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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3759533" data-attributes="member: 2067">That's exactly why this wouldn't work in 3e, but it's shortsighted. There's no reason a Beholder HAS to be as powerful as 5 other monsters. The new encounter design is 4 monsters/4 PC's. The Beholder can be as powerful as ONE PC, and not loose one bit of it's beholder-osity. There's no reason for a Beholder to be as powerful as 5 other PC's in the new edition, so your reason falls flat: if the beholder is designed to be one monster among 4 in an encounter, it can be designed to be one monster among 4 in a PC party of the same level. That's a problem, because it shouldn't be hard to do. The designers have an opportunity to address that concern NOW that they won't have again until 5e. If the drow fighter in the party and the drow fighter the party is facing have dissimilar and incompatible abilities, my realism is curb-stomped. If the abilities are similar and compatible, there should be no reason the PC can't get it if the NPC can.In 3e, the answers to those questions are a few die rolls away: do they meet anyone? Roll encounter chance. Is it a centaur? Roll on the encounter table. Is it exceptional? Not if I don't already have the stats. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Can it help them survive? It has a Wisdom bonus, and it has listed skills, let's roll a check for it. I don't really have to make anything up at the table there (unless you count adding class levels to the centaur, which, again, I wouldn't do unless I had set it up beforehand). I just have to let my brain leap from logical point to logical point and let random tables fill in the gaps. In 4e, if I have to arbitrarily decide how well a given centaur can find edible food for the party, I will pretty much scrap the monster manual as "not designed for my uses."There's a centaur in the MM, y'know. And treasure generation methods to find out what kind of stuff it might have. All the descisions there are already made, a few die rolls away at most, and unless I do some extra work for a specific purpose, there's nothing left for me to invent about it's stats. Which is perfect, because then I can concentrate on running the encounter and not pondering the mysteries of centaur skill points. So what am I paying these guys for, if not stats? Fluff? Artwork? Why should I have to decide what bonuses the creature has when, presumably, the purpose of the MM is to have that work already done for me? And my method of "random determination" isn't at all. I look at the stat block, and I say "Well, looks like the typical centaur isn't that good a teacher. Maybe Chiron is an Expert with some ranks in Profession (Teacher). Looks like I may have to do a little pre-prep for this game." Or I say "Well, they're pretty wise, so maybe they can give the PC's some aid." I have a starting point and I divert from it for variety. If 4e doesn't give me a starting point, 4e's monster design sucks for my purposes.Again, I'm an improv-heavy DM. I don't spend much, if any time pondering the mysteries of centaur survival outside of the times it comes up at the table, and when it comes up at the table, I want to have an answer RIGHT THERE, so the game can keep plugging along. That particular Centaur may not have appeared before I randomly rolled him on an encounter table, or before I had a character in a nearby town mention him (which I didn't anticipate doing) or before the party druid, just five minutes ago, mentioned how he would like to train under a truly wild creature, or before I chose some arbitrary creature of the appropriate CR...in fact, Centaurs may not have existed in the world at all before the party encounters them. So my knowledge of centaurs in the world, and of that particular centaur, may not be any deeper than the PC's knowledge at the moment, and may, in fact, be more shallow. I like DMing that way -- it keeps me on my toes and keeps nearly all of my work directly useful. But in order to DM that way, I need a very solid baseline that I can pull from, to keep things fair and to ensure verisimilitude. I need monsters that are more than just XP gristle. I need monsters that are part and parcel of the world I throw them into, down to whatever probably-irrelevant detail that I need to render them complete.If it doesn't tell me their Diplomacy bonus, it doesn't support me using it as a social challenge. If it doesn't tell me their Survival bonus, it doesn't support me using it as an ally to the PC's. If it's combat abilities would be unbalancing in the hands of a player, it doesn't support me using it as a consistent party member. If it doesn't give me a solid, stable baseline, it doesn't support me departing from that.If things are excepted because they're "not relevant," and if monsters are designed solely for combat, without considering their game-world and player-character usefulness, there's no reason to believe that Wizards really wants me to play 4e, because they're not going to be designing for what I need at a game table.</blockquote>

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