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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6671816" data-attributes="member: 4937">The sad truth is that most campaigns are kitchen sink.  And even if they aren't kitchen sink, there would be no economic sense catering to them.I've always found monster books to be about the worst rules investment I can make.  The only real reason to have one is to flip one open and run the monster straight off the page.   And that's only a good investment if you plan on running monsters that aren't modified or customized in some fashion, and you also are planning to use more than 5-6 monsters out of the book over the course of a 5-6 year campaign.For me, the intersection of those things being true tends to mean that only 'Monster Manual 1' has been of any value to me at all since late 1e.  The problem is that even back in 1e, I tended to modify or invent unique monsters.  In 1e that often meant something like, "This manticore has 12HD and can roar like a Dragonne.  It can also bash with it's tail for 6d6 damage when in melee."   1e stat blocks were notably compact, so I also could do something like "Muck Elemental: 10HD, Atk: 2 slams 1d10".   In 3e it often means writing out my own custom 4 line stat block that basically mimicks the 1e block with some extra 3e'y details like attribute scores.  When I open a monster book I usually only find less than a dozen monsters I'd actually use, and less than half I'd use as written.  Part of that is driven exactly by your complaint that too many monsters of disparate sorts can make the setting seem random or illogical.  For example, I figure a large dragon needs a 100 mile wide hunting territory.  So how many dragon species can a setting reasonably support?  Eventually the breeding pairs are going to be so scattered about that even dragons would have a hard time finding each other.   I mean, there might only be 500 mature dragons on an entire planet.  That might work dividing the dragons among 5 species, but 10? 20? 30?   And what about all those other barn sized predators?  And in 30 years of gaming, I've never found a reason for using a good dragon outside of Dragonlance, and the one DM that did use one ended up regretting it I think.All of which makes a $40 book with 300 pages just not worth it.The best Bestiary I've ever found is Betabunny's, "Bestiary: The Predators", because really, who doesn't use animals occasionally and often extensively for the first 2-3 levels of play?   As for your criteria, it's pretty rare to have a setting where Earth like plants and animals don't exist in some numbers.</blockquote>

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