D&D 4E Thing I thought 4e did better: Monsters

[hawkeyefan]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] I'm not sure what thread it was in, but I don't think I have commented in this one, so it must have been somewhere else. My knowledge of 4E is pretty limited, so I wouldn't feel all too confident to offer much in that regard.

Generally speaking, though, I think you missed my point or that I was unclear. I said I like to include encounters that are beyond the PCs from a combat perspective. I did not mean that the encounter would require them to flee, although I may have provided that as an option. It really depends on the circumstances and the intended goals of the group at the time, but I'd think that when PCs run up against a foe that is beyond them, there are usually several options that they can use....diplomacy, guile, stealth, magic, fleeing....it really depends on the campaign and the game world and many other factors. I definitely don't use these tactics to railroad players.

Maybe an example would help...the Millenium Falcon didn't assault the Death Star head on because doing so would be certain death. Instead, they tried to flee...but were then pulled in by a tractor beam. They then used a mix of many tactics to infiltrate the personnel and get what they came for.

I certainly never intended to imply that I put the PCs into a situation where they had no choice but to flee or die. However, what I want to avoid is my campaign's equivalent of Han Solo saying "Let's do this, boys" and fly head on at the Death Star with guns blazing....and then somehow succeed.

I believe that I mentioned this approach to the game in order to alter my players' perception that every potential combat they faced was winnable. I didn't want them to assume that just because this is a game that it meant they should engage in combat at all times assuming victory was possible. I mentioned other methods I use to help accomplish that as well. If I remember correctly this was about a group of PCs who didn't see an orc army as a threat. So that kind of set us on a discussion of aligning player and character "thought" as much as possible.

So having not been privy to this whole exchange between [MENTION=15700]Sacrosanct[/MENTION] and yourself, from the last few comments, I think perhaps he is citing that same conversation, or ones similar to it. Some folks like to take the monsters right out of the MM, plop them down into a battle map, and then not treat them as much more than obstacles for the PCs. Which means the stats are paramount and little attention seems to be paid to how such a creature may actually behave. Which can be fine...but it has an effect on player expectation.

I simply cannot view monsters or villains without also taking into consideration environment and tactics. Three elements that can all affect an encounter in drastic ways. Many folks seem to only want to have to worry about one of those three.

I hope this wound up being relevant to you guys' discussion. If not, then I'll attempt to get back on topic by saying of 4E monsters: I kind of liked minions, and that I agree with the others who mentioned that they liked having different tiers of humanoid villains, and that I wish 5E would do more of that.

 

[pemerton]

Some folks like to take the monsters right out of the MM, plop them down into a battle map, and then not treat them as much more than obstacles for the PCs. Which means the stats are paramount and little attention seems to be paid to how such a creature may actually behave.

But in the context of ENworld discussions, who are these folks?

I don't see many of them self-identifying. Rather, I see quite a few posters telling others that that's what they must be doing, because otherwise they wouldn't complain about monster stats.

To borrow from your analogy: if I was looking at playing a Star Wars game, and the mechanics for starship combat didn't allow drawing any sort of distinction between the manoeuvrability of a fighter and a Star Destroyer, I might express some disappointment about that. And it wouldn't be a helpful response to tell me that I need to be a more imaginative GM, or that I'm using my TIE fighters wrong.

I said I like to include encounters that are beyond the PCs from a combat perspective. I did not mean that the encounter would require them to flee, although I may have provided that as an option. It really depends on the circumstances and the intended goals of the group at the time, but I'd think that when PCs run up against a foe that is beyond them, there are usually several options that they can use....diplomacy, guile, stealth, magic, fleeing....it really depends on the campaign and the game world and many other factors. I definitely don't use these tactics to railroad players.

Maybe an example would help...the Millenium Falcon didn't assault the Death Star head on because doing so would be certain death. Instead, they tried to flee...but were then pulled in by a tractor beam. They then used a mix of many tactics to infiltrate the personnel and get what they came for.

<snip>

what I want to avoid is my campaign's equivalent of Han Solo saying "Let's do this, boys" and fly head on at the Death Star with guns blazing....and then somehow succeed.

This is an interesting analogy.

Many posters on these boards - at least, based on my past experience - would describe a hard scene-frame of the Millenium Falcon getting pulled into the Death Star as a railroad. I don't think it is - I've generally got nothing against hard scene-framing as long as the scene is interesting and engages/escalates the ongoing action of the game - but I wouldn't pretend it's an encounter. The players aren't expected to take action to avoid being sucked into the Death Star.

