During the Wizards of the Coast Epic-Level seminar at the 2009 Gencon, the group discussed the differences between Monster Manual 1 and Monster Manual 2 creatures. One of the members of the audience asked “How do we monster-manual-2-ize our solos?” The following tips outline the response from the panel with some slight modifications for myself. These house rules go hand-in-hand with the tips for running a solo encounter.
Tip 1: Cut hitpoints to 80%.
The first and easiest modification to make with older solo monsters is to multiply their hitpoints by .8, cutting them down to 4/5 of their original hitpoints. Older solo monsters took far longer to kill than intended, usually burning encounter and daily powers until all players have left are at-will powers. This reduction in hitpoints keeps the battle moving along.
Tip 2: Reduce defenses.
Original solo monsters had increases to three of the four defenses including AC. These higher defenses drastically reduced the number of actual hits PCs landed. Remove two points from AC and two points from two other high defense scores of the monster to get them back in line with their smaller Elite brothers.
Tip 3: Add some sort of power when bloodied.
This is where things start getting creative. The reduction in hitpoints and the reduction in defenses will make it easier to kill a solo monster but the solo monster needs something in return. The panel jokingly suggested an explosion at blooded that stole one healing surge from the party. While this lacks creativity, it gives us the right idea.
When modifying your creatures, consider adding a burst attack dealing the DMG page 42 limited high damage amount. Come up with a good reason your creature has this power or, better yet, tie it to an environmental effect of some sort.
A quicker and easier way is to increase the damage done by your modified solo creature by one die. This will improve the overall damage of the creature without having to track anything more. This could even be done in our head while playing.
With these few tips, DMs everywhere can modify the original monster manual 1 solo creatures to reduce the grind and increase the threat faced by our heroic PCs. Enjoy!
That all sounds fine, though of course it’s unfortunate that such modifications should be advisable.
I haven’t ever actually run or fought against a solo, but I’ve wondered if the extra defenses and hit points of the solos could be used to give them more freedom in a fight. Opportunity attacks, defender bonus attacks, striker bonus damage, harmful zones and the like will mean less to such a creature, so it should feel more free to move around, use any powers it wants, and engage whomever it wants.
Like I said, my experience with solos is zilch. In my general combat experience, though, people tend to avoid opportunity attacks on principle. And I doubt the designers had such strategies in mind when they designed the MM1 solos. Still, it’s what I’ll be trying before I go about modifying the monsters.
I also give them more action points – an additional AP per tier.
So Heroic = 3 AP, Paragon = 4 AP, and Epic = 5 AP
I’ve used solos before, and let me add tha even with the above advice (similar to those spread around the web), solo battles still take a long time (duh), but are less of a grind to the players. Don’t expect the encounter to end 1 hour earlier because it won’t, in most cases.
To me, those guidelines are specially important for solo battles you didn’t have time to prepare – when the terrain is like “bland” or “randomly created on the spot”, MM solos may not work well with the enviroment and WILL need a lot of grinding to be defeated.
In battles that you have planned and adjusted the enviroment – MM solos can be fine and even add an “extra” to the fight if they’re used instead of their MM 2 counterparts. MM solos -need- a well crafted enviroment and scene in order to not allow the game to be reduced to “grinding”. The terrain should give both players and the solo creature extra option in combat – and perhaps the particular objective of that fight is not even to reduce the bad guy’s hit points. The battle will take longer, but may be as well more memorable if you craft a good scene with the solo monster.
So, in my humble opinion, MM solos are best used to portray fundamentally important plot villains – the battle with them takes long, but they need a well crafted and thought enviroment and scene so that the -game- doesn’t end in grinding. MM 2 battles are faster and more lethal and they don’t have a dire need for a well crafted terrain to be able to work good in game.
In my home campaign, I use MM2 style solos for creatures that should be particularly challenging and fighting the PCs alone, or for villains that may be encountered in any kind of terrain, depending on the action of my players. I use MM 1 style solos to represent the adventure’s boss if I know if that battle can only occur in one particular place. It is a if we had two kinds of solo – “bully solos and fast solos” – sometimes, its best to use one or another.