Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 2401832" data-attributes="member: 22424">That's very true, from what I've seen. I did have to do quite a bit of prep work for the Shackled City, mostly in the later adventures, but it was of the form of working out how the enemies were going to interact with the PCs (their tactics, choice of spells, and so on), rather than in statting out those encounters. The use of a pregenerated campaign was a huge help in this regard.I also did a fair amount of work in re-reading the adventures and preparing tokens for all the foes encountered (no substitutions for us  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ). However, none of that was required work.I think Wizards of the Coast would be better to not do this work themselves. They're not software engineers. Far better to subcontract another company to do it for them. Additionally, it's probably too late to do anything with 3.x rules at this time - by the time a product could be rolled out, we're probably going to be less than a year from the launch of 4th edition.When the development work for 4th edition kicks off, or very shortly thereafter, Wizards should start working with their team of choice to develop appropriate tools. And they should ditch all the big dreams that have killed of their products in the past - give us a good, expandable character generator, a good, expandable stat-block generator, and a few other things, rather than promising the world and delivering nothing.While that could certainly be useful, I don't know how realistic it is to do for intelligent high level monsters. One of the key attributes of, say, a beholder is that it is likely to do extensive research on its opponents, and act accordingly. But, how can any book provide any reasonable description of tactics to use against such a diverse group as high-level PCs?To be honest, though, thinking up tactics for the high-CR monsters to use against my party was never a problem I faced while running the Shackled City - creating the stat blocks would have been. With that other task taken care of, the rest just followed.Incidentally, I think it's worth stating my opinion that the single greatest weapon that D&D has over (almost) any other system is the wealth of pre-generated adventures out there. Between Dungeon, the third-party companies, and Wizards own (relatively sparce) offerings, it is more than possible to run this game for a decade without running out of material. As a very busy DM, I find that advantage impossible to ignore (and that despite my preference to write my own adventures).</blockquote>

Verification