CER: ±5 CER Mini-Templates

One Enemy

Innovation!

Typically, it is nice to be able to "right size" an encounter to a party, and this is part of the point of CER. However, we have giant libraries of enemies and even though we know how strong they are, it kinda makes *me* feel like "everything is off limits except for what fits the parameters created by party CER.
That's not supposed to be the point, I know, but I just had an idea to make quick tunes faster when you like a monster, but it is too powerful or too weak for the job you have in mind. So let's look at ways to turn red monsters either green or blue.

To start off with, I am going to use the very subjective measure that I feel like +/- 5 CER is a big enough difference that if the enemy is in the "comfortable" threshold of a particular character's power, it matters, so all of these mini-templates are based off of quick ways to add or remove 5 CER to an already calculated enemy. Add a few templates to beef something up a bit, do a few pluses and minuses to give an old friend a new feel, or do whatever. These are 5 point hack level changes so they probably won't scale well for giant differences, but you can try. I might revisit this topic at a later time with larger scale mini templates to lend more variety to the possible changes.

Attack Power

To make an enemy a harder hitter, add this:

Statistics: Add 2 damage (1 if Impaling or damage type is in the 200% category) to the best attack, Add 2 to skill (1 if best attack is Cutting or in the 150% category), and 1 to FP

To make them a bit weaker, do the opposite

Statistics: Subtract 2 damage (1 if Impaling or damage type is in the 200% category) from the best attack, Subtract 2 from skill (1 if best attack is Cutting or in the 150% category), and 1 from FP

Be careful with enemies that have an automatic hit attack or rapid attacks.

With an enemy that uses projectile attacks, consider changing the accuracy stat instead of the skill. Double the amount of the effect for abilities powered by FP (+/-4 to skill, for example, for a magic attack).

Tenacity

If you want a monster with more staying power, add:

Statistics: Add 1 DR universally, Add 1 to the best defense, and add High Pain Threshold. If High Pain Threshold is already there, add 2 to Hard To Kill and Subdue.

This doesn't work well on a monster that is diffuse. A simple hack for a diffuse monster is 5 more HP. To weaken an enemy, do the opposite again.

Statistics: Subtract 1 DR universally, Subtract 1 from the best defense (or defenses if it is a tie), and remove High Pain Threshold if it exists. If it doesn't, Subtract 2 from HT.

Again, this doesn't work well on diffuse monsters, so simply subtract 5 HP from them.

Speed

For a speedier feel, you can add one level of Extra Attack (or subtract one to go the other way) or, a more spread approach:

Statistics: Add 2 to basic move, add 1 to the best defense, add 1 Fatigue Point and use Fatigue for Heroic charges.

For a sluggish enemy:

Statistics: Remove 3 from basic move, and 1 from the best defense(s).

Again for diffuse enemies and swarms, it might be better to consider putting everything into, or taking everything out of basic move.

Notes

One could potentially mix and match these as mentioned before. A Slow but Tenacious enemy might be a mighty glacier. A fast, but vulnerable enemy might be a fragile speedster. If an enemy is way too powerful or way too weak, you could potentially add or remove from all categories, maybe multiple times from the same category. Be wary though that some of the negative templates depend on monsters already being strong (if they were weak, why would you want to weaken them some more?) If you want to mix things up a bit, I have these three categories, which correspond nicely to a 6-sided die; perhaps you can give a random attribute every time the fights seem ho-hum by rolling and saying "Odd is positive, even is negative, 1 and 4 are attack, 2 and 5 are tenacity, 3 and 6 are speed."