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

[med stud]

I like the new format. The amount of fluff is how much I percieve as needed in the game. I have never been especially fond of classic D&D- fluff, though, so that might have to do with it.

As an aside, I missed the Iron Golem too. I made my own:

-Start with Stone Golem.
-Bring it up five levels, using the rules from the DMG.
-Add Cloudkill as a minor action, recharge :five: :six:.

It does it's job perfectly well. OK, I made the iron golem into a solo, but I started with a base line iron golem first.

 

[thundershot]

I like the new MM too, but sometimes they're missing things. If I want to use a monster, I want to be able to describe the attack they're using.... Most of the time it's no problem, but some lack any notion of what the creature is actually doing. For example: I wasn't familiar with Shifters at all until 4E. The longtooth shifter has a power called "Longtooth Shifting". What the heck am I supposed to describe to the players? I had to look it up in a 3.5 book for the answer. That little bit of fluff would have been nice... There's a few more examples, but you get the drift.

Other than that, I love the new MM...

 

[Asmor]

I like the new MM too, but sometimes they're missing things. If I want to use a monster, I want to be able to describe the attack they're using.... Most of the time it's no problem, but some lack any notion of what the creature is actually doing. For example: I wasn't familiar with Shifters at all until 4E. The longtooth shifter has a power called "Longtooth Shifting". What the heck am I supposed to describe to the players? I had to look it up in a 3.5 book for the answer. That little bit of fluff would have been nice... There's a few more examples, but you get the drift.

Other than that, I love the new MM...

Wow, good call. That's funny that it completely neglects to mention in the fluff that they are actually shapeshifters. For some reason, I found this line under the longtooth hunter's tactics particularly amusing: "When
its foe shifts away..."

Okay, so we have our first monster which is missing important fluff. Any more?

 

[Shroomy]

I too love the 4e MM and I think its reputation for a lack of fluff information is overstated. I also like the fluffier DDI articles.

 

[Steely Dan]

Unless you mean things like shadow snakes... But I mean, that's a snake. Made of shadows. Its whole schtick is already explained in its frickin' name.

But don't you want to know how many times it craps a day?

 

[Lizard]

Please let me add my support to this theme. When 4e was in development, it looked as if the rulebooks would rival White Wolf for fluff cluttering up the rules. Whether by design intent or due to page count limits, it turns out 4e is perhaps the most fluff free of the MMs, carrying just enough information so that two gaming groups can talk about "orcs" and have some reasonable baseline assumptions in common. The MM gives you what you need to run the monsters mechanically, and leaves everything else up to the DM, which is as it should be. (I would have liked to see more out-of-combat powers/abilities, especially for things like doppelgangers and succubi, but that's another thread.)

 

[Doug McCrae]

The 4e MM has more fluff than is commonly supposed, probably more than any other edition except 2e, it's just that most of it is in the lore sections.

Fluff was the last thing we needed though, we already have decades of it in Dragon ecology articles and Van Richten guides and so forth, 99% of which is crap. What we desperately needed was better crunch, which the 4e MM delivers.

If you want good fluff there are always other rpgs, such as RuneQuest, and books, movies and comic books.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

(I would have liked to see more out-of-combat powers/abilities, especially for things like doppelgangers and succubi, but that's another thread.)

In fact, that was a topic for several threads...

 

[JeffB]

Naw, I still prefer the long winded descriptions that are full of fluff. I am especially fond of the Van Richten's Monster Hunter's compendium. I even liked the old Volo's Guides.

+1

I think the MM is by far the weakest of the 3 core books-I hate the lack of fluff. I don't need or want 5-6 pages of it for each entry, but yeesh

 

[thundershot]

Wow, good call. That's funny that it completely neglects to mention in the fluff that they are actually shapeshifters. For some reason, I found this line under the longtooth hunter's tactics particularly amusing: "When
its foe shifts away..."

Okay, so we have our first monster which is missing important fluff. Any more?

That was the one that really stuck out for me... So far I've been fine with most everything else. There was at least one or two others that you really had to read into the knowledge checks, but I love the new MM.


Chris