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Generic monsters don’t have an alignment listed. Individuals do. Like in Candlekeep.
Not having an alignment listed doesn't make you nice.
I was about to say, I was still hoping they at least stick with Unique Characters and what not still keeping their Alignments.
They should hopefully have enough information about them to let the DM how to play them without having to rely on an alignement tag.
Something like a list of common goals would be nice. That would certainly make some fights more interesting. Instead of it being just swing until your enemies are all dead, having actual goals for the enemies to focus on would be a huge step up. A lot of DMs already do that, of course, but making that explicit in the books would be nice. A return of a proper morale system would be good. Something front and center on the monster stat block instead of an optional rule buried at the ass end of the DMG.
Agreed. If it's an individual, like the Darklords, then their background should be enough. At least in CoS, they included the personality traits/ideals/flaws/bonds things for them, which helped enormously. For other monsters, yes, having more goals would be useful. I very much miss the Habitat and Ecology sections from the old 2e monsters. I wish they'd include something like that in 5e, or even just a line for Motive, like they do in the Cypher System books (although for a system that's supposed to be mostly about exploration and discovery, a whole lotta creatures have "hungers for flesh" as their Motive...). I quite like what they're going to be doing in the Level Up monster book, since it seems that each monster is going to have a Behavior section.
I didn't see that in Strahd's writeup in the video pagethrough. Was it provided elsewhere in the book?
I’ve tended to do morale checks in the opposite manner. The natural reaction to being frightened is to try to Run away - a Wisdom check is required to force oneself to Stay.
I've heard that mentioned elsewhere online as well. Kind of an odd choice if applied universally - older versions of Ravenloft never shied away from unique Darklord statblocks (to include Curse of Strahd), and they'd be missing the opportunity to include customizations like legendary actions. I suppose it would save them some space, though?
