Unhappy w/4E monster manual..3PP pls. publish monster books pronto!!

[Scribble]

You're fighting medusae, Illithids, Wyverns, and Chimeras at low levels?

The idea that boars and bears aren't scary is a relatively new idea. Poachers went after pheasants, not boars ;p.

I have a cousin in Germany... He's still actually considered a "knight" and is tasked with protecting the village from boars. (No joke.)

He says his gun is only loaded with one bullet because by the time he got off a second shot, he would already be gored.

We had wild boar for dinner when I went to visit him. It's pretty good. Taste like pork, but less fat.

 

[Jack Colby]

Reskinning monsters is easy, which is why the book is such a disappointment. More people would get more use from classic/familiar D&D monsters than untested/new ones. And I am speaking here of the flavor and the "traction in the imagination", not the rules.

A lot of people find the new monsters and names silly, and not resonating with DMs or players, yet they were chosen over proven favorites. And that is a problem, whether the "just reskin them" camp likes it or not. The unusual, wacky monsters that few people will fit into their campaigns should be the result of reskinning, not the old standbys everyone already loves and expects and associates with D&D and fantasy in general.

 

[doctorhook]

I agree with your post there Dave Turner, reskinning monsters is a good way to get the most mileage out of the MM, but i think a problem many people are having is they simply don't want to do that. They want to open the book, flip to the monster they need (with the proper picture) and run with it. While retooling monsters is fun (i think it is anyway) it can take some time, and the middle of a session isn't always the best place for it (although i did convert an adult kruthik into an ankheg on the fly and it worked fine).

Renaming is the easiest kind of reskinning!

 

[Benimoto]

I don't think the new Monster Manual is perfect, but I like it. I like most of the new monsters, even including the lightning scorpions. I feel it's important for each new MM to be 85% classics but still include around 15% new monsters.

Personally, my suspicion is that not including a read-aloud monster description is a sneaky experiment. Reading the old Design & Development articles late in 3rd edition, I remember an article where the authors mentioned that based on their observations at conventions, players' eyes glazed over within seconds of encountering "box text". Their advice was that DMs don't actually read that stuff aloud, but paraphrase or invent their own. The article posited that even an awkward, but spontaneous, paraphrase would hold the players' attention better than the most eloquent pre-written box text.

Now, with no monster descriptions, but a full-color picture of each monster, we have that advice enforced onto every encounter. Like any kind of enforcement, it's going to generate some resentment. But I'm interested in seeing if the experiment works.

 

[Blair Goatsblood]

Dungeons & Dragons got a long just fine w/o detailed descriptions for 95% of it's monsters until 2nd edition...

 

[Xeveninti]

I don't think creating new 4e monsters is as easy as some people in this thread are saying. If this was the case, then D&D forums would be bursting with 4e monster stats. And there wouldn't be threads like this, complaining about the lack of monsters in the 4e MM.

I've been scouring the net for 4e versions of 1e MM monsters. I've only been able to find The Monster Project. It's incomplete. The index page needs a drastic overhaul. Loading pages on this forum takes too long.

There needs to be a better website dedicated to 4e monsters. If it's so ridiculously easy for some people to conjure monster stats, I'd sure love to see them all in one place.

 

[WizarDru]

I don't think creating new 4e monsters is as easy as some people in this thread are saying. If this was the case, then D&D forums would be bursting with 4e monster stats. And there wouldn't be threads like this, complaining about the lack of monsters in the 4e MM.

Or it may be that many gamers feel that 4e present enough adequate creatures that they're not that concerned about making new ones.


That said, it looks like there are plenty of monster threads here, including this one mentioned earlier and this thread for purely new 4e monsters (which is pretty large) and then there's this thread for converting al-Qadim monsters to 4e, a thread for templates to create new monsters and just the occasional ad-hoc creature.

That's a lot of monsters, especially this early in 4e's life-cycle...and certainly much more far earlier than for a similar passage of time for 3e. I don't know if that proves that it's easier to make monsters under 4e, but it certainly can't be THAT hard or we'd see far fewer than we are.

 

[1Mac]

For those looking for a Tome of Horrors type 4e sourcebook: Fiery Dragon got ahold of the rights to Sword and Sorcery and is publishing a 4e Creature Collection this year (scroll down).

I'm not very familiar with the Creature Collection series, but it was a sort of Tome of Horrors also-ran, yes?

 

[Henry]

I'm not very familiar with the Creature Collection series, but it was a sort of Tome of Horrors also-ran, yes?

Not quite; Creature Collection was a set of all-new monsters, for what would later be known as the Scarred Lands setting. Tome of Horrors were 3E stats for AD&D critters who hadn't made it into the WotC books at the time of its printing.

 

[Jack99]

You're fighting medusae, Illithids, Wyverns, and Chimeras at low levels?

The idea that boars and bears aren't scary is a relatively new idea. Poachers went after pheasants, not boars ;p.

Fighting animals at low level is so EQ/WoW'ish. Let's keep them away from 4e.