For example: The beastman has a ST 5 (4): Does that mean he has a total DR of 9?

Toughness: 5 (4) Is that a total soak of 9?

Agility 5 (4) is that a total defense of 9?

Thanks..my memory is hazy and it's been on my mind...

>>>>>Umm... sure they do. Look on pg 51 of the Tome of Adventure. The number in parenthesis next to the number for their Strength is their DR. They have no CR unless you give them specific weapons, in which case you use the DR and CR of that weapon.

So, as an example, if a monster has an entry for their Strength that shows 5(4) ... their Strength stat is 5, and their natural DR is 4. Toughness is similar, 5(4) means thier Toughness is 5 and their Soak is 4. Agility of 5(4) means their Agility is 5, and their Defense is 4. Anyway, check the stat line for the specific enemy in the Tome of Adventure.

Strength: X (X) - the number in parenthesis is Damage - it's like a normal weapon's DR. So, Strength is added to Damage as part of Damage Potential .

Toughness: X (X) - the number in parenthesis is Soak - it's like normal armor's Soak rating. So, Toughness is added to Soak as part of Damage Mitigation .

Agility: X (X) - the number in parenthesis is Defense - It's like normal armor's defense. So, it's the number of misfortune dice added to the difficulty of a character's attack roll against this creature. Agility is not used to add misfortune to attack rolls, only Defense.

Emirikol said:

The beastman has a ST 5 (4): means he has a total damage potential of 9 (plus any other additions like from success lines)

Toughness: 5 (4) Is a total damage reduction of 9 (plus any other effects that add damage reduction like boon/bane results)

Agility 5 (4) is a total defense of 4

Wouldn't it just be be easier on GM's to have another actual column for those bonuses instead of having the parentheses? It's like not labelling strength "because everybody knows that's the first stat." Maybe I'll groan to jay and see if they'll evolve the stat block.

jh

Emirikol said:

fwiw, I find the stat line to be well done and pretty easy to use, and can't think of a way I'd change it.

Questions in relation to GM management of monsters:

Are the monster Action Cards available to the GM, or does the GM have to have the book open a specific page during combat encounters? If the latter, how does the GM manage to have recharge counter on actions on different pages?? Does the GM have to print the relevant pages in order to manage monster action recharge???

The monsters can use basic actions, and specific monster actions. The Bestiary is designed so that you probably only need one page open at a time. Managing monster action recharges is pretty straight forward, but I guess it could be eased by having some sort of marker on the table to put the tokens on. Nezzir has made a pdf Monster Token Tracking Sheet on the main page of the forum.

So, I guess there are no specific monster Action Cards available yet. This will definitely be a resource that should be available to GMs in a future expansion, maybe together with a GM screen...

Thanks for you answer, Monkeylite!

monkeylite said:

It's in my sig now.

I actually found these to be quite confusing as well when I first picked it up. However, with just a small amount of use, I've discovered that it really is a convenient way of having everything at hand.

I think that Monster Cards would be a great addition to the game, so the GM can have everything arrayed in front of him, making flipping through the book practically unnecessary.

I have had my copy of the GM book "Spiral bound" and can just swing open to the page I need. Wound traking on each monster is a bit of a pain thought...

This was one of the most frustrating things during my demo. Why not just put extra columns in? If I had a dollar for every time I went "what's in the parens after strength?". I'm sure I'll get the hang of it after a couple games, but just putting extra columns in would have been much nicer.

@ Gobbo: During my demo I just stuck the monster's wound cards under that monster's standee. It worked really, really well.

Well, the monsters do have "monster action" cards in a sense. They are just in the rulebook, but they are shown in a card format there. You could copy the sheet from the beastiary on cardstock (or somesuch) and cut out the monster action cards. Presto! A deck of monster action cards. The difficulty, of course, is finding which cards in the deck are used for which monsters. The cards do say, but you'd pretty much have to open to the beastiary to make sure you had them all. Personally, I think just making some copies of the needed beastiary pages (stats+cards) is easier and it worked well enough for me.