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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4016506" data-attributes="member: 47776">Allow me to elaborate on my point; before including winged, giant, or regenerating enemies, GMs should ask themselves "What would happen if the PCs could, at will, fly/be large/regenerate?"For instance, what happens when, in response to you introducing a group of trolls, the PCs manage to get a troll on their side, either by sparing its life and gradually changing its attitude with diplomacy, directly by using magic to override its will, or by pulling in another plot point from a previous adventure you had not considered initially (such as collars of enslavement that burst into flame taken from a previous villain)?  With any of such efforts, the party now has their very own trap-detector; if they make liberal use of Detect Magic, and can insulate the troll against fire and acid, they never need fear traps again, and have a powerful and deadly ally.Likewise, if you send a horde of Nightmares at the party, and then the party wizard slays them and animates four of them to serve as steeds, then the party can now fly incredibly quickly overland, indefinitely.Point the first: I agree that 3E does this incredibly badly.  I think that because 3E was the first edition to give unambiguous, unable-to-be-interpreted-away-without-houserules power to PCs, it was the first edition of D&D to truly expose the problem.  I fully expect 4E to pull away some of the effects that make this so easy, as I said.But as long as characters interact in the same world together, there will exist the potential for monster-powers to be used for PC-ends.  I think that monster design that moves into the explicitly arbitrary territory (or rather, into the rigorously-defined combat effects that has horribly arbitrary effects when used out of combat, or in combat but out of its original context) is not a step forward.  The problem with designing monsters solely as PC foils is, as I am saying, that when PCs stop treating them solely as foils and start thinking of them as resources, your game world fall down and go boom in a way that it doesn't if you level-set, and build monsters and PCs both on one set of rules.  3rd edition's lackadaisical monster abilities (Wish as a spell-like ability, Quickness of chokers, etc.) caused problems; I believe that statting monsters with the assumption that they will engage in 5-10 rounds of combat and then neatly expire will cause similar problems.</blockquote>

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