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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannager" data-source="post: 5588240" data-attributes="member: 73683">Sure. That. And if you ask them what it's about, you'll get something about killing monsters, looting hoards, exploring dungeons, drinking Mountain Dew.I don't think this detracts from the point. Should I rephrase? It is delusional to believe that an extremely well-connected individual who designs D&D for a living and has no doubt run, played in, and witnessed hundreds of different D&D games is not even vaguely aware that people play D&D differently. That is not a defensible position.Yes. What you play is your game. D&D, however, is not your game. D&D is Wizards of the Coast's game. It is not owned by you. You do not define it. You have some degree of influence over your own game, and no one else's.But we're not talking about your game, here. We're talking about D&D - the whole game.Let's not. It very much was what I meant.Hardly. No one in the industry even knows who I am (except perhaps, ironically, some of the fine folk who work at Paizo).And yes, I am defensive about 4e. This is a reaction to the perceived, persistent hostility that a segment of the tabletop community has towards the game and its creators. Hostility that, I believe, is by and large utterly unwarranted. For instance, someone actually tried to claim that one of the game's creators was actually unaware that people play games of D&D differently. That is not a reasonable approach to take; fifteen seconds of thought on the topic would lead to you conclude that to be more or less impossible.Mind you, I am also defensive about Pathfinder. I am also defensive about Deadlands. I am also defensive about Battletech. I am also defensive about Dragon Age 2. I am defensive about any number of things that I feel have received a bad rap, or are being misrepresented by someone with an inflamed opinion. And, most importantly, I feel that - as a fan of each of these things - I have an obligation to make sure that it receives a fair representation, and that any falsehoods or half-truths about it are addressed in a thoughtful, reasonable manner.If they're a monster, they get stats. If they're not a monster, they might get stats, depending on the expectation of their use. When I run a game, I do not stat up every one of the NPCs in my town on the off-chance that the PCs might fight them. Neither do you, and nor does anyone. And neither, certainly, should WotC waste valuable design time and page real estate providing stats for creatures that 99% of DMs will not need stats for. The monster creation guidelines are as easy to use and straightforward as they are for a reason. DMs should and do craft their own NPC and monster stat blocks when the material provided does not exactly suit their campaign.I have read about plenty who have. In fact, so many did complain that the WotC devs made the ease of creating and running monsters one of their defining changes in 4e's system.If the significant level of time spent creating and running monsters in 3.X proved to be a stumbling block for DMs of that edition - and it did, for a lot of them - then it behooves WotC, as the company servicing those DMs, to look for ways to lighten that burden. If something made the game hard to run for DMs, it also made the game harder to sell to those DMs.I should have elaborated. I was speaking in the context of a hypothetical WotC developer working on developing 4th Edition, and talking about 3.X.I'm not sure. But it was. Now it's not.The higher you set the bar for a DM's knowledge (and, frankly, the level of system mastery you need to possess to create a monster according to the 3.X rules is high; the level of system mastery needed to do so on the fly is phenomenal), the more difficult you make it for people to play your game.</blockquote>

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