Origin Stories: Commoner
For those of you unfamiliar with the long and gory history of commoners and house cats, I refer you to the succinct explanation from this forum post:
The gist of it is that, on a successful hit, any damaging attack deals a minimum of 1 HP damage. Average commoners have 4 HP, an attack bonus of 0, and an armor class of 10. A cat has 2 HP, but a total attack bonus of +4, AC 14, and gets three attacks as a full round action.
That’s the 3e D&D explanation. If you’re morbidly curious, you can even check out the math over here. The natural enmity between commoners and cats extends further into the past though, with AD&D cats posing a similar three-attack threat to any dirt farmer unlucky enough to be born with a wimpy d4 hit die. Given that kind of brutal damage output, you begin to see why poor Commoner had to cough up his monthly protection tuna.
Happily, the Handbook’s own Commoner has left those dark days behind. Life is hard for any small business owner, but when fate has dealt you a single rank in Profession (cook), the razor thin margins of a medieval meat market stall get even thinner. Add in the local awakened cat mafia, and Commoner’s choices were down “sign on with the Heroes” and “starve.” At least he’s got superior cookware now. And so long as he can put up with the company, there are few better safeguards against extortionist felines than a protective layer of adventurers.
All of the above leads us to a somewhat obvious observation: adorable kitties killing grown-ass humanoids is ever so slightly absurd. And that of course brings us to the question of the day. Have you ever encountered a monster whose stats seemed a little off? What was it? Did you adjust the numbers or play it as-written? Let’s hear about your favorite unbalanced critters down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
The first session I ever ran as DM was Mines of Phandelver for an entirely new group other than myself. I had been over the guide time and time again, but when the first encounter was reached: those lovely goblins that are there to teach the party how to steamroll, I misread the AC of 15 as HP.
And that’s how I nearly TPKed a bunch of noobs in their first encounter. We actually had deathsaves over two goblins.
Ha ha ha! That first encounter is notoriously deadly even played as written. Well done NOT killing the party with double the goblin HP!
Speaking of misreading HP, our GM once showed us a misprint of a statblock from Pathfinder – they had swapped the XP and HP boxes, so the monster had 800 HP as written… at level 3.
Thankfully that was an obvious error, so it was easily fixed!
Back in the day, my group had to chase a badly injured goblin around the map for three full rounds of combat, swinging and missing and getting poked by the goblin’s rusty dagger. In consequence, whenever things are looking bleak for the party we generally shout, “Run away! It’s only got one hit point left! It’s invincible!”
Is Commoner an elite NPC by now? If not, he doesn’t have 6 HP, he probably has 3.
Anyway, I don’t recall any terribly off-kilter monsters like that, but does anyone else remember the character generator that came on a CD with the original 3.0E Player’s Handbook? Or possibly it was a download. Anyway, it was really cool when I first played with it in, like, 2000. It let you build a character with skills, feats, equipment and stuff. I remember that the Unarmed Strike “item” had a typo in it, so it did 1d30 damage (1d20 for Small characters). Crazy.
And I can’t remember where… possibly the 3.0E Monster Manual? But I’m sure that somewhere, there is a printing for a donkey that does 1d20 damage with its bite.
lol typos
After his many adventures, I’m sure Commoner is at least a cut above common commoners. Probably he’s got like… two ranks in Profession (cook).
Level 1 Commoners have the strength of 10 soldiders as stated by Miniatures Handbook 3.5 edition.
I think the entire caravan combat system of Jade Regent can be considered “unbalanced”, from what I’ve heard. We’re currently halfway through the AP with my group, but we just ditched that part from the start.
I haven’t met anyone who’s actually played with it, so I’m curious how it worked out in practice?
We tried it out for the first session. It worked fine, but it was “Caravan Sim” rather than Pathfinder. Too many dice rolls and bookkeeping for our taste. We ditched it in favor of appropriately themed caravan encounters, same as any overland travel encounter.
