The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour: Monsters and Playtesting

Mike Mearls
(by Tim Emrick)

For most of July, the focus of the "The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour" was designing a number of new monsters. Mearls' personal goal in this was to produce some new monsters for his home campaign, which is set in Nentir Vale. That was the default setting for 4E, so this was the perfect opportunity for him to update some of his favorite undead from that edition to the current rules.

As August began, Mearls shifted gears to talk about the playtesting process and how that drives the design process.

7/10/2018: Mearls goes over Wizards' in-house process for designing a new monster, from the "white page" that sketches out the creature's core concepts before any game mechanics are assigned, through the creation of a first draft of the actual stat block. Along the way, he stresses frequent comparison to other monsters, both to set appropriate stats for a creature of the intended type and Challenge Rating, and to avoid designing something too close to an already existing stat block.

7/17/2018: Mearls reviews the stat block for the CR 1 blazing skeleton he designed last time, with a few tweaks he's made in the intervening week. He also introduces a spreadsheet that is used in-house at Wizards to calculate Challenge Ratings. He will be looking into the possibility of releasing this spreadsheet through DM's Guild, but stresses that this is only a tool, not a magic solution to determining CR. Comparison to other creatures of similar level, and playtesting the new creature, are still essential.

He then sketches out stats for two legendary creatures--monsters with legendary actions they can use at the end of another character's turn. The game includes very few such creatures at lower levels, so Mearls creates a four-armed guardian skeleton (CR 3) and the vassal of Orcus, an undead monster created from a demon's corpse (CR 6). These two examples provide some useful insight into how legendary abilities factor into a creature's CR. They also show how the monster's back story (in this case, servants created for Orcus's cult) can influence the design of the creature's game mechanics.

7/24/2018, 7/31/2018: Mearls returns to an idea he conceived during the shows on psionics. The Shaper Psion's signature trick involved summoning astral constructs, which required development of a new spell to provide rules for the summoned creature. He uses the Spell Damage table from the DMG to provide a baseline for the hit points and damage for a summon monster spell. Ideally, this new spell could be used by many spellcasting classes, perhaps with a different creature type for each (such as beasts for druids, elementals for wizards and sorcerers, and constructs for shapers). It could also provide a much more systematic way of handling summoned creatures in the game. However, Mearls stresses that this basic framework will need rigorous playtesting to prove that the core idea is sound before he's willing to start adding a lot of potential options to the mix.

8/7/2018: This week, Mearls begins to talk more directly about the playtesting process. He breaks down the steps of the process, and strategies for getting the information you need to refine your design. He then shows some playtest survey results for the Brute fighter subclass, which appeared in Unearthed Arcana but did not get good enough ratings from playtesters to appear in an official release. In the last few minutes of the episode, Mearls starts to sketch out an alternative subclass to replace it.

8/14/2018: Mearls presents a first partial draft of his new Weapon Master fighter subclass. His discussion of the subclass and its features is strongly geared towards how it would be presented to playtesters, and specific questions that he might highlight in the feedback survey. For now, he is focused on the first five or so levels of the subclass, because he needs proof that the core pillars of the subclass work before proceeding with later, second-tier abilities.

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My past columns about this series include:

• The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour (1/30/18-4/17/18) 
• The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour: Psionics! (4/24/18-7/3/18)

This is likely to be my last review of the "Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour" in this level of detail. The show does not really need an exhaustive episode guide, and I feel that I've discussed the series enough by now to let others decide whether they would be interested in watching it. I do plan to continue following the show for my own enjoyment (and contining education as a game designer), and I may occasionally comment on it in my "Unearthed Arcana and Freeport" series when those releases include material first shown on the "Happy Fun Hour."

I also anticipate needing a bit more space here at the blog for my "Time of the Tarrasque" campaign when that finally starts up again soon--hopefully next month!