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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6116748" data-attributes="member: 1465">I agree thoroughly.The idea behind 3e monster creation was exactly that of providing a framework of common rules, that would result in monsters of a certain complexity level (see below) and power level, the latter of which was fundamental in order to assign an appropriate CR to a monster so that you would expect that monster to have attack and defense numbers in line with those of a party of PC of appropriate level. First of all this framework was meant to be used by game designers to produce consistent monster entries in books. The secondary purpose was that of being used by DMs to create their own monsters.Now unfortunately the problem was that 3e made huge assumptions about monsters, and actually about anything... the PCs were assumed e.g. to have a certain worth amount of equipment with certain +X weapons at a certain level. Another big assumption was that the complexity level of the game had to increase at high levels, both for PCs and for monsters, and that players and DM just had to eat this up and accept the complexity... which clearly is not what a lot of people wanted, but still they wanted to play/run high level games including making their own monsters. Within the 3e principle of "system mastery", the fact that designing a monster from scratch required a large effort of the DM made a lot of sense. It was supposed to be an achievement for a DM to learn to create high level monsters just in the same way as it was supposed to be an achievent for a player to learn to play a high level character with all its stuff, and therefore there was nothing wrong (within the assumed "system mastery" gamestyle) to require the DM to spend an hour to create a new monster type, and then presumably use it for one memorable end-of-adventure encounter OR re-use it as a setting-defining race of monsters that comes up often. 3ed totally assumed that this was a rewarding work for those who accepted the edition's defining gamestyle.Then it didn't work, because it turned out that such gamestyle (mostly probably coming from Monte Cook) is not so popular. People still wanted to play high level PCs and run high level campaigns, but not running high-complexity monsters. IMHO this is because most gaming groups like changing the monsters very frequently, so that they hardly fight the same kind of monster twice in the same campaign. But then, the work of creating new monsters all the time becomes too much of a burden.Absolutely! I was actually going to post the same comment <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=":)" />3ed monster creation process is so logical and robust (but then at the same tedious in all the details to remember and numbers to re-calculate), that what would have really make it shine would have been a simple "monster advancement/creation tool" program that would take care of all those calculations, and would have easily presented the stats in a way that the user cannot forget to assign feats, skills etc.WotC had included a simple PC-generator on a CD in early prints of the 3.0 PHB, which sadly was never continued in its development. They should have included an equivalent for monsters in the MM, and maybe something also to generate encounters and treasures in the DMG.</blockquote>

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