From what I understand, it gets really unbalanced when you get to the arctic circle part of the adventure. Supposedly that stuff is straight up impossible.
I GMed that one. It works okay for the first two books, and then goes bananas in Hungry Storm. Basically every caravan encounter in that volume proved capable of easily TPKing the party, so we eventually just ditched it. I later ran Jade Regent for other groups and found It’s best to just skip the system entirely. Redo all the caravan encounters as regular encounters. It works better.
So in 5E the size category range goes Medium > Small > Tiny to do away with the granular sizing of earlier editions. For the most part this is fine until you consider that Halflings, Gnomes, and young children of medium races are Small, and that you can grapple creatures up to one size larger than yourself. This means that a spider can grapple a halfling. I imagine horror stories of people’s children being taken in the night by rats.
Also, in 5E the cat/commoner dynamic no longer exists.
A cat has 12 AC, 2 HP, one attack, +0 to hit, and deals a flat 1 damage.
A Commoner has 10 AC, 4 HP, +2 to hit, and does d4 damage.
I suggest that the murderous AD&D cats have immigrated, cleverly disguising themselves in spider suits.
Ran a Dragonlance campaign back in the day. 2e AD&D. My group failed to buy rations, and decided that hunting would be a better alternative. They rolled well on survival, and encountered a single cow that had apparently gotten separated from its herd.
By the end of the combat, the main fighter was unconscious, nearly having been stomped to death, the casters were out of spells, and the other fighter was down below half. The party had a new respect for that ton of muscle grazing in the field.
Lol. I love everything about this story.
Was it just a case of awesome cow rolls, or was The Beef that powerful compared to the party?
Oh the beef was that powerful. The reason it got that bad though was that the main fighter tried to take it on alone at first, thinking that a heavily armed and armored fighter, even at level 1 should be able to take on a cow. It wasn’t until he went down that the rest of the party tried to step in to save him from the cow.
Them being first level, a single casting each of magic missile, and cure light wounds was enough to deplete the spells of the spellcasters, and a single charge attack from the cow cut the other fighter’s hp in half. Thankfully the cow was already injured from the first fight, and went down quick with the other three pounding on it.
Well at least it was properly tenderized by the time it finally became steak.
As was the party.
For my first “real” campaign as DM (not counting the “there’s no story, I just made a fun encounter for you guys” one), I wanted skeletons because plot reasons but needed them to pose a threat to Level 4 PCs. So, I created (via some templates and rookie errors in the stats), Advanced Black-Blooded Skeletons. Advanced Black-Blooded Skeletons have an initiative of +9. They have only 11 hp but DR 5/bludgeoning and AC 21. On a good day, they have an attack bonus of +5 but sometimes one of +2, doing 1d4+5 damage. The result is a bunch of enemies who usually go first, are fairly squishy but hard for most of the party to hit and also can’t hit the party very well. Skeleton fights sometimes end up being both sides just kind of helplessly waving at each other until someone gets lucky. Once, a character took control of a skeleton with Command Undead and had it attack another one and the two could barely do any damage to each other (beating each other’s AC on a 16 and, with DR, doing effectively 1d4 damage per hit). Also, the ABBS is technically CR 1. So it’s just kind of weird. The players are all used to these skeleton stats at this point, though, so I’m not planning on changing them. I just think it’s funny how they turned out. Beware the custom creation of the first-day GM, folks.
#SkeletonSlapFight
This isn’t exactly a case of the challenge level being off for a monster, but in D&D 5e, I’ve always been amused by the fact that snakes are effected normally by the prone condition. It really makes one wonder what physically is going on when you knock a snake prone.
As pictured here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVwarsVErEM
On the subject of murderous cats and interesting rules intepretations, you can buy animals (in PF1) with your starting gold. Usually I start with a pet gecko or something for flavor reasons.
But one time I ran a party of 1st level PCs against a level 1 venerable human witch NPC. CR1/2, that’s basically a cakewalk, right? Except that she’d spent her a fraction of her starting wealth on buying and training housecats. The ultimate crazy cat lady. Yes I stole the idea from the internet, but the results were traumatizing and almost a TPK.
