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By Jotto, August 2024, DC20 Beta 0.8
The below values are the ‘average’ of a monster of that level up to Level 10. Monster and player levels are designed to be roughly equal, so a level 1 monster is medium-deadly (see HP columns) difficulty encounter for a single level 1 player. Level 0 is one step weaker than a level 1, with ‘Null’ Level monsters being the very low threat level monsters, basically minions.
Player Experience: A medium monster is a decent challenge for new-mid level players who haven’t got a full grasp of what their character can do yet. Hard monsters are close in power to player characters piloted by players who have experience with the system. A full party of hard monsters will likely be defeatable, but 1-2 characters may die in the encounter.
A base damage of 1.5 means that the monster has a base damage of 1 but with a damage feature, like impact or pack tactics etc. It could also be conditional additional damage, generally you can round down for ranged attacks and round up for melee attacks if they have no other effects as movement requires action points to get into melee. For example, the Skeleton in the official monster set released with 0.8 has a 1-damage ranged attack and a 2-damage melee attack, meaning it’s base damage is on average 1.5
Upscaling Monsters: The easiest to upscale a monster is to increase its HP, or increase its base damage by ‘1 level’, e.g. a Hard Level 1 monster could have 14-15 HP, or could do 2 base damage instead but still maintain its 9-11 standard HP. Other methods of changing difficulty would be additional features, action points, weaknesses etc.
First consideration for encounter making is the difficulty of the encounter you want to run.
| Easy | No or low threat to the character’s lives, great spacing encounters or random encounters. |
|---|---|
| Medium | Great for newer players, might struggle if they are unlucky. Low challenge for experienced players. |
| Hard | Decent chance of a character going to Death’s Door, good challenge for experience players. |
| Deadly | Medium to High chance of one of a character death. |
The encounter HP is the total amount of health the monsters have, that could be evenly split, or focused in 1-2 big monsters with many small minions.
Encounter HP: Number of Players x Average HP of a monster at that level, for the difficulty of encounter you are running, for example: