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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3757792" data-attributes="member: 42582">Judging from what Mearls said about the Beholder in his monster makeover column, and also drawing inferences from the Dragon combat example posted in the recent Design and Development column, the logic of a Beholder will be that it is the functional equivalent, in combat, of 5 more typical monsters/NPCs. This requires that the Beholder have many actions, and certainly more than a PC can have.To allow a PC to be the functional equivalent of 5 characters would defeat the purpose of the mooted monster design principles, because then a Beholder or Dragon, to fill the same niche, would have to be the function equivalent of 5 x 5 = 25 characters - and so on up if PCs are again allowed to scale up equivalently.An LA/ECL-style "solution", of treating a PC who is the functional equivalent of 5 5th level characters as a 10th level PC is probably not very satisfactory, for two reasons:*Such a PC will hog time at the table; *Such a PC, despite the time-hogging, will probably be reasonably ineffective because of the comparative weakness of each of its actions.This is just one example to show that monsters can vary in parameters (in this case, the number of typical characters to which they are functionally equivalent) which should not be allowed to vary for PCs, if the desired style of game play is to be preserved.It may be, of course, that one doesn't care for that style of play, in which case one will not care for (at least this aspect of) 4e.</blockquote>

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