Article - Tips for Creating Challenging Monsters by Drakefyre At some point, you'll get tired of the general types of monsters and want to create something more interesting, more challenging, and more innovative. These are some general tips to make your monsters more difficult without making them boring or repetitive. Depending on the degree to which they're used, they can make any level scenario more challenging and interesting. 1) The basic thing you can do is increase a monster's level, which will greatly increase a monster's damage, health, spell points, and general effectiveness. However, it doesn't do a lot to make them new and interesting. 2) Experiment with melee attacks. Increase the melee stat and strength of a monster and decrease the monster's HP or even the number of sides on the dice for innate melee attacks. A 20d5 attack is much better than a 5d20 attack, and a 20d5 attack is more likely to pierce armor and do damage at higher levels. 3) Increase the effectiveness of spellcaster AI by adjusting spell levels. Using the call 'change_spell_level' you can adjust spell levels to 0, 1, or 3 (two is the default). Setting the spell level to '0' will mean that the monster will never cast that spell, meaning that you can effectively choose which spells a mage or priest will cast, reducing (or eliminating) the amount of castings of woefully ineffective spells. 4) Use disabling special abilities. Disabling special abilities are ones that limit the mobility and effectiveness of the party, like slowing, cursing, webs, paralysis, confusion, et cetera. Paralysis should only be used sparingly, since it will doom a singleton (one-PC party), which many people play with. Still, webs, sleep, and slowing will allow your monster to get extra attacks in, while slowing down the movement of the party, forcing the player to use different tactics. 5) Target a certain type of PC. Using the dumbfounding ray special ability will remove spellcasters from the battle, making the party use melee to beat you. Using an antimagic field will also do it, as will adjusting immunities. Likewise, giving a monster high armor and low immunities will necessitate using spells to attack it. 6) Play around with monster behavior scripts. Stareye wrote a behavior script called 'magekiller', which will make the monster attack the PC with the highest amount of mage or priest skill. Other behavior scripts involve regenerating, hasting, blessing, and other things that monsters shouldn't be able to do but can. Be careful with some of them, though - making a behavior script too powerful will seriously annoy the player. 7) Use the ray special abilities. Rays only take one AP to fire, and they're a good way to put medium-level parties on the defensive. 8) Don't ignore the eight item slots you have! One of the most powerful tools that designers have is the capability to equip our monsters with weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and more. Giant Chiefs in Avernum 3 quaffed an invulnerability potion before every battle. Giving an invulnerability elixir to a warrior-priest will allow him to cast defense priest spells without having to worry about dying for a few turns. Giving a goblin a scroll with Lightning Spray will shock a low-level party. Tweaking items and testing various combinations will ensure that you've got the right balance for your scenario. Still, all of these are only useful if they're used in the right setting. Having an outdoor combat full of heat ray-firing ruby skeletons in a beginner scenario will make anyone but the best players give up in frustration. A more appropriate combat would be a few ghouls (disablers) along with a ruby skeleton or two - slowing the party so that they can't respond to the barrage of fire unless they quickly cast Repel Spirit. As a player, I'd rather face a few interesting monsters used in combination than slogging through tons of the same monster. Note From Jeff Vogel: Excellent article. A few suggestions I would add. Even the strongest creature is weak if it's by itself. The best way to spice up an encounter or make it more challenging is to add friends. If a creature isn't doing enough damage to affect players, increase the strength or melee weapons skill. The damage from innate attacks (like clawing and biting) is increased by melee weapons skill. Finally, an advanced trick. You can give a creature special abilities or defenses by giving it an item. If you don't want the get that item, you can erase it by using the destroy_char_item call in the DEAD_STATE state. (Note there is a bug with this call. You can't use ME for which_char. Get the creature's number using my_number.) - Jeff Vogel Spiderweb Software, Inc. http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com