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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 5067290" data-attributes="member: 60075">BryonD answered this well ("Mechanics should should be about capabilities and leave behavior to the players.") but I'd like to spell it out for everyone: a lot of the great things in 4E stat blocks is simply information that got shifted from accompanying background text into the stat block itself. I documented a striking example of this on this site <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/269740-wizards-coast-desperately-needs-learn-paizo-privateer-press-10.html#post5042605" target="_blank">not long ago</a>.But since you brought up humanoids, I thought it pertinent to provide a supplementory example. Let's ask what differentiates gnolls from other humanoids like orcs. 4E designers told us that they don't differ (or at least, not enough) in editions pre-3E but now they do. I strongly suspect their answer highlights the gnoll's "Pack Attack" power in its statblock:So basically what differentiates a gnoll from an orc in 4E is that one guy has Pack Attack and the other doesn't. Fair enough. If you then compare this to the gnoll entry in the 3.5 MM (page 130) you see no such thing as "Pack Attack" crop up in the stat block. However, in the flavour text it says (emphasis mine),And if you look up the enormous combat flavour that Paizo gave to gnolls in Classic Monsters Revisited (e.g. page 15 therein on horde tactics) you can see the shift in emphasis: information that previously (in 3E) belonged to "flavour text" was shifted to stat blocks in 4E.So for me the following two things are actually false::1. Humanoids had too little to differentiate each other in editions pre-4E.2. Monster entries in the 4E MM are awefully short on flavour text.As to 1.: I said why I deem it false already. I also disagree with 2., since 4E monster statblocks tell a story of their own. I love those stories (the MM being my favourite 4e book), but I absolutely understand people who'd rather work with flavour text.So the real debate is whether you want to codify monster tactics mechanically, or whether as a DM you simply make up mechanical repercussions for "horde tactics" and their ink on the fly - which gets us back to BryonD's point. I think it's a good point, but it really merited spelling out. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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