SilverfireSage
Explorer
I'm also a bit bothered by the size of the art. The PHB took up about 20% of pagecount with artwork and the MM probably took up at least that much. I do think that they could have made the art a bit smaller and crammed more content in without sacrificing anything real. But that too is a minor gripe. Less content means more monster books in the future.![]()
As others have said, this likely isn't a zero sum game, i.e., we have all this art but only 316 pages so let's cut down on the amount of material. I wager it was more of a "here's all of the stats, flavor, crunch, how can we fit it into this book while keeping the layout well designed?" and then they filled most of the negative space with artwork. Same is true of the MM.