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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 8746838" data-attributes="member: 20323">I really enjoy monsters where the fiction and the mechanics are mutually reinforcing, there's a "tightness" / economy of words, and encounter ideas spring off the page.Using the 5e <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/16907-goblin" target="_blank">goblin</a> as an example, a couple things come to light...Nowhere are goblins described in the fiction as favoring ambushes nor what a goblin ambush looks like. That's a glaring omission, and would be very helpful to designing an encounter (e.g. Keith Amman recommends staged retreating to a choke point with more goblins lying in ambush). So I'd want to see that in the flavor text.Their malicious glee is left as a roleplaying note, but including something like a d6 victory table of random wicked celebration a goblin might engage in after defeating a foe would be really interesting. Maybe that could be mechanically implemented as a sort of "universal goblin lair / warband trait" that appears in the fiction rather than the stat block... goblins are pushovers unless you get ambushed OR they manage to start getting the upper hand, when things can snowball out of control. That would inject this flavor more directly into goblin encounters, and make it less something that a GM could easily overlook.What does a Neutral Evil follower look like? You know those nature videos of a penguin pushing a fellow penguin into the water first? That's how I think of goblins. While this is left as a roleplaying note, it could be leveraged to augment or even replace Nimble Escape. Some kind of a reaction to, say, an area effect to hide behind another goblin or duck for cover makes a lot of sense – not just for Goblin Bosses either.This is a really strong statement... without any mechanical implementation (not even Animal Handling proficiency). What if some goblins had a worg-rider trait that (at a minimum) helped them avoid opportunity attacks when mounted on a worg? That would reinforce the fiction nicely.With enemies that can be encountered in "overwhelming numbers", it would be nice to the GM if some kind of horde stat block – or appropriate adjustment to the baseline statblock – were provided to make it easier than rolling dice for 20 goblins. That's more of a usability issue, but if the core mechanics make it unwieldy to run 20 goblins – while the narrative is saying "oh yeah, you could totally get jumped by 20 goblins, that's their style" – then the fiction and the mechanics are at odds. When the reverse should be true – the mechanics should be encouraging the GM to run goblins en masse.My "hack" for this has been to use a combo of the DMG mob rules (rewriting the stat block essentially) & adding Lair Actions for the entire goblin lair/warband.</blockquote>

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