Monster Manual: How Much Cut?

[UngeheuerLich]

Considering how skills work in 4E and that dragons will loose spellcasting there wouldn't be much to customize anyway.

Look into your 3.5 MM:

Spellcasting and skills are the easiest things to customize. There would be feats and special maneuvers and spellike abilities. But the most annoying thing is that dragons have no real statblock and you constantly have to search on 3-4 different pages...

 

[Steely Dan]

Don't look on it as losing a frost giant, but as gaining a legion devil.

Let's not bicker and argue, about what dropped what…

 

[Aristotle]

Hmmm... maybe they could pair down vermin and animals into a single entry, something similar to (but maybe a little more robust than) the Creature entry in SWSE that will allow any GM to approximate a critter, if needed, in a quick -build-your-own fashion? I think I'd be okay with that. I still like vermin and animals, and I think an encounter with them can be just as colorful as one with demons or undead. In fact I've been thinking about running a 3rd or 4th level adventure with lions as the primary antagonists (based loosely on Ghost And The Darkness). I think I can keep it fun, and it'll be a surprise for players who go chasing local folk tale creatures hoping to find what is killing off the villagers. They'll never suspect lions.


MY CONCERN
A few comments I've read imply that monsters are having tactics or even feats "built into their stats". I'm okay with this for monsters. It makes a fair amount of sense to me actually, but absolutely not for humanoids. I'm going to be horribly upset if unique creatures are cut to allow for gang entries of humanoids that are mechanically different even though the only thing that should be different is their gear, class, or a feat to allow for some non-standard tactic (i.e. orc warrior, orc shaman, orc archer, orc poison spitter, etc..)

 

[Evilhalfling]

from Ruin Explorers list of monsters to cut, I have only used 4 of them, and 2 them well.
vs countless animals and vemin.

The mundane is a staple of my campaigns, with fantastic elements usually getting rumors before they appear, the Mother of all winterwolves was never encountered, but the 15th level PCs still feared her.

 

[Lizard]

I sincerely hope they go for the "core" monsters and cut the fat. MM1 is full of things you're not likely to need stats for, really. As my MM1 is hiding, I'll use the SRD for examples (which means I may name some not really in the MM1 so shhh):

Should go (can come back in later MMs or stay away):

(Deletia)

Your game is not the world. Several of those monsters -- aranea, chaos beasts, merfolk, and winter wolves, for example -- have been major players in games i've run or played in. (By this I mean 'were a focus of many sessions of play, major powers in the world, long-running NPC allies ro foes, or all of the above'.)

The advantage of a game like D&D is that it offers a huge palette for DMs to draw on. No DM will ever use ALL the monsters in the MM (at least not in one campaign...), but you never know which ones will suddenly appeal. (Of course, with the new design presumption being "Monsters live for five rounds, that's it, and they don't have any abilities/powers which are useful outside of their brief appearance on the battlemat", it is less likely someone will decide to make the Aranea the core of a global assassin/spy network, or have PCs try to adopt/raise winter wolf cubs to turn them from evil.)

 

[Lizard]

How many times a was a cat so important to your game you needed to roll his balance check? That's what I mean.

When a sorcerer in the game had a cat familiar that she constantly sent out to spy and otherwise engage in the kind of activities where hide, move silently, and balance needed to be rolled?[1]

When a druid shapeshifts into a cat? (Or any other mundane animal?)

Etc?

There's a great deal of "We know how you play the game" to the 4e design ethos, and, really, they don't. They're going for the center of the bell curve, but it's a very flat, broad, curve, and the there might not be enough customers in the middle to make up for all the ones they're cutting off at either end.

Or, possibly more likely, players looking forward to 4e are projecting onto it the delusion that it will be "The game with all the rules for all the stuff *I* care about and none of the stuff *I* don't care about!" I suspect a number of the kitten-stabbing sect will be tearing their shirts when the real game gets here and it fails to meet their imagined ideal of perfection. But that's another thread.

[1]Please refrain from the usual reply of "Well, you don't need to roll for that! Just make it up!", which is the default reaction to any comment about missing or truncated rules in 4e. Heard it, don't accept it, don't waste our time rehashing it. KTHXBAI.

 

[Voss]

I'd be pretty happy as a player if I never had to slaughter random animals that, for no apparent reason, attack armed groups of humans in a way that animals... don't, generally speaking. One, it lacks believability, two, it isn't heroic. Yay, I killed a wolf. So did generations of farmers.

Animals with spikes on can go too.

I'd back most of ruin explorer's list, however. I've found a use for Chuuls, surprisingly, but not having them wouldn't make me cry. Krakens, though... Krakens make sense.

 

[Steely Dan]

I'd back most of ruin explorer's list

Me too, but I do think Azers have a place – I've used them since back in the early Planescape days, and they don't seem goofy to me.

…But formians do, which I will be bummed if they eek their way into 4th Ed.

 

[Lackhand]

[1]Please refrain from the usual reply of "Well, you don't need to roll for that! Just make it up!", which is the default reaction to any comment about missing or truncated rules in 4e. Heard it, don't accept it, don't waste our time rehashing it. KTHXBAI.

I actually take more fault with this footnote than the rest of the post. It suggests that I've taken away a very different message from the conversations in which "Make it up!" has been a reply than you have. Balance, in the service of the protagonists, is a very plot-centric, player-involved use. Deciding how well the cat balances/hides/sneaks matters; the rules for how well a wizard's familiar serves him need to be at least sketched out.

Is that the same as the combat stats of a cat, though? A wizard could have a sparrow familiar, but do we need to know the sparrow's initiative check, except in the most extreme of situations?

I think we deserve at least skeletal statistics for a cat, for what it's worth, but it's not at all clear that you couldn't fill the same rule-hole in a different way. Is a cat likely to be encountered as a monster? Its best (most common use) is probably, as you say, for spying. It wouldn't be crazy to build its stat block around that, in the same way that traps and monsters and items and characters each have different types of stat blocks.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

KTHXBAI.

In seven letters, you sum up why nothing you say has any redeeming value for my games.