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"more overall statblocks" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that assertion. If it has fewer statblocks that I need in my campaign then it is of less utility, is it not? If I gave you a Monster Manual with 10,000 statblocks that are say, all varieties of pirates, would you say that has more or...

It's not great to have a "new and improved version" having less utility than the version it replaced?

I guess its not problematic to stat out drow in monster manuals after all. Huh.

The About as The closest we got was the “Appearance” sub ability in Skills and Powers.

This is really an American thing, to be honest. My wife's from Singapore and I can tell you that it's a fairly non-controversial word on plenty of buildings. Interestingly in 15th century England, it seems to have been used to refer to people in the east of England (ie Essex).

That particular phrase is an ill omen.

I'm crossing my fingers this means an end to "revisiting" classic settings and "updating them for a new audience".

Non-ironically I think it should have stayed as Girdle. (again, D&D creator's love sucking any flavour out of anything)

"Exclusively" is a bold claim, as I've pointed out I've used the word myself and never associated it with that. And I mean... how many tefillins do you think 1960s Wisconsin men encountered? I think Gygax's thought processes extended to "wow that's a cool sounding word" and not much beyond that.

I honestly think the only reason Gygax didn't choose the word "amulet" was his love of archaic language (cf dweomer). The link to Judaism would have never even factored into it. (AFAIK anti-semitism is one thing that Gygax hasn't been accused of)

That post is the most American-protestant brained thing I've ever read. And it seems others have already pointed out the issue with it, so I won't bother. "Asmodeus is different just because I say it is." Ok.

In all seriousness I assume the idea was to draw from Christian and Jewish mythology in the same way the names for the demon princes and archdevils do.

We'd have to remove Asmodeus and pretty much most of the Archdevils.

I can't speak for the US, but in my own country "phylactery" is an archaic word for amulet. I never even realized it had a Jewish meaning until relatively recently,

Hmmm, ok, I've got to confess I've never read the 3E description. Is that the first time it appears? It doesn't seem to match any actual named phylacteries that appeared over the years. EDIT: I found this post which says they didn't start to resemble tefflins until 3E, but the change may have...

Has it really? I can't think of any phylactery illustrated to look like a tefillin. To me that seem to me more alluding to Sauron and his relationship with the one ring. (ie, the "amulet" definition)

That would've been great. But WoTC decided no orcs at all.