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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6119629" data-attributes="member: 82106">Personally I'm always very dubious about rules that are made to "save the DM from himself", especially when they don't really seem to do that job. I mean who's to say what is 'gotcha' and what should or shouldn't be 'bundled'? I think there can be reasonably some guidelines for that, but I don't see any evidence that PC classes and options, which are designed for a completely different purpose, serve that end. MANY things that in the hands of the PCs are OK are gotcha! in the hands of monsters for instance. Nor do a vast array of PC options really make much sense for monsters. Many of them at best require some reflavoring and rewriting before they DO make sense at the very least. As a general principle of rules design for D&D I am not really buying it. Looking at 4e's approach I see instead that the general concept of powers is pretty nice, they tend to be small modular reflavorable units of crunch that are unlikely to be problematic in the hands of a monster, even in odd combinations. Beyond that monsters evince a pretty coherent theme and DMs are strongly advised to do the same when designing new monsters. Gotcha! abilities don't generally exist, and when they do they are pretty easily made thematic and interesting, especially since they aren't SoD type mechanics anyway. This is a pretty good system, and it is further buttressed by monster roles, which give you a very nice indication of what you should do. Can a DM create a monstrosity by ignoring all those guidelines? Sure. The guidelines aren't flawless either, you can construct some rather silly encounters, mostly at levels 1-4 or so, if you really try which are technically following the guidelines. Of course it is far more trivially easy to do that in 3e, and I would humbly suggest that class levels on monsters doesn't help that. My advice to game designers is that adding such a large degree of complexity to the game is VERY unlikely to have a high payoff. If there's one consistent thing that people agree on about 4e it is that monster design was a huge boon. While there's no denying that there's SOMEONE out there who will love class leveled monsters its likely to be a minority taste. If you're going to go out of your way to support THAT then where's the justification for dropping other things that aren't so popular? K.I.S.S</blockquote>

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