Well that's out of left field. Again, I have no stake in things that happened before I was born. I do, however, dislike rules that unbalance D&D's delicate balance between competitive and noncompetitive playstyles and effectively exclude people from the game because they do not fit the mold. Monster roles are an example of this kind of mechanic.
Huh?
You admit that slapping the Solo tag onto something in no way affects whether or not a given encounter will be resolved with combat or non-combat. Yet, here you're saying that slapping the solo tag on something means that it will unbalance the delicate balance between combat and non-combat?
Isn't that like saying adding 4 levels of barbarian to an orc to make an orc chief (3e style) or using an ogre's stats (pre-3e style) or adding the solo tag (4e style) makes ANY difference in how the encounter plays out.
At no point is the Orc Chief going to be a standard 1st level warrior straight out of the monster manual. There is absolutely no difference in play as to whether this will be a combat or non-combat encounter.
The difference is in the recognition of action economy, which is a 4e innovation. Simply jacking up the orc to a ogre worked reasonably well in AD&D because the monsters were generally so weak. An ogre only did a couple of points more in damage on average than an orc (d8 vs d10) and its AC was only a couple of points different. Add in some flunkies (which were effectively minions in most cases anyway - they died in one hit) and you were good to go.
I remember in 2e setting up an encounter with an Ancient Red dragon, the biggest thing in the monster manual, buckets and buckets of hit points, only to watch the 10th level party obliterate it in a couple of rounds. 2e characters were EXTREMELY good at dealing damage.
3e made things a bit more difficult because it massively added to the workload of the DM. Instead of simply flipping to a different monster, you were supposed to build the new monster like a PC, a process that was neither simple nor fast. And, the problem was, because the monster damage progressions scaled so sharply, jacking up the monster a few levels turned the game into rocket tag. By and large, the best encounters in 3e involved 2-5 monsters. Single monster encounters were often lackluster. I remember the party finally meeting the Tarrasque, smoking it in 2 rounds without a single loss of hit points. Two or three heal spells is all the fight cost.
It took 4e's recognition of the action economy to finally make single monster encounters into something that didn't turn into balloon popping contests. Note, they didn't get it right at first, as evidenced by the first Monster Manual. When people talk about 4e solo's, they're talking about what came a few Monster Manuals later (MM3?) and the changes that came with that.
One of the biggest innovations in 4e was breaking out of the standard initiative model which had been relatively unchanged since OD&D - you rolled your init, and you could ONLY act on your init. Breaking out of that, which is what makes solos work, is a fantastic idea.
