People are afraid of the unknown.
This may be true, but in an RPG the monster generally aren't unknown in the relevant sense. They are imaginary constructs.
Those kinds of measures are either an illusion (in that they don't take into account the complexity of the scenario and don't truly reflect its level of challenge) or a limitation (in that they impose a style of play on a freeform game with diverse players-bad idea).
Or a mathematical measure of the mechanical capabilities of the NPC/monster, and - on the strength of those - the mechanical challenge it poses to a generic Nth level PC.
if you're going to take this approach, why have stats at all? Why not just have one table that says "this is your percentage chance of success: easy/medium/hard" and roll that for every challenge that comes up regardless of what choices the PCs or the DM make? The whole point of having these rules rather than playing a freeform rpg is that the players know the difference.
TIf the point of that monster's stats is to provide a certain challenge, why give it any stats at all? Why not just say that for all fighters, whenever they attack a "boss" they have to roll a 15 to hit, and have to hit it twenty times to kill it? Why give the monster all these details like ability scores and hit points if its purpose is truly that narrow?
In order to provide choices to players, in both creation and execution. 4E characters are complex. The complexity of monsters + the complexity of characters means that there are different choices to be made in order to achieve your goal (killing the monster without getting killed in return, usually), with some ways better than others.
LostSoul's answer is probably sufficient. All I would add is that it can go beyond "kill without being killed" to various ways of expressing the PC, and of making thematically or dramatically relevant choices. Have a look at some of the actual play examples I link to below, and you will see some of that in action.
I don't scare my PCs by "putting their PCs in situations which will require clever and challenging play to resolve" of by telling them that what they see is of a certain level or manner of challenge; I scare them by putting them in situations that none of us know how they will resolve or whether or not they will resolve.
You seem to be drawing a contrast that I don't feel the force of. There is no relation between a need for clever and challenging play to resolve, and knowing how things will resolve.
I believe that's called "DM cheating". This isn't a pejorative term; it simply describes when DMs go outside the rules to make a better game.
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I don't want a combat system that says "when a character's hit points drop to -10, that character is dead, unless the DM thinks he deserves to live" or a skill system that says "the search DC to find a secret door is 20, unless the DM is in a hurry to get home, in which case it is whatever the PC rolls". Likewise, I don't want a monster system that says "this monster has enough extra actions per round to make the battle really tough" or "this monster has few enough hit points that the PCs kill it automatically with one hit".
My own view is that there is, in general, a very big difference between build mechanics (for monsters, NPCs, PCs, etc) and action resolution mechanics. You are eliding that distinction here, and assimilating monster building to a species of action resolution: it's not entirely clear what the action in question is, but something like "ecological occurrences within the gameworld". I am not saying that that is not a valid way to play, but it is a pretty narrow approach. The only RPG that I am aware of that fully embraces it is Classic Traveller. (3E and HARP have a veneer of embracing it, but use various techniques like "natural armour" in 3E, and "survival instinct" in HARP, to get around some of the consequences for playability of such an approach. Because Traveller is a sci-fi game with extremely flat maths, it does not need such kludges in order to work.)
I've yet to see the "flexible monster creation destroyed my game" example or even the "encounter based design is totally fun" example.
Here are some actual play examples posted from my 4e game. They illustrate encounter-based play in action. And here is a
blog by Eero Tuovinen explaining the general rationale of and techniques for encounter-based (= scene-based) play (you can find it under the heading "The standard narrativistic model").
given that the DM does control all characters and events that are outside of the PCs' direct control, there is always going to be a "very strong degree of GM force", isn't there?
What you say, here, is a given, is in fact not. Leaving aside whatever power the PCs enjoy to introduce NPCs into the game, and to control their actions to some greater or lesser extent (fellow cult members, family members, gods and patrons, etc), there is also the determination of what such characters do via the action resolution mechanics.
The actual play post linked above by the word "some" is an example of this: in the fiction, the PCs successfully goaded their nemesis, with whom they were dining as guests of the Baron, into attacking them, thereby revealing his treachery to the Baron. In play, this was the result of a successful skill challenge, and hence not under my control (as GM) at all, but rather determined by playing the game. That is how scene-based play works: of course, it needs the action resolution mechanics to support it. 4e is the only version of D&D to date to have robust mechanics of that sort.
In any case, I'll take "GM force" over "game designer force" any day.
I don't understand "game designer force". The game designer doesn't force anyone to do anything, nor exercise any control over the content of the game. It's the players, after all, who choose which system to use to generate their shared fiction! All a designer can do is provide useful tools.
The mechanics themselves are designed to facilitate a very narrow playstyle (the "gamist" style advocated by Rouse, Mearls, etc.)
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If you want to run a roughly six round combat against a group of four PCs of a particular level that causes them to use a predictable percentage of their resources before predictably winning, the encounter-based monster design approach probably makes your life easier.
