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Message: <blockquote data-quote="malraux" data-source="post: 4616736" data-attributes="member: 24352">As you note, preparing plot and personalities are largely system irrelevant.  But I find that DnD is a combat based game system (or at least that's what I play the game for).  Prior to this, I had only really played and run 3e.  I found that 3e worked against me as much as with me.  For example, in 3e, when I was running EtCRavenloft, while the story and personalities were awesome, the combats were horrid.  Undead heavy adventures are rough.  The rouge gets screwed (because sneak attack doesn't work), the tank character gets screwed because undead often bypass hitpoints by attacking ability scores, the cleric often feels screwed because the ability to inflict long term status effects (like permanent ability drain) were not keyed to the ability of the cleric to remove those effects.  That's the system actively working against you.In addition, its hard to make creatures tougher (and almost impossible to make creatures easier).  Yes, tossing a level of barbarian on a melee monster is actually fairly easy, but not tossing a level or two of a caster class.  In addition, a 3e stat block is usually not "complete".  I can't just copy and paste a 3e stat block into my notes and be ready.  I need to figure out what the spell like abilities do and make sure I understand what its tactics should be.  A lot of 3e monsters have entirely pointless attack and damage lines, because their usefulness isn't in their bite (that does 1d4-1 damage), its hidden inside the abilities section.  By contrast, a 4e monster has its attacks listed, usually ranked by power.  A keyword at the top lets me know its rough tactics (soldiers and brutes run up, artillery hangs back, lurkers lurk, etc) which lets me set monsters down without too many mistakes.</blockquote>

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