Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
Having monster creation rules is pretty much an afterthought. Every edition of D&D that has every existed has approached the problem of "how you do you get new monsters" with "buy more monster books", and that has worked out at least as well as any monster creation system I've seen a game of non-trivial complexity. The real issue is PC-like NPCs, and that's an inherently harder problem because you can't just cheat. A Gargoyle is not supposed to be a PC. It doesn't matter if its Stone Form ability is different from PCs abilities, because it is not presented as being the same. But once you start talking about differences between PC Wizards and NPC Wizards, you're on thin ice very quickly. There's a real chance that what you want is not any kind of mechanical change, but some kind of easy-to-use online character generator. If you could just say "give me an NPC Wizard at X power level" and have a website spit out a useable stat block, that would be fine for 99% of use-cases and require few-to-no sacrifices in terms of transparency.
I mean, if that's what you see as the real issue, more power to you. However, upthread there were at least some people who were comparing if/how a PC could something compared to the monster entries.