> From: woodelf [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > > From: woodelf [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > > >> are you able[0] to answer this question, then?: > >> is this why the creatures in the MM have such sparse, often > >> incomplete, descriptions? > > > >You mean "monsters in the SRD", right? > > no, i mean monsters in the D&D3E MM. Ah. The lack of detail for the creatures in the MM was dictated by two factors: How much interest the designers had in fleshing them out, and how much space the editors provided to fit that text into. A design decision was apparently made to expand the descriptions of creatures likely to appear in relatively organized groups at the expense of "monsters" that are likely to be treated as simple combat opponents. At no time was a decision made to reduce the text in the book for IP protection. The MM suffers, in my opinion, from four problems. First, it was the last book designed, thus it was the book under the most pressure to go to press. All the slack that the system coughed up for the PHB and DMG was exhausted by the time we got to the MM, and the MM went "on schedule" like it or not. That meant that people had to work extraordinarily hard in a short amount of time to get it finished, after having already worked extraordinarily hard for the two previous months on the two previous books. Tempers, time, and attention to detail all ran into short supply. (And the high quality of the book under those conditions is a real testament to the people who did that extraordinarily tough work). Second, it suffers from having too many "monsters" I consider unimportant/uninteresting from a game play standpoint. I argued this case and was overruled by people who remain convinced that a "Fantasy Game" isn't a fantasy game without faeries, unicorns, etc. I would much rather have tossed most of those creatures into an appendix (or another product entirely) and instead populated the book with all new monsterous creations. (*) Third, most of the technology used to create the monster stat blocks themselves was not fully quantified until after the book was in final editing (and even not then in some cases). Don't even ask me about CRs/ELs. I would have liked to include the rules for making monsters in the book (Monte's follow up article in Dragon, basically), as well as a complete treatment on playing monsters as PCs. The ECL concept didn't fully evolve until the FR book was under serious design, but had I had access to that technology, it should have made its appearance in the MM itself. Templates need extensive revision to quantify how to use them more clearly and how to more accurately calculate CRs for monsters that have them, and to ECL PCs who might get them. "Template technology" in general is one of the least developed parts of 3e. I don't like the CR calculation in the monster advancement rules either; even the example of the Otyugh clearly looks a hell of a lot more powerful (higher ! CR/EL) than what the text suggests it should be. Fourth, the book's layout doesn't work. I don't think going back to one creature per page is the solution, but the irregular text, and cramped presentation isn't helping matters. We chose quantity over clarity, and the result is unsatisfying. All that said, I think the MM is still a good book. It suffers in comparison to its siblings, but it is still a hell of a work, both of game design and of imagination/illustration. (*) If I were brand-managing 3e all over again today, I would insist on replacing all the creatures in the Monster Manual with all new monsters. One of the problems WotC has is that TSR did not have a process in place to track the origins of creatures. As a result, "conventional wisdom" is the only real guide to what WotC outright owns and what it derived from public domain sources. There are a handful of people who still work in R&D who could probably be extensively interviewed to get a better picture, but they're all very busy people and in the long run it wouldn't matter that much anyway. The MM should be reconcepted from scratch, giving 3e a clear "brand identity" related to monsters that appear in D&D and don't appear in typical sword & sorcery fantasy products. The handful of really unique and valuable D&D creatures could be retained (illithids, githyanki, ropers, etc.) but the rest of the book should be all new monsters designed from scratch and documented as being original, nonderivative creations. Had we done so in the first place we would have ended up with an obvious easy product ("old" D&D monsters in their own book!), and a constant series of surprising new challenges for jaded older players ("darn - everything we're facing is brand new; we've got to stop making assumptions about the monsters we're encountering!") We were changing so much, while at the same time trying to stay very true to the "essence" of D&D that we were blinded by the importance people would actually place on "old favorite" monsters. The issue seemed super critical at the time, but I think hindsight shows that we could have whacked all the old creatures and replaced them easily, provided the new stuff was quantitatively as cool or cooler than the stuff we left behind. Ryan _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
