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<blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1444374" data-attributes="member: 10201">Ah, i see--yep, that was after i stopped reading Dragon. And, based on the issues i've looked at since then, none too soon.&nbsp; Let's put it this way: if i were to describe the change in the Ecology articles, it'd be &quot;they used to have tons of cool content, with a few crunchy bits in the footnotes; now they don't have any useful content, just the crunch&quot;.&nbsp; In a decade of running D&amp;D, and well over 200 issues of Dragon, i think i used the crunchy bits from maybe half-a-dozen Ecology of... articles, but used the &quot;real content&quot; (the fluff) from dozens of them.&nbsp; Not that the crunch wasn't well-done, just that it isn't of much use to me. I already had tons of game stats, what was lacking was context and society and the like--especially before 2e.Still, not surprising: it parallels the changes in the game itself: way too much crunch for my taste, way too little fluff (witness, frex, the lack of &quot;how to RP&quot; and &quot;how to DM&quot; books, as lamented in this thread). It sounds like the new Ecology articles would particularly frustrate me, since i've always relied on them to flesh out the narrative parts of monsters, and the format for monsters in the Monster Manual (3E) has less of that to start with [than the Monstrous Compendia did]. [I think eliminating the standard &quot;Ecology&quot; and &quot;Habitat/Society&quot; sections from the monster descriptions is the biggest backwards step of 3E.]</blockquote>

[QUOTE="woodelf, post: 1444374, member: 10201"] Ah, i see--yep, that was after i stopped reading Dragon. And, based on the issues i've looked at since then, none too soon. Let's put it this way: if i were to describe the change in the Ecology articles, it'd be "they used to have tons of cool content, with a few crunchy bits in the footnotes; now they don't have any useful content, just the crunch". In a decade of running D&D, and well over 200 issues of Dragon, i think i used the crunchy bits from maybe half-a-dozen [i]Ecology of...[/i] articles, but used the "real content" (the fluff) from dozens of them. Not that the crunch wasn't well-done, just that it isn't of much use to me. I already had tons of game stats, what was lacking was context and society and the like--especially before 2e. Still, not surprising: it parallels the changes in the game itself: way too much crunch for my taste, way too little fluff (witness, frex, the lack of "how to RP" and "how to DM" books, as lamented in this thread). It sounds like the new Ecology articles would particularly frustrate me, since i've always relied on them to flesh out the narrative parts of monsters, and the format for monsters in the Monster Manual (3E) has less of that to start with [than the Monstrous Compendia did]. [I think eliminating the standard "Ecology" and "Habitat/Society" sections from the monster descriptions is the biggest backwards step of 3E.] [/QUOTE]

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