Metallic Dragons: Unaligned!?

[Bumbles]

I'd rather make up my own soulless statblocks, thank you very much. Please don't make WOTC waste space on something I consider junk.

Maybe you should just not buy the book then. Or just buy it for the pretty pictures!

What is "junk" in an Monster Manual is highly subjective.

You don't say! What a revelation!

Sarcasm aside, that's exactly the problem. People want different things, and what one person is looking for in a book may not be the same as somebody else. I see some background information in some monster description, I prefer it to be generic rather than give me some fluff. If they want to make fluff, I would prefer it to be in a campaign setting or something. Things about Io, Vecna, Gruumsh, Bane, etc., they often mean nothing to me in my games. Core books should be generic, that's how I like it.

And oh yeah, my statblocks do have souls. So don't be discriminating!

Apart from my recent post not saying anything about slaughtering everything unaligned I do have noticed that players do have certain predispositions when it comes with interacting with monsters. Not having any good monsters enforces the image that everything in the Monster Manual is an enemy. Sure, experienced players know that this isn't so (generally), but what about new players? Many new players will be influenced by MMOs which have exactly that mindset. How should they know that not everything in the Monster Manual is supposed to be an enemy by default? Because the DM tells them? What if he is also new?

That tendency existed prior to MMOs, and has long been a factor in the game. If you want to deal with it, I suggest some advice articles, but then you may find many folks just enjoy fragfests. Some don't. People play whatever game they like, best you can do is offer some opinions.

 

[cwhs01]

I'll agree with you on this one.
I'd quite like a little more background info together with the statblock. I don't find either to be imposibly difficult to come up with myself, but it would save a lot of time to have both. And i kinda miss the physical descriptions of monsters like size, weight or colorscheme in addition to generel ecology and behaviour of the monster. Just a few lines would be fine.

I'd rather make up my own soulless statblocks, thank you very much. Please don't make WOTC waste space on something I consider junk.

I do believe system matters (borrowing from Forge terminology i think).

If, as an example, in your games it is important to know exactly how good a pc is at crafting a bow or how good a smith you are, then the associated skills matter. Not having them in the game makes it less suitable for your preferred playstyle.
But i disagree that the lack in 4e of a number of skills present in 3e, means that 4e fails for all playstyles, and especially that it means 4e is only suitable for dungeoncrawl hackfests. I believe that the rules are adequate for games where it is relatively unimportant how good a cook a PC actually is. Which i would guess would be a lot or even most games.

I also don't believe that changing dragons alignment is objectively worsening the game.
It is mostly a change to the implied setting and may change how people new to the game, play the game compared to how it was done in earlier editions.

And so?

I do not believe that you can play DnD the wrong way. Unless youre not having fun, and then you properbly should make some changes or be playing something else.