Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="nexx" data-source="post: 2008106" data-attributes="member: 12881">This book could have been so much more, and that's disappointing.Like many others, I'll harp upon the layout, which was often confusing and difficult to follow.   I agree with Wizards that putting one monster per page would've been problematic, since you then give a false page count; sure, you seem to have a hefty book, but you also have a lot of wasted space.  I would've instead gone with a more 1st edition Monster Manual approach to layout, with the monsters in neat, easy to read blocks, rather than wraping text around pictures and so on.  A better effort really should have been made to put all of the stats for a given monster on a single page, as well, since the current setup makes some monsters difficult to use.Next, we have the choices of creatures to go into the book.  I dislike that they included many creatures that are dependant on the core cosmology, such as the Celestials, the various types of demons and devils, and the etheral creatures.  Since you haven't covered these areas in any 3e book (aside from blurbs within spells), including creatures specific to them is a poor design choice; new players won't have the background in these creatures that older ones do, and older players (i.e. those with previous edition experience) have probably already decided whether they use them or not.Mechanically, the book was passable, but only barely.  I found most of the CRs to be completely out of whack, but its very easy to figure out what the new CR should be based on any changes you make to a monster (of course, that new CR is still out of whack).  One of my major peeves is that, along with the CR stat, they did not include a "Level Equivalent" stat, telling you how many levels this race counted as if you wanted to play it as a PC.  What if I want to play a pseudo-dragon?  How many levels is that worth?  We don't get a clue, except for exhortations by WotC staff to "wing it".What were the good points?  I rather like templates as a concept, but I also think they could have been more widely implemented... a mummy template, or even a zombie or skeleton template, would make a lot of undead easier to deal with.  Personally, I'd also like to see precalculated stats for the summonable monsters (fiendish badgers, celestial dire rats, whatever), since that's certain to come up again and again.  Grouping the normal animals together makes for easy reference, and classifying creatures by "animal", "beast", etc. makes things very clear as to where the creature fits into the world.This book could have been so much more, but its riddled with systemic weaknesses.  The rating would more accurately be 2.5, but there isn't that degree of control.-Nexx</blockquote>

Verification