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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4172145" data-attributes="member: 2067">Right, that is exactly what a new edition could fix about it. Nothing about stealing time or alternate cowboy dimension duplicates or killing you with old age needs to bring back the insanity of 3e high-level combat at all. You can keep the cool abilities without making the thing obnoxious to run.I'm not really saying the 3e version was better, just that its abilities were much more evocative than this knock-off, and that I'm a little surprised the coolness wasn't kept, given that the beast seems pretty bland.The first point is that I'm talking about retaining but redesigning the cool evocative abilities. I'm not shouting from the rooftops that this critter was better in 3e, but I am saying that the abilities were more evocative, and that 4e had a chance to retain interesting abilities, but, to all appearances, decided not to.So the issue with Time Stop is negated because Time Stop itself is negated, so your quote is a false comparison. There's no chance that any encounter with a time duplicate in 4e could ever cause that issue (leaving aside the fact that you no longer have a concern with "highest level spells" or anything like that). Secondly, it's pretty easy to say "He has the exact same abilities and just makes all rolls at -2." This is especially true in 4e, since the sheer quantity of abilities will be less. The complexity of high-level play is something that 4e is expressly addressing, so any evil cowboy mirror universe twin would NOT be very complicated. Thirdly, the idea of "evil doubles" is a very archetypal conflict, and one that the 3e phane expressly used to its advantage, and that it has lost in the jump to 4e. Causing a player to "suffer for competence" has never really been the point -- the point has always been that classic conflict with a you that is slightly...off. To compete against your own shadow. The fact that the time double is obviously less competent than you are (-2 to everything) makes it obviously a horrible choice for DMs who want to make their players suffer for their skill. It's disappointing that the 4e phane doesn't leverage the "fight yourself" conflict idea, just like it's disappointing it doesn't leverage the idea of "stolen time" or "death by rapid aging" at all. These were all things that made the original phane evocative, and these are things that it, to appearances, has surrendered in the move to 4e. And I'm not much of a fan of that, because I don't really think it was necessary to loose any of those abilities, given that they could be retained and redesigned to give the same feel with new rules.Things like this are the reason I'm really looking forward to the new Tome of Horrors. From what Clark has mentioned, it seems like it'll be a better monster manual than the monster manual, because it seems to make some deliberate design choices that are quite different from the path that 4e monsters are taking.If it ain't a stillborn giant fetus floating in Astral afterbirth, it ain't an Atropal. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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