Originally Posted by
MeeposFire
Wow goes to show how people are different I absolutely refuse to DM 3e ever again and one of the big reasons was having to make NPCs in 3e. It was way too much work for the fun involved. Before 4e came out I was making use of all sorts of hacks to make things easier and to reduce items being given to the party (those not in the know 3e NPCs designed to fight are really supposed to have a certain amount of magical gear in order to have the numbers that their challenge is supposed to have so if you have them fight these NPCs how tehy were intended your player's wealth will explode compared to them fighting standard monsters) such as giving out vow of poverty bonuses to NPCs while they did not actually have VoP. Eventually when the 4e previews came out I started using a lot of 4e principles in designing the enemies the party was going to fight and that was much easier and generally better. Later we just switched to 4e because the players really enjoyed its tactical combat and I enjoyed myself more because it is much easier to run and in more fun to run monsters.