depth and information. That's a game improvement over no depth and no information.
Why? Why is it an improvement to lock-down the souce of doppelganger's natural AC? Eg what if, in the context of a game I'm running, the PCs are facing their first doppelganger. And one of them is a swashbuckling rogue or F/Th type, chasing the doppelganger through a market-place and across roof-tops. And it would make for exciting and engaging narration, when the player rolls a to-hit roll that just misses, to describe the doppelganger lithely getting out of the way.
Why is it better to be directed by the Monstrous Manual to, instead, say "Your blade is defelcted by the thick hide of the doppelganger"?
From the point of view of human knowledge, more information is (generally) better. From the point of view of fiction, especially fiction that is co-authored in real time, not necessarily so?
And I dispute "depth". It adds no depth to be told the source of a doppelganger's AC. I've read LotR many times and couldn't tell you how the colour of Elrond's footwear. Knowing that little titbit of information wouldn't deepen my appreciation or understanding of the work.
The point is to provide to DMs a starting point to work with when developing a doppleganger story.
Being told they have a single tribe is not more a starting point than being told that once there was a doppelganger named Harry. Or that they prefer to eat lunch in the early afternoon (that might actually be more helpful). That's why I say that it's unhelpful verbiage with no real content. They could have typed anything else there - or even the exact opposite, that doppelgangers are fiercely tribal and exclusive in the territories they haunt - and it would have made
no difference to the rest of the entry and its presentation of doppelgangers. It's as if they rolled a random "humanoid tribal structures" die and just wrote down the result.
Lore is information about something. Just because you don't find it useful doesn't stop it from being lore.
This is a thread about setting lore. My threshold for lore is that, at least, it contributes something to the shared fiction of the game.
I mean, they could have got in another few hundred words by writing, "When a doppelganger wields a dagger, it does d4 damage; when one wields a longsword, it does d8 damage; . . .", so on through the whole weapon table. By your standards that would apparently be yet more impressive lore. In my view, telling us that a monster whose
whole raison d'etre in the game is to be a mind-reading shapechanger might act as a spy or assassin, and might imitate a rich person to get his/her money, is in the same category. It's utterly redundant banality. Writing it down doesn't actually add anything to the sum total of human knowledge, neither about doppelgangers in the fiction nor about how one might actually use them at the table.
pemerton said:
This is not stuff that I don't need because I'm creative, but that others might. It's utterly banal GMing advice (on how to use infiltrator-type monsters) masquerading as a monster entry.
The bolded portion is the key here. This is not about you. This is about the monster lore entry in general. What you need or don't need doesn't dictate whether something is or is not lore, or whether it's useful in general.
You misread the bolded portion (I think by disregarding or missing the first "not"). My whole point is that
this is useful to no one. It's not just a case of me being creative, and so not needing it. No one needs it. In case it's not clear why, let me repost it once more:
[G]roups of dopplegangers can be found anywhere at any time, and in unexpected locations. . . . [D]opplegangers often trail their targets, waiting for a good chance to strike, choosing their time and opportunity with care. They may wait until nightfall, or until their victims are alone, or even follow them to an inn.
This is worthless. Actually worse than worthless, because it fills the page with random characters that make the modicum of actual information (banal as it is, other than the stuff about artificial origins) harder to extract than it otherwise would be.
And in case it's unclear why I think it's worthless: being told that a shapeshfiting mindreadewr can be found anywhere unexpectedly is the same as being told that a fish might be found in a body of water. Being told that they might wait until nightfull, or until a victim is alone, or when a victim is at an inn (not alone? in the day?) is just repeating what is already obvious, that anyone anywhere
could be a doppelganger, because they are mindreading shapeshifters. Those passages literally tell us nothing that we didn't already know just by knowing that we're talking about doppelgangers, a monster in a fantasy RPG.
You're really arguing that lore that says how dopplegangers behave and why doesn't explain to a DM how to use them?
By "all that descriptive stuff" I meant the stuff I had just been referring to in my post. To quote myself "Being told that a monster is grey, hairless and with a thick hide (when I already knew, from its stats, that it is AC 5) is not significant content."
But the rest of the stuff does not tell a GM anything that was not already obvious. And nor does it give the GM any advice on how to handle doppelgangers in play. Compare it to what [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] quoted from DW, which cuts to the chase: your "friend" could actually be a doppelganger. In a sentence or two it tells the GM more about how doppelgagners fit into the game (their uses, their pitfalls etc) than the hundreds of words you posted.