Another way to look at it is this: what does the GM actually say to the players, when the Death Star activates its tractor beam, or the red dragon turns up to talk to the 1st level PCs, or whatever? In my view: if the GM knows that the PCs have no hope of combat success, then s/he should just tell the players that. Why hide it? Presumaby no one is trying to trick the players into thinking that the dragon (of the Death Star) can be defeated - so why even make a show of leaving that option on the table? (@Sacrosanct talked about "smart play", but what's smart about guessing whether or not the GM thinks the fight is winnable?)

In other words, if a GM is going to hard scene-frame then I think that it is better to be upfront about it then pretend that something else is going on.

As far as non-combat options for action resolution are concerned, my view is that the best way to have players engage with non-combat options is to (i) have mechanics that make them a feasible choice, and (ii) have a game set-up where PCs (and their players) have a reason to care about something other than violence. I've personally always found that that's enough.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But in the context of ENworld discussions, who are these folks?

I don't see many of them self-identifying. Rather, I see quite a few posters telling others that that's what they must be doing, because otherwise they wouldn't complain about monster stats.

If it's the conversation I am recalling, and I could be wrong, but the OP of the thread described what would (read: should) be an incredibly dangerous encounter based solely on the enemies the party was going to face. The PCs in question defeated the enemies easily. The OP in question didn't seem to mind....so in that sense, more power to him at his table. But some folks suggested that in order for the enemies to be the threats that they should be, they need to be run by the DM as such.

Other posters then literally said "I want X monster to be threatening as is" meaning tactics and environment should not matter. Which I can somewhat understand the sentiment...but I think this stance taken to the extreme is absurd. I mean, to be a threat, a creature must behave in some way, correct? So the DM must apply some tactics. Since that's the case already, why not simply try and make those tactics be effective? Instead, the "need" for tactics was seen as a design weakness.

This led others, myself included, to draw the conclusion that it seemed that such folks want to be able to do as little work as possible with the monsters and villains. And maybe that isn't entirely accurate to what actually happens at those tables...but based on the info shared, that's how it seems.

And I am not even saying that playing the MM stars straight from the book with little else applied to an encounter is bad in and of itself. Just that to complain that higher level monsters are easily defeated when the DM certainly can do things to mitigate that seems a bit odd.

To borrow from your analogy: if I was looking at playing a Star Wars game, and the mechanics for starship combat didn't allow drawing any sort of distinction between the manoeuvrability of a fighter and a Star Destroyer, I might express some disappointment about that. And it wouldn't be a helpful response to tell me that I need to be a more imaginative GM, or that I'm using my TIE fighters wrong.

Sure. I would say that folks generally didnt just say "you're doing it wrong" it was more along he lines of "what if you try this" or "how about if you modify that". These suggestions are sometimes considered and become part of the discussion. Other times they are dismissed because they "should not be necessary" or because it means we're doing Crawford's homework for him or something.

This is an interesting analogy.

Many posters on these boards - at least, based on my past experience - would describe a hard scene-frame of the Millenium Falcon getting pulled into the Death Star as a railroad. I don't think it is - I've generally got nothing against hard scene-framing as long as the scene is interesting and engages/escalates the ongoing action of the game - but I wouldn't pretend it's an encounter. The players aren't expected to take action to avoid being sucked into the Death Star.

I don't try to railroad my players at all. I try to leave things up to them as much as O can. However, there is going to be some form of narrative thread that must be followed to at least some extent. Not sure if that's a railroad or not.

For me, to use the Star Wars example I gave...I'd likely see what the players did as the closed on the Death Star and realized their peril. The tractor beam would likely be my way of forcing the issue of it seemed they were going to do something foolish or something like that. Perhaps a bit railroady....but sometimes it doesn't always have to be a negative.

Another way to look at it is this: what does the GM actually say to the players, when the Death Star activates its tractor beam, or the red dragon turns up to talk to the 1st level PCs, or whatever? In my view: if the GM knows that the PCs have no hope of combat success, then s/he should just tell the players that. Why hide it? Presumaby no one is trying to trick the players into thinking that the dragon (of the Death Star) can be defeated - so why even make a show of leaving that option on the table? (@Sacrosanct talked about "smart play", but what's smart about guessing whether or not the GM thinks the fight is winnable?)

Well I never said I wanted to trick the players. I think that in general, when I set things up like this, the threat is clear. They're closing in on the Death Star...they've created a hill to see an entire orc army. They've encountered rival adventurers who seem far more powerful than they are.

