Mythras Encounter Generator Difficulty Levels Refactored and Many Other Things As Well

The Most Important Table in Mythras (Monster Island page 282) did not exist at the time MeG was created 8 years ago. During that time more than 3800 public encounters have been created and similar number of ones that have been private to their creators’ campaigns. MeG has also evolved during that time getting many new features and most of all the creators have gained experience in how to use the MeG and creators’ ambition has risen as well.

As I have created 2300+ of the encounters I decided to go back and take a look what I could with some amount of work improve or change based on the experience so far. All creators can change only their own creatures so this is how I changed mine.

One of the contributions of Monster Island was the MITM (Most Important Table in Mythras). It gives you the idea of what skill levels novice, competent, proficient, expert, master and paragon would have and what they are known for.

MeG has a similar ranking but with not as many levels. As currently it is not feasible to change the names of the MeG ranks I made a tentative mapping between MeG and MITM as follows.

Main skill	MITM ranking	MeG rank
01-30	Novice	Rabble
31-50	Competent	Novice
51-70	Proficient	Skilled
71-90	Expert	Veteran
91+	Master and Paragon	Master

After this I generated each (well almost each) of the 2300+ templates I have made at least once and took a look at few of the first npc’s generated from each template what is the main skill generated and the rank MeG has and changed the ranking to correspond to the above. So for example if the MeG rank was skilled and the generation yielded mostly in 71-90 range – I changed the rank to Veteran. And so on. Most often this was combat skill but for some templates for example sorcery magic skills were more appropriate to judge. In some cases I took a general view and not exact view on one skill percentage. For some templates I found that I wanted them to have higher skill to maintain their rank or lower skill to lower their rank so I changed them. In several cases I wanted more variety in the percentages so I changed the flat percentage add to be more varied dice rolls. This changed ranks for 822 of my creations – some went down, some went up.

I also took a look at the notes block for the creation and if some things could be moved to be “features” like “Abilities”, “Combat Style”, “Basic Poison” etc or if some abilities were missing I added them and cleaned some of the notes block. This changed 173 of the templates.

I also added few tags here and there but that would need another round sometime in future.

Some of the monsters and animals were missing “Natural armor” tick box – so they were slower than they need to be in initiative. I added the tick box to everything that was not wearing armor. This changed 465 templates.

I also changed few characteristics for less than a couple of dozen templates that did not follow the SIZ and STR guidelines from the RAW.

So what is the benefit of this:

When you filter by rank in MeG – many creatures (all of mine) now are of appropriate difficulty level to that rank. So if you want skilled opponents – you are not confronted by masters or if you need masters you will not find novices in the filtering results.

Also you will find that those generated have now correct natural armor penalty – so animals and monsters are quicker in initiative. There is also more info in the encounters for the abilities so it is easier to use – do not have to look up the info in the RAW or MI so much.

I encourage everyone who creates new creatures to fill the rank correctly and use the “features” and natural armor tick boxes. It is also hugely beneficial for all of us as users if you use enough proper and useful tagging. When you go back and visit your templates – it would be useful to do similar changes if the creatures are public.

So what will happen in the next refactoring – perhaps more tagging, more adding of combat styles and additional features and more explanations what the creatures are and where to refer for more information. This may come some time in future but not this year…

You will find Mythras Encounter Generator here