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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SWBaxter" data-source="post: 2971802" data-attributes="member: 27926">When I first picked up the 3.0 PHB and MM, I saw that monsters were being given class levels and said to myself "cool, now all those goofy critters with a bunch of random spell-like abilities will be rewritten to have spellcasting levels instead." I turned to Ogre Mage, and was immediately disappointed. So I ignored the official Ogre Mage and just used Ogres with sorceror levels in the same role. Worked fine, and captured a heck of a lot more "flavor" than any random suite of abilities held over from 1E or earlier since I could customize my Ogre Magi via spell selection to make them sneaky or charming or warrior-leaders or whatever. Worked well.Nowadays, though, I'm not as happy with that method, since adding class levels to critters can become a lot of work. What I'd really like to see is a much greater use of templates to customize creatures - take a basic Ogre, apply a "War Leader" template of combat stuff to make it a better fighter, then some kind of magic template to match whatever magical role I have in mind. IMHO this is a much better idea than having a bunch of different monster statblocks and figuring out which one is best.So IMHO, the "new design philosophy" is just a more rational version of what's been going on for thirty years, the endless process of churning out critters to fill monster supplements. Nothing particularly new about it, it's just a more coherent process now. The new philosophy I'd like to see is still pretty far off - it'd focus more on making it relatively easy for DMs to put together unique critters rather than making them buy even more monster books.That said, Mearls' redesigned Ogre Mage works better than the traditional version IMHO, so even though WOTC are on the wrong track, at least they're paying more attention to turning out quality material than in the past. So give 'em one thumb up from me.</blockquote>

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