NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bbjore" data-source="post: 6001477" data-attributes="member: 27539">As a DM, I think the minion, elite, standard, and solo designators for monsters was one of the greatest parts of 4E. It told me how to make a monster specifically designed to be a challenged for a group vs. monsters designed to work together as a group to challenge another group. I never had a need to use a Solo again later on, because there was a standard monster to take it place, or I made it up on the fly. Truth be told, the monster design aspect of the game was so beautifully simple, I never had to use a monster manual except as inspiration for new tricks to give the monsters I designed on the fly when the PCs decided to fight. I used whichever stats made for the best encounter at that time. I wasn't hindered by some need to have all ogres have the same hp or anything like that nor did I require that for an ogre to be better, it had to have class levels or templates. The game just went and said monster math works differently than PCs, because that's faster and easier for the DM. Minions had only 1 hp, because it was easy to track, not because a cat could kill them with one hit. That's what it's all about.The game looked at the DM, said the DM didn't have to play by the same rules or try and simulate a real world. The DM was supposed to make a good adventure. Here are the tools that make that easier. There isn't a version of D&D out that that makes it easier, and I haven't seen a similar game with an encounter design system that makes it so easy to design an appropriate challenge as a DM, especially on the fly.In 4E solos are tougher than the PCs and have powers that will put the hurt on the PCs as well as make for interesting encounters even by themselves. This is probably why they are in charge of all the other mooks around them. It's not the tag that did this, it is the nature of the creature, just like a monster four levels higher than the PCs is also tougher. I don't really see the difference other than in naming, and that a Solo is easier to design and makes for a better fight because it is specifically designed to fight multiple PCs at once.</blockquote>

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