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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 5619518" data-attributes="member: 63">Well, to be totally honest, I'm infected by the 2nd edition/4th edition mentality of "give it an interesting skin, and screw the mechanics" when it comes to NPCs, monsters, and pretty much anything the PCs don't have on their character sheets. DMs and players don't have to use the same rules.It's a lot easier to say a 5th level monster has an attack bonus of of +11 because my party's best AC is 20 and I want it to be able to hit most of the time "so I'm giving it a +11 because that's the number that works best for the game," than it is to assemble an attack bonus of +11 by saying, "Okay, it's undead, but I don't want it to have so many HD it can't be turned, so I'll say it has 6 HD, but that only gives it a +3 BAB, so now I need to get +8 from somewhere else, so I guess it has a 26 Strength, though I really was envisioning it more as a nimble monster, so how about I give it a 26 Dex and Weapon Finesse, except now it's damage is kinda low, etc etc."Rugult had to convince me that some PF folks would appreciate having monsters follow the monster-building rules, so I let him handle the fiddly bits of how many hit dice and feats he needs to get reasonable attack bonuses, hit points, and saves. What I'm getting at is, it's up to Rugult how he converts to Pathfinder. In the 4e version, any psionic stuff we put in will do interesting things, but we don't have to only use options that have already been printed in some other sourcebook. Old school Mind Flayers had mind blast because whoever designed them thought it would be cool, not because the psionics supplement listed 'mind blast' as a power psychic creatures could take.On the Player side of things, having listed options is excellent because it helps PCs of the same level be on equivalent footing. And it establishes what the baseline of the world is, so when a monster or NPC shows up and starts doing things PCs can't, the players can know, "Okay, that's ominous." (Or occasionally, "Okay, our GM is a bastard.") And those rules help the GM adjudicate how things play out whenever he does decide to wing it.I know many groups play in ways different than how I do it, which is why I'm cool with letting Rugult worry about the fiddly bits. I just know that in the games I run, I make monster stuff up all the time, and as long as I stick to stats that are reasonable within the conceit of the setting, the players don't seem to care how I came up with those stats.</blockquote>

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