I was the biggest fan of your
other monster you did this way and I absolutely love this one too. I said before this was a great way of introducing a newly designed monster because you can show off what makes it cool. But now that you've done it on a monster from the MM I see a whole different benefit. Do you realize how easy this makes a bulette to DM?
If I open up the 3.5 MM to "Bulette" I get a statblock like any other and the information that the bulette attacks things it senses from below ground. If I try to run that as a random encounter I'm not likely to get anything more creative than "claw claw bite."
If I opened up a monster manual to
your Bulette as a random encounter, that encounter is going to be so awesome it will look like I prepared it! That Bulette's going to have an fearsome furrow crisscrossing the ground and knocking people off their feet, it's going to mow on the party's shields with its giant jaws, it's going to burst up like something out of Jaws and pull a player beneath the surface. (I would totally panic at that). It's going to be totally different from, say, fighting a huge monstrous scorpion, even though that has essentially the same statblock of claw, claw and grapple.
Best of all, I can run this right out of the manual because all the rules are right where I need them. Who keeps enough of the definition of "burrow speed" in their head to remember it doesn't leave a tunnel behind?
The pictures are what get your attention first. But this way of presenting monsters has
so much going for it beyond the pictures. You have added a ton of value here. I've already mentioned the tactics, which are really creative and you must have put a lot of thought into. The encounter suggestions are also creative -- I totally want to run that one where the bulette bursts up in the middle of another combat.
Just looking at your list of "suggested feats" makes me realize every other monster that offers Hit Dice advancement is underdesigned.
Every monster should come with a list of appropriate, interesting feats. You can advance it in a flash and keep it unique.
These are things that any monster designer can do to add a ton of value to their monsters. Knowing what "niche" you designed a monster for lets you make much better strategy and feats for them. If you didn't understand a bulette was supposed to be a "land shark," you'd never figure out attacks like these. (My impression from the MM description was that it was like a cross between a remorhaz and a bear -- bursts out from underground, then claws you.) The original designer basically left his design half done -- he gave it the stat block it needed, and never explained how to use it.
You know, in my perfect world, this kind of major advance in monster presentation is the sort of thing that would justify a new edition of the game. I would be very happy to trade in my 3.5 Monster Manual for one full of your designs -- a book of monsters that guaranteed cool encounters and showed me how to run them.
