How strong should I make my monsters?

[Duckman]

Make monsters at start of dungeon so easy that ye can be sure they are nay too hard, and make them more difficult towards the end.

And, it is better to make a dungeon bit too easy than bit too hard as ye can always increase the difficulty if ye feel like so.

[Duckman]

Is there a list of default monster stats in DM somewhere so I can see how a Knight compares health wise to a Screamer, for example?

Create new objects window, then monster menu and choose to "clone" it and ye can see it's statistics, inducling default hp.

[Jan]

Did you notice that you were replaying to posts that were more than 3 years old? Not that it would matter, I just wanted to note it.

Make monsters at start of dungeon so easy that ye can be sure they are nay too hard, and make them more difficult towards the end.

LOL - obviously, you're right. The proper question is how to achieve and balance this.

[Ameena]

Playtesting, I would say. Lots and lots of playtesting .

[beowuuf]

Monster difficulty. First put up monsters that are def eatable easily, with perhaps a chance at harming the party, just to set a baseline of the party being good. Quickly ramp up to the monsters having no trick, but being comparably powered to the party. Start splitting monsters into two camps. The first camp pushes the normal abilities of the player/party while still being the same straightforward comparable attack/power. The second camp should be 'specials' where the monster has a powerful ability, balanced by a weakness.

Once the player has improved and got a few more tricks up their sleeve, and improved their baseline abilities, taker them fully out of their comfort zone with a strange monster or strange situation where some basic pillar of a character's abilities or some basic aid/lack of restriction is removed.

Next to last have monsters which combine the two camps from earlier, having an unusual powerful attack while lacking weakness, merely possessing the comparable skiils.

Finally, have your boss that not only combines the two camps again,but also does the removing from comfort zone thing again due to the boss encounter setting, or some other quirk.

Just one thought

[Gambit37]

Awesome tips, Beo! Excellent advice. We need more "dungeon craft" posts like these