A cat costs 3 cp. I gave her about 40 trained, charmed, and murderous house cats. Imagine the PCs surprise and horror when they were swarmed. And nobody wanted to attack the kitties. I don’t blame them.
Luckily they were able to grab the witch and force her to call off her fluffy army before the last PC went down to nonlethal damage.
And yeah, I know technically that was a CR inappropriate encounter but it was sure as heck a memorable one.
I’ve always wanted to turn an old favorite of mine into an RPG antagonist:
http://mtg.wtf/cards_hq/pjgp/18.png
I think perhaps I might go in for a reflavor now. 🙂
Yeah, the PF Will-o-wisp has some absurd stats for something with such a low CR. Especially if thrown at the end of the day or the middle of the night, when spells are in short supply.
When you absolutely, positively, got to annoy every gunslinger in the room; accept no substitutes.
One of the players in our groups often runs one-shots, and is very good at designing challenging encounters. And by that, I mean that he’s very good at designing encounters that bring us right to the edge of a TPK, with only one player still standing at one hit point having only just finally managed to defeat the boss. He doesn’t even give more than a brief glance at the effective encounter level, it’s through pure chance that this happens. And it would have happened for this one last fight, except that his misread the stats for a mind flayer lich, giving it a two or three higher save DC for the mind blast, and thinking the mind blast did half damage, not no damage, on a successful save. Meaning that, in the end, it was the mind flayer who won with only 22 hp remaining, as the wizard was pinged to death by mind blast and I kept on failing the saves by two. It was so close but due to some slight accidental modifications to stats we had our first, and currently only, TPK.
Now see, I’d have privately harbored suspicions that this guy was fudging behind the screen to make things exciting. The fact that you guys actually TPK’d makes me think it was all on the up-and-up. And that is some very good guesstimating indeed.
If I remember correctly commoners aren’t the only ones with this problem. Magic users aka wizards back in OD&D also started with d4 hit dice. Of course they eventually became god wizards if they managed to survive
True. But they had the option to magic missile the cat.
Once our DM got to think that Cthulhu, as present in Pathfinder, was unbalanced and underpowered. That one was a very fun night 🙁
So how exactly did you go insane and die?
Oh, no, no, no. Our pc didn’t go insane and died. Our DM didn’t want a TPK he just wanted to make us suffer. He usually gets cranky when one of us, the other guys, try to make a move with his girlfriend and kiss her. In my defense i was not the one who kissed her that time and while i have kissed that one girlfriend it was a long time ago before she and our DM become a couple. Well, like just a week before the two of them become a couple. After that we decide to make a new homebrew rule of “We will not make a move, try to seduce or just plain kiss our DM girlfriend”. For insistence of our DM, the rest of us, the guys, we need to uphold this rule. Except for the only girl on the group, she is exempt of this rule, mainly because our DM is that kind of guy.
I’m confused. You DM is dating Cthulhu?
Well… the was once that time that one of his girlfriends look like Cthulhu, but actually no. Our DM was angry because one of us, not me and i don’t remember who, try to kiss his, i think, human girlfriend. He sometimes gets angry when that happens, that one time he demonstrated his angryness with an OP Cthulhu. That and other incidents lead us to a homebrew of “Hands off the DM girlfriends”.
My go-to example of the Pathfinder CR system not being a super effective judge of strength works for this. Threw a group of 3 level 1 NPCs at a party of 4 level 2 PCs. The NPCs: 3 level 1 Barbarians, and I’d upgraded their weapons from the scimitars the book listed to falchions. The situation: Party was walking through the forest and the Barbarians jumped from the trees above into the middle of the group. They then proceeded to almost one-shot the Cleric, the party’s only healer, and did a number on the rest of the party too. Fun times.
Low-CR brutes swinging crit-fishing two-handers? Back in my day we called those “orcs.” 😛
My group nearly got TPK’d by a trio of illusory ones. Falchions are no joke!
