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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ShadowX" data-source="post: 3722959" data-attributes="member: 3720">While I definitely want to wait for actual information before bemoaning or heralding their monster design, I do want to weigh in on the purpose of monsters.I see a lot of people that want a high congruency between the rules for monsters and characters so they or their players can play monsters.  While this is definitely a cool option, I think core D&D needs to be created to serve the vast majority of its player base who don't expand their racial options past your basic fantasy archetypes.  D&D has never been, nor should it be, a fantasy RPG toolbox and as such monsters need to serve as monsters first and foremost.Also, Third Edition races were a rather transparent lot, a different set of stat bonuses and relatively few unique abilities.  This made creating monsters as PCs rather easily.  Fourth Edition is ramping up the impact of race and as such I think you might enjoy the basic races again, but also it will be harder to make monsters into PCs.  If the previews are to be believed, your minotaur as a PC race needs special abilities linked to every class.While on an intellectual level, translucency between the rules for monsters and PCs is a neat idea, when you actually sit down to play it completely degrades in importance.  Your players likely don't care and will never know if your 3 HD monster can have skills or BAB that high or not.  If you have ever ran a published adventure you have almost assuredly, unless you are John Cooper, used a monster with a slightly askew statblock.  Did your game stumble to a halt?  Likely it didn't make any difference.  This is not to say that guidelines for creating monsters are not important or desirable, but hard rules based on the HD of a monster make little sense since CR is not rigorously tied to HD and is instead based on numerous other factors.</blockquote>

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