My goal is to leave such decisions in the players' hands. I present the info and they decide what to do with it. If they don't seem to realize then I'll add more comments to try and make it clear. It's not an attempt to trick them. One of the reasons I do this is in order to affect how they view other encounters.

In other words, if a GM is going to hard scene-frame then I think that it is better to be upfront about it then pretend that something else is going on.

That's fair. I prefer a more "show don't tell" approach when possible.

As far as non-combat options for action resolution are concerned, my view is that the best way to have players engage with non-combat options is to (i) have mechanics that make them a feasible choice, and (ii) have a game set-up where PCs (and their players) have a reason to care about something other than violence. I've personally always found that that's enough.

Yeah, I would agree. I try to do both of those things at almost all times.

 

[Rhenny]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] I'm not sure what thread it was in, but I don't think I have commented in this one, so it must have been somewhere else. My knowledge of 4E is pretty limited, so I wouldn't feel all too confident to offer much in that regard.

Generally speaking, though, I think you missed my point or that I was unclear. I said I like to include encounters that are beyond the PCs from a combat perspective. I did not mean that the encounter would require them to flee, although I may have provided that as an option. It really depends on the circumstances and the intended goals of the group at the time, but I'd think that when PCs run up against a foe that is beyond them, there are usually several options that they can use....diplomacy, guile, stealth, magic, fleeing....it really depends on the campaign and the game world and many other factors. I definitely don't use these tactics to railroad players.

Maybe an example would help...the Millenium Falcon didn't assault the Death Star head on because doing so would be certain death. Instead, they tried to flee...but were then pulled in by a tractor beam. They then used a mix of many tactics to infiltrate the personnel and get what they came for.

I certainly never intended to imply that I put the PCs into a situation where they had no choice but to flee or die. However, what I want to avoid is my campaign's equivalent of Han Solo saying "Let's do this, boys" and fly head on at the Death Star with guns blazing....and then somehow succeed.

I believe that I mentioned this approach to the game in order to alter my players' perception that every potential combat they faced was winnable. I didn't want them to assume that just because this is a game that it meant they should engage in combat at all times assuming victory was possible. I mentioned other methods I use to help accomplish that as well. If I remember correctly this was about a group of PCs who didn't see an orc army as a threat. So that kind of set us on a discussion of aligning player and character "thought" as much as possible.

So having not been privy to this whole exchange between [MENTION=15700]Sacrosanct[/MENTION] and yourself, from the last few comments, I think perhaps he is citing that same conversation, or ones similar to it. Some folks like to take the monsters right out of the MM, plop them down into a battle map, and then not treat them as much more than obstacles for the PCs. Which means the stats are paramount and little attention seems to be paid to how such a creature may actually behave. Which can be fine...but it has an effect on player expectation.

I simply cannot view monsters or villains without also taking into consideration environment and tactics. Three elements that can all affect an encounter in drastic ways. Many folks seem to only want to have to worry about one of those three.

I hope this wound up being relevant to you guys' discussion. If not, then I'll attempt to get back on topic by saying of 4E monsters: I kind of liked minions, and that I agree with the others who mentioned that they liked having different tiers of humanoid villains, and that I wish 5E would do more of that.

I really like the Millennium Falcon example, [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]. To me, what it foregrounds is the idea that players need to know more clearly what is a "winnable" combat encounter and what will require more than just combat to survive, succeed, escape, etc. In 4e, there were more options for DMs to provide for a varied experience (with orcs for example), than core 5e, and minions did account for some of that. The thing is, because a party could see a group of orcs, and not know whether or not they were minions, lower level orcs, higher level orcs, etc. it could muddy the waters, making a situation seem ambiguous to a party. This required DMs to make sure they described the situation well enough to hint at the power level of the encounter, which is not always reliable. Yes, out of the box, DMs could use more variety in 4e, but ultimately, I think it led to more players just charging into combat even when the situation was actually more dangerous than it looked. The game (and the encounter design) seemed to rely on DMs setting more balanced encounters. I think this was one of the reasons why WoTC decided to start 5e with a limit on monster variety within species. BA and AC that doesn't scale with level (and other scaling statistics) make it much more clear,"what you see is what you get."

That said, I definitely like 4e monster design when it comes to giving more interesting powers/abilities to creatures, and making some higher level creatures basically unfightable for lower level PCs. That in itself fulfills the "what you see is what you get" criteria.

