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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5072885" data-attributes="member: 2067">Hahaha, I had forgotten about Bear Lore. Bears, again, probably one of those critters that serves other critters (bears and dryads or something), rather one of those critters that deserves their own entry. It's wonderful how easy it is to double the amount of stat blocks you have. Here's one old DM's trick. If you have 100 fleshed-out monsters, go through the MM,find their statblocks, and change their damage to Fire (or to Cold, if it is already Fire)Oh, here's another one: add templates (yeah, 4e still has those, and I think they're pretty solid!). Here's a third: change the appearance, but leave the stats the same.And a fourth: Adjust the level or the group role (minion/normal/elite/solo).Viola. I've just turned 100 monsters into 500 monsters.And that's just the easy stuff. That doesn't include making your own monsters (something 4e makes easier than ever before), or using creatures from stories and legends, or updating creatures from earlier editions, or any other of the more involved processes. 4e has over 1,000 individual monsters, currently. That's before any ofthe tricks above (which then creates at least 4,000 more). Quantity, especially by this point in the game, is pointless. There are more monsters than the entire life of 4e will ever need. I find the appeal to quantity to be kind of a weak one. Good flavor, on the other hand, is ALWAYS difficult to create, and is essential for many DMs, especially the newbies, especially the improvers, especially the story-focused ones.I do heart this, and I don't think more fluff will interfere with that at all. Though I think the "everything I need to run the monster" isn't far enough. They should give me "everything I need to run an encounter with the monster." Which includes about four other monsters, on average. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I'm on board with all of this. I don't think it's gonna happen in the MM3, but the alphabetical organization of critters needs to be questioned, because it's not the most useful way to present them, and leads to things like Bears having their own Lore entry just for the sake of symmetry, when there's NOTHING interesting about the bears to say. It's the old joke in 2e where some critters who didn't need a full page of fluff got one just because it was the format.</blockquote>

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