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Comments and dislikes of lore and other changes in the 4th ed MM.

MinionOfCthulhu said:
This is what I was going to post about, along with phoenixes. At least the unicorn, despite being unaligned now, isn't TOO different. I mean, it's still intelligent. The phoenix, on the other hand, went from a noble intelligent paragon of good to an unintelligent cousin of the roc. On fire.

But think about how much EASIER it is to give players an excuse to kill them now? ;p
 

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DonaldRumsfeldsTofu said:
I think having dinosaurs in D&D, and giving them names like "treehorn" and "bladetooth" is silly. (This isn't Land Before Time)

Especially given the role dinosaurs would generally play in a game. "You #$&@:close:^$ ! You killed Littlefoot!"
 

size changes

creatures that have been upped: mezzodemon: medim to large, balor (large to huge, I checked) can be put on card bases

Creatures that have had size cuts are trickier.

I'm annoyed at lack of stone giants, I have 2 minis, no hill giant ones. I will use stone giants as funny-looking hill giants for the time being.
 





pawsplay said:
At least they went with Elves and Eladrin instead of Elves and Alfar. And giants and titans instead of giants and gigantes.
It's "alver" in plural.

Alf is the singular. Alver or alfer is plural. Alfar is an Anglo-Saxification ;).
 

ProfessorCirno said:
I did say latin, greek, etc ;)

What I'm getting at is, you can't use the argument of "Well, it's called Blood Tooth because that's what the peasants would name it!" Maybe if it was one creature it would be called "Bloodtooth," but an entire race? Again, the peasants wouldn't give it a name. It would be "That monster that's killing us."

It's the learned people who name the creatures.

Not always...

Folklore is folklore... Not learned people lore. :)

In either case... what's the difference? Ok so they give us a name that sounds more like what the commopn peopple might call the thing.

Awesome..the majority of people in my game world are going to be common people.
 

pawsplay said:
And naming them according to 20th century folk biology makes you feel better?

EDIT: And the behemoth/Bahamut thing just bugs me. It's the same name.
They are cognates and not the same name. Yes, both words share the (transliterated) consonantal letters of BHMT, but changing the vowels in between and treating the final T as a TH instead as well as one being a god and the other a monster pretty much places a great deal of separation between the two words in most readers' minds. Behemot is also occasionally used in the Hebrew bible as a general term for beasts (behemot hasadeh - "the beasts of the field").

med stud said:
It's "alver" in plural.

Alf is the singular. Alver or alfer is plural. Alfar is an Anglo-Saxification ;).
Didn't the Angles and Saxons not have their own word for elves? (I'm sure that's what the wink is all about.)
 

Into the Woods

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