General Monster Manual 3 Thread

[Phaezen]

Our copy has some printing errors where some pages are missing a green ink - the headings are all blue instead of the normal color.

If you take it back to where you bought it they should be willing to replace it.

 

[Victim]

If you take it back to where you bought it they should be willing to replace it.

Yeah, we figured - but we just got it today, and then had our group over, so we haven't taken the time to do that yet.

 

[Celisasu]

Overall I agree, this is probably the best designed of the MM books. They're obviously starting to get a feel for how strong monsters are supposed to be and taking steps to deal with the solo problem. A couple of monsters have required me to reread to make sure I'm understanding how their powers work correctly and I'm not sure about how viable a few of the monsters are, but overall I like this one a great deal. I especially like the new format for the monster blocks.

I'm mixed about the fluff. I like to have fluff and I'm glad that they're doing more than they did in MM1 and MM2 but the fluff I've read has been less than inspiring. Well I did like the banderhob ones.

 

[Hammerhead]

The banderhob entry (well, the fluff) was utter excrement. I liked the core concept of the creature: abductor monsters who swallow people whole, then regurgitate them later in another plane. But the style of the fluff was just horrible: writing about how some watchmen gets eaten in the tactics section of the monster? Horrible.

 

[Jack Jericho]

I do not think Lolth is as tough as many people seem to think. Someone with the Lord of Fate destiny would make 4E Lolth cry as she spends the majority of the encounter dominated.


Overall, I think the monsters in the book are nice. Having a little more fluff is nice. I know many people want rules in place of fluff, but sometimes MM1 was so sparse with fluff that I was unsure what a creature was even supposed to be. A few of the older monsters had neither descriptive text to tell you what the creature looked like nor a picture. Fluff for a monster should be about the monster though. Stories and excerpts from a campaign or an encounter that someone ran is something that should be reserved for an ecology of article or -at best- a sidebar.


The change in damage is interesting, but I am not sure what this means for D&D overall. I do believe the damage increase was needed, but I have two concerns about it.

1) Many of the damage increases were done with increased static damage instead of adding more dice of damage. While it is a good thing to allow higher level monsters to do more consistant damage, I feel that such a sudden increase in guaranteed damage is something which probably was not playtested as much as it should have been. I also feel that more variable damage would make monster critical hits seem more special.

2) The current books really are starting to seem quite different from the first batch of 4E. While I am glad work is being done to improve the system, I think there comes a point when the new design direction of 4E seems different enough from where 4E first started to give someone a little concern about how well mixing and matching old and new elements will work out. I have a feeling that Essentials and the Rules Compendium will bring more change than I originally anticipated.


The book is good. I had a chance to look through it at the store and then again when looking through a copy owned by a friend. I am waiting to buy it until I see if one of the local stores here has a copy with better physical quality. A few of the ones I looked through at the local book store had some rather noticeable physical defects. It surprised me to find this because it is not a problem I had noticed since the first three books.

 

[MrMyth]

As far as the fluff/rules thing goes, I enjoyed the extra fluff in the MM3, but did feel it was a bit much at times. The Banderhobb is a good example. They are probably my favorite new creature in the book. On the other hand, I don't know if they needed short pieces of fluff both before and after each entry. Having the story part first, then the creature presentation, then some brief tactics - I think that would be the best of both worlds.

Overall, though, I agree with most everyone else. This is pretty much my favorite monster book yet, and I hope is a good sign of standards for thigns to come.

 

[Aegeri]

A couple of comments on what you wrote Jack:

1) Many of the damage increases were done with increased static damage instead of adding more dice of damage. While it is a good thing to allow higher level monsters to do more consistant damage, I feel that such a sudden increase in guaranteed damage is something which probably was not playtested as much as it should have been. I also feel that more variable damage would make monster critical hits seem more special.

Monster critical hits are a joke at epic, for one thing penalties can ensure many of their critical hits are negated outright in some cases and the other problem is that PCs can negate critical hits with powers or abilities. This means the effect of criticals on a battle is basically irrelevant. Damage that has a good solid static modifier is more reliable, consistent and much less easy for a PC to deal with. Additionally it means that most monsters are going to be doing damage roughly around what they should be, with the dice providing a bit of variation towards the "bottom" and "upper" levels.

Thus far what I've played of paragon and epic with the new damage it's a great improvement. Combat is more challenging but actually predictable. When a monster hits it has a significant effect: Rather than being a crit to do anything at all to begin with or just an insignificant housecat scratch otherwise.

2) The current books really are starting to seem quite different from the first batch of 4E. While I am glad work is being done to improve the system, I think there comes a point when the new design direction of 4E seems different enough from where 4E first started to give someone a little concern about how well mixing and matching old and new elements will work out. I have a feeling that Essentials and the Rules Compendium will bring more change than I originally anticipated.

I agree entirely. I hate to admit this, but the MM1 creatures take a lot of work to make as viable with MM3 than say MM2. MM2 has better power and creature design, just doubling a MM2 monsters static damage does the trick. The creatures in the MM1 though often not only need the math fixes to damage they really need someone to rejigger their powers.

 

[Rechan]

I'm mixed about the fluff. I like to have fluff and I'm glad that they're doing more than they did in MM1 and MM2 but the fluff I've read has been less than inspiring. Well I did like the banderhob ones.

I knew this complaint would surface as soon as WotC made more fluff for the monsters.

 

[Victim]

I knew this complaint would surface as soon as WotC made more fluff for the monsters.

The sort of style mishmash makes it especially jarring. If you have some book where pretty much everything is described on an in world level with quotes and stories (the DL SAGA monster book), then it may be good or bad in execution, but it's a consistent concept. Or you could have the MM 1 or 2 style technical manual of monsters with some omniscient 3 person writing.

But using both styles at once doesn't seem to strongly appeal to people preferring either approach.

 

[Aegeri]

I'm a crunch man myself and to be honest I don't really care about the fluff. The fact is the monsters in the actual book have awesome, creative and very well put together stat blocks. In the end if the fluff they had put in had made the stat blocks suffer in some manner I would be upset, but IMO they have put more fluff in to try to appease some people and the stat blocks haven't suffered at all.

I'm honest when I say the MM3 monsters are the best monsters to date they have published. I don't care what outside of that they do with future monster manuals or books. Keep up the standard of quality of those stat blocks (Crunch) and I'm not going to care.