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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ketjak" data-source="post: 2292340" data-attributes="member: 1083">It's a user interfaceMonte, I love and respect your work. I cannot do what you do, at least not without about a dozen years of dedicated effort and a good mentor like Coleman along the way. However, except for a few very talented people changing stat block presentation makes them harder to use, not easier. I'm going to go into user interface design for several paragraphs - I'm not impugning your knowledge of UI design and I may state things of which you are already aware. My apologies if I sound pedantic, it's not my intent.Essentially this is a discussion about user interfaces. In this case, how does a user access information about an NPC or monster (or trap or room...) using a stat block (a display). One of the primary lessons UI designers (should) learn is that the user should not have to relearn the UI with each new screen. If a region of the screen is used for messaging, that area of the screen should always be used for messaging - with (very rare) exceptions, admitted. Imagine your operating system popping up messages in each display corner and the center based on what the OS designer thought was a logical way to display messages depending on the context... top left for memory usage warnings, top right for execution failures, bottom right for dialogs, bottom left for confirmation messages, and center for write failures. A few people will love that. Most will hate it. (As an aside, I'd hazard a guess that you don't reconfigure your word processor's menu and toolbar system when you write an adventure compared to writing a sourcebook. You might add a (assuming MS Word) tool bar (like the Comments toolbar) but you probably don't change the order of the buttons, or the placement of the menus.)If a user seeks information and it is in the same location each time, the user spends less time searching for that bit and has no need to understand or recall anything else except the location of the information. There is one layer of cognition between wanting information and accessing it.If the location is different based on context, the user must first process what the context is ("ah, this is a combat challenge/social challenge/resource generator"), then must recall the location accurately, then must access the information. It's another layer of cognitive function between the user and the information being sought. Worse, if a mistake is made (by thinking the feat list from the social challenge is in the location of the combat challenge), the user has to mentally backtrack or sort through the different options.If the location is inconsistently different ("random") users experience frustration and stop trying to access the information.You can also see this frustration in product reviews in which the reviewer complains the chapters are "out of order" from previous similar products (the original 3E WotC splat books come to mind). You can see it best in reviews of computer software, mostly games, where designers generally change interfaces (display locations, console button functionality, right mouse click functionality) without explanation or warning when it happens. The player (reviewer) gets confused and from personal experience I know it can mess up game sessions. Try it on a child and watch the tears flow (I've done it unintentionally).There are two great places to study user interface design: <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/" target="_blank">http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/</a> (the Hall of Shame is amusing as well as educational, and they have a new Hall of Fame since I last visited)Blockbuster (Seriously - they've put big money behind figuring out how most people "access" the "information" on their shelves, and have taken great pains to find a good solution.)You can also Google for "interface hall of shame" - there are many hits returned nowadays that I didn't know about until a few minutes ago. <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=";)" />- Ket</blockquote>

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