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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6119604" data-attributes="member: 82106">I can't say, but IMHO the notion that my players can tell the difference between my made-up "sort of an assassin" monster and your kobold assassin 3/rogue 2/trapsmith 2 with 7 different feats in the middle of a game seems dubious to me. If a player were to ever say something like "why can't I use Shifty, I'm an Assassin too!" my answer is going to be "you're not a kobold, find a master kobold assassin and convince him to train you, then lets talk" (and if the PC actually pulls that off, great, it ain't like its all that hard to give PCs unusual powers and such). IMHO the entirety of the gain is theorycraft. There's not one player in 100 that can tell you what class(es) and level(s) your class/leveled NPCs are. I'll fully accept that to some DMs it is satisfying to muck around in the rules coming up with some obscure way to bend, spindle, and mutilate character generation to produce his unique NPC, but I have yet to see a game where the DM engaged in an exposition of his NPCs character sheets at the table. Beyond that, FOR ME, my world seems quite a bit more self-consistent and believable when I don't have to assume that every town has a temple with a 5th level cleric in it who can cure disease, etc. Those rules are great and fine when applied to a rare PC or two, but they rapidly make no sense as a tool to build a consistent world around. I always found that whole conceit to be one of the most verisimilitude-killing aspects of AD&D. 3e just multiplied it by fobbing the whole problem onto monsters as well. At least in AD&D monsters had their own sort of semi-class-like stuff (shaman, witch doctor, priest, etc), and in some cases spell-casting tradition (granted there are a few that 'cast like an Nth level whatever') but in general the notion that even humanoids had class levels was basically non-existent. As close as you got were Drow, which are more in the demi-human camp and make legitimate PCs. So, I found 4e's lack of imposition of classes on both human/demi-human and monster societies to be quite nice. I am now expected to simply construct the town priest as whatever I need. In some worlds that might be a guy with lots of PC-style magic, but it doesn't need to be and there's no expectation that it is. He can be a pretty formidable ally/threat too without necessarily causing issues like the old "wait, if there's a 9th level cleric in the temple then he can just raise the king..." etc.</blockquote>

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