Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darrin Drader" data-source="post: 1818039" data-attributes="member: 7394">In first and second edition nobody complained about the mistakes because nobody knew how to deconstruct the stats. In fact, its safe to say that there was no way to deconstruct stats because the various values were set by the designers and then playtested to ensure that the monster worked the way it was intended. In 3rd edition there is a greater emphasis on adhering to defined mathematical formulas. I think its good that these formulas exist because they make it easier to design a monster so that you can accurately predict the level of challenge it will be against a party, but by allowing your fans to deconstruct the stats, you open the door to the math check review where the reviewer isn't required to actually put the monster up against a party to see how it performs, but instead, the reviewer can just go through all of the entries to see if they were done correctly. In the process, the critique goes from whether or not these are interesting monster ideas or whether they will make for cool encounters to something more along the lines of how many mistakes the designers and/or editors made. While I agree with Sean's point above, and I do feel that designers should strive to turn in work that is as accurate as possible, I don't feel that many of the mistakes pointed out in this review will actually result in a noticeable difference in gameplay. So, to summarize, in my own humble opinion, WotC put out a good book that would probably be getting a lot more respect right now from its fans if they had never publicly provided the information on the "correct" way to build a monster.</blockquote>

Verification