Interesting – a talking cat, eh? A shifter in disguise? Vigilante’s arch-nemesis? Druid’s estranged sibling? What secrets are you hiding from us, Luigi? What dark past led to that permanent dazzled condition? We must know!
All cats are secret mafiosos. It is known.
As far as creatures way more deadly than they seem, we lost our swashbuckler and monk to such a beast not a week ago (monk was brought back with Breath of Life – swashbuckler had to reroll). Namely, a fish. A huge-sized, prehistoric fish.
Long story short, it was a CR6 encounter (we were lvl 5) that, on a crit, could auto-kill any given party member in one bite attack by doing double to triple their maximum hp in damage (which happened to our monk in a surprise round). Or in two hits, on non-crits (which happened to our swashbuckler). It put optimized vital strike builds to shame, unbuffed. And it also had grab and swallow whole! In fact, being swallowed by it was safer than being outside of it! Even with the DM fudging the dice, it skewered two martials in three rounds. Luckily, my wizard, who was on a boat and safe, fried it with scorching ray, allowing us to retrieve the swashbucklers mangled, half-digested body (which was good, as he had a plot artifact on him).
Yo! What was this creature? Gimme a link!
Here you go! It was a Dunkleosteus. And as a bonus, here’s the full story of the fishy encounter!
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/animals/fish/fish-dunkleosteus/
We just weathered a nasty storm, and the Captain NPC asked us to check on the ship’s rudder in case it needed fixing. Our 15-year old monk went under to check on it (we tied rope to her, just in case), confirming it was busted. Unfortunately, nobody but her noticed that a huge-sized fish had sneaked up on her, hungry for medium-sized prey! A surprise round is called, with the fish winning initiative. It promptly rolls a crit. And then confirms it, with it’s absurd bonus (it needed to roll a 4 or higher versus the monk – we were level 5 at the time). Monk takes enough damage to die four times under normal circumstances – but DM fudges it to her being dropped to -9 hp instead, as they were not expecting the fish to be this hardcore (this ain’t Dwarf Fortress!).
Our swashbuckler, next on initiative, rushes to the rescue, tying his own rope around himself and and trying to stab at the beast, Moby Dick style, whilst the rest of us scramble to drag the dying monk out of the water. Unfortunately, the monk has only 10CON, went before everyone else in initiative, and rolled a nat1 on her stabilizing check, leading to the first death of the campaign (an official AP, in case you’re wondering) before anyone could heal her.
More DM fiat-ing happens, and the captain produces a breath of life scroll to get our monk back from the brink! Unfortunately, she doesn’t have any spares for our swashbuckler, who, whilst the party was hadnling the monk, got bit once by the fist, dropping him to 10% of his hp and grappling him. My wizard gives him a liberating command, and he nat20’s the check to escape! Unfortunately, he then fails his climb check to get away from the fish, giving it another chance to bite him – this time fatally, and swallowing him up.
My wizard then, in a fit of rage, goes nuclear on the fish, dumping exploit boosted, empowered scorching rays that fry it from full hp to dead in two rays. We retrieve his body, but it is far too late to rescue him – being dead and partially digested. In the end, the swashbuckler rerolled, and the monk, harrowed by an actual-death experience, went back home to her family (dramatic character reroll).
Long story short, NEVER GET ON THE BOAT. And if you do, NEVER GET OFF THE BOAT.
I’d also like to add a candidate for the ‘most horrific/awful creature to face at level 1’ award, the Gryph (not to be mistaken with Griffon/Gryphon).
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/magical-beasts/gryph/
At a glance, it’s your bog-standard magical beast: A mean-looking, huge stork with too many legs. Nothing too scary about that, right? Like an owlbear, but less threatening in melee, since it’s the equivalent of a mean magical goose. And at CR1, it’s prime for hunting by even the lowliest of adventurers.
