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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 6906295" data-attributes="member: 6779">Actually, the only 4E books I kept were Monster Manuals, so I could occasionally skim through looking for nifty abilities to add to the monsters in my 5E game.What I have found in practice so far, however, is that for all the "cool sounding" names, most of the 4E monster abilities still boil down to "attack with a rider," with that rider being push someone, pull someone, apply a status, or that most boring of results, "take MOAR damage."Pushing and pulling are less central to 5E due to the "theater of the mind" model, which is why you see less of it. (See also "Why 5E Doesn't Really Have a Warlord".) But if a monster wants to shove someone, they can use an Attack action to do it just like players can.Applying status effects is still fairly common (often hidden in the Actions block behind "Hit: x damage and..."), but remember that tracking all this stuff slows combat down, which is why any creature that's going to be able to do this had to "earn" it in the design process, so to speak.That said, just to grab a random example I pulled out my 4E and 5E Monster Manuals to compare the hippogriff. The 4E version has two stat blocks– one "normal" hippogriff and one wearing armor to act as a mount. The 5E has a beautiful illustration that takes up 60% of the page, but only one stat block.The 4E "normal" hippogriff has a power called Diving Overrun which basically knocks a target over by landing on them, can make a flying attack without provoking AoO, and has a single bite attack, and is a 5th level monster with AC 18 and 64 hit points.The 5E hippogriff has advantage on Perception checks and two attacks (one with beak, one with claws), and is CR 1, with only AC 11 and 19 hit points.Honestly? Even skipping over 5E's strange desire to not let monsters be more than CR 2, the 4E hippogriff is a more interesting critter. Sure, a DM could have the 5E griffon use a shove attack, but there's nothing in either the description or the stat block to suggest it, and doing so forfeits doing any damage on that turn (unlike the 4E version), and it's rare that any monster will find knocking a target over in and of itself to be preferable to just doing damage.On the other hand, the 5E one has a much more streamlined statblock and is something I could throw at players in the first session of the game without too much worry. Now it would be absolutely trivial as the DM for me to give the 5E hippogriff Diving Overrun and if I were using one in an encounter I might do just that, or possibly some sort of Snatch ability to pick up halflings and fly up into the air to drop them, or whatever. But that sort of thing is kinda what we pay the game designers to do for us. ;Ptl;dr version: Yes, 4E monsters do tend to be more interesting than 5E monsters right out of the box, but 5E's monster simplification in service of speeding up play and can be worked around. It's a tradeoff.-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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