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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pinotage" data-source="post: 4105246" data-attributes="member: 15194">The general complaint is that the MM is filled with non-unique creatures, in that every creature, such as the gnoll, contains 10 varieties. I'd far prefer to see a MM filled with 500 unique creatures, than one filled with 150 unique creatures and 350 'filler' creatures that are just different combinations of the same thing. That's not saying they're not useful, it's just saying that you're only paying for 150 creatures, rather than paying for 500. The other 350 you can do youself with minimal effort. At present, 350 creatures are a waste of space in terms of unique material, although they're potentially useful.I think most of your other questions are unrelated to this issue, apart from this one:Not necessarily. 4e's design paradigm is to take a role and design the mechanics based on that. It's top down approach. 3e's approach is to take the mechanics and build those up into a role. That's bottom's up approach. They're very different. You're also assuming that the 4e MM is actually going to contain information that will allow you to do a bottom up design, which it might not. But I think in general the philosophy in 4e is top down, since most of the design is assign a role and function, use guidelines to determine the rest. We have no knowledge, that I'm aware of, on what specifically or mechanically constitutes the unique characteristics of any creature, such as, a gnoll.Pinotage</blockquote>

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