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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ccooke" data-source="post: 6336492" data-attributes="member: 6695890">Okay. Whether we agree or not, I think you win the hyperbole award for this thread.That means everyone else has to stop - any attempts to beat this amazing award will be derivative and boring, now. <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=":-)" />So... Some people feel strongly that spells should be all spelled out. Some people feel strongly that they should be left as brief references.The issue here is that people are making absolute statements about a matter of taste. There don't need to be any "excuses" for the layout that WotC used in the starter set - it's a perfectly valid way to lay out the information. Some people prefer it this way. Some people do not.Conversely, the people saying this matters to them also have a point - just because it's a valid way to express the information doesn't mean that everyone has to like it.So let's actually have a debate about the interesting point, here:WotC have chosen a surprisingly low price point for the Starter Set - half the cost, allowing for inflation, of the original basic set. They've done this because they want to appeal to a wider playerbase than any edition of D&D has targetted in the last few decades. A lot of design of the starter set is informed by this choice - the size of the box, its durability, the structure of the adventure... and how many pages of printed material they could afford to add to the set. Even one additional page to either of the books would have added significant cost - it's no coincidence that all the booklets and books that WotC have talked about have a page count that's a multiple of 32. So, there must have been a significant amount of culling and condensing of information to fit into the 64/96 page booklets in the starter set - we can be certain that they started out with more material and then condensed and reformatted until it fit within the limits.That puts this formatting of monster statblocks into a useful context: Was it, objectively, too condensed? Given the format, WotC must have accepted that there must be some annoyances in the reduced and compressed ruleset, because they don't have space to expand them. So, was this a step too far? If they added spells to monster stat blocks, they would have needed to cull some other information - what could have gone, instead, to pay for the extra space?For all I prefer spells to be referenced only, I can see that having them expanded in the starter set would make sense. I'm just not sure it's important enough compared to the other things it would have cost.(It should also be noted that the MM is not in the printers yet - given they just made a decision to add more pages, maybe they could be convinced to add expanded spells if they haven't already?)</blockquote>

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