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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 7016886" data-attributes="member: 2067">I didn't select my dragons to demonstrate 4e distinctiveness, I selected them to try and note 4e "typicalness" - what a given player may have actually encountered in play at some point. For that, MM dragons in the middle of the level range is an okay choice: the chances of a player seeing one of those in play is much greater than the chances of a player having seen a post-MM3 elder, for sure, and debatably greater than having seen a post-MM3 Young (though the higher ratio of low-level parties might offset the longer tenure of the original dragon, it's not automatically clear that this is the case, and I wanted to get a dragon old enough that it had some room to grow and be what 4e envisioned its dragons being - comparing wyrmlings isn't exactly a great point of comparison for that reason). 5e is exactly as amenable to "inspired GMing" as 4e was. If the monsters required "dynamic, interactive battlefields" to be distinctive, then that once more exhibits that the thing in-and-of-itself wasn't the distinctive element, it was all the aids and crutches and build strategies that gave it that property. All those "inspired GMing" strategies remain viable in 5e. So if inspired GMing was what made the difference, having the same list of actions as another color of dragon shouldn't be an impediment to distinctiveness - just use that same inspired GMing to encourage the kind of fight you want to have. Of course, I think you're minimizing the most distinctive qualities of these two dragons which is that one spits electricity and one spits fire. If that's the only difference your players note between the fights, that's, to put it bluntly, quite enough for a lot of players and a lot of groups. Making one do their thing more in melee and one do their thing more at range doesn't really rise to the level of "significant" for a broad swath of the D&D playing populace (this is especially true if it takes a handful of powers, the right battlefield, and inspired GMing to even get at that significance - that might as well be Proust for how much your average player can derive the significance from it). Mearls doesn't seem to like it, at least in the Grapple case, ("A question: PCs with multiple attacks can replace an attack with grapple. Can monsters with Multiattack do the same? i'd say no – might have some unintended effects. OK on a case-by-case basis, but be wary about it."), but if what you want is damage + a shove, that's clearly what you want to do in that case. Here's a thing that I'm not sure you're appreciating: if it requires extensive knowledge, detailed analysis, and careful building to understand why the thing is distinct, it's going to be lost on a huge swath of your audience. In my terminology, it's not significant in-and-of-itself. It requires greater understanding and nuance to appreciate. Like, sure, to someone who knows a lot about fancy vroom-vroom machines, those brands all have distinct identities. But to, I dunno, my mom, they're all just fancy cars. Their distinguishing trait is "fancy." The differences between them are irrelevant if they're even coherent. Most people, when they approach D&D, are like my mom with fancy cars. Subtle distinctions that those masters of the system may appreciate are entirely meaningless. What matters is big things: X breathes fire. Y breathes lightning. DONE!I imagine older groups that have been gaming for longer have more nuanced needs (I'm cool with opt-in complexity), but that's not a ding against an original design that leaves the monsters striaghtforward enough to let the thing that most people will see as distinctive shine without unnecessary cruft. (Hell, even with the relative simplicity of 5e dragons, I still see DMs with decades of experience forget to use legendary and lair actions!)I don't think it wouldn't increase distinctiveness as much as it would increase the GM's cognitive workload. +5 Distinctiveness, +20 Cognitive Workload.Which is why I'm cool with something like that being opt-in. Someone who is willing to pay the price in cognitive workload to achieve the real but minor gain in distinctiveness is great! It's just not great for the "original" version of the monster - it's quite complex and distinct enough for a big swath of D&D's potential audience (arguably too complex, but that's D&D for ya).</blockquote>

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