Quote Originally Posted by MeeposFire View Post
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.
I have never used the expected wealth rules in 3.x (the closest I ever came was when I whole-sale ripped out all the magic item bonuses for one campaign world and worked out a flat progression of level-based bonuses instead which was the same for everyone). I did the same as I do for everything else - just eyeball it (and remember to be very careful when converting AD&D modules - not that I need to now, as Pathfinder has showered me in more adventure paths than I expect I can realistically ever use, without me buying one again1).

I had to think hard to the last time I even USED a stock monster in something I'd written myself (which was at the end of a low-Epic game wherein I needed to trash-fight cannon-fodder and I used some balors/pit fiends/malariths) and that was probably a frighteningly long time ago.

I mean, for the aforementioned campaign world, I also ditched Vancian casting entirely (never really liked it) and tossed the MM away completely and re-designed everything from scratch - and a large number of monsters were designed as monster classes to make them closer to classed characters.



One of the reasons I refused to run 4E was because the monsters were totally different to the characters; again, 3.5 having full stat blocks for everything was such a good idea, I started doing it for Rolemaster as well.

I did - as I always do - steal some ideas, of course. 4E's solo idea was also pretty genius, and my back-retrofitting it to 3.x as a repeatable template that essentially increments the monster hit points as blocks (which they can use to effectively Iron Heart Surge off statuses) and rerolls-at-the-expense-of-effectively-negative-levels has been the best idea ever, as it means you can sensibly have all the boss minster fights you like, even when dealing with my typical 7-8 character parties. (Without negating saves or dies or making them instant wins.)



1At a rate of roughly three years for an adventure path, realsitically, I reckon just ten is likely to be at the point the players are going to be getting on a bit (I'd be seventy and I'm about in the middle).