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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3988028" data-attributes="member: 2067">Whereas I would use it as an essential part of how I DM. Quick, they're on the coastlands, I need to have them fight something, let's scan the terrain/habitat index....ah! Here we go! Giant Crabs are about the right CR. BAM. Fight it. A few moments in the middle of the session where I scan an index is all I need to give them a battle that doesn't stretch their believability to the breaking point.If I don't have that in 4e, I've gotta go insert it myself, meaning I'm going to be taking a lot of pre-prep time. Alternately, I guess I could just pre-plan encounters, but that's profoundly dull for me. Well, the bullet points don't take up a half-page. That's kind of why they're there. WotC has a history of doing this, for instance, with the MMV: under a Habitat heading, they give a quick prose run-down of where it lives, and then bullet point it for quick reference in the game. That, with the index, is all I need. But because some of the designers may see that material as useless (simply because they don't play the game how I play the game), it might be cut. It would be much more convinient to list it with the monster's combat stats so that I'm not referencing three different books to try and figure out what monster my party should be facing RIGHT NOW. And I brainstorm plotlines with the MM because D&D revolves around combat. The plotlines are basically a chain of things you fight, linked together by story. The things I fight should also provide me anchors for the story I'm telling. I bet the Craft skill will stay, though. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Kind of, yeah. I need statistics for noncombat so I can do a quick word-association game and get my players to the next sword-slicing, spell-slinging combat.</blockquote>

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