Monster books: No love?

[Davelozzi]

Tome of Horrors II is great. It's probably the only monster book ever that I've read cover to cover.

The idea of a monster book designed to be used with existing miniatures is very cool!

Agreed. I'm far more likely to use monsters for which I own minis that are a decent representation. Hence, I'm generally more likely to use monsters from official WotC books these days, now that the D&D mini line has made building up the collection so easy.

 

[jgbrowning]

Monster books are an interesting nut to crack. Of all the d20 product types out there, they're the only one to follow a clear development path. All of those d20 companies saw Privateer getting award after award for the Monsternomicon, and many of them have chosen a similar design approach. There's an increasing tendency to make detailed, long entries that give a lot of information about a few monsters.

I think that leads to the sort of book that is fun to read, but not necessarily easy to use. The more monsters a book offers, the greater its inherent utility. A book with 5 creatures of CRs 1/4 to 20 has a much greater chance of purchase/use than one that has 12 creatures of different CRs. If your game is at level 3, or level 8, or whatever, the book with more creatures has a greater chance of having something you need. You may have had more fun reading the book with a lot fewer monsters, but it's less likely to have a creature that you can use, and a lot of the details may never work their way into the game.

So that's the first problem - you can't really judge a monster book until it's been on your shelf for a year, unless you buy RPG books as literature to read. That's why I don't trust monster book reviews. There's a big gap between the monster collection that's fun to read and the one that's easy to use.

Heya Mike, might as well take your excellent post and turn it into a shameless plug for our upcoming Monster Geographica books. The monster number is important to me as well, I know I've deliberately not bought a monster book because there were too few monsters for me. [plug]That's why Monster Geographica books contain 200 monsters![/plug]

But here's the second, and more difficult to overcome problem: familiarity.

Most veteran gamers, the type that are going to go out and buy a new monster book, have a good grip on the monsters in the Monster Manual. They know them from second edition, they've used them before in 3e. When a DM sits down to create an adventure, he might think "I need a CR 12 or so creature with a lot of magical abilities." If he thinks about it for a minute or two, he can come up with a bunch of classic D&D monsters from the MM - mind flayer, beholder, lich, and so on. If he wants to use a non-standard monster book, he has to make the effort to pull the book off his shelf and flip through it.

That's more work. Work is bad. So in goes the familiar monster.

This is something else I've noticed. Personally, I think that a lot of this has to do with the formation that monsters books use: Alphabeticaly listing each monster by name. This format's great when you're already familiar with every monster and it's relative power, but when faced with a new book of unfamiliar monsters, what GMs really need is a CR arrangement. That way they can go right to that group of monsters they can use to challange their party without having to constantly flip around in the book's pages. And then, remembering "What was that new cool monster's name?" is less of an issue because it's easier to remember that it partially cool because it was of an appropriate challange for your group. That's why the Monster Geographica monsters are arranged by ascending Challange Rating rather than Alpha-name. Even the monsters by type (ala Fey or Abberation) is listed according to CR rather than alphabetically. But an alpha Table of Contents allows for name searches, of course.

So, you might now see the fundamental dilemma - companies are trying to break that familiarity barrier (wittingly or not) by sticking in lots and lots of detail. But that in turn cuts down the basic utility the book offers. In essence, the designer robs Peter to pay Paul.

I think that monster books are an excellent example of the d20 market's inability to really look at the problem of design in a new and interesting way. d20 companies generally just try to do what WotC does, but they lack the budget to do it better, especially since monster books are so art driven.

Hopefully we'll challange the assumption that monster books have to follow WotC's lead in design. Monster Geographica books are compilations of 200 OGC monsters (around 50% updates from 3.0 to 3.5) from 20 or so sources. They're focused on a particular environment (the first one is Underground), pocket-sized, contain no art, are arranged by CR not name, and sell for only $20. All of this is most-definitely not WotC SOP. Hopefully, this means they'll sell great rather than bomb... *cross fingers*

joe b.

