the Jester
Legend
All kinds of stuff! Ecology, habitat/society, frequency, organization, alignments tagged as "often", "usually", or "always"... morale, treasure types.... gah.
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Anything you miss from older monster manual stat blocks?
- Thread starter cavetroll
- Start date
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Probably an unpopular opinion, but Morale. A metric for how likely monsters are to say "screw this, I'm outta here!" While it takes up a lot of space, I used to really enjoy reading monster lore- did you know that Mustard Jellies originated when a young wizard attempted to polymorph into a ochre jelly? The wizard failed and she was transformed into a mustard jelly. Since the accident, these jellies multiplied rapidly and spread to many areas.
Professor Murder
Hero
If not individual morale entries, then at least a good discussion about morale in the DMG, along with making Intimidate worth a damn please.
cavetroll
Explorer
Oh thats a great one, I thought having Morale numbers was great, especially for a dungeon crawl or wandering monsters.
Ath'kethin
Elder Thing
There are morale rules in the 5e DMG. They aren't as robust as the 2e rules, but they are there and they work.
cavetroll
Explorer
Right but thread is about what you miss or would like to see in the stat block though, and in 2e you had an explicit entry for Morale
Ath'kethin
Elder Thing
That's true.
They do have morale listed in the monster manual, though - it's Wisdom, which you use to make a morale check (WIS save) when you would normally make a morale check in older editions. I guess that's an optional rule now that I think about it but I can't imagine running combats without it.
I do agree that some indication of whether the monsters appear in small groups or alone or large groups would be nice. I don't necessarily need the dice ranges on it anymore - once 3e decided that the game needed balanced encounters, the idea of randomly stumbling onto 3d10x10 orcs started to feel like a bit too much spread on those numbers even with a bell curve.
I do agree that some indication of whether the monsters appear in small groups or alone or large groups would be nice. I don't necessarily need the dice ranges on it anymore - once 3e decided that the game needed balanced encounters, the idea of randomly stumbling onto 3d10x10 orcs started to feel like a bit too much spread on those numbers even with a bell curve.
cavetroll
Explorer
Back when I played there was no internet so nobody knew how anyone else played (at least not in my college).
So when it said 3-30 I never took it "literally" meaning I should roll 3d10 to create an encounter. It just meant (to me) that often that is how many orcs you would find in a community/lair in theory.
What I like about it the entry is that it immediately tells you something about the creature, if it says only 1 encountered at a time, that speaks volumes, versus dozens packed together.
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