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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5628606" data-attributes="member: 22424">To be fair, that's hardly an apples to apples comparison! Your comparing some standard low-level monsters with a unique, deity-level creature that served as the end-boss not just of an adventure, but an entire 20-level campaign!Still...Depends. If the numbers are going to be very close to one another (say, within a point or two), it's probably just as good to collapse them to a single value. If, however, many monsters have some defences notably higher or lower than the others then having separate values has some value - it rewards players for identifying and exploiting weaknesses.See, that's what I don't like about the abridged format. The fewer references I have to chase down while running the monster, the better. If you can't include a decent stat-block in your adventure, just give me a page reference to the Monster Manual and I'll use that.One of the few things that the Delve Format adventures got right was in supplying full stat blocks for all monsters (or at least, as full as required for the adventure - no point including "desert adaptation" if the adventure takes place underwater!). When reading the adventure, I can skim over the stat blocks easily enough; when running the adventure time is of the essence - make the stats as easy to use as possible.The worst stat blocks I'm aware of were the ones from the early 3e adventures - they were compressed much like the older edition blocks yet contained far more information. This meant that they were several lines long - long enough to take up non-trivial amounts of space, but compact enough to be a major pain to actually use. I could never find saves (in particular) in those blocks!</blockquote>

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