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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 5068120" data-attributes="member: 60075">Emphasis added. I appreciate the difference in opinion, but the bolded bits seem to indicate we could be talking past each other, at least in part.See, nowadays I wouldn't want to DM a 3E or 4E game without heavily dishing out circumstantial bonuses on the fly every round - meaning, I make them up as I go. It has nothing to do with sitting down to write up house rules, or spend brooding over how to advance a monster with class levels or feats (though there are handy e-tools for that in 3.5 nowadays).In short, if I know from the monsters' background what their preferred tactics are, I'll mechanically "reward" monsters engaging in those tactics by dishing out bonuses to their attack and damage rolls (if its an aggressive tactic) or a bonus to their AC (like the stance the bugbears get when fighting in formation). That's exactly how I'd run older (pre-3E) edition games as well. My impression is that a DM running Basic D&D is basically doing that anyway... and then the 3e era came along and made the dogma prominentthat "unless it's in the stat block the monster can't do it" (here: unless a mechanical bonus for fighting in style x is there in the stat block the DM must not award one). Frankly, I'd have thought that 4E with its "say yes to things not covered by the rules" would have rendered that attitude obsolete, so I'm a bit puzzled that it's brought up here by a fellow proponent of 4E.</blockquote>

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