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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4094792" data-attributes="member: 2067">In general, I think I'm coming around to 4e monster design, because I think they've approached it carefully enough to pass a sort of minimum threshold for me.I like the idea that you can quickly grok a monster's exceptional traits and thus use them effectively. I like that they've spelled out what a given X of level Y should be capable of.But there are some failings so far.The first is the idea of a specialized tool being used for something it's not intended for. This is pretty much assured to happen. There's a lot of believable scenarios in which a mosnter that is designed to be a deadly encounter suddenly gets used to the player's advantage (they team up with it, or someone decides they want to play as it, or they make the monster teach them their super-special attack). As a DM, I want to be able to SAY YES to these without (a) unbalancing my party, or (b) inventing a whole new tool and somehow retconning the existing tool and the new tool to be the same thing. It's possible that the guidelines solve this pretty nicely, so this might not be a problem when the thing is actually out there.The second is a bit more freaky to me, and that is the idea that monsters are becoming boring. This is a purely fluff issue, so it's easy to fix, but it's also pathetic to see it happening. The case in point is the Bodak, which has gone from "A spirit slain by ultimate evil who still may retain flashing memories of the past" in 2e/3e to "It kills because it likes to kill and killing is what it likes to do! Also it may be a sidekick!" in 4e. It's easy to avoid this, but if I see much more, my 4e MM may make better mulch than gaming material. Part of the issue with the tool analogy is that a monster is so much more than a single-purpose implement. It is, by it's nature as a creature in the game-world, a multi-purpose implement. There are multiple intentions. If the siloing is so strict that it only serves a single purpose, it doesn't do it's job as a monster very well. Now, I do believe it's possible to fullfill all these intentions. 4e believes otherwise and isn't really trying to fill them all. Maybe it's trying to do one well and do the rest "good enough." If they succeed, it will be good enough. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> If they fail, I may have to take a brutal claw hammer to this.</blockquote>

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