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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2406463" data-attributes="member: 32740">Agreed.  The problem isn't really FORGETTING a monsters abilities but not knowing or realizing what they are in the first place. Now, I often do find it helpful in modules when the author will list several rounds worth of tactics but that doesn't mean I don't want or need to EXAMINE the monster/NPC anyway to see if the listed tactics actually are aggressive or easygoing (often completely ignoring the best abilities an opponent has) and whether the party's standard tactics and abilities are going to result in a good/bad encounter when the two meet.  After all, no module author has the first clue what my players are capable of, what my campaign is like, why I placed a particular oppenent into an encounter, or what I might expect a given encounter to turn out like. Frankly, the way the game is now structured I find that as PC's get into teen levels and up the players begin to lose track of everything their PC's possess and what they can actually do  They have TOO MANY options and end up simply forgetting about many of them unless they find themselves regularly called upon to act in a genuinely wide variety of capacities that normal play simply doesn't require.  The same applies to a DM when running opponents of PC's.  They have so many abilities and combats are generally so short that most of those abilities are moot.  It then becomes very easy for a DM to fall into running encounter after encounter in a very staid, straight-forward manner that both ignores M/NPC abilities that are less used as well as failing to ever test lesser-used PC abilities.</blockquote>

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