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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benimoto" data-source="post: 4039478" data-attributes="member: 40093">I enjoy DMing 3rd edition, but I'm looking forward to the 4th edition way of building NPCs and monsters.  I'm probably repeating what people have said here, but I thought a few points needed reiterating or rephrasing.The 4th edition system lets you design a NPC from the top down, as opposed to the bottom up.  One problem with building the NPC from the bottom up is that it gets more laborious the higher level you get.  As other posters have mentioned, each new level is more feats, more spells, more class abilities, skill points and equipment to choose.  My hope is that in the 4th edition system, it will take as much time to design a 26th level NPC as a 6th.The other main problem with starting from the bottom up is that you're never sure what you're going to get until you're finished building him.  You might build a whole NPC only to realize that he's a total creampuff who's going to die immediately, or isn't even capable of the evil plots you had in mind for him.  With monsters, you might go through the whole process of advancing a monster by hit dice, only to realize that it's mechanically inferior in almost every way to other monsters of its CR.  Or that it has way many HP, or an attack bonus that makes the party's ACs irrelevant.  But you don't generally know until you do all the math.So you end up doing a lot of work that gets bad results, and then you either have to throw it away, spend time reworking it, or use your inferior/overpowered monster.  Good judgment can help with the problem, but only so far.And, as mentioned a lot of the stuff you do for a NPC is not going to be used at all.  If you spend time fleshing out non-combat stuff for a monster than ends up just fighting, you've just wasted half your effort.  Same thing if you spend all your time buying equipment and choosing combat spells for an NPC who doesn't get into a fight.  And because it can be a lot of work, it can be frustrating to do all that for no payoff in any way.</blockquote>

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