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Message: <blockquote data-quote="D'karr" data-source="post: 5637128" data-attributes="member: 336">These two assertions are just so laughable that I don't even know if you actually believe this and are being serious, or if like usual, you're just goading.For one second let's skip over actually creating your own monster.  I would say that most people are not going to go there first.  A brand new DM is probably going to go grab a monster from the monster manual and create an encounter.  With basic monsters that don't do much in the way of "effects" both systems are somewhat comparable.  If I choose a goblin in 3.x and a goblin in 4e, preparing an encounter boils down to putting "goblins (4)" on the page, and running the monster directly from the book.  You can get more elaborate and print their stats on the page, etc.  But that is not very important at that level with those creatures.Let's skip just a bit forward, how about a wraith?  It has some additional powers, and it has a type, plus a plethora of other things that affect it's use in combat.  For a brand new DM that is getting an encounter ready, that is going to be more time looking up stuff to prepare.  That is if he wants to "not fall from grace".  Let's look at what "mechanical" things a 3.x DM would have to know, or have to look up if he was running a wraith and wanted to be prepared.  First it's an Undead Type, it has the incorporeal trait, it has a Fly Speed and Good maneuverability, it has turn resistance, it has feats.  All these things are NOT defined in the creature's, already extensive, stat block.I won't run through ALL of them but I'll just list the most common that might be relevant to a combat with this creature.  I'd also like to point out that some of these definitions have nested effects (things that are mentioned but not defined in that definition)  Notice the "No Constitution Score", and the immunity to charms, compulsions, etc., which would obviously have other mechanical effects.  So some of those things might be needed in combat and the DM will probably have to know what they "mean" to run the creature, somewhat effectively.This problem gets progressively worse as you go up in level.  Creatures are going to have spell and spell like abilities which are not even defined on the monster book, but on the Player's Handbook.Try running a Balor, sometime, from the monster manual without looking anything up for it.  It's a demon, what immunities does it have because of it's demon type?  How about resistances? It can use Blasphemy, what are the effects of that? It can use Insanity, what are the effects of that?  Oh wait, insanity is a continuous Confusion spell, what are the effects of that?  Unholy Aura, what does that do?So the fact that you can skip all of that, if you choose to, does not make the preparation time less intensive, it just means that you found out that it was too much work and decided to simply skip it.  Something that can be done with any game if the DM chooses to.  If you can remember all those traits then good for you, it's still mental gymnastics that create a problem when preparing for a game.Preparation also involves having somewhat predictable levels of challenge for your party of PCs.  Let's look at the tool provided.  Behold the CR system.  On second thought let's not.  It's crap.Let's run a dragon directly from the book...  Oops, can't.  The information for dragons is spread out over I can't even recall how many pages.And in this case I'm even talking about just looking at the actual books.  There might be some electronic tools out there now, but when I was running 3.x there was PCGen, which was pretty good and customizable if you were into the challenge.  There was another tool that used MS Excel as the engine, and a few others.  But that was for PCs, what about monsters?  Nothing.I don't run at the table with a computer.  So none of those tools would amount to a hill of beans if they could not make it easier for me to run a game, without the computer at the table.</blockquote>

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