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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9554888" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Alrighty. I think the issue then is, more or less, that you're going to need to have a HUGE menu of abilities to choose from if you want to both (a) have those abilities actually be interesting to face off against, and (b) get even a reasonable accuracy of knowing what X monster is with bare-minimum description + seeing some abilities. That's not necessarily a problem per se, but it does induce combinatoric explosion in the testing of these abilities, because now you need (to invent a number) 100 genuinely different monster abilities (counting say 2 "blank" abilities so that not all monsters have 4 distinct abilities), and 100 choose 4 = 3921225. Even if you only need to actually test a tenth of one percent of that...you'd be testing almost as many monsters as were printed during all of 4th edition. Just to get things off the ground.Oh, a zillion reasons.The party has gone from an arid/desert area to a forested/woodland area (perhaps a cork forest, since cork oak tends to like dry climates), so you want to adapt a creature to that environment but still have it be identifiable as that specific type of creature.You want to craft a red dragon that was infected with vampirism (something that actually cropped up in a game I was in, though not a D&D game.)You want to distinguish Red Wizards of Thay from Candlekeep Bibliomancers from Rashemi "Witches" from...etc., even though all three might favor evocation magic.A magically-created volcano has been growing in an area, corrupting the creatures around with elemental fire and earth. You want them to still be clearly recognizable as whatever they were before that corruption, but also identifiable as a corrupted creature of the appropriate type.You want to represent subtle but meaningful cultural/behavioral differences between different populations, e.g. two different tribes of ogres who practice both warfare and magic differently.I'm sure I could come up with more, but I think you get the point. Having a monster's statblock be totally inviolate, unalterable under any circumstances whatsoever lest it become not-immediately-identifiable, is a pretty serious limitation on creativity. But maybe we're talking past each other? It sounds like you see it as "ah, this monster is perfect in its identifiability with what it has, why would I want to change it?" But what I'm saying is that the identifiability isn't perfect, it's fragile. To change even one ability would make it unidentifiable.</blockquote>

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