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No. 38956
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>>38950
This is because 4E shifts the focus on monsters to the essentials. 4E holds the opinion that abilities that a monster will probably never use in actual play are extraneous and waste design space and time. Now, that's not to say no monsters have non-combat abilities--the succubus, for example, still has the ability to change shape to a specific humanoid. Dragons no longer "cast arcane magic," but it's more like instead of giving the red dragon a list of fire spells, they gave it "Immolate Foe," a power that deals a lot of fire damage. The green dragon no longer has charm spells, but it does have Luring Glare and Cunning Glance.
It's funny, because in a lot of ways, the shift from DnD 3.5 to 4E is similar to the shift from Civilization 4 to Civilization 5, but I have basically the opposite opinions of both shifts. But I can explain why. I thought Civ4 was a very tightly-designed game with good reasons for just about every aspect of it. It functioned very well as a whole, in that it encouraged multiple strategies as effective. While there were obviously balance concerns, they weren't unplayable. You could make up the difference with tactical skill or a bit of luck. Civ5 changed the system from the ground up, and unlike Civ4, I do not think it encourages a very fun kind of gaming experience. It feels like there are fewer effective options, and the balance concerns were much larger. Most of all, there are just too many turns in Civ5 where I just hit enter and do nothing. As I'm sure most people who have played Civ4 multiplayer with me are aware, I don't do that very much in Civ4~
On the other hand, while I did have a lot of fun playing DnD 3.5, I think it's a shoddily designed system. There are HUGE balance concerns, with the obvious ones about fighters sucking horribly past the fist few levels (and a druid's animal companion being about 80% as effective as a fighter at the first level), to the even more obvious ones of full casters possessing world-ending spells by epic level ( http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0639.html ). If you actually READ the rules, it's like they were schizophrenic when writing them. They couldn't decide if they wanted to try and simulate "reality" or create a good game system. So they tried to do both and it fails badly all too often. Compare the absurdly complicated rules for grappling to the frustratingly vague rules for mind control, for example. DnD 4E changed all that. Now it focuses much more on DnD as a system used for running games. I think this change was for the better. There was some cost, though, and I admit that I think the one thing that I miss from 3.5 was the cool things spellcasters could do with the right spells outside of combat. I understand why they had to be cut or marginalized, however; for balance concerns. It's not very encouraging if you're a beast in combat, but the other guy is a beast in combat AND can solve any social situation with the right spell. It makes you feel like you picked the wrong class. Still, while I won't call 4E the perfect system (far from it), I think it's improved greatly from 3.5.
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