delericho
Legend
Aloïsius said:Rules transparency between monsters and PC , and the mathematic formulae in the MM seemed a great improvement
I've been thinking more about this recently, and I've fond myself wondering if it's not the case that this actually was a good idea, and should have been retained, but that the specific implementation didn't perform as expected.
The classic example of a weakness of this that gets thrown up is the Giant with the extremely high Fort saves and virtually no Will save... but I can't help but think that the problem there is the massive difference between 'good' and 'poor' saves (gone in 4e). I'm also wondering if perhaps the Giant 'class' should not have had a hit dice of 2d8 per level, giving a big boost in hit points without a matching boost in saves, BAB, and so forth (or, perhaps better, give each monster 'class' a fixed number of hp per level, with Giants getting 10 or 12, or even more).
I get really uneasy whenever I hear the designers commenting that, "designing X is really more art than science." Firstly, these things are basically mathematical entities, which strongly suggests that it's a matter of science. Perhaps more importantly, though, Andy Collins' 'art' might well not match Mike Mearls 'art', and James Wyatt's 'art' might be entirely different again. At least a properly-checked mathematical system provides a consistent baseline, even if some of the results aren't exactly right; what guarantees of consistency do we have without it. (That should not be read as a bash on 4e - just something that makes me uneasy.)