In Praise of the Fluff-Light Monster Manual (Forked: Ecology of the Dragonborn up)

[Asmor]

Forked from: Ecology of the Dragonborn up

Those made me sad, too.

Next person I see who champions that point of view is getting bonked on the head with the 4E MM, the product of their madness.

Note: the view the honorable Mr. Dustyboots speaks of is that fluff should be absent from rulebooks.

*puts on helmet*

The 4th edition Monster Manual is the single best Monster Manual I've ever seen. It has as much fluff as it needs, it packs close to 500 stat blocks with over 200 unique monsters into its pages, it has knowledge checks for every kind of monster, and it has art for damn near everything in the book.

It sets a new gold standard for value and page economy.

 

[Parlan]

I'm with you Asmor.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the Ecology Of articles from Dragon. In fact, they were generally my favorite part of the whole magazine.

But I think the new MM got it right. Now there's tons of possible monsters to throw at my PCs, and I don't need to wade through pages of extraneous text to find it.

Finally, I've generally found the paragraph of fluff the 4E MM provides for each monster to be perfect for sparking my creativity.

 

[Corjay]

Less fluff means more room for other things. Could you imagine how few monsters would be in the MM if it had the fluff of the old MM? There's already enough furor over the reduction of the number of entries. Now people want to reduce that? (Yes, I know, there's bigger words and more space on the leading edges, I hate it too) I don't think so. I'll take fluff light, thanks.

 

[greyscale1]

I've always been a 'make my own fluff' sort of guy. So I love the new MM. Though I still must complain that it is weird that despite the improved spaciousness there are NO IRON GOLEMS?


Meh, still like it.

 

[wedgeski]

I find the new MM a joy to use. The lore sections provide just enough fluff to be getting on with, IMO.

 

[Fenes]

I love good fluff - like Paizo's take on goblins, gnolls, etc.

I am rather disappointed with 4E's fluff so far, so I prefer their fluff-less MM. Easier, should we switch to 4E, to ignore the fluff.

 

[Jack99]

I agree whole-heartedly. I have my AD&D 2nd Edition Monster Manual for my fluff. I don't need more variation of the same 5 lines the MM 3.x had. I want crunch. For fluff, I rather have larger write-ups, such as Ecology of the.. or Paizo's new take on old monsters.

In short, the 4e MM was perfect for me.

 

[Bagpuss]

I'll come in with support of the new MM too. I like my fluff but the MM should be a practical reference book easy to use at the table and when planning encounters. Fluff should either be left to the DM or expansions like the articles in Dragon or the adventures themselves.

 

[Jhaelen]

I agree. While fluff is extremely important it is just as important to keep it separate from the crunch. I've always preferred books with separate sections. It's sooo much easier to look up stuff when it's concentrated in a rules appendix.

The 4E PHB and MM are really just reference book - all rules, almost no fluff. That's going to be a big advantage when the books are used during play.

The 4E DMG is a bit different. Some chapters concentrate on advice, some contain rules and some have a mix of both. At least most of the crunchy bits are concentrated in the toolbox chapter.

Nonetheless, 4E is lacking in the fluff department so far. If they'll release ecology articles for all the races, that'll be one big step in the right direction. Actually, I prefer the DDI articles to be light on crunch.
E.g. I didn't care much about the 'Bazaar of the Bizarre'. It's unlikely I'm ever going to use any of these items in the game just like I never used any of the magic items appearing in any of the 3E splat books - except the Magic Item Compendium.

When I'm writing an adventure and try to decide which treasure to place in it, I'll never start flipping through all of the supplements and scanning all of the online articles. I'll only ever look at a compilation of magic items.

Now, if the items from DDI articles were put into an item database along with all of the items from print products, they would actually be useful. It's also something WotC initially promised. But unfortunately they seem to have dropped the idea.

Ah, well, I'm starting to ramble, better stop now.

 

[Bagpuss]

E.g. I didn't care much about the 'Bazaar of the Bizarre'. It's unlikely I'm ever going to use any of these items in the game just like I never used any of the magic items appearing in any of the 3E splat books - except the Magic Item Compendium.

I think until the MIC (or whatever it is called) for 4E comes out, that the Bazaar of the Bizarre is filling a useful service, sense we are pretty starved for items at the moment. I imagine once the MIC is out, then the Bazaar articles will have much for fluff and less items.