Quote Originally Posted by OldTrees1 View Post
1) They say DMs should be able to use the PHB when creating encounters.
2) They suspect there is almost always a "better / easier" way.

This does not sound like either extreme. It shows a strong preference for one method and says both methods should be available to the DM.
Should be able to. Absolutely. Should not be considered "doing it wrong" for doing so.

However, doing it that way is extra, unnecessary work every time I've tried to do it (which I've tried). And doing so has led to less-successful monsters than doing it the "normal" way.

An analogy: Someone making a Skyrim mod could build all his own animations and scripting from scratch. Or, realizing that he's just making a minor change to an existing thing, alter the included asset and scripts and call it a day. There are cases where the first is the right thing to do. But they're cases that the vast majority of modders will never run into. Is it forbidden? No. Just...not encouraged. Because honestly, the chances of accidentally breaking things is much higher. It's like using straight C (the programming language) for web development. The risk of foot-gunning well outweighs (for most of us) the increased efficiency and speed.

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Realizing that monsters and PCs have complementary but different roles and different mechanical needs is the key to the whole thing. And realizing that the game mechanics are just a UI into a fictional world. They don't define anything other than how the players interact with the world and with those game elements. They're not part of the world at all, although they should be designed to be compatible (at some level of abstraction).


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And he, not she or they. But I don't particularly care.