the board fills with Square monsters, you are going to be hurting. They have lots of nasty effects and many are tough to kill.

4. Monsters are supposed to interfere with movement and block gates. Also, some bad effects trigger on movement, so not having all the monsters move at once staggers these effects out over the course of the game and averages things out over time.

This gives me an idea.

One thing you could do is develop a "Random Monster Table" for each otherworld that is only used for Otherworld encounters that say "a monster appears!" You can dial in the likelihood of each monster appearing, and since the monster never stays on the board after the encounter (you either take it as a trophy if you kill it or return it to the cup if you evade it or it defeats you), then most of the problems above are avoided. You still get the flavor of specific encounters in specific otherworlds.

If you do this, I'd set up some dice ranges. For each one, designate a "primary" monster and a secondary monster with that world's symbol. If needed, you could mix in moon symbol monsters (they originate from earth) or a few monsters with different symbols so that things don't get too predictable. You could also skew some of the ranges based on the specific world -- the Abyss could have nastier monsters than the Dreamlands (which is usually a lot more tame), for instance. The primary one can be from the base game or any expansion, but the secondary one should always be from the base set. You roll the dice and check the primary monster. If its set is in play, you encounter it. If not, you encounter the secondary one. This way, the table can be used even by people that don't have a particular expansion or just choose not to play with it. This is what the Miskatonic Horror expansion does with its mythos cards. If all the monsters of that type are already on the board or have been claimed as trophies, reroll. Done well, this could go a long way to making monster encounters in the otherworld unique.

I just got an idea to solve the closing the gate they emerged from problem: The monsters get a chance to survive it.

Each monster that emerged from a gate getting closed rolls a dice.

Maybe they have an increased chance of staying based on the distance from the portal. Or the awareness or toughness adds an increased chance. I'm going to ponder on this in bed.

Night.

One of the designer's own house rules is that all monsters at a gate's location get sucked in (returned to the monster cup) when a gate is closed.

Still though, I think there are other problems with letting too many monsters on the board with the same symbol, as I stated in my previous post.