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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 6060400" data-attributes="member: 1210">Breadth doesn't require a monstrosity of a book. And this is only one example. 2e had the insanely-awesome Monstrous Manual, which probably crammed more monsters into one book than any other product for D&D, ever, even if it didn't give all of them full coverage. The 1e Monster Manual covers half of what you need and has a tons of stuff you can leave out- I'm fine with not having the flightless bird, herd animal, stag, giant sea horse, baluchitherium, cerebral parasite, Portugese man-o-war, Irish deer and buffalo in the MM, even if some of them are pretty useful for me personally.So what do these have in common that contrasts with the monster products that aren't so good as fundamental core monster books? (Here I'll cite the 2e Monsterous Compendium vol. 1 and the 4e Monster Manual.) Obviously, it's a matter of content, but how? One huge factor is good use of space. The MC vol 1 and 4e MM limit themselves to one monster per page (with a few exceptions). The 3e MM and 1e MM don't- they cram as much awesome content as they can fit into each page. I have a clear and very strong preference here. The 4e MM was terrible for having huge swaths of white space or useless lists of monster combos. I'd wager better organization could have fit 20% more monsters in there. Anyway, a great Monster Manual seems to be not only possible, but typical across the editions. I'm hoping that 5e will give us one with no serious omissions- especially intentional ones (remember, the 4e designers were quite frank about holding back some monsters from the 1st MM to help sell the MM2 as 'core').</blockquote>

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