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Message: <blockquote data-quote="catastrophic" data-source="post: 5671439" data-attributes="member: 81381">No edition holds a candle to 4e in this respect. In previous editions, monsters have mostly been bags of hit points. In 4e, the only way they are uniform is they they have a uniformly high level of individualisty and distinctiveness.  This is not accurate in the slightest. 4e monsters do not have those qualties. In fact, it's earlier editions that have the uniform attack/damage or claw/claw/bite, while 4e monsters have all sorts of versatility in how they attack and defend, how much damage they deal and can take, and how they react to, for instance, becoming bloodied or having various effects or kinds of damage applied to them.  This is also not the case. Prior to 4e, dms had a laughably limited pallete of options for encounters. Only with 4e have monsters become genuinly versatile and distinctive, and has it become viable to build encounters around them. There is plenty of interest and diversity in 4e, far more so than previous editions. And the balance plays a key role in this diversity- it's only because the features of the system are well balanced, that using them on a monster makes for meaningful gameplay.  For instance, forced movement matters in the game, so monsters using it have a real, distinct impact on the game, as opposed to monster using say, ongoing damage. This in contrast to previous editions, where the powers monsters (and indeed, pcs) have were often completly imbalanced, and as a result, fights rarely if every had the qualities people tried to build into them, no matter what they might claim in hindsight. No, what we correctly recognise is that, after years of 4e bashing, people are not talking about 4e at all, no matter what experience they claim to have with it.  But those changes have nothing to do with your criticism of 4e, and do not validate them.  4e combat has a lot of problems- it can be slow and grindy, there are too many effects and exceptions to the combat round, it can dominate a session- but 4e monsters are certainly far more distinct then previous edition's monsters, and that is something that the people who propose popular fixes to the system readily recognise.</blockquote>

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