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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3985214" data-attributes="member: 2067">I don't care one whit about legacy, but I'm still gonna miss these guys.Because their concepts (A coastal dragon that manipulates the weather and is close friends with mortal races, and a dragon of the rocky deserts who carves their home into living rock and likes to tell riddles from secluded caves) are really cool concepts. Missing that from the game is sad, though I'm willing to give them a chance to make it up with the new dragons.If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times:I want RULES. "Make Stuff Up" is a profoundly crappy rule.And you're looking at it backwards. It's not that I need an orc with a +20 Blacksmith skill. It's that I look at an orc, see that it has +20 blacksmith, and infer a whole host of world details from that. These world details ground the creature, and give me dots to connect to other features of the world. If it has +20 blacksmith, that must mean that it has a forge somewhere, makes a lot of weapons maybe, that other nations will buy because they're very good, and if other nations buy them, this orc must be fairly friendly with regards to at least some other nations, but if he's still Evil, maybe these nations are Evil too, meaning he's the chief blacksmith of a vast goblinoid empire.I took a skill bonus, spun it into an Empire. These are things that I can do on the fly easily in 3e. It's something 4e will make harder for me, it seems, and this means that it will take longer to prep a game for me, and thus 4e will fail miserably at it's goal to reduce the fiddly bits in D&D by not giving me what I need out of the game, forcing me to create it myself if I want it. This completely untrue.You're forgetting the most prominent rule in any edition of D&D:The DM can do whatever the heck he wants.This has always been ESPECIALLY true with monsters. No part of 3e or any other edition prevented you from having an orc or a dragon like you describe, and many, many parts actually encouraged it.You see, that's the problem. I don't have a specific story requirement I need filled. My games are flexible, on-the-fly kinds of things, rather than heavily pre-planned and pre-meditated. I don't know what I'm going to need a monster for. That's why I rely on the designers to tell me what the monster is supposed to be doing.They're going to do an admirable job of telling me what the monster should be doing in combat, I'm sure, but I am going to need more than that. I'm going to need to know what the monster is doing in the world, in the woods, in this neighborhood, what it's doing interacting with the PC's, what it's dreams and goals are, what it's life is like before it meets the PC's, and what it will be doing when they are gone. If they ignore that, then they've made me pre-plan my games more than I have had to before, increasing the prep time I need to run a game.This is a problem.</blockquote>

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