Standardizing Creature Types & Subtypes
Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule for this. I will just tell you what I did (which works for me, may not for everyone) for quickly getting
types of creatures up and running. On the d20SRD site, and in the MM, creature types and subtypes have a series of traits (which, generally, though not always, are standard for those types of creatures). For example, animals have low-light vision (I don't enforce everything on the list, such as INT of 1 or 2), and that's about it needs. So I made a tAnimal (for Animal Type) Special that does two things. First, it bootstraps the Low-Light Vision, then I add a Type.Animal tag to the Special, and then assign the tag to the
hero using the following code snippet in its eval script.
Code:
<<First 10000>>
~ Assign type to hero.
perform hero.assign[Type.Animal]
Next, under Source I create a new tag, which I called typeAnim and gave it the name "Animal". On the bootstrapped Low-Light Vision, I then SpecSource the ability to typeAnim.
So, with this method, you can now just bootstrap the tAnimal to the creature that is an animal, and you get the Low-Light Vision on the creature. Obviously, for animals its not that bad, since you really one need to bootstrap the one thing (Low-Light Vision) which is no different than bootstrapping the one thing (tAnimal), however some creature types have multiple bootstraps (such as Undead) that is much easier to create the tUndead type with all the bootstraps, and then when you make an undead creature, you can just bootstrap the tUndead to the creature and it brings them all along without you having to look for them each time you make one. Also, I've got some scripting I do with undead, like removing the CON score and so forth, but I won't go into the specifics here. It's just the way I standardized a process that was time consuming.
Furthermore, you can do the same with subtypes, such as Dwarf, Elf, Orc, Angel, Baatezu, etc. There is a mechanic in place for that to, as I id them as sDwarf (for subtype Dwarf for example) and add the tag Subtype.Dwarf. Type and Subtype are accepted tags for HL, and are references to the types and subtypes of a creature.
I've gone into far more complication than this, but I won't go into those details. I just wanted to show that such a thing can be standardized, and thus can save alot of time looking for bootstraps for creatures. You can even bootstrap on the Simple Weapon Proficiency for things like Humanoid (fSimple). Anyhow, that's creature typing in a nutshell, hope you will find it useful.