And then you notice it’s special attack. Note the DC20 heal check required to prevent it. Oh, and they often come in flocks or throngs!
Any character victimized by this beastie might as well retire early – even though the CON damage is fleeting, no amount of resting and cure spells will treat their murdered dignity.
I’m familiar with the gryph thanks to the Glass Cannon Podcast. Those things are nasty in all kinds of ways!
As for the big fish… My version was this thing:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/animals/felines/cat-great/lion/dire-lion/
It’s an ambush predator, and the encounter I was running specifically called for it to go after small and weak-looking prey. Insta-kill surprise round on the poor gnome bard bringing up the rear of the column. Claw-claw-bite-rake-rake on the charge is shenanigans. They were Level 3. 🙁
It shouldn’t be doing rake attacks in the same round it grappled, but still, an average of 31 damage on a level 3 bard is rather deadly.
We had to double check as well. As per the pounce rules:
“When a creature with this special attack makes a charge, it can make a full attack (including rake attacks if the creature also has the rake ability).”
So, I went down the rabbit hole a little on this one.
I had never seen that part of the pounce rules before, and thoughts of adding grab and rake to my pouncing eidolon danced in my head, but I had to make sure that it worked that way before inflicting that on my poor GM (and players in my own game).
The one thing that bothered me is that rake states “A monster with the rake ability must begin its turn already grappling to use its rake—it can’t begin a grapple and rake in the same turn.” That seems to directly contradict the pounce rule. So how could they work together?
I checked grapple to see if there was anything there that might make it possible. While that is a complicated mess, and I did learn things looking at it, it did not help. There was no way for them to work together.
Then I checked grab, just to make sure. That is how this works: “The creature has the option to conduct the grapple normally, or simply use the part of its body it used in the grab to hold the opponent. If it chooses to do the latter, it takes a –20 penalty on its CMB check to make and maintain the grapple, but does not gain the grappled condition itself.”
So, in order to get rake as part of a pounce, the lion would need to grab a character, take the -20 and still grab them, maintain the grapple with the -20 (+5 for maintaining), then it could pounce the next character, while doing the rake damage and automatic bite damage to the first character.
These rules get complicated, but honestly? I kinda like that.
I suggest double-checking on the Paizo forums. I suspect that you simply roll to grapple via grab, then make the charge-pounce-rake attacks if you succeed.
Further down the rabbit hole, and you are right. Rake applies on pounce, even without grapple. That just seems way too dangerous, but I guess that is how it works. Yikes!
You can see why my pal the gnomish bard got reincarnated as a halfling bard. She now has to dye her hair pink, poor thing.
The creature that most embody the “too powerful for it’s CR” spot in my mind is the Mosquito Swarm.
It’s CR 3, and a diminutive swarm thus making it immune to weapon damage.
It also has 31 hit point to back that up, which is to say more than most of its CR 3 peers that aren’t immune to the vast majority of characters.
It’s offensive capabilities consist of 2d6 swarm damage which also inflict 1d6 bleed, which of course also triggers the standard issue swarm distraction ability.
Finally to put the cheery on top it has a fly speed of 40 ft, so you can’t even run from it without splitting up and letting it pick it’s own sacrifice among you to devour.
We met one of these when we where level 2 in skulls and shackles, and truly we where blessed that the Alchemist in our party wasn’t there that session, or we might have committed suicide by trying to fight the damn thing.
I’ve heard many a Skull and Shackles story involving this thing. I’ve also heard that “use torches to deal 1 fire damage per hit” is a viable strategy… from people who are no doubt unaware that they’re trying to burn through 31 hp.
Hey Colin! As a question since I love this series and see you’ve mentioned your own games. Have you ever had a campaign just fall apart as a result of out of character issues? Maybe I’m just unlucky but I’ve lost almost all of mine to those.
I dunno who reads my comic, and I don’t wanna go naming names. Suffice it to say that yes, I’ve let campaigns crumble and die for out-of-character reasons.
