Monster Manual: I miss the fluff.

[pukunui]

I miss the 2e level fluff in a number of books. Hell, I've yet to find a WOTC book that I would buy to read if I wasn't going to immediate use the rules contained within. They are unreadable.

By contrast I own a number of White wolf and Indie RPG's that are actually entertaining to read. Why is it that D&D can't do this?

I enjoyed reading Lords of Madness.

 

[Jack Colby]

Fluff makes game statistics reference manuals hard to use. Good riddance to the excessive fluff. Besides, it's still in the game... 4E has a lot of nice descriptions of how things fit into the world, what PCs might know about the monsters, etc. But it is in it's own place, not mixed in with vital info on how to run the battle and handle a monster's abilities.

 

[Jack Colby]

I miss the 2e level fluff in a number of books. Hell, I've yet to find a WOTC book that I would buy to read if I wasn't going to immediate use the rules contained within. They are unreadable.

By contrast I own a number of White wolf and Indie RPG's that are actually entertaining to read. Why is it that D&D can't do this?

Maybe their game designers don't have delusions of being fantasy novelists anymore? Really, it's like being a captive audience for bad fan fiction when a rulebook does what you suggest.

 

[Wolv0rine]

Ehh, I miss the Ecology/Habitat fluff. I remember a monster of mine that got published in a 3rd party monster book at one point, and was dismayed to find that a big chunk of text had been axed which gave a lot of personality and texture to the monster. What passes for fluff in the 4E MM is akin to an NPC being included in a book with a statblock and the text "Ted is a blacksmith. He squints a lot." as the entirety of the NPC description. Is he runnable? Yeah. Is he open to the DM's interpretation? IMO yes, to the point where his usefulness is rendered pretty much null. He's so open he may as well not have been included.

Giving not-setting specific fluff to monsters not only provides sources of inspiration for how a DM might want to use the monster (which is an entirely different animal than suggestions on how to use the monster), but gives it some texture along with crunchy flavor that you can get a feel for it from.

 

[pukunui]

The thing is ... we all know that they didn't include much fluff in the MM because they plan to sell it to us in bits and pieces throughout the life of 4e. Come on! WotC is a subsidiary of a massive toy corporation: "Parts Sold Separately" and all that.

 

[med stud]

I think the lack of fluff makes the books less useful. Take the dopplegangers for instance. There's no fluff at all that helps me come up with a story, to dream up possible scenarios. It's just ... uninspiring. And this is a general feeling when reading the other two books as well. In making them more crunchy, they've also made them less inspiring. To me, at least.

I don't think that the toolbox approach is altogether satisfying. I would much have preferred a default setting with more fluff in the books, even if I wouldn't use it directly. Fluff makes things come together, and that helps me put them together in new ways too.

What I *do* think has improved in the MM is the art and the whole monster system. All I'm missing is another 32 pages of fluff.

I'm the opposite to you here. When I read that a doppleganger is a creature that can take another creature's shape, my inspirational wheels start spinning.

What I thought up, right now as I'm writing this, is that dopplegangers are lone wolves who move like predators in human society. The things that get them going is to imitate and take someone else's place. They don't have personalities of their own, they just take someone else's. If they find someone who they find is interesting they are not above killing that person and taking that person's identity. At certain times they move and at other times they have grand meetings, sages speculate that they move according to the stars.

Maybe not for everyone, but I have a description of a creature that in adventure nr 1 provides for a detective story and in adventure 2 can be much bigger when the dopplegangers of the world unite and throws everything into chaos. Then it surfaces that dopplegangers is a time bomb planted by a vengeful primordial at the moment of the primordial's defeat.

Here is the strange thing: If I read the 2e MM, for example, I wouldn't come up with those ideas. I would just sit with a description I don't like. Irrational, but still the way it is.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I personally prefer that most of the fluff is kept to the Lore DC, in the MM for multiple reasons.

-Cuts down on space for new monsters.
-I can more easily input my own fluff.
-Less fluff means the DC Lore can be tweaked more easily.
-I can run various monsters together and/or reskin them more easily with less fluff.

Also, more ambiguous and less concrete fluff means we could have in the Ecology/Creature Books, ie: Draconomincan, various fluffs. So we could have:

1 Fluff: Dragons are such and such...
2 Fluff: Dragons are such and such...

It works quite well to gather a bunch of different ideas and concepts for something together in one whole piece.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'm the opposite to you here. When I read that a doppleganger is a creature that can take another creature's shape, my inspirational wheels start spinning.

What I thought up, right now as I'm writing this, is that dopplegangers are lone wolves who move like predators in human society. The things that get them going is to imitate and take someone else's place. They don't have personalities of their own, they just take someone else's. If they find someone who they find is interesting they are not above killing that person and taking that person's identity. At certain times they move and at other times they have grand meetings, sages speculate that they move according to the stars.

Maybe not for everyone, but I have a description of a creature that in adventure nr 1 provides for a detective story and in adventure 2 can be much bigger when the dopplegangers of the world unite and throws everything into chaos. Then it surfaces that dopplegangers is a time bomb planted by a vengeful primordial at the moment of the primordial's defeat.

I love the idea of a Doppelganger stealing identities just because he thinks that the person in question might be "interesting". An immoral explorer of human nature, so to-speak. And who knows what a Doppelganger might find interesting? Maybe one Doppelganger loves to explore the life of beggars, while another enjoys the identities of merchants...

Here is the strange thing: If I read the 2e MM, for example, I wouldn't come up with those ideas. I would just sit with a description I don't like. Irrational, but still the way it is

I don't know what it is, but for me, the 4E flavor I gathered so far (primarily still from the Preview books) inspired a lot of random ideas in me, and never gave me the feelling it was to constrained.
But to be fair, I can't tell how I felt about the 3E flavor when i first read the books.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Also, vampires are mammals.

Isn't their purpose to flip out and kill things?

(sorry )

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Don't be. It was well-played, sir.