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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3760176" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is a 4th Faction, namely, me.I don't think verisimilitude is under threat, because monsters and PCs will have stat blocks that look more-or-less the same: abilities, skill bonuses, save values, feats, attack bonuses, damage output, special ability descriptions. That is, verisimilitude is preserved by build output, not build process.But I don't think that monsters have to be built in the same way as PCs. This is not, for me, an issue of simplicity (though that's good too). It's a recognition, as Mearls put it, that monsters are a different game element from PCs. They are challenges. The rules should therefore support the building of challenges.The current monster rules build monsters like PCs, and then leave the GM to guess what sort of challenge the monster is. The 4e rules, as I understand them, will tell a GM what numbers to assign to a given monster so that it constitutes a challenge of the desired role and level.The upshot of the new build process is that GMs should find it easier to build satisfying challenges. Another upshot is that there will be no simple way of determining what level of PC a monster is equivalent to (because the answer cannot be read off the build process like it currently is). To me, the price seems worth paying (especially because, at the moment, the reading of PC-level-equivalence is pretty rough-and-readay anyway).</blockquote>