 

[Desdichado]

For what it's worth, I don't think that having lots of monsters necessarily makes a monster book more useful or valuable to DMs. Books that are full of little more than stat blocks and maybe illustrations lack anything to encourage DMs to use the creatures.

The Monsternomicon, for instance, is a book that shows me something I may not ever have ever used based just on the stat block or ilo, but then, reading the rest of the information on it, it grabbed me by the throat and convinced me that I could do something cool with this monster. Consequently, I use a lot more Monsternomicon critters than, say Tome of Horrors critters, even though there's a lot more in Tome of Horrors.

 

[Varianor Abroad]

On a similar note, how portable is the Legacy of the Dragons to a non-AU campaign?

Tremendously. It's got an appendix in the back on what AU feats to switch if you're using D&D 3.5. None of the monsters in there are dependant upon having AU or DT, although they all have background stories that fit in. Example: One of my personal favorites is the Navver's Curse. It's a twisted faen. In D&D terms, it's just a scary, Large faery that delivers a nasty curse if you kill it!

That said, I don't think there's such a thing as too many monster books. There are decent ones and good ones. Some of the really good one include MM, Tome of Horrors and Legacy of Dragons. But then again, Draconomicon is looking mighty tempting. I would have liked to have seen more of a nod to Bastion Press myself. I personally contributed two monsters to Into the Green, and I rather like the whole "Into" series.

 

[Garnfellow]

Tremendously. It's got an appendix in the back on what AU feats to switch if you're using D&D 3.5. None of the monsters in there are dependant upon having AU or DT, although they all have background stories that fit in. Example: One of my personal favorites is the Navver's Curse. It's a twisted faen. In D&D terms, it's just a scary, Large faery that delivers a nasty curse if you kill it!

OK, so it sounds like the monsters will work OK. But doesn't something like half the book consist of statted out AU NPCs?

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

OK, so it sounds like the monsters will work OK. But doesn't something like half the book consist of statted out AU NPCs?

Nope. There're 15 of them, taking up (IIRC) a page each. I think it's worth the money.

 

[DonAdam]

I think Grim Tales might end up having an impact. It brought the IH system to a much broader audience; before I saw that stuff, I didn't really consider making my own monsters (too much work), but with it I'm questioning whether I need to buy any more monster books (except those for specific settings).

 

[Campbell]

I to greatly appreciate the Monsternomicon model since I usually prefer to make the monsters I use into vital campaign elements, rather than populating areas with an overabundance of sentient creatures. As a user of the IH CR/EL system, I also need to take time to recalculate the CRs of monsters to fit within UK's framework, which durasticly cuts down on the out of the box appeal for a number of monsters.

In reguards to the faltering appeal of monster books I believe some blame has to be levied against submission books like the early Creature Collections that had monsters of varying levels of quality, backed by some spotchy rules framework. These submission-dependent monster books lacked the internal consistency that the Monsternomicon had in spades.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I think Grim Tales might end up having an impact. It brought the IH system to a much broader audience; before I saw that stuff, I didn't really consider making my own monsters (too much work), but with it I'm questioning whether I need to buy any more monster books (except those for specific settings).

Just a side note for those of you using either UK's document or Grim Tales (which is UK's document almost verbatim, with only a couple of tweaks I thought were helpful to make it less of a math chore):

I have commissioned a programmer to put this system into a spreadsheet. The hard work is complete-- it works!-- and now it's just being polished up on the front end to be more user friendly. But soon building a creature will just be a simple exercise in choosing from drop-down menus and scroll buttons.

When this tool is complete, I will make it available-- though exactly when, how, and at what potential cost, I have not yet decided.

Wulf

 

[haiiro]

For what it's worth, I don't think that having lots of monsters necessarily makes a monster book more useful or valuable to DMs. Books that are full of little more than stat blocks and maybe illustrations lack anything to encourage DMs to use the creatures.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. The bestiary section at the back of Mindscapes (from Malhavoc) is one of my favorite sources of monsters -- because they'rew creative, well-described and full of little hooks. The same is true of Legacy of the Dragons, Monsternomicon and a few others (like the Freeport monster book, which I don't have).