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Message: <blockquote data-quote="slobster" data-source="post: 6002025" data-attributes="member: 6693711">I'm just a little younger than you, and have a similar history with D&D. I did start with AD&D, but by the time I really got into it 3E was just coming out. It definitely forms the baseline of what I consider the D&D experience.I like 4th, but I do think that 3.x did some things better. Everything that 4th did is not, in fact, superior to 3.x by the sole virtue of being new.The converse is also true. Not everything in 3.x is better by virtue of being classic.Giving monsters levels is already an abstraction, but one that is necessary for good gameplay. A monster with vastly mismatched offensive and defensive capabilities is going to be an uneven challenge and difficult for the GM to run. Thus I suffer the level system for monsters to continue, even though realistically speaking I could see a monster with massive AC but crappy attacks as being a possibility. Instead all monsters have a level, which largely determines the range of their attack bonuses, hp, defenses, damage abilities, and so on.With that abstraction granted, I don't see a further abstraction in the form of elite/solo tags as being a problem. They serve a definite purpose, as I and others have pointed out. They give the GM guidance that is helpful to produce the game she wants to run. They grant capabilities not already served by the level system. They are no more decoupled from the fiction of the game universe than arbitrarily assigning levels to monsters already is.If you don't want solos anywhere near your game, don't use them. But this is an instance where including rules for them is a large value for me and people like me. It's work that I couldn't necessarily do myself, involving the mathematics of the system which I don't have access to or the ability to playtest out my own version of. On the other hand, for people like you, it's trivially easy to ignore.It seems to make sense to include it.</blockquote>

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