Dannyalcatraz said:
The MM would be released in the same form as the 2Ed Monsterous compendium...but with a twist: Monsters would be released in packages of 30 pages each, containing a variety of monsters. And by variety, I mean COLLECTIBLE! That's right! Monsters would be released randomly with distribution determined by their ACTUAL rarity!
I know you're joking, but I want to seriously address this common prediction: it wouldn't work. Not only would it make a lot of us rather angry, but the way D&D works is quite different from Magic. In Magic, having multiple copies of a card could be a benefit -- up to a point, at least; in D&D, there's no reason I couldn't use a single kobold card to make an entire army of kobolds. Sure, I might not have enough kobold minis, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who isn't above using Lego men or generic counters or a mini of a different monster. And they could make it against the rules to do so, but most people would ignore it as D&D is not a competition. So a group would share their copies, and a large portion of the set of monsters would be wasted (as compared to the marginal utility in Magic), both of which would tend to reduce sales.
The idea of distribution by "actual" rarity is intriguing, but unfortunately that would mean, for example, in a typical pack, I might get a gang (4-9) of goblins and a warband (10-24 plus 2-4 dire weasels) of kobolds. That would be much less useful than 1 goblin, 1 kobold, 1 dire weasel, and 27 other monsters.
Something that would be interesting, perhaps, would be breaking up the monster manual into low-level, mid-level, and high-level books, or breaking it up by terrain, like the XRP monster books. However, while this might be useful for us, it would most likely reduce total sales, because many people would only buy a few portions, and as I understand it, there is more overhead in producing two small books than one large book.
Dannyalcatraz said:
The PHB would receive similar treatment, with all of the crunchy stuff the players would need- grapple rules, AoO rules, etc.- but with seperate binders dedicated to collectible Spells, Psionic Powers, Feats...even CLASSES & RACES!
"Oh...you want to play a Halfling Rogue? Awwwwww- I don't have that class...or race! Here- try a Feral Duskling Spellthief instead!"
Again, if Larry in your group has a halfling card, you can just copy the stats off of his.