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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3765961" data-attributes="member: 42582">They will have the sams sorts of stats, yes. But I'm not sure they will have complete or total stats in the way that PCs do.That's not too far from what I've been saying. It suggests that in some cases the GM has to add to the stat block on the fly (eg by working it out as a social rather than a combat challenge).If the "making up" is deciding, on the spot, whether the orc in front of you is a skilled speaker or not, or whether his chain armour is +1 magic or +1 quality, then there is no danger of inconsistent rulings. Because these are not rulings, they are encounter design decisions.This claim has already been shown to be false - for example, using spell like abilities for monster abilities eats into playing time by necessitating cross-referencing.This is obviously not true.First, a monster can have full stats but still be generated in a very different manner from a PC, because its generation system is designed to serve a different metagame purpose (of generating a challenge, rather than a player vehicle).Second, there would be obvious costs of going this way, such as ruling out Beholders and other creatures which will be the functional equivalent (in terms of useful actions available) to several ordinary characters.Third, it's not obvious what the gains are. How is the game better off because multi-function monsters are excluded, and every opponent of the PCs is (in effect) a PC under the GM's control? There are other sorts of challenges which players cannot play in D&D - walls, for example, or poison needle traps, or the positive material plane, to name some environmental ones. Why is it important that every personal challenge (monster or NPC) be, in effect, a PC under the GM's control?And, conversely, if Beholders were designed so as to be playable as PCs (and therefore to be limited to PC parameters of actions per round) than the designers would be (artificially? I'm not sure what that means here) limiting what I can do with that Beholder. In particular, they would be preventing me from using it as 4e will allow me to use it, namely, as the functional equivalent of ordinary characters.The question is, which is the better set of limits? I think the designers are right to think building monsters to work well as monsters is a higher design priority than building monsters to work well as PCs.Agreed.</blockquote>

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