>>16227340
>On the DM side, I disliked the design choice of "Monster in a box" as opposed to each monster being procedurally created with the same rules as every other creature including the PCs. It felt like the game designers were withholding a favorite tool and it made it harder for me to tweak the challenge for more or less players. Also, skill challenges were just boring, but perhaps that was a failure of my DMing.
Er, there's guidelines in the DMG for how to make monsters- the appropriate stats/attack damages etc. There's no rules for exactly how to make special abilities, bar the guidelines in the damage rules, but I don't believe there were in 3e- you didn't have the monster 'chargen' rules include feats like "Can tunnel" or "Has 3 2nd level spells as at-will SLAs", so the end result is the table of appropriate stats fills in the same values as levelling up a creature using the monster classes, except it's a lot faster.
Plus it's pretty easy to tweak the challenge- knock 1 off all defenses, knock 1 off their attacks, add 1 to their attacks, add 3 to their damage... these are things which whilst you *can* do them in 3e it requires choosing to ignore the particulars of the rules- to knock 1 off the to hit, you have to for example reduce their level... which means recalculating their HP/saves/feats/skills, or reduce their strength... which means recalculating their damage and skills. You can always ignore that, but then you're treating the whole system as guidelines just like the 4e one.
Of course 4e is designed around 1 player:1 monster challenges so you can easily tweak encounters by just adding or removing a single opponent of the PCs level, or a handful of minions (or a trap or environmental feature).