I agree with some that 5e requires DMs to tinker to get the level of power of monsters up to the scaled values of 4e, and to perhaps provide more challenge when using less foes and less encounters per day. But, 5e does not hide any of this. It is very transparent, thus easy to futz with. 4e was much harder to futz with.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I very rarely see anyone compare his/her own game to a boardgame. It's almost always a comparison I see made by others criticising those games (as you are doing here).

It's fine to prefer one's own game to others who are playing differently, but if you want to understand what those others are talking about you're going to have to go beyond pejorative labels.

Rather than do another wall of text reply that most people probably won't even read, I'm just gonna reply to a couple things that really stood out.

First is this, and it illustrates a problem (along with your earlier comment about implying I said you were a bad roleplayer earlier). If someone ignores the role-playing part (flavor, how would a monster act and behave, etc), and instead places the monsters down on the battlemap and literally treats them like game pieces, then they are in fact playing a board game. You cannot play a role playing game and ignore the role playing parts or else by definition it's not a roleplaying game. It's no different than playing Wrath of Ashardalon or something. However, that does not mean it's a pejorative label. This is one of my biggest issues here. You (and others) seem to think that any disagreement with you or your playstle is an insult to you and it's not. By pointing out how if you ignore the role-playing you're left with something more like a boardgame is neither good nor bad, it just is, by the definition of what role playing games are. If you want to play that way, knock yourself out but it's important to realize that that is not how the game is designed nor expected to be played. I see your type of response I just quoted often, almost as much as people accusing others of badwrong fun. I.e. "I don't play the game as it was designed, but rather than me take ownership of that, I'm gonna say the game is broken and if you don't agree, then you're accusing me of badwrong fun and you're wrong for doing so!"

If someone who likes to haul things buys a porche, and if they complain about how the porche does a bad job filling their needs, it's not me being the bad guy for pointing out how they are using a car not designed for what they want.

But in the context of ENworld discussions, who are these folks?.

And this type of response is why I say I am doubtful for believing you. Why? Because you know who they are. We just had a thread by CaptZapp in the past week or so where a few people made these arguments. I find the feigning ignorance to be disingenuous. Almost as much as your earlier post when you asked where did the expectations of always winning encounters coming from and immediately posting about how Gygax said encounters should be balanced for PCs to win. "I don't know where people got that idea from, now here's a quote of where people got that from."

 

[Argyle King]

I really like the Millennium Falcon example, [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]. To me, what it foregrounds is the idea that players need to know more clearly what is a "winnable" combat encounter and what will require more than just combat to survive, succeed, escape, etc. In 4e, there were more options for DMs to provide for a varied experience (with orcs for example), than core 5e, and minions did account for some of that. The thing is, because a party could see a group of orcs, and not know whether or not they were minions, lower level orcs, higher level orcs, etc. it could muddy the waters, making a situation seem ambiguous to a party. This required DMs to make sure they described the situation well enough to hint at the power level of the encounter, which is not always reliable. Yes, out of the box, DMs could use more variety in 4e, but ultimately, I think it led to more players just charging into combat even when the situation was actually more dangerous than it looked. The game (and the encounter design) seemed to rely on DMs setting more balanced encounters. I think this was one of the reasons why WoTC decided to start 5e with a limit on monster variety within species. BA and AC that doesn't scale with level (and other scaling statistics) make it much more clear,"what you see is what you get."

That said, I definitely like 4e monster design when it comes to giving more interesting powers/abilities to creatures, and making some higher level creatures basically unfightable for lower level PCs. That in itself fulfills the "what you see is what you get" criteria.

I agree with some that 5e requires DMs to tinker to get the level of power of monsters up to the scaled values of 4e, and to perhaps provide more challenge when using less foes and less encounters per day. But, 5e does not hide any of this. It is very transparent, thus easy to futz with. 4e was much harder to futz with.

Even as someone who has a history of being somewhat anti-4E, I'm not sure that I'd agree that 5E is easier to "futz with." At lot of 5E parts are hard-baked into the game. While, to some extent, I'd say that's also true of 4E, I felt a lot more confident that changing something in 4E wouldn't cause many other parts of the game to break. With 4E, the results of my change might not have been immediately apparent, and maybe I ended up frustrated with undesirable results a few times, but I didn't feel that the end result was difficult to build upon or tweak. If I came to unsatisfactory results, it mostly due to WoTC designing the edition worth a mindset that was often diametrically opposed to what I wanted, and not because the rules were necessarily bad.

