Hello all,

I recently got the game on friday and I was looking at the monsters in the back of the GM book, and came across info that basically states that monsters have access to all the basic actions players do. Initially I thought that made sense, but then after thinking about it, why would you want to have to be using active defenses with you monsters. That seems like a very annoying thing to have to keep track of all the time. I could understand it for maybe boss monsters, but I thought that was the whole point of the A/C/E on them anyways. Maybe it is the D&D 4.0 in me, but having to keep track of many things for many monsters becomes a nightmare. I use to GM exalted and having more then a few enemies was tiresome at best. Critical hits for monsters also strikes me as the same micro managing that would get annoying (or forgotten) a lot. I do like the critical hit rules for henchmen though, so perhaps that is a better way to go for all non-important monsters (It would be cool to give your nemesis a broken nose

Another thing I find strange is that creatures of the same type share the same A/C/E and recharge of their powers. So if there are three boars in a fight, only one can headlong charge and the rest need to wait until it recharges. I am sure this is done to lessen the bookeeping, but it is too hard on my suspension of disbelief. Again I can understand this for henchmen, because they are one unit and no matter what action they are performing it is a bunch of them doing it.

Would changing monsters so that they have their own A/C/E pools & actions throw things out of balance? My idea is to print action cards (or use index cards) for my monsters and limit them to only a few powers (so it is not overwhelming to run them). I would like to print monster cards as well that have a picture of the creature, it's stats, A/C/E boxes (that you can remove tokens from), etc... Would definatly be in the whole spirit of the game I think.

Thanks,

Korvanus

(1) There are some good fan tools (check out hammerzeit website) with print off sheets for tracking monsters ACE pools etc. Yup it would have been nice if there was a "GM's sheet of basic actions" to use with monsters etc. though if you've a scanner you can make that yourself etc.

BTW, I would actually give some tougher monsters the improved active defence cards not the basic ones.

(2) On groups of monters "sharing" powers - what I see it doing balance wise is it makes sure that if you have two monsters who both have some terrific power (say a wargor's roar or whatever it is), they don't both use it same time. One uses it and once recharge done, as long as either left, it's used again. The other one does something else. This prevents a "strong power" from becoming "overwhelming" - just like PC's can't have duplicate actions and pile them on so too monsters don't. Narratively/cinematically it also ensures "one trick doesn't dominate the scene.

Rob