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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blackeagle" data-source="post: 4236072" data-attributes="member: 41120">I hardly think the 3e monster design system can be described as "easy".  Building a high level monster from scratch is a hell of a lot of work.  I don't really think it's all that robust either, at least not in the way that matters most: CR versus actual power in combat.  Building or modifying a high level monster is pretty much a crapshoot, you may end up with something that will TPK your party with ease, or something that's little more than a speedbump.  Now, a lot of this has to do with 3e in general (particularly it's underlying math and some of the assumptions about what capabilities a party will have) rather than just the monster rules, but I don't think the monster rules help.That assumes that adjudicating something on the fly is more difficult than applying the rules.  At a certain point the rules become so complicated that it's easier to fudge it.  Grappling is the classic example of this, a player or monster decides to start wrestling and the game grinds to a halt while the DM flips through the rulebook and players start trying to figure out how their current buffs affect their grapple check.Unless your players don't read the rulebook, then it seems to me that the designers are the ones telling the players these things.So, it comes down to the tradeoff between the complexity of a process-response model and the limitations of a black box model.  Like I said, whether you like 4e is going to depend a lot on how you view this tradeoff.</blockquote>

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