New Monster Building Guideline Weirdness?

I've gone through and redone all of the monsters in The Whispering Cairn and did all of monsters in Three Faces of Evil with the new rules including Sage's suggestion for replacing the first two questions from this thread. The changes seem to have fixed some of my concerns without having to do stange math or answer the questions disingenuously. I'll let you know how it goes after my game on tuesday.

I read the "spawned" question as "where is it normally found", personally.  Like, a sort of tie-in to "monster settings".

So, even if an imp was literally spawned on some other plane, you'd typically find it in a civilized place (hanging out in a wizard's castle) and it wouldn't be too much of a threat.

Or, maybe your imps are more rare, and only found with more powerful wizards, guarding his magic circle or other "places of power", and it would be more dangerous.

So, I like the question in that regard.  Maybe it should be "normally encountered" instead of "spawned", if that's the intent.

A rabbit and an elephant might both be "normally encountered" on the open plains, but I don't think that fact should be the fictional basis for determining their hit points.

A rabbit isn't a monster and the open plains isn't a monster setting.

While I agree with your first point but the open plains works for me. To that point, an elephant and a cheeta might both live there and both threaten the party but would have different HP.

They certainly would.  A cheetah would have, say, 20HP and an elephant would have 27 (and Armor 1 and +Forceful).

Besides, we all know that HPs don't represent the number of times you can be stabbed and survive or anything.  They're an abstraction.

A rabbit is a monster in my game.  It is a more aggressive version that carries poison in its bite.  I don't want it to have 20 hit points, so I simply ignore the current monster hitpoint questions and use common sense.

Thinking more about it, I agree with sage that fundamentally it's a clash of expectations.  His expectation is that every monster, for example, spawned in the forest will have either 24, 30, or 37 hitpoints (at least if it has a discernable anatomy!).  And my expecation is that there is a vastly greater variation in nature that I want to account for.

While I like the monster creation rules and some will find them really concrete and helpful, I'm guessing that eyeballing the stats won't really do any harm.

Marshall speaks truth. A Monster's Moves and Instinct, and then its HP (in combination with the Player's damage potential) gives you a rough idea of how much of a narrative obstacle the monster(s) will be to the players schemes.

Monsters are nameless hordes of creatures that stand between the players and what they want. Give each monster details that bring it to life: smells, sights, sounds. Your monsters are arrows, fired en-masse at the players. Give each enough detail to make it real, but don't cry when it gets slain by intrepid adventurers.

All of that's true.  If we know how many HPs a "low level" (for example) monster should have, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to fudge it.

While the questions seem like a good guide to stating out a new monster, I don't think the monster block actually needs to include the answers to those questions.  They add a lot of text but it's not nearly as interesting or evocative as anything else in the monster block. 

I think you need to do a clean sweep on the all the math and make sure it's working first and then go back and figure out how craft questions to aid DMs in creating on-the-fly challenges.

I haven't playtested the damage/hitpoint changes yet but given the big bump for first level and the gradual addition of more hitpoints as characters increase in level, I can already see leveling feel like going backwards relative to opposition if DMs aren't careful.

It looks like you may have fixed some problematic issues with first level characters in Basic but added the potential for a whole host of monsters to one-shot heroes at even higher levels. 

I feel my DM confidence may be shaken by scenarios like, "Hmmm, do I escalate things in narration or do I now hit the 3rd level Paladin with FORTY-EIGHT points of damage?"  If a monster can kill a "Knight" then Class, Armor (and even almost Level) won't matter a bit in the face of that nuke.

I play to play some Beta soon but I am not going to playtest the damage rules as written but instead come up with something I think will work better (and report on that if there's interest).

Interested folks: we have a new version, what do you think?

Replace the first two questions with these:
...

This is slightly more forgiving at low levels, gives a little more fine differentiation, and doesn't compare PCs to NPCs in odd ways. Thoughts?

I like the new version. I wonder the ranges couldn't be stretched further at the ends, but additive modifiers are much less scary!

We'll certainly add text to unpack it, but your instinct is right: a gang of thugs could cause trouble for an undefended village.

Yojimbo, Fist Full of Dollars, etc, etc.

The paladin's healing not being very useful is certainly useful information though. We've had a hell of a time dealing with the healing niches and we'll keep working on it.

It seems like healing needs a boost in light of the new monster damages.

Actually, I've never really considered Lay on Hands to be effective healing in DW (but to be fair, it was only slightly better in D&D). With the old damage and armour ratings, an armoured paladin wasn't taking much damage at low levels, so shuffling damage to her (7-9 result) from a mage/thief/cleric was somewhat better than zero sum. Now that damage levels are higher and armour is comparatively less effective, the paladin probably needs her HP more.

How about something like:
10+ heal levelx2, 7-9, choose one:
*Heal levelx2 and take levelx2
*Heal levelx1.

Cure Light Wounds seems like it might need a bump too.