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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9814713" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Does it?Because that exact thing is the problem. You've locked monsters into being one, and only one, kind of progression. But the purpose monsters fulfill within the abstraction that is the game doesn't progress that way. I agree that having numbers has its uses, but those uses are vastly outweighed by how much they hem you in as almost all of your GMing hats: the rules-adjudicator, the world-drafter, and the (I know you're going to hate this one) storyteller. When creatures work by precisely the same rules as characters, you as rules-adjudicator cannot ensure that (as I mention below) the specific, intended experience that characters really do survive/escape most combats, while monsters almost never do (with "capture" counted among "not surviving/not escaping").Unfortunately, that's where you--and most fans of this approach--are wrong.The "fix" IS the "overboard". There is no separation between the two. Doing to D&D the thing you call a "fix" will always produce that, unless you build the entire system, top to bottom, to be what is needed. And that's......where point-buy enters. A truly point-buy game from the ground up, one where actually every character is assembled from disparate pieces, actually does put all entities on the same footing. It abandons some of the premises that went into D&D's design which separate the role of monsters from the role of characters. Unless and until you abandon those premises, you can't get a game that puts things on the same footing. Characters have genuine classes, have full articulation of a bunch of built-in stuff. Monsters/opponents don't. Characters are meant to survive through an indefinite number of encounters. Monsters/opponents aren't. Characters frequently carry significant spent-across-the-day resources. Monsters/opponents can't--because they're going to blow their whole load all at once, massively exceeding the design limits.When you move to true, pure point-buy, all of the above is taken care of in looking at the budget for each creature, since you're, y'know, building them yourself, piece by piece, and you can directly tabulate precisely what each monster is. You know, down to a very fine grain, what each monster is--so you know precisely how much you're challenging the players. That's not possible in a class-based, asymmetrically-balanced, "daily"-resources (or other long-period resources) design paradigm. By moving to pure point-buy, where even having a single "daily" resource is something you had to buy, you break that connection.D&D monster design doesn't work that way. It's all hunches and hard-coding. The latter is what traps you into the progression, the former makes it so putting a threat outside of a narrow set of contexts breaks that progression. The in-built design assumptions do you in.And those hard numbers being identical to player numbers is what causes the "overboard".Having numbers is fine! But making it so those numbers have to be locked into one, and only one, progression--numbers that must always work precisely the same as the players' progression--is what causes the "overboard" you lament. It can't be separated...unless, as noted, you go to true, fundamental point-buy. Do that--abandon the class-based, asymmetrically-balanced, variable-resource-schedule structure--and you can perfectly achieve the goal you've set out for.The game just won't look very much like D&D anymore.</blockquote>

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