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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4609272" data-attributes="member: 2067">Ah, yes, because searching through individual monster entries is exactly what I have time to do in the middle of a game. Checking a page on the DMG with a list of monsters by terrain and habitat (with CR ratings!) and dungeon level was better for this.I hate generating monsters spontaneously because there's no context for them. It just feels like I'm creating a pretext for draining healing surges. It should be feeling like I'm battling a fearsome beast (which is easier to do for me with 3e's pre-defined fearsome-beast fluff).I never said that it did. I don't know where you're getting the idea that I said this. I didn't say this.Pgs. 64-69 aren't the same thing as 3e telling me that 10% of the battlefield is filled with trees (and giving me the exact mechanical effect of these trees, including how easy they are to knock over) in a forest with light density. The latter is much more useful when I'm whipping up a forest combat on the fly.I don't know of any 4e dominate ability that is actually useful "socially" in any capacity, but that aside, I certainly won't know if the monster has Skill Focus (Tea Party Hosting) as a feat, and so I won't be told if the monster has any particular interest in hosting a tea party or not.And, of course, if I think my NPC is going to be used as a tea party host, that's context-less combat stats I need to materialize out of nothing if the PC's decide to kick them in the shins instead.But basically:Context, context, context. Warhammer, as the OP's article uses, has the virtue of having a world with a very strong flavor and very deep context -- it's very setting-specific. The article says that you should know things like how certain races and creatures behave, so that it's easier to react as they would react. 4e is too aetherous for me to run as spontaneously as I ran 3e. I have to prepare too much. 3e was much more detailed, and this detail gave me a solid grounding that I could launch from -- it prepared everything for me, so all I had to do was plug it in and let it run. 4e, in trying to give the DM broader power to change things more easily, doesn't give me nearly enough context.</blockquote>

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