Designing Strategic Encounters | 4th Edition Monster Roles

God bless the simplicity of monster roles. Those were the days... I still use the idea of Minions in my 5e encounters.

I wouldn't call minions, elites, and solos roles. Basically the six monster roles where artillery, brute, controller, lurker, skirmisher, and soldier. Then you had what I would call status: minion, normal, elite, and solo. On top of that, you could also add the keyword leader to a monster that had some healing or other recovery power.

Very helpful for my upcoming Halloween game, thank you! 😊

Intelligent creatures should have stuff. A few items can give some unexpected versatility with their roles. A goblin with a bag of excrement covered caltrops can slow and poison enemies as control. And imagine the joyful surprise on your players faces when an ogre snags their wizard with a grappling hook and drags them to the front lines. Mage hand and fishing tackle can introduce theft at a distance, harpys can throw ink in peoples' eyes, and a pixie's polymorph can be even worse with the addition of a quickling with a sealable jar. A portable ram, tinderbox to set the environment on fire, or simple climbing equipment can change terrain expectations. Or the most obvious one. Dragons can pick up and drop heavy things on you for a ranged attack. Giants ain't the only thing that can pick up a rock.

How to improve your combat - have all of your players roll a d20. Whatever number they get is how cool their character looked while winning! Congratulations everybody! All classes are equal, nobody has to worry about getting bad rolls, everybody gets a trophy, and it's perfectly balanced. No more arguing about which class is the most or least broken. Fixed.

You could also just play 4e....