Maybe there are some ways in which 5E is easier to change, but I'm not sure if that's reality or illusion in the same way that 3E was flexible. 3E was very flexible, but something being broken or producing odd results often wasn't obvious because the system was already somewhat broken as a default state. (Though I still feel that 3E was a massive achievement in the context of the time it was released.) I do not feel confident that the changes I want to make to 5E are easy to do. I see a lot of transparencies at the surface, but I do not see much beyond a rather shallow depth before it gets murky for me. Sometimes I wonder if that's because I can't see or if it's because the depth isn't there.

To be completely fair, I'm willing to admit that this may be a lack of experience on my part. 5E stands as the edition I've spent the least amount of time with. Still, I feel that the length of time between picking up 4E and feeling confident enough with it to change it was far shorter than the time between picking up 5E and feeling as though I could dig deeply into changing the system. I'd even go so far as to say that there were parts of third edition that I found easier. Perhaps one of my own failings is that I haven't found the 5E DMG to be particularly helpful. I find both the layout and the presentation of information to be somewhat unintuitive.

 

[Sage Genesis]

In 4e there was a steady progress of bonuses, so monsters needed variants to be used at higher level. But they could have been the same monster with increased bonuses, hp, and defences. Each higher level variant didn't need new attacks or powers. There are 93 variants of orcs in 4e, ranging in level from 1 to 27

We didn't need an orc freak, and orc scout, orc raider, orc harrier, and orc reaver all with completely different attacks. There could have just been a level 1 orc raider, a level 2 orc raider, etc.

Quick fact check: that's not quite true.

When you type in "orc" in the DDI compendium you do get 93 results, but that also includes half-orcs, Tanarukks, and a surprising amount of unique characters who happen to be an orc or half-orc. It's like complaining you have too many human variants just because some module happened to include human NPCs.

There's also several unique setting-specific factions, such as the Ghaash'kala from Eberron.

The highest "orcs" in the list are the souls which Gruumsh himself called to join his divine horde after their death, making them divine entities which ascended from mortal stock, closer to Vecna or St Cuthbert than just regular old savage tribesmen. Yes, we could complain that they're high level orcs, but that's really contrary to the point of their in-game flavor.


The highest level regular old orc is just level 12, the Orc Mercenary from "Revenge of the Giants". Funnily enough, the Mercenary is just the level 3 Orc Raider except leveled up a bit so that it could fit in will with the rest of the monsters in that adventure. That suggestion you made, that they needed higher level variants instead of brand new version with completely different attacks? That is exactly what this is. They did exactly what you say they should have done.

 

[Rhenny]

Even as someone who has a history of being somewhat anti-4E, I'm not sure that I'd agree that 5E is easier to "futz with." At lot of 5E parts are hard-baked into the game. While, to some extent, I'd say that's also true of 4E, I felt a lot more confident that changing something in 4E wouldn't cause many other parts of the game to break. With 4E, the results of my change might not have been immediately apparent, and maybe I ended up frustrated with undesirable results a few times, but I didn't feel that the end result was difficult to build upon or tweak. If I came to unsatisfactory results, it mostly due to WoTC designing the edition worth a mindset that was often diametrically opposed to what I wanted, and not because the rules were necessarily bad.

Maybe there are some ways in which 5E is easier to change, but I'm not sure if that's reality or illusion in the same way that 3E was flexible. 3E was very flexible, but something being broken or producing odd results often wasn't obvious because the system was already somewhat broken as a default state. (Though I still feel that 3E was a massive achievement in the context of the time it was released.) I do not feel confident that the changes I want to make to 5E are easy to do. I see a lot of transparencies at the surface, but I do not see much beyond a rather shallow depth before it gets murky for me. Sometimes I wonder if that's because I can't see or if it's because the depth isn't there.

To be completely fair, I'm willing to admit that this may be a lack of experience on my part. 5E stands as the edition I've spent the least amount of time with. Still, I feel that the length of time between picking up 4E and feeling confident enough with it to change it was far shorter than the time between picking up 5E and feeling as though I could dig deeply into changing the system. I'd even go so far as to say that there were parts of third edition that I found easier. Perhaps one of my own failings is that I haven't found the 5E DMG to be particularly helpful. I find both the layout and the presentation of information to be somewhat unintuitive.

I get what you mean. Admittedly, I'm an old timer who began playing/DMing D&D late 70s early 80s so for me, 5e (which harkens back to the days of yore) is more comfortable than 4e, which, to me, changed a lot of the preconceived mechanics/ideas used in D&D.

