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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6815676" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't really understand this comment, and I'm going to have to speculate on where that perception comes from.From my perspective, 3E was massively exception based.  It had some rules for helping DMs to create balanced monsters according to certain expectations, but it's hard to find a monster entry that didn't validate designer creativity by providing exceptions to those rules.One of the most common and often applied exception was the 'racial' provision.  If you thought that the monster in question needed more skill points (or fewer) or more feats or higher attack bonus or really anything else, you could just append to the monster 'X gains Y as a racial bonus'.  But indeed, pretty much every rule in the game for making a monster was broken at some point.   Need an intelligent ooze, animal, or plant?  Sure, make one, just note that despite being a whatever, it's intelligent.  Want an undead plant?  Just tack on a comment that it's both undead AND a plant.   And so on and so forth.  All those extraordinary and supernatural abilities that appear below the stat block are exceptions.  Where I think some DMs went wrong with this is that they felt all these tools meant that they were required to make any monster they created fit for publication, tracking each skill points and bonus down to the least jot and tittle.  That of course is a huge burden.   It's such a huge burden that even the 40 hour a week pro's often screwed it up and needed errata.  This was of course true even before 3e, as the 1e Monster Manual II - which was nothing but exception based - still managed to misprint and misstate various things (no, Jann Nobles weren't actually supposed to have 83 HD, cool though that concept is).  But it is not at all a burden that a DM keeping track of things for his own use needs to over worry about.  If it was actually challenged, you could justify pretty much any stat block by making the exceptions from the norm simply racial and extraordinary bonuses of this creature.</blockquote>

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