Ease of Adventure Creation

[Dragonblade]

I want the focus to be on adventure design, not encounter design.

I want the 4e ease of monster design with a module available for 3e style toolbox monster making as well.

I want monsters that are a threat at low levels to still be useful in an adventure at higher levels.

I want good support for groups with different playstyles; where some groups hate empty rooms, others prefer about 75% of rooms in a dungeon be unoccupied. Where some like the 6-room dungeon model, others prefer Gygaxian megadungeons. Both should be supported. Sandbox and story-driven should both be supported. Skip the gate guards and roleplay every encounter should both the supported.

I want pcs to be able to choose their danger level, with commensurate rewards.

Pretty much this, but I don't see why you can't have both adventure design and encounter design. No reason why we can't have our cake and eat it too.

Oh, and 4e style self-contained monster stat blocks. I never want to see a stat block that lists out monster feats or spells by name and expects me to go look them up in some other book, or online.

Every time I get the urge to actually DM a Pathfinder game, I crack open one of my Pathfinder adventures and look at the stat blocks. The urge to DM Pathfinder dies quickly after that.

 

[the Jester]

Pretty much this, but I don't see why you can't have both adventure design and encounter design. No reason why we can't have our cake and eat it too.

Oh, sure! To clarify, I think the 3.5 DMG, with chapters on encounters, adventures and campaigns, had a good balance. 4e, unfortunately, focused so much of its system on the encounter that I feel like it neglected the adventure as a whole. (It had a reasonable amount of focus on campaign building- most of the dm books have several awesome campaign arc ideas in them.)

 

[Mattachine]

I love that 4e acknowledged that monsters, NPCs, and PCs are different things, and different stats are needed and different design principles can be used for each.

In particular, the 4e DMG (and adventures) pointed out that you can give monsters and NPCs whatever non-combat abilities, rituals, and skills are needed for the story. The rule is that the story decides, not a rule.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Complete and thorough statistics for monsters. I need to easily be able to add a few hit dice or a few class levels, and I need to be able to know what it can do and usually does at all times, not just during the minute or so it may or may not spend fighting.

The biggest thing I think with stats would be to cut down on the number of spells per spellcasters and on magic dependency. Those are the only really time consuming things.