The funny thing about my experience with 4e was that I really enjoyed it for a while, and found it much easier to DM than 3e/3.5e, but after a while I just felt trapped by it. I became too worried about the plethora of powers/abilities of different classes, and became too aware of the scaling treadmill to appreciate it over a longer time period.

But still, the way monsters did interesting things (and they were included in the stat blocks) was great.

 

[Argyle King]

For me, I wouldn't say that I ever felt trapped by 4E, there simply came a point to when the game seemed determined to evolve in a direction that I didn't want to go. After a certain point, I rarely bought books because I was drifting in a direction that wasn't the way that later 4E was going. Later books sought to solve problems with the game that I did feel were problems, but the official solutions to those problems went a different way than I wanted to.

In the case of 5E, I feel like I don't have a clear idea of what kind of game it is intended to be. I don't feel very comfortable with running the game. I'm not so sure that I clearly understand the mentality behind the design. Words like "modular" and "bounded accuracy" have turned out to mean things that are different from how I'd use those terms. At the end of the day, I just honestly don't feel confident in my ability to run a 5E game. Part of that is due to feeling like I don't grasp the layout of the DMG very well. Part of that is due to feeling like I do not have a clear idea about what kind of game 5E is meant to be. By contrast, 4E may have had a philosophy which clashed with my own, but it was a philosophy that I could see and understand. I often find difficulty in navigating 5E's DMG.

My familiarity with editions of D&D largely starts with 3rd Edition. I like reading the 2nd Edition stuff, but my experience with playing it is virtually zero. I have even less experience with playing 1st Edition. I am familiar with some of the old adventures though. As a player, I've experienced them, but the DM was using a different set of rules. (I learned to play GURPS via an old Greyhawk adventure.)

I have some experience with Pathfinder.

Outside of D&D, the games that I most frequently play are GURPS 4th Edition and Edge of The Empire.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I really like the Millennium Falcon example, [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]. To me, what it foregrounds is the idea that players need to know more clearly what is a "winnable" combat encounter and what will require more than just combat to survive, succeed, escape, etc. In 4e, there were more options for DMs to provide for a varied experience (with orcs for example), than core 5e, and minions did account for some of that. The thing is, because a party could see a group of orcs, and not know whether or not they were minions, lower level orcs, higher level orcs, etc. it could muddy the waters, making a situation seem ambiguous to a party. This required DMs to make sure they described the situation well enough to hint at the power level of the encounter, which is not always reliable. Yes, out of the box, DMs could use more variety in 4e, but ultimately, I think it led to more players just charging into combat even when the situation was actually more dangerous than it looked. The game (and the encounter design) seemed to rely on DMs setting more balanced encounters. I think this was one of the reasons why WoTC decided to start 5e with a limit on monster variety within species. BA and AC that doesn't scale with level (and other scaling statistics) make it much more clear,"what you see is what you get."

That said, I definitely like 4e monster design when it comes to giving more interesting powers/abilities to creatures, and making some higher level creatures basically unfightable for lower level PCs. That in itself fulfills the "what you see is what you get" criteria.

I agree with some that 5e requires DMs to tinker to get the level of power of monsters up to the scaled values of 4e, and to perhaps provide more challenge when using less foes and less encounters per day. But, 5e does not hide any of this. It is very transparent, thus easy to futz with. 4e was much harder to futz with.

Yeah I think you're right about why 5E doesn't have that scaling enemy factor, where there was a suitable orc or gnoll threat for just about any level. I think it kind of achieved the opposite effect of what I hope to achieve....the players knew that the enemies before them were level appropriate.

In 5E, I essentially do the same thing myself. I create orcs that are more of a threat to a level 8 party, let's say. But because it's something I've done on my own, my players aren't privy to it, so it's unexpected. It makes them view orcs a little differently. Now, I don't rely on this alone because I don't want every instance of the party running into an or. To become a debate about how tough he may be....so I reibforce it with description and narrative elements.

I think 4E perhaps went a bit too far with how many versions of each creature they provided, but I liked that aspect of the game. I also agree that monsters tended to have more varied abilities baked in. Mostly, I liked that...sometimes I thought it was being done out of habit rather than as some kind of synergy between theme and mechanics.

Ultimately, I want my players to think of the fictional world as closely to their characters as possible. I think when an army of orcs doesn't cause a PC to blink, or when several high level threats are easily defeated, that works counter to that goal.