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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 3677530" data-attributes="member: 1465">Well if I just want to run a game which is a series of random encounters, all of which are 5-rounds fights, then the article is perfectly right.While I of course agree that having a monster with 20 spells prepared is hard to use unless you prepare yourself, I don't like the approach of &quot;give him 5 spells and forget about the rest&quot;. This is IMHO a step backwards to when monsters and PCs were two completely different worlds, in this case: monsters exist only to fight, PCs have a full existence. This may be true in practice, but it somewhat feels sad and metagamey to me.I much prefer an approach where the DM is left to choose between forgetting the rest and not... And the best way IMO would be to simply highlight in the monster manual entry what special ability is combat-oriented and what is not. Grouping the secondary (non-combat) abilities like &quot;Read Magic at will&quot; into a tiny paragraph at the end of the MM entry is good enough to spare the DM all the confusion, but I kind of like having these &quot;useless&quot; (couple of) abilities, why not? I can still ignore them, but at least it's up to me.Otherwise I agree with concerns about overly-complicated mechanics, like the example of those bonuses that the DM needs to keep track of durations.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 3677530, member: 1465"] Well if I just want to run a game which is a series of random encounters, all of which are 5-rounds fights, then the article is perfectly right. While I of course agree that having a monster with 20 spells prepared is hard to use unless you prepare yourself, I don't like the approach of "give him 5 spells and forget about the rest". This is IMHO a step backwards to when monsters and PCs were two completely different worlds, in this case: monsters exist only to fight, PCs have a full existence. This may be true in practice, but it somewhat feels sad and metagamey to me. I much prefer an approach where the DM is left to choose between forgetting the rest and not... And the best way IMO would be to simply highlight in the monster manual entry what special ability is combat-oriented and what is not. Grouping the secondary (non-combat) abilities like "Read Magic at will" into a tiny paragraph at the end of the MM entry is good enough to spare the DM all the confusion, but I kind of like having these "useless" (couple of) abilities, why not? I can still ignore them, but at least it's up to me. Otherwise I agree with concerns about overly-complicated mechanics, like the example of those bonuses that the DM needs to keep track of durations. [/QUOTE]

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