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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3731428" data-attributes="member: 42582">Apologies for the long post. But to me this thread really highlights that 4E is cementing certain aspects of the metagame-ingame relationship that have always been part of D&D, but have not always ben explicit. I think the current designers have really got a good handle on that relationship, and are designing the new rules keeping it clearly in mind.Except that the game is a set of rules on how to deploy game elements, so it can't help but tell the players and GM what to use those elements for.Thus, for example, D&D (in its current edition) has no rules for gods as PCs.The real question, therefore, is this: are monsters, NPCs and PCs identical game elements (as some posters on this thread regard them) or not? That is, are they the sorts of things that players can use as their vehicle for gameworld exploration and activity? I can see why the designers have answered "no" to this question. D&D, in its current incarnation, thrives on permitting PCs to be extremely responsive, in details of mechanical build, to player desires. For monsters to meet this goal is for them to become, in practice, unusable for GMs.In other games it might be possible to treat NPCs and PCs alike. But these games probably do not demonstrate the degree of player-responiveness that D&D does. That is, those games have a different metagame priority.What a creature is capable of is determined by its attributes, skill bonuses, special abilities etc - just the same as for a PC. As I think was fairly obvious, and as Mearls has made clear, the changes in monster design aren't to the way in which monster capabilities are described, but the way in which monsters are built.If what you want is a system to tell you how good a 4HD monstrous humanoid should be at tying rope, the answer is "As good as they should be, given their talents as a race of rope-tiers". That is, pick the gameworld-appropriate number and give it to them. If you don't know what the gameworld-appropriate number is, then make it up! Or forget about it and move on.Again, the issue is not about whether monster capabilities are expressed in the same language as that of PCs - of course they will be - it is about whether they are built using the same set of rules. They won't be. Which makes sense, given their different roles in the game.It is becoming very clear that, in 4E, the rules for building PCs and monsters do not model any gameworld process. (I would argue that this has always been true in D&D - for example, the earning of XP by garnering gold in 1E, or by overcoming adventuring challenges in 3E, does not model any in-game causation - but 4E's design will make this more explicit.)Thus, the monster build rules do not simulate a monster species' evolution, or an individual monster's birth and growth and learning. They play a purely metagame function of building GM-usable game elements.I think another thing that has to be acknowledged - and it is a natural consequence of the fact that build rules are purely metagame - is that monster write-ups may not be complete, in the sense that (within the context of the gameworld) it is possible that the monster has an ability not in the stat-block (perhaps the Ogre knows how to speak Elvish) just as PCs may have some properties not in the stat-block (eg perhaps the PC has a twin sister).This is another example where the monster may have an ability not mentioned in its stat block, because for the typical use of that stat block (namely, by a GM running a level-appropriate encounter) the information is irrelevant. It does no harm at all to the game for the GM to decide that the Ogre Mage, when off-screen and not cone-of-colding PCs, is Sleeping Kobolds.This is exactly what 4E will have. "Symmetry" will obtain in the description of NPCs, monsters and PCs, but not in the rules for building them. Because those rules do not simulate any in-game reality. They are purely metagame, and different metagame rules serve different metagame functions.Just assign the number and move on.If the real question is "How challenging is such a modified monster" and "How many XP is it worth to beat it" then it would be good for the rules to answer that question. At the moment, they pretend to, but everyone knows that the rules for calculating the CR of monsters with NPC levels don't really work (as Dave Noonan admitted in his article some time ago about building Drow NPCs).Like he said.And in conclusion: It seems to me that those who are objecting to the new design want the metagame-ingame relationship to be different from what it will be in 4E. In particular, they want the monster build mechanics to model some process that is actually part of the gameworld. But as a poster on another thread said, D&D (for better or worse) is really abandoning such simulationist-style mechanics. Such mechanics being abandoned, there is no reason to build PCs and NPCs/monsters according to the same set of rules.</blockquote>

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