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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 4178664" data-attributes="member: 5948">I'm not even pretending to defend 3e's worldbuilding, particularly once you get to the higher levels!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  But it could be made to work - I'd point you to Sep's story hour for a prime example of a setting made infinitely richer and deeper by due consideration being paid to the implications of out-of-combat monster abilities (and spells, while we're at it) and their setting effect.But 4e gives me even less to work with.  3e gave me a list of spell-like abilities for a demon (for example)  - clairvoyance, suggestion, dispel magic, etc, etc - that a GM or player could look at and get a general impression of a monster's out-of-combat capabilities.  Assuming what we've seen so far is the entirety of the MM writeups for each preview monster (and I see no reason not to - why on earth would WotC give us the fluff/ecology header paragraph and snip out the out-of-combat bit?  Especially since all preview pages displayed at that con a while back had NO out-of-combat bit whatsoever!) 4e leaves me utterly whistling in the dark on this front.Any out-of-combat depth to the 4e monsters is going to have to be provided by individual GMs.  And each individual GM is going to have to individually deal with the setting implication of their choices in this department.  Not every GM is as good at this sort of thing as Sep, and 4e asks more of its GMs than 3e did of Sep.  I've got a unpleasant feeling at this early stage that a lot of 4e campaigns are going to be very linear and predictable (those GMs who adhered to the rules as written) and a lot will be chaotic messes (those who tried to add setting depth of their own but didn't have the time/resources/ability to fully deal with the implications.)</blockquote>

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