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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5912037" data-attributes="member: 54877">I know this is not exactly what you meant, but I'll take advantage of your post to contrast it slightly with a more extreme version of what you posted.  I think what you suggest, when taking to its ultimate conclusion by well-meaning game developers is incoherence.  It doesn't have to, inherently, but somehow it always does.   What I advocate instead, is stop filing off the rough edges trying to make disjointed things fit seemlessly together when they can't.  You have to do some filing off of rough edges, lest the immersionist crowd have nothing to connect to, but don't go all the way down that road.  People will sometime say that they want a dog/cat combo, even though plenty of pet owners like their dogs to be dogs and their cats to be cats.  People get it in their heads that they'd like a "pat"--an animal that is fairly independent, but loves you unreservedly.  If we tried to make one, we'd get a "cog" -- an animal that shreds your curtains and pees on your bed if you don't walk it every day. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> So I'd do it something like this (trying to stick to the same neighborhood as your example): Default:Orc, 1st level Warrior Monster8 hpAC 12 (leather)Att +3, 1d8+2 damage (longsword)Str 14, Con 10, Dex 10, Int 8, Wis 10, Cha 8Core Mod +3 Tactical:Ferious Charge, +2 to hit, +4 damage on chargeMorale: Standard Background and Personality:Skills: Underwater Basket Weaving +2, Ikebana +1, Torturing Wildlife +7, Baker +2Traits: Orcish clan warrior Lore:(Insert here things that people know or think they know about orcs) And then probably a few others such headings and entries in those after the default, because I suspect there are 3-5 main D&D styles, and we want to support them all. The ability scores are in the default listing, because so much on the core is riding on them.  You may not care about skills or tactics or background, but if you are running off the core, you need that ability score to do almost anything outside of standard attacks.  Then the "Core Mod" is the number you use when you don't want to use a subsystem, but you want to keep the monster roughly balanced.  If you throw the tactics bit out, then you give the Orc +3 to hit and damage.  If you throw the skills out, you give the Orc +3 to any skill check that you think is sufficiently orcish or fits this particular orc's place in your adventure.  (The "Core Mod" might need to be somewhat more complicated than a simple +N, but I can hardly know that until we see more of the system.) Basically, everything that comes after the "Default" elaborates on something in the default, if only expressing more fully what "orc" or "orc warrior" means.  Then you just need to arrange this additional information such that people who like a particular style can focus on the ones that matter to them and ignore the rest.</blockquote>

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