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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 7004333" data-attributes="member: 6778044">Agreed. But the stat blocks in 4e, especially with the different versions of monsters, steer you toward a particular approach, in the same way they pigeonholed PCs into roles by class and the design of those classes. To me, those abilities don't speak to personality, in part because every blue dragon is expected to be that way. Instead, those abilities read as game design to me. That is, let's come up with stats and abilities to make the red dragon different from the blue dragon. They each need a bloodied ability, and an aura ability, etc, because there are these combat role and slots, you see, that need to be filled. That's the design of the game.And I don't want my world to be designed to fit the slots of a game, I want the game to model the world however we wish to design it. If the design of the game is preventing me from making the creature, character, or action the way I want, then there's a problem with the rules. I don't expect stat blocks to excite me. Because they tell me little about a creature. The stat block shouldn't control how I would portray a particular monster any more than it should control how a player controls their character. There's a similar thread on Reddit about how chromatic dragons all "feel" the same in combat. To me I say, "of course they do, they're dragons." That is, the general abilities of a dragon, the general look, etc. are what make a dragon a dragon. A breath weapon, magic, a really large and powerful lizard-like creature that flies (and yes, there are some that might swim). But all dragons should feel different in combat, or in any encounter for that matter, because each one is a unique, intelligent individual. It's not like meeting 30 squirrels that will all have a similar instinctive approach to life. Meeting 30 dragons of whatever type should be a unique experience.Really, it's more a question of perspective and goals. I think that a dragon is a dragon and should, on the face of things, be very similar from one type to another. There are more similarities than differences in terms of biology. What differentiates them are not their abilities, but their personality. If you want to give examples of personality and tactics in the MM, I'm fine with that, but that the personality and tactics could be applied to any type of dragon, not that a blue dragon acts this way, and a green dragon that way.Because to me, the stats shouldn't tell you anything about personality. As soon as you start designing personality into the stats, you are restricting my usage, and my lore of that monster. Although the 4e approach really wasn't about personality as much as it was combat effectiveness. In your band of orcs you need strikers, leaders, or tanks, or whatever. So here's a striker orc "build." And they create rules, with new abilities, that change the established lore.Perfect if the new MM is tied to a new world with its own approach, lore and what have you. It was even highlighted as one of the design goals, that they realized that D&D had some iconic monsters and such, but it didn't have its own lore. That the lore was either borrowed or assumed in terms of other influences, so we'll make a new D&D lore. And we'll make new abilities that fit our new format that accentuates that lore. Like elves aren't elves anymore. Now they are eladrin. Unless they're elves, that is. Those elves can stay the same.Except that this wasn't true, elves in the Forgotten Realms had lore. Thousands of years of it. Yes, it closely resembled Tolkien, but it had its own lore. Halflings had their place in the world, which was quite different from those in Athas. So more than anything, I object to all of this new design changing the established lore around which I have based my campaign for 30+ years. Don't make your new lore the default for all campaigns in this new edition.</blockquote>

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