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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9553207" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Oh, that's also not the case. 3.x was all about derived monster stats from fixed type norms; you were absolutely supposed to add 3 Fighter levels to that orc, pick an appropriate set of feats and have a skirmishing archer. The criticism was not that the PC/NPC transparency or "naturalistic" derivation of stats didn't work, it's that it was time consuming and the CR system that was supposed to allow you to easily evaluate the results wasn't very accurate or useful. The 4eism that 5e accept as a design principle, all the way back in 2014 was that NPCs do not need to confirm to the system norms of PCs, and do not need to function as full agents in the way PCs do outside of their brief stage time. Indeed, bounded accuracy is partially reliant on them not doing so, as combat pacing is largely a function of HP instead of AC.That's not true in any absolute sense, it's simply a design choice. There's no particular reason (aside from perhaps that it makes the design task significantly harder), that it needs to be done that way. You could create monsters/NPCs that scale and progress in ways that are transparent to PCs, and might well want to do so, if your particular goal is to assuage that concern around "naturalism." 4e explicitly rejected that as a design goal, and 5e implicitly carried that forward. Really, the issue is that minimalism was an initial 2014 design goal, and now it's significantly lower priority, so better monster designs are possible.</blockquote>

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