A thread for asking questions about monster design.

I'm looking at two monsters in the Monster Manual, both brutes, one level 2, one level 4, the former small, the latter medium.

The small, level 2 brute does 1d8+ with its MBA. The medium, level 4 brute does 1d10+ with its MBA. Based on the damage by level in the DMG, that's about what Medium damage should be for a level 1 through 6 creature (with a scaling down to 1d8 for the smaller creature, assuming that's what's going on there - the rules don't really mention resizing attacks like that).

But, these are brutes, so using the advice for monster creation, I'd use the High damage expression, of 2d6+ for the small level 2 brute (or 1d12 plus, we're supposed to resize) and 2d8+ for the medium level 4 brute.

I know the monster math has been updated, though I've never quite understood how to handle damage or how to increase dice expressions by a percentage. I thought I'd try working with the DMG 1 approach and see where it got me. I tend to do okay with stock MM1 monsters.

Bottom line: could these damage expressions be in error, and should I bump them to 2d6+ and 2d8+ respectively?

I haven't had a chance to compare a lot of the monsters, but from what I can tell, and what I remember, there's almost no relation between the damage tables in the DMG and the damage potential of any of the monsters. Monsters with weapons tend to do damage based on that weapon, though not always. It seems rare for low-level monsters to do as much as 1d10 damage with their basic attack, which is what "most" basic attacks should do, between levels 1 and 4, according to the rules.

Am I missing something?

The left hand not knowing what the right is doing -- in this case, the DMG and MM not speaking to each other. When they supposedly revised the standard for defenses, attack rolls, and damage expressions for monsters, they should have applied it retroactively and given us a list of every creature in prior publications that affected, with revisions.

And I mean everything. MM 1 and 2, every new critter in Dungeon or Dragon, all the critters in splatbooks like Open Grave or the Eberron Campaign Guide. But by the time they got around to MM3 and its changes, and DMG2, they were starting to disregard their earlier books and dump everything into the Essentials line.

They were burning their bridges without first making sure no one was standing on them.

In reply to LonePaladin (msg # 4):

I wind up feeling like the damage expressions in the DMG never really got a fair shake, though for all I know they were tested extensively and then rejected but then accidentally included and pointedly ignored in hopes that no one would notice.

A charitable interpretation might be that premade monsters were intentionally less damaging, so that people who wanted to just use those wouldn't wind up steamrolling their players, but people who wanted to make their own monsters would find them satisfyingly powerful.

I always got the impression that it wasn't as much that the designers wanted to avoid players getting steamrolled and more that they did want to allow players the opportunity to cut through large numbers of monsters per encounter and many encounters per day without having the issue 3.5 had with players stopping mid-dungeon to rest and recover spells.

I don't know that it was wholly successful.  But, you are right that it is certainly true that it's easier to toss extra weak enemies into an encounter that is too weak than it is to arbitrarily remove difficult enemies from an encounter that is too hard.