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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7775252" data-attributes="member: 37579">Oh, I understand the purpose. It's just that the purpose was flawed and ineffectual that has rightly been abandoned. Yeah, not so much. Because there were monsters with special abilities, and being told "rusting" or "glue" or paralysis" or "poison" isn't enough information to remotely run the monster. Yeah, you know what the giant spider needs to hit you, but not what happens when it does.Right. But it doesn't tell you want half the special abilities actually DO. It doesn't really help when running the game if you need to have the page open anyway.It's all well and good to summarize the additional information like name and alignment of NPCs, but the little abbreviated monster statblocks could be useless. I had multiple a fun experience running an adventure where a monster was included that I was unfamiliar with. Is it intelligent? Can it be reasoned with? Can it even speak? Can the PCs sneak by in the dark? Heck, can it seen in the dark?I also have memories of an adventure like that where the monster I needed wasn't in the Monstrous Manual so I then had literally no idea what it looked like or how to run it. It was a random name attached to random powers. That I knew its hit points and defenses did absolutely nothing for me. Products shouldn't be designed assuming system mastery or memorization. They shouldn't assume the DM is experienced. They should be for everyone.Quick, without looking at your books, what did the mind flayer's Mind Blast do in 1e? What was the range? Sometimes. Sometimes not. Like most things in 1e, there wasn't a lot of consistency, and things changed constantly. Later stat blocks got larger and larger as they included more and more details people discovered were needed to run the monsters. Like intelligence and briefer descriptions of powers. But that ate up more and more of the adventure. Whole pages were wasted on text that could be looked up in a hook the DM was likely to have on hand anyway. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have five more rooms of dungeon than a brief incomplete description of every monster. How about the one this thread was started to talk about. The NPC write-up that gives the named non-player character description in sentence form.Y'know, like they did when describing important named NPCs in 1e.</blockquote>

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