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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 9154649" data-attributes="member: 87792">It is clear you don't understand the problems. That they are a miserable failure for new DMs - and that new DMs are the people who most need tools.I'd forgotten that but this is correct. As is the fact that about half of these traits don't adjust the CR. And also (as a pet hate) these aren't actually traits - these are pointers to traits that mean you need to cross-reference the monster manual.And this is the basic problem. If you have already mastered the system you can get good results. If you just read the system and try and do the obvious things it gives you complete crap. They are not user friendly and do not work out of the box for the most basic examples.A system that gives you terrible monsters unless you actively master and push the system is terrible when it comes to the single most important thing - making things easy for newbies to learn to DM because there is a lot to learn.Meanwhile every single monster you made in 4e both had a role and had at least a decent balance once they fixed the maths in the MM3. There was no equivalent to the awful CR 1/2 monster I posted that is not just RAW but actively using the default options.Which means that it is absolutely necessary that they should work when the offence and the defence are both kept in balance. They don't. They fail hard.They only work properly when you push the systems far away from the default at low levels. They actively give you a strongly negative play experience if you leave the settings anywhere near the defaults at low levels. Which means that for any sort of tentative DM who is trying to run their first campaign they are quite literally worse than useless, actively leading to bad games. Even the 3.X monster design rules did a better job at teaching newbies and making it easy for them to give good results. Now it might be that all that needs fixing is rebalancing the offence and defence below about CR 2. But this is the single most important section of these rules for the single most important function of the DMG. And that the rules are a completely miserable failure at the most basic and most important functions means that yes I haven't delved into them more deeply.</blockquote>

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