Last night I spent two hours working through the DMG and Monster Manual to build a monster, just because I felt the need for it to be 'balanced' in terms of CR. My players are comfortable playing 5e, which is fine, but I am amazed that I couldn't find a system out there for simplified 5e monsters. I can throw together an OSE monster in ten minutes and _roughly_ know how it'll fare against my players, but in 5e, the fact that Hit Dice are completely divorced from CR and that there are two separate CRs which are averaged makes it so difficult for me to stat a monster quickly. Surely there's some sort of quick 5e monster generation technique out there? I can't believe the only two options are (1) reskin an existing monster or (2) do backwards math to work out how many dice make up a damage-per-round of 39. Show me your secrets! #DungeonsAndDragons #DnD #D&D
What I would love is a system which reworks all 5e monsters to: (1) fit in a one-line stat block with extra information for special actions; (2) have the same save for everything, and for that save to be based on HD/CR; (3) have their CR based on their HD or vice versa; (4) have a tag-based system where adding the 'fast' or 'spined' tag adds +5 to attack or +2 to damage or whatever; (5) have simplified damage maybe? 5e is such a punchy game that you end up throwing huge quantities of dice for attacks, so that may be unfeasible.
@Sandra I saw your other post while looking around, but I missed this excellent one! I very much enjoy what I've seen of your blog/wiki (bliki) so far.
https://idiomdrottning.org/one-digit-monster-stats