Incenjucar said:
Got a better alternative?
Oooh, ooh, I've got one!
You start by looking at the elements of the world that you're working with. Your world has elements like size, combat skill, armor, a tough hide, and so fort affecting difficulty to be hit. You look at what your challenge can have. You look at what they can't not have. (No first-level hyrda minions, please). You then construct a table that tells you what target values a Nth level X-ifier should have. You look and note what a Nth level N-ifier needs, and see if you can reasonably make one out of your desired challenge. If you can't, you say, "I guess the game world I've made doesn't support what I want to do. I'll throw in an obvious exception. Huh. Maybe these are special kobolds that have performed a ritual to gain the extra AC they need. Yeah! Kobolds adorned with glyphs, painted-on with the blood of the innocent! And that explains why they've been raiding the village!"
Then, you ask yourself if adding the capacity to perform a ritual to grant an extended bonus to AC at the cost of a humanoid will break the game world. If the answer is no, then you're good to go. If it's yes, then you find another way to change the kobolds.
I like rules. I like rules that enable me to predict the behavior of the universe. Handing out ACs arbitrarily in light of the changibility of ACs prevents me from doing this. I want a game world that supports a high level of emergent behavior; if events conspire that enable and encourage me to get a strike force of kobolds of my very own, I want to know, without need to resort to fiat, what happens when I do something as elementary as dress them in armor.
I also can't be the only DM who had PCs Planar Bind a devil, incapacitate it, rip its armor off of its flesh, and either lock it away or use Temporal Stasis on it, then keep the armor for their very own. The rules are quite clear, after all; no dead devil, no malformations to the armor. (Hell might look for their errant devil, of course, but that's an engineering problem, and can be addressed within the context of the rules).
The problem with exception-based rules is that they assume a level of communication and shared expectations that you need either loads of source material or rules themselves to convey. There is expectation that, in most cases, you can kill a monster and take its stuff. Messing with this expectation because the item to be looted is 'too good' is not necessarily part of the default expectation; there's no reason to assume that characters won't try to loot.
I was more than OK with inconsistent, exception based monsters in 2E. In fact, I had way more fun in 2E than 3E. I'm not claiming the monster design was the sole (or even main) source of the fun/the problems; but if this didn't hold back 2E I'm sure it won't be a problem for 4E.
