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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 4953387" data-attributes="member: 3820">I don't game with a laptop and the monster builder at the table, which is certainly a good way of handling it. However, I love reskinning. And when I anticipate running a campaign rather than a one-shot, I like to prepare index cards with short and sweet monster blocks ahead of time. If I were running a 5th-level game, for instance, I would probably want a variety of 4th-to-6th-level stat blocks that can be reskinned: for example, "orc bruiser" might be a L4 brute with a two-handed weapon, and if I decide to use him as a pirate, he loses the orcish racial power and maybe gains some thematic "pirate" thing and now uses a big boarding axe or a gaff on a pole. Most frequently my monster cards are written in ink, leaving me room to pencil in level adjustments nearby. That L4 orc bruiser might get pencil notes making him L2 or L6, depending on the players' level. So there's a certain level of prep work to having those stat blocks ready to go, but once I have enough of them ready, I can practically start rolling for random encounters. Monster builder aficionados probably have it even easier than I do.(This was admittedly something I learned from running a lot of Champions back in the day; with enough characters built beforehand, and a willingness to reskin published villains, you could always ad lib an encounter because stat blocks were reusable: you probably didn't kill that villain in your last encounter, after all. And even if you did, hey, comic book death.)While you could recycle stat blocks with any edition of D&D, I think 4e has a distinct advantage in being explicitly built for it. Having monster role be the foundation of stat blocks means it's much easier to make a minotaur from an ogre or vice versa. And honestly, the players don't tend to notice unless they do a lot of running the game and reskinning themselves.</blockquote>

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