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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8537808" data-attributes="member: 6704184">What you describe is not what I'm talking about. No one I know ran 4e in a way where players could expect a "good friendly battle where they usually win" against "even level foes". But you could take a monster stat block that was mostly appropriate to what you wanted, change the attack/ac math and HP with trivial ease, and have what you have described within the fiction represented in the mechanics. Whether that was an easy, moderate, hard, or deadly (or even impossible) fight depended on the fiction, not on what stat blocks were premade at a given level. If you wanted Tiamat to be the end of campaign BBEG at level 30, great, use the premade stats. If you don't want the campaign to go into those levels and instead want to treat level 20 as the end of what mortals can even be, the math to treat Tiamat as if she had been built for that campaign assumption from the beginning was very easy. Nowhere in any of that, my last post or this one, am I talking about scaling Tiamat from a level 30 encounter to a level 25 encounter so the PCs have an at-level encounter. I'm talking about scaling the hobgoblin captain they didn't manage to kill 10 levels ago, having advanced in power just like the PCs have, or using that low heroic tier statblock with advanced math to represent a similar kind of character in the fiction without having to dig around and find a level 17 martial leader enemy with similar abilities to the level 6 martial leader enemy I am already familiar with. You can dislike that whole dynamic all you want, but it is just as valid a preference to prefer it over 5e's monster dynamics. And going back to the whole reason this came up, none of this has any impact whatsoever on the question of how well recieved the cosmology of 4e was, especially amongst people who hadn't decided to dislike 4e before taking the cosmology into account. When a thing is as divisive as 4e was, trying to tease out which things worked and which things didn't, without the kind of consumer data that wotc has access to, is a foolish endeavor. The simple fact is, none of us has anything meaningful to go on when discussing how well received the 4e cosmology was. We have our own perception of discussions about it, and that is genuinely it. </blockquote>

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