Dungeon Command By The Numbers: Creature Stats

Dungeon Command is Wizards of the Coast’s most recent take on a D&D Miniatures Skirmish game.  Each miniatures faction pack comes with a full complement of creatures and order cards to play with.  Although new faction packs are in the pipeline, many of us have been collecting D&D miniatures for years and will invariably want to create our own creatures.  Although the art of balancing a creature/warband is known only to the designers, I’ve crunched a few numbers to get aspiring custom creature creators something to start with.  This information is based on the first three available sets, Sting of Lolth, Heart of Cormyr, and Tyranny of Goblins.

Levels

Creatures range in level from 1 to 6.  For Sting of Lolth and Heart of Cormyr, the total level of all creatures in a band combined is 34.  For Tyranny of Goblins it is 36.  The individual breakdown of levels varies between the two sets (see table below).

Number of Creatures

The three released sets all have 12 creatures each, with two in each set being duplicated (so ten unique creatures in a set).

Baseline Stats

In general, the average stats for a creature of a given level appear to be as follows:
Hit Points: 20 * level
Melee Damage: 10 * level
Speed: 6

Powers

Most creatures (9 out of 12 in a pack) have a special ability.  Very few have two powers (one creature in Sting of Lolth, two in Heart of Cormyr; all of them level 4 or higher) or three powers (one in Tyranny of Goblins).  Currently, powers that do additional damage, heal, or prevent damage, generally only do 10 hit points worth (though some powers can affect multiple creatures).

Balance

Balancing powers/stats so that a creature isn’t broken is probably as much an art as a science.  In general, most creatures seem to make tradeoffs among their own abilities, increasing hit points at the expense of damage, for instance.  If a creature has a power that does melee damage, it might deal less melee damage with its basic attack. The tradeoffs among other stats/powers is less obvious.  How are differences in speed balanced, or the number/type of stat the creature uses?  Are creatures balanced only when compared to other creatures of their level, or are they balanced with respect to the entire warband the appear in?  We may need to see a few more sets published before the answers to these questions can be teased out.

Warbands By The Numbers

Finally, here are some statistics about the three released warbands, Heart of Cormyr, Sting of Lolth, and Tyranny of Goblins. These numbers come only from the creatures themselves, not from any order cards.

* Special ability grants Prevent 10 to creatures on board with certain keywords. Upper bound based on number of creatures in set.