My advice is to keep on keeping on. Eventually you’ll find the right group with the right players, and those are the ones you’ll stick with for years.
But that cat with an eyepatch is adorable. I kinda want him for my next familiar. ^.^
In my years of D&D, I’ve seen lots of insanity printed. Like 5E’s intellect Devourer. Read that thing and it’s intelligence damaging mind attack, then go look at what level you can fix that. Compare that to the CR 1 or 2 that the Intellect Devourer has listed. Note its Resistance to nonmagical weaponry and ability to possess anyone who has been reduced to zero intelligence. Kill your friends. Laugh.
Anima: Beyond Fantasy has these little plant monsters that are level 1 assassins and hide in the trees. They are effectively little petal helicopters with big Venus Flytrap like mouths. They have a special attack where they wrap their tongue around your neck. If you fail to dodge it and resist, they then follow up with a targeted attack to bite your head. They are the single most horrifying dangerous level one I’ve seen in a long time.
And of course, this is aside from old D&D traditions like the Grell, the Allip (CR 2 with Wisdom Drain!), and 3.0 Werewolves who had DR 30/Silver.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the intellect devourer:
https://adventureaweek.com/shop/pathfinder/pathfinder-adventures/b24-young-minds/?doing_wp_cron=1553004988.4125280380249023437500
Laurel did that art on that one. 🙂
Fortunately in real life we don’t have to worry about silliness like this. Or is not everyone aware that defense against cats is why we have dogs? They really are man’s best friend.
I knew there was a reason I kept him around: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/946F0640-67A8-4DFF-9B3C-541A8A1FC8BE.jpeg
I’m surprise that no one’s mentioned that crab.
http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fw/20040221a
This beast has 66 hp, AC 19, a 40 ft speed and 10 ft reach, a full attack of two claws that deal 1d8+9 each and it has Improved Grab with a +19 bonus and Constrict. It’s also amphibious and has a 30 ft move speed, which gives its a huge home turf advantage. Just to add insult to injury, it has crazy high fortitude and is flat out immune to mind affecting effects.
It’s CR? 3
It’s even worse if run as written: “A monstrous crab is straightforward in combat. It lumbers forth toward the nearest target and attacks with its claws. Once a monstrous crab has a morsel or creature in each claw, it retreats into the water to feed. Creatures held in its claws when it does so soon drown if they can’t breathe water.”
So your party is walking along the shoreline when this monster rushes out with its 40 ft speed, grapples a party member with its +10 to hit improved grab (which with +19 to grapple checks will not be beat at that level) and 10 ft reach, then retreats back into the water, drowning them if they don’t get crushed first, and anyone at that level who foolishly tries to follow can’t keep up woth it’s 30 ft swim speed.
O_O
That is a whole lot of crab. Even at CR 5 or so, that would be a tough encounter. I wonder how that got through the editing process…?
Because if I mentioned that crab, I have to mention the Drowned (3.5 D&D).
A thirty foot radius of make DC 10 Con checks with a cumulative +1 to the DC every round. Fail one, you are unconscious, fail two, you are at -1 hp and dying, fail three you are dead. 20HD Undead with all the immunities that come with it. CR 8.
Or the Blasphemy, who stuns the target with every bite. I forget its CR, but it has a bunch of other abilities to go with its “this person can’t act and drops their weapon” bite.
I always thought the chuul was the fun version of this kind of encounter. It’s mean, but in a fair kind of way.
My first near-character death was as a result of a giant hermit crab. Party had to use Enlarge Person, Aid Another and every other grapple check-booster we could think of to free the two grappled characters so we could run away. I got away with 2 HP, so a single additional turn would have been a PC death. Did help that all of this happened at the bottom of a dungeon, after an actual boss fight.
In short, Crabs = bad.
Pathfinder’s Orc. Specifically the orc warrior 1 in the bestiary.
Sure, orcs are supposed to be tough and all, but that guy is way stronger than his CR 1/3 rating indicates.
After some trial and error, I found its best to consider that orc to be a CR 2 monster, except with experienced groups.
