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Once you've got the type and the size probably the most important property of your creature is then its hit dice. Once you know the hit dice a lot of other things will just fall into place.
Hit dice (or HD for short) consists of 2 parts. The first is the number of hit dice, in monster terms much like class levels (in fact in some cases the two are used in exactly the same way). The second part is the die type, much like each character class has die types so do creature types.
Again, the How to Create a Monster PDF has guidelines, for each type and size of monster, but these are just that, guidelines. If you feel your large horse shaped beast is really tough, then give it more than the maximum 4d10. If you do go outside the stanrdard though you'd better have a good reason for it, and follow this up with a good description.
Example 1: Our ooze is small, and the HTCM document gives ½ - 1 hit dice as a helpful range. I don't feel like using that as I think this is one tough cookie, so I'm going to up it to 2HD (that’s 2d8 in this case). Don't forget though that for actual hit points oozes gets a bonus on top of its con bonus).
Example 2: Our huge fella is somewhere between 4 and 16 hit dice, quite a range. For his size he's probably not that tough (thin fella even though he is big) so we'll put him at the lower end, say 5HD. That’s 5d8 as his base hit dice.
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