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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5906560" data-attributes="member: 2067">Like any activity of imagination and creativity, it depends on the context around it. Ingredients by themselves are not enough. You must be shown how to use them, if only so that you can ignore that. You can't be Jackson Pollack without first knowing how to turn colors on a canvass into an image. You can't be Shakespeare without first knowing how to put together a play. You can't be a molecular gastonomist without first knowing how to bake a meatloaf. The D&D MM should, IMO, be to the great adventures what a meatloaf recipe is to carbonated fruit at Moto. It shows you the basics. There's nothing saying that kobold stat block MUST be part of the default kobold set-up, just like there's nothing saying that an onion MUST be part of your meatloaf. You can do a lot of things with an onion. You can do a lot of things with that statblock. The recipe book shows you one way to use it. I'd imagine something like the Compendium would even catalog all the stat blocks in one place, so you could use it like a grocery store: go and browse and get what you want to bring home and turn into stuff. If one wants fantasy adventure goodness in May of 2013, they'll be up to their eyeballs in swords and sorcery in every form of media imaginable and then some, each one capable of delivering an amazing, delightful experience within minutes. D&D offers something subtly different, but the more hurdles there are to get to that, the more likely someone's just gonna boot up Diablo III to kill things and take their stuff (maybe with friends!) instead of figuring out this arcana, because it's good enough for them. So one way that I think D&D can lower the hurdles is by giving people MM's that are more useful at the table, instantly. It's also the case that things like the Compendium didn't exist in 1975, and an internet database is by far a better format for gobs of stat blocks than a book. It seems then that we're mostly quibbling over the names of things. And I suppose this is where a lot of the controversy comes from. There's an expectation that the MM be formatted a certain way, and a gut hostility toward changing that format. It's all "Awesome idea, just don't call it The Monster Manual." I see the MM more as "the third core book for D&D, the one with the DM's cast of characters in it." I don't see it as an alphabetical compendium of random beasties, because that's never been the point of an MM to me. The fun part about monster manuals wasn't the alphabetical order or the encyclopedic format, it was that these were characters that I as a DM would get to be. So what I want is more help in playing these characters. Not a bigger cast with less info.I think the old MM format was fine for 1975 standards. Even for the standards that have existed at the start of every edition until 4e.But just because a horse-and-buggy has been fine and dandy for thousands of years doesn't mean that an automocar isn't a more useful way to tool around the countryside. And if you persist in using a horse and buggy when there's cars out there, you become the Amish -- marginalized, small, and insular. Not that the new thing is automatically better in every way (cars cause pollution, this format would probably mean fewer monster entries), just that it's better for your main use (cars get you places faster, this format gives you more material to use at the table).</blockquote>

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