It’s the extra layer of hp thanks to ferocity. That ability is no joke!
Everybody wants to be a cat…
Well then. That’ll be playing on 101.9, Colin’s Head FM for the rest of the day. So thanks for that.
I just always love the fact that in 5e, apes have an int of 6, making them a bit dumber then your average orc with 7, and a bit smarter then your average ogre with 5. As such, I have decided and convinced every dm that I have played with that they are fully sentient, and should be able to either learn sign language, or, just because it’s funny, speak, ideally with a high level of sophistication.
It also makes for a useful option when your GM insists that the “retains its Alignment and personality” clause on polymorph means that you’re simply an unusually lawful and goodly animal. Lassie can’t read incriminating documents though. Kong can.
Between that, the fact that it is already the second best general combat form, the fact that it is the only one with range, and the sheer utility of having reasonably dextrous hands, i end up using the large ape form even more then trex.
I ran Crypt of the Everflame for my family and when they met a confused guy with a dagger, the hunter wanted to disarm the fool, because she didn’t want to harm him. Well, disarming provokes an AoO, on which he critted, rolling maximum damage. The hunter was dying and could only be saved by the group’s cleric…
Thief knows your pain: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unlucky-crit
I actually managed to create a LE housecat PC who hid himself from the other good-aligned PCs as an evil genius manipulator.
The base of the PC was a kitsune mesmerist, reflavored into a rakhasha-blooded bastard child of a wealthy familiy with long-hidden ties to the tiger-like fiends. Born bearing the visage of a tiger, he was essentially a tiger-man who could transform into a shaggy black cat (reflavored fox shape feat).
Due to how the Mesmerist stare as well as psychic magic work, the mesmerist could perform 90% of his class actions in the form of an ordinary cat. But this wasn’t enough to make him hidden from the world. Which is why he had a slave via leadership! Completely under his claws, a lowly commoner elf was dressed up as a witch, given adequate knowledge of how to fake being a spellcaster, and was let loose into the world, her ‘familiar’ in tow. Thus, what the PCs assumed to be an awkward, but nice witch with a mean can, was in fact a mesmerist, secretly manipulating her cohort ‘witch’, pretending to be her familiar and making the witch’s nonsense utterances into actual magic.
My one and only cat PC was built for a one-shot. It was an Exalted game, and he was a god-blooded private dick in the dirtiest city of ’em all: Nexus. His human secretary had to light his cigarettes for him. There might have been an adorable kitty-sized fedora.
What kind of purrrpetrators did he investigate?
She walked into my office, and I could’ve sworn her legs were ten feet long. She was a lady in trouble. A war goddess on the lam. I shoulda known not to trust her.
I occasionally poke around on Monster-A-Day for creature ideas, but I’ve found that quite a few of their creatures’ stats seem… odd. In particular, their HP totals seem rather high.
I mean, look at this thing. How the hell does something that’s size category: Tiny have roughly as much HP as a dragon (and with Regeneration to boot)?! I mean, yeah, it’s an aberration, so it doesn’t have to make sense, but still…!
I think basically what’s going on is those guys are sticking closely to the guidelines for how much health something should have at a given CR, whereas I am of the opinion that small things that are primarily composed of flesh should generally go “squish” when you hit them with a mace.
The beauty, of course, of being a DM is: if I see a cool idea but don’t like how it’s implemented… I can change things to how I think it should work. Take the crownweaver spider (which I got some use out of in the spider forest adventure I’ve mentioned on previous pages). Their version has 40 HP and can therefore stand up to some punishment even if people manage to spot it before it gets someone. My version, however, has 7 HP, because I see it as more of a hazard than a monster you fight. It’s dangerous if you don’t know it’s there, but once you spend several rounds figuring out why your ranger is suddenly attacking his girlfriend out of nowhere, you can prepare for it in future encounters (and maybe still get snuck up on if you flub your Perception check, allowing further shenanigans to ensue).