The notion of percentage-of-resources attrition is found only in the 3E DMG. It is a notion that has no work to do in 4e, and does not appear in any 4e rulebook. 4e is, to a signficant extent, not a resource-based game in the way that 3E, and before that classic D&D, are. This is part of what makes it highly suitable for scene-based play.
I also get the feeling you are not that familiar with scene-based play, given that you equate it with something that no text on scene-based play has ever advocated, namely, running a sequence of roughly six-round combats to generate a predictable rate of resource attrition. The best book on scene-based play that I know of is the Burning Wheel Adventuer Burner, although the Eero Tuovinen blog I linked to above is pretty good too, and so is Robin Laws' HeroQuest revised. Encounter-based, or scene-based, play, is about a certain approach to framing situations - namely, by reference to hooks the players provide to the GM, rather than the more traditional GM plot hook - and about the resolution of them, with the focus of the action being within the scene, rather than the transition between scenes.
This also has nothing particularly to do with gamism, as [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] already pointed out. While there can be good scene-based gamism (I don't play supers RPGs, but I think that would be one common way to approach them) there can also be exploration-based gamism (Gygaxian D&D is the classic example of this, with Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain as the poster children).
In D&D (as opposed to in some rpgs), characters are so powerful that they usually come up with something, but the possibility of different outcomes, including failure, is still present.
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If I knew that a certain battle was expected to be defeated by my party in six rounds, I would roll no dice, tell the party they beat the enemies in a short battle, and move on to the good stuff.
I don't entirely follow all the points here. You seem to be assuming that encounter-based play involves no possibility of failure, for example. That is not true. You also seem to be assuming that the manner in which something is resolved makes no difference to it's resolution, which is in my experience radically untrue. If the PCs resolve their negotiations with the slave traders by agreeing to redeem the slaves, for example, that makes a huge difference to things. If the PCs kill rather than temporarily disable the door guardians placed by the Raven Queen, that also might make a pretty big difference, especially if some of the PCs are devotees of the Raven Queen.
Such a battle would certainly not empower the PCs
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it reflects designer fiat. Whoever wrote the monster has apparently already decided what will happen at your table.
I don't understand why you say this. Nor what exactly you mean by "designer fiat". Nor what you mean by "empowering the PCs" - my interest is in player empowerment, which can be possible even with a feeble PC (eg a certain sort of "lazy warlord" build, in 4e).
I can tell you that when the PCs in my game encountered Kas (link above, under "play") and Calastryx (link above, under "examples") the outcome was not foreordained or known in advance, as you can see by reading the actual play examples.
I full well expect that 3e's mentality is much harder for the designers because they have to cover a much wider range of possibilities for what a monster can be or do.
Wider than what? The 3E monsters that I'm familiar with are not remarkably wide it what they can be or do. Once action moves beyond combat, they have the same fairly thin action resolution elements as any other 3E story element.
It's as neutral as it gets. You spend as much or as little time building the monster as you want. You can plan with maximum depth or you can improvise with unprecedented ease. You can build monsters as flexibly as PCs, meaning you can make them do whatever you want. What playstyle is not supported by that?
3E monster building is hopeless for my purposes. As I noted above, it tries to assimilate monster and NPC building to action resolution. In doing so it prioritises petty issues of world exploration ("Is the dragon's natural armour bonus +22 or +23?") which are in any event a thin veneer for issues of playability (what, in the gameworld, does it even mean to have +22 or +23 natural armour, given that the most powerful magical plate mail tops out at +13 or so?). And it dose not prioritise the expression, in play, by means of the action resolution mechanics, of the monster's essence. Whereas 4e reverses these two priorities.
And if you think that the ease of improvisation with 3E is unprecedented, I want to know what range of games you're basing that on. 4e admittedly is not a precedent - coming later, as it does - but fantasy RPGs that I can think of that make improvisation easier include Rolemaster (but not HARP), HeroWars/Quest, Tunnels & Trolls and at least arguably RuneQuest.
having the tools laid out in front of you makes it so much easier to skip out on prep work and improvise. It's easy to take monsters and hack them on the fly when they have predictable rules for advancement.
Rolemaster, Tunnels & Trolls and 4e all have easier advancement mechanics than 3E.
I looked at the 4e monster manual, and the thought of having to break everything apart and rewrite the entire thing just to make it marginally usable was not appealing.
This gives me the impression that you didn't look at the section of the 4e DMG that already pulls it apart for you.
I believe that some DMs are and have been overworked.
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I don't believe is that the mechanical constructs at issue caused the initial overwork, or that any changes to them necessarily effected the anecdotally positive experiences some have reported.
Whereas, in what I quoted a little bit above, you implied that mechanics, and transparent advancement, can make GMing easier, here you appear to deny that mechanics make much difference. I think the first of these two positions is the correct one, but I do not think that 3E has the virtue in this respect that you claim for it, when compared to a range of other mainstream fantasy RPGs, including 4e.
I run many styles, multiple systems
Out of curiosity, what systems do you run other than 3E D&D and variants thereof?
