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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 5720805" data-attributes="member: 7006">My inference from what was created and released at the start of 4E was entirely that it was new game crunch that was the driving factor in it's design and release.  The fluff they already had on record was absolutely fine.  Which explains why the first MMs were light on description, and the early campaign settings were 3 and out.  Because the assumption was probably that most (not all obviously, but most) of the players who were going to pick up this game already owned or had access to most (if not all) of the books from their 3/3.5 range that already included the fluff... and thus repeating the fluff was seen as less important than coming up with the crunch needed to play the new game.  And (in terms of the MMs) if the word-count issue came down to having a couple paragraphs of the ecology of the ogre versus a stat block for an ogre of a different level/role than the ones they already had included... they went with the extra stat block.The problem we all face now is that we are looking back on the first MM from a much different perspective than we did in 2008.  Right now, we have so many monster stat blocks for every monster available to us (especially those of us who are DDIers), that now the loss of fluff is more evident.  But I know that for me at the time when I first bought the MM1 in 2008... the fact that it included stat blocks for like 5 different types of goblin at several different roles/levels rather than only a couple plus a rehash of the goblin fluff of 3.5 (which was only still about 5 years old at that point)... seemed much more useful at the time.</blockquote>

Verification