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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elderbrain" data-source="post: 7584472">Because all the monsters assumed the 4e cosmology and fluff. In 4e, Giants were created by the Dawn Titans, the Dawn Titans were Evil, therefore all Giants were made Evil, including traditional good-aligned Giants such as Storm Giants (who couldn't be Chaotic Good anymore anyway, since 4e eliminated that alignment outright, along with Chaotic Neutral. If you had the word "Chaotic" in your alignment in 4e, you were Evil, period. Likewise, if you had the word "Lawful" in your alignment, you were Good. Lawful Evil and Lawful Neutral didn't exist in 4e, at least, no more explicitly then those alignments exist in, say, GURPS. There were creatures that behaved in what we would call a Lawful Evil manner - Devils, for one - but as a game mechanic the alignment didn't exist and wasn't recognized.) The Metallic Dragons all ceased to be good and became unaligned. Demons became Elementals and gained elemental resistances because the Abyss was moved to the bottom of the Elemental Chaos.  Eladrin became a type of Elf rather than Celestials (or High Elves became Eladrin, depending upon how you want to look on it.) You get the idea. And it was completely unnecessary - the Eberron book for 3.5e, for instance, had a new cosmology without killing off the old one. The 4e writers could've taken their cool new ideas and released a new campaign setting for 4e that incorporated all these ideas, without putting them in the core rulebooks and literally changing the cosmology of other campaign settings to match, i.e. the Forgotten Realms.Now, I am not saying all this to "dump" on 4e, just to point out that there were some pretty massive changes that threw a lot of older players for a loop. There were a lot of really good ideas, concepts, monsters, and yes planar material in 4e - especially what they did with the Feywild and the Shadowfell. I love Shadar-Kai and the Raven Queen. And I did buy every book up until the "Essentials" line came out (which I did not buy for the same reason that I did not buy the 3.5 edition after having bought the original 3rd edition.) Some of the changes I either didn't mind or actually preferred - for instance, I've always used a grid and minis when playing, so the fact that 4e assumed this was no sweat off my back. Introducing new types of Dragons and other monsters was fine in my book. And having different challenge rating stat block for, say, skeletons was smart - i.e. weak skeletons for low-level PCs, strong skeletons for higher-level PCs.</blockquote>

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