Monsters And Crises

Everything the players will face in Seed - dragons, soldiers, madmen, wizards, demons, beings of cosmic evil beyond mortal comprehension - are lumped under the single term - "monsters". Crafted and operated by the gamemaster, Seed provides tools for the hope of making monsters both impressive yet beatable to the players, and satisfying and fun to the person who plays them!

To that aim, Seed provides systems for the construction of exciting, challenging battles - the Monster Creation System, or MCS provides rules for the construction of monsters.

Optionally:

The article on Battle Situations contain some special rules that may apply to certain tense situations.

The Position System allows the creation of the battlefield as an environment of its own, applying special effects and rules based on who stands where - modeling everything from a duel with a giant bird atop an airship to a giant, demonic wall slowly pushing a group of heroes towards oblivion.

The Idea of Monster Creation

Seed's Monster Creation system is not an unlimited toolkit. Within it, you'll find that it makes certain assumptions about how effects work, places a tight limit on how many abilities and properties monsters can take, and requires monsters to take certain weaknesses to gain certain potent abilities.

This is done for a small handful of reasons:

  1. Makes Player Choices Meaningful: By requiring monsters to be of certain families or to carry certain vulnerabilities to employ certain special effects, players are capable of preparing for those nasty effects by equipping matching abilities. Players particularly irritated by the Amorph ability can carry Amorph Killer weapons, they can learn that high MP Arcana monsters might fear MP Rend, and they know that if they're going to fight monsters that rise from the dead, they should bring holy weapons. This makes, for example, the choice between the "Fire / Blizzard" Black Mage rank and the "Thunder / Water" Black Mage rank non-equivalent.
  2. Forces Monsters to Specialize: A reoccurring theme in the MCS is that the first rank of a property is generally overpriced, and subsequent ranks are cheaper. This has the net effect of encouraging the creation of monsters that carry one strong defense mode, forcing the player characters to alter their tactics, as opposed to creating monsters that slightly mitigate everything the party does, which makes the party keep doing what they were doing, only slightly worse.
  3. Makes Monster Design a Game: Monster design should be fun. The gamemaster probably doesn't want to overpower the party, so the MCS should create monsters that are of a comparable power level - as such, a toolkit that grants the gamemaster the ability to create monsters of arbitrary power requires them to limit themselves. So, what the MCS does is place some prices on things, making things it guesses will make for less fun monsters more expensive, but not really being too exact about anything, and lets the GM play a little mini-game with it to create a monster, which the GM can then try to kick the party's tail with. It's not exact - for example, Near-Fatal effects are curiously cheap - but the limitation allows the GM to play a little harder.

Does It Accomplish All These?

(Rewrite after I can say "yes" to this.)

To a degree. The MCS isn't perfect - there are probably very many perfectly acceptable, exciting, dangerous monsters that can't be created with it, and throughout the design process it will be continually fine-tuned. It can also create monsters that aren't fun and that lock down the party - it just tries to make it difficult to do this by accident.

This means that, after some experience playing with the MCS as it is, you might be able to fudge slots or change the assumptions on properties. This, however, will weaken its ability to accomplish points 1, 2 and 3, above.

(…But if you're playtesting you better stick to it like glue.)

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