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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4699046" data-attributes="member: 40961">Wow. 4e doesn't do what you said. And 3e doesn't do what you said. 4e gives you arrays of balanced stats for every level of monster.  It doesn't say you should start there.  It just tells you things like, "If you want a monster to be a level 12 threat and hit hard, this is the damage it should have."  So if your concept is, say, an ogre who has received military training and wears heavy armor, 4e would say to conceptualize what you want that monster to be, lets say a level 12 soldier, and then to use stats that make a good level 12 soldier, and then finally to add on one or two trademark abilities that will make the monster memorably ogrish and militant.  You can see this design philosophy in every monster from level 1 onwards.  Take a basic kobold skirmisher- its got good stats for a skirmisher that threatens level 1 or 2 pcs, its got a trademark kobold abilty (shifty), and its got a trademark skirmisher ability (bonuses with combat advantage).  Bingo, you're done. And your view on 3e is wildly off.  Instead of giving you an array of expected values, 3e attempts to procedurally generate those expected values by adding together hit dice and levels like Legos.  So if your concept is the aforementioned ogre with military training, it would suggest starting with an ogre, and then adding levels of fighter.  Eventually, as you add levels of fighter, you will reach a CR you find appropriate, and you stop.  Sometimes this worked very well.  Othertimes it created three common problems.  First, its a lot of work sometimes for not a lot of benefit.  Had the game just told you the target values, you could have assigned them instead of procedurally generating them by advancing hit dice and class levels.  Second, you could confuse the system by combining things that didn't work well together, or by adding in unpredicted extras- an ogre with 4 more levels of monstrous humanoid and a club is a very different difficulty foe from an ogre with 4 levels of fighter, magical platemail armor, and a magical shield, even though both are technically the same CR.  Had the system focused more on assigning CR to the end result instead of procedurally generating an end result with a procedurally predicted CR, this wouldn't have happened.  Finally, it tended to lead to most humanoid opponents being about the same, since they all used the same pc and npc classes as they advanced.  That's where 4e's focus on racial trademark abilities was born- you always know you're fighting kobolds because they're shifty.  You always know you're fighting hobgoblins because they shake off dehabilitating effects.  That applies whether you're fighting level 1 kobolds or custom designed level 25 epic kobold ninja assassin wizards. 4e gives you a bit more of a "behind the scenes" take on monster creation.  The positive side of this is that it does almost everything 3e's monster creation rules could do, except better and more.  The negative side is the one thing 4e's monster creation rules can't do- create monster PCs.  The other pseudo-negative is that it breaks DM's suspension of disbelief, because instead of imagining a real ogre who goes to fighter school for a while and emerges with four levels of fighter and some fancy equipment, they're delving into numbers to craft a balanced and thematic monster.  I only consider that a pseudo-negative though, because I don't think DMs should have a suspension of disbelief.  Its kind of like the little man behind the curtain complaining that he just doesn't find the Great Oz all that believable.  Meanwhile, the system does focus reasonably well on making the monsters more believable for the players, through the aforementioned use of racial and role/class trademark abilities and the design philosophy of combat lasting long enough for these trademarks to be used.</blockquote>

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