What happened to our monsters?

[Dr Berry]

I have been playing a Pathfinder game for almost three months now, and I have to say that I am very impressed. Every aspect of play has been, in my opinion, greatly improved. Characters have more options than ever, and I have enjoyed my character since day 1.

However, there is one aspect of the system that really makes me miss 3.5: the monsters. On their own, each monster is fantastic, but now they are very hard to customize. Monster PC's are nearly impossible, and adding class levels to make NPC monsters is no picnic either. I think it takes flavor from the monsters when you can't get into the nuts and bolts and tweak things around with ease.

I am looking at this from a DM's perspective. If you have any thoughts on Pathfinder's approach to monsters, I am interested to know what you think.

[harmor]

My GM still uses the 3.5 Monster Manual books (I-IV), plus some of the splat books still in addition to the Bestiary.

[outrider]

Paizo seems to be taking the road that monster pcs are not a good thing, On pages 314 and 315 they talk about monster pcs. As for customing, I would stuff from 3.5 to make customing monsters

[Dr Berry]

Mostly, I would really like to know the racial adjustments to the monsters' ability scores for the purpose of creating NPC's, especially for monsters with unusual (but effective) class choices, such as a Minotaur Rogue.