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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8065834" data-attributes="member: 87792">I'll second this but for different reasons. When I DM my players like to improvise and to leave the beaten path - and I wouldn't have it any other way. Which leads to a lot of me improvising what's going on on the fly - I mean I know roughly what's there but not the way the PCs will go at it or even where they will be. But there's no way I can prepare for all possibilities in a reasonable amount of time.This means that I need statblocks I can turn to, skim through, and be ready to use right there at the table. Any NPCs with text that is a rules reference other than for the basic standard rules and conditions is necessarily incomplete. I need to not only look at that NPC's statblock to work out how it works, but to look at everything it references, whether feats or spells, and figure those out. I can read a complete monster statblock literally right there at the table and still use it competently - but I can only do so of the statblock is complete. If I also need to flip to four feats or four spells (assuming I know two already) I can't improvise that NPC at the table.Sure I can prepare it as a BBEG for a set-piece fight. But I can't use it for improvisation. I'm also unlikely to use it for a set-piece bad guy because for the huge stuff I homebrew anyway, and for the mid-sized stuff my players can go in weird directions so I'll need them at a time I never expected to and not have prepared for that session. What this means in practice is that I find that monsters with spellblocks either have a tiny handful of cookie-cutter spells or I find them unusable in practice because I can't use them for improv and I can do better for my own set pieces.This doesn't mean that everyone has to DM the way I do. You can spend hours prepping possibilities - far longer than you do playing the game. You can call for breaks when the players improvise. Or you can run linear railroads. But incomplete statblocks make relatively free-flowing improvised DMing much much harder than it needs to be with, so far as I can tell, no benefit.</blockquote>

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