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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GQuail" data-source="post: 4321175" data-attributes="member: 30709">This isn't just C-listers, of course: Drow, Githyanki, Githzerai and Ogres all go from being low level threats to being primarilly in the teens.  Even Orcs have one level 3 stat-block in 4E, and a few at level 4: making them masterminds at best for 1st level heroes.  There's been a lot of shiftsWhat this does in practice, though, is cast villains at levels more appropriate to how they are actually used.  Githyanki are an extraplanar race as written, so what's the point of having them available for starting players to fight?  They're going to need to get into the Astral Plane/Sea before they cross silver swords with them, so the stats in the 4E monster manual feature Githyanki at the sort of level players might start dabbling in planar travel.  The classic 1E Drow adventures were for mid-level characters: D1 is for 9th-14th level charactrs, yeah?  So the same principle is in use: the Drow get cast at levels 11-15 in the 4E MM.Frankly, if there os one problem I have with the MM in 3rd Ed, it's the amount of monsters stacked near the bottom of the CR lists.  I'm running a game at ECL 18 right now, and short of piling on templates or class levels there's very little I can pull out for my PCs: out of the book the amount of decent challenges are pretty few.  Combine that with the design blog on Wizards site way back complaining about building Drow as NPCs for an adventure, and how their lack of HD for their CR made them pretty flimsy.... I think the decision to kick some monsters up the level list is a very purposeful and probably quite practical move.  The Berbelang and his psychic duplicates now stand out more as a level 10 bad boy than they did when they were just one of a hundred 1HD critters.</blockquote>

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