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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5970312" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think now that I've got the point.OK, what you're talking about here doesn't bother me at all, though I'm perhaps in the slightly different position of thinking that 4e already does it - there are no goblin soldiers that I can recall, no hobgoblin lurkers (and I can't think of any skirmishers either), maybe one gnoll soldier in MM3 which is obviously an exceptional case (and wears plate armour, a fairly clear ingame signal to the PCs and players). In this respect, the flavour text - which talks about cowardly goblins, militaristic hobgoblins, and nomadic, pillaging gnolls - seems to be borne out by the mechanics.I haven't used any ogres, so can't comment on them in particular! And I would have nothing against even greater mechanical reinforcement of these distinguishing characteristics.It's a bit of a fine line, though, and this sort of regulation is hard to manage at the system level. What I'm thinking of in saying that is that the "gotcha" monster - be it the clever ogre, or the rock-throwing one, or Obmi the evil dwarf, or the good aligned drow who poses a risk of alignment violation to those PCs who cut him down without thiking - has been a staple of D&D for a long time. So even if you don't put any rock-throwing ogres in the MM, and even if you say that there aren't any of them in the D&D world, some GM somewhere is going to conceive of and want to use one - the PCs see the ogre on the bridge, start walking up, and suddenly that ogre rips a stone out of the bridge wall and hurls it at them!I think the game is probably better if it supports the GM who wants to do this sort of thing rather than pushing hard to shut him/her down. Which (I think) means that the game should make it easy to build a rock-throwing ogre and to work out how difficult that monster will be in an encounter.EDIT: I just had a look at my books and found the Lolthbound goblin, which is a soldier - but also, I think, a special case.</blockquote>

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