Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9093925" data-attributes="member: 82106">This whole, &quot;4e lacks lore/color&quot; thing is both old as the hills and full of nonsense. I once actually went through the 3 core 4e books, and the 3 core 5e books and COUNTED the amount of words of color/background/description. Just elements that are 'rules free' and convey things like setting, lore, etc. 4e actually WINS by a small %. I don't think its enough one way or the other to declare that either edition is specifically much heavier in this area than the other, but 4e is NOT deficient in this area. I don't recall the numbers, they're probably buried in some thread here from the mid 2010's but there it is.Now, if you compare ONLY the MM1 of each game, you find that the 4e one concentrates a lot more of its material in the stat block, and does, for most monsters, add less unstructured verbiage, but the 4e stat blocks convey a LOT more information, and a lot more KEY information regarding the nature of monsters than the 5e ones do. Also 4e has a table of lore and sample encounters, which 5e lacks. Overall 4e's MM is more spare, but its other books are, contrariwise, considerably richer, so it kind of comes out in the wash.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 9093925, member: 82106"] This whole, "4e lacks lore/color" thing is both old as the hills and full of nonsense. I once actually went through the 3 core 4e books, and the 3 core 5e books and COUNTED the amount of words of color/background/description. Just elements that are 'rules free' and convey things like setting, lore, etc. 4e actually WINS by a small %. I don't think its enough one way or the other to declare that either edition is specifically much heavier in this area than the other, but 4e is NOT deficient in this area. I don't recall the numbers, they're probably buried in some thread here from the mid 2010's but there it is. Now, if you compare ONLY the MM1 of each game, you find that the 4e one concentrates a lot more of its material in the stat block, and does, for most monsters, add less unstructured verbiage, but the 4e stat blocks convey a LOT more information, and a lot more KEY information regarding the nature of monsters than the 5e ones do. Also 4e has a table of lore and sample encounters, which 5e lacks. Overall 4e's MM is more spare, but its other books are, contrariwise, considerably richer, so it kind of comes out in the wash. [/QUOTE]

Verification