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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5814610" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm puzzled by where people find these 'wimp monsters' that I hear about all the time, lol. Looking at the skill bonuses of typical monsters my observation is that they are normally about average for their levels, sometimes a bit high, sometimes a bit low. They certainly almost never hit the level of what a character CAN get in one or two skills, but you don't always get to use your best skills. Your average monster has a better init bonus than a PC of equal level and on average its other bonuses will be pretty close to the same. They certainly shouldn't have many problems. Typically what you'll see is just that there's a super expert PC who's the only one that tries something, where the monsters are all fairly similar in most encounters. So you have a monster using its +4 STR bonus and some PC with a +10 being compared, yet that same PC has +2 in a bunch of other skills that the monster is also +4 at.Anyway, a number of posts have been pointing out to me that IMHO one of the purposes of the game is to give the players a platform to show off some. Monsters are threats and adversaries, but there's always been a strong convention that it is the PCs that really get to be clever and develop tricks and whatnot. This is why most CaW has never struck me as terribly clever. Opponents rarely get to operate on anything close to the same level that the PCs do. Monsters mostly seem to wander around or follow some basic script. They'll react, but rare indeed is the day when the bad guys bring the war to the PCs. Frankly it better be that way, the DM has infinite resources. There are no such things as fair fights. If you win it is ALWAYS because the DM let you win. That may be out of a sense of fun or fairness or any number of motives, but all types of play are built around an illusion. I appreciate a game system that doesn't try to pretend differently.PCs are the heroes, they'll always be the ones INTENDED to pull off the cool stuff, it is just the nature of the beast. If a DM can't challenge his players it isn't for lack of ways to do that, but due to a lack of willingness to do it.</blockquote>

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