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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 4290666" data-attributes="member: 996">"Evil hates pie."   - Master Panda.Seriously, though, I hear where you're coming from.  3e did move monsters towards being more PC-like.  Having levels, having many abilities, having stats, for that matter, 1E monsters didn't have STR or DEX or CON (all that was just 'part of' thier dam/att, AC & hps) and had INT given in small ranges.  The cool thing about making monsters PC-like is that they follow the same rules as PCs (so you have a more unified system), and they're more customizeable - I suppose, there's also a gain in versimilitude, since it implies monsters having background and experiences of thier own, too.  The uncool thing is that they take longer to stat out, are more effort to run in combat, and occassionally either fold like paper tigers, or kick the holy crap out of the party when they shouldn't.   In 1E, generally, monsters had lower AC than PCs, poorer saves, hit a little better than most PCs, didn't do all that much damage (no STR bonus or magic weapons), and didn't have all that many hps (no CON bonus).  The Heros are supposed to win, so that's as it should be.  Of course, in 1E, monsters also had bizarre arbitrary abilities that just killed you character out of hand, or were subject to wild swings of interprestation.In 3E, monsters generally were bigger than PCs, much better at grappling, hit more, did more damage, had lower ACs and more hps.  But, they were supposed to challenge a whole party of thier 'level.'  Bascially, all 3E monsters were like 4e Solos.  A single monster of your level was a challenge, a group of them was brutal.  (Two things many DMs never seemed to figure out, BTW:  Improved Grab carried a -20 penalty, and it's OK to throw groups of 'lower level' monsters at your PCs instead of one big one.)In 4E, AFAICT from my first readthrough of the monster manual, monsters have lower AC & Defenses than PCs, more hps (brutes, elites and solos have a /lot/ more), more at will powers, fewer encounter or daily powers, and the wierd/arbitrary powers now tend to just annoy you until you make your coint-toss save.  I'm not sure how that's really supposed to work.  Just looking at the stats, it seems like even a basic challenge is going to force a party to burn through all thier enocounter & daily powers, second winds, healing words, and what not, while they slowly wade through it's enourmous bag of hps.  The exceptions being minions that pop like baloons on any successfull attacks.  I can imagine a DM engineering some fairly cinematic fight scenes from that.  The PCs are attacked by a band of orcs, they quickly cut down some of them (minions) with style and flair, then settle in to a drawn-out 'dramatic' battle with the non-faceless leaders and elites, in which the heros get beaten down, only to rally, well, heroiocally, at the last minute and defeat thier foes.  Works great on film.  It seems obvious that's what 4e is going for, but I've never seen D&D actually pull that sort of thing off before.  The game has really more definied it's own fantasy sub-genre and feel (ripped off by many other RPGs and MMOs) than simulated any existing ones.</blockquote>

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