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General Tabletop Discussion
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WotC Considering NPC Stat Format Change
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<blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 7775281" data-attributes="member: 3586"><p>My experiences with trying to condense the 5E stats into an inline format have been horrible. It works for a small subset of monsters - the ones that have common abilities that can be remembered, such as pack tactics - and then falls apart quickly thereafter. AD&D could do it due to so many monsters being vanilla and no ability scores, and even then you'd need a Monster Manual whenever something complicated popped up, like a beholder. However, 5E's monsters have a large amount of required information to run them, so much so that you lose huge amounts of readability when using them in an inline format. 5E wants the full statblock treatment.</p><p></p><p>This, of course, causes problems when the full stats of monsters are included on the encounter's page. There is no doubt it makes it easier to run such encounters at the table, and it works very well for complicated set-piece encounters. Unfortunately, the trade-off is in the flow of the adventure. The extreme example is the 4E adventures printed in the "delve" format, as well as late 3.5e adventures such as "Return to the Ruins of Undermountain". It's great for combat, but less great for non-combat details. It's very easy for story beats to be lost, and it also has the drawback of assuming every encounter is a combat. That's not great.</p><p></p><p>Also, it kills the page count. (This is not short descriptions of the monsters, this is their stat-block material; typically 1/4 of a page or more for each monster). </p><p></p><p>As to a more expansive way of writing character descriptions as suggested by Chris Perkins? I don't like the example he gave that much, but it's not so bad when there's only one NPC in an encounter. Once you have several together, I think it doesn't work that well.</p><p></p><p>Cheers!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="MerricB, post: 7775281, member: 3586"] My experiences with trying to condense the 5E stats into an inline format have been horrible. It works for a small subset of monsters - the ones that have common abilities that can be remembered, such as pack tactics - and then falls apart quickly thereafter. AD&D could do it due to so many monsters being vanilla and no ability scores, and even then you'd need a Monster Manual whenever something complicated popped up, like a beholder. However, 5E's monsters have a large amount of required information to run them, so much so that you lose huge amounts of readability when using them in an inline format. 5E wants the full statblock treatment. This, of course, causes problems when the full stats of monsters are included on the encounter's page. There is no doubt it makes it easier to run such encounters at the table, and it works very well for complicated set-piece encounters. Unfortunately, the trade-off is in the flow of the adventure. The extreme example is the 4E adventures printed in the "delve" format, as well as late 3.5e adventures such as "Return to the Ruins of Undermountain". It's great for combat, but less great for non-combat details. It's very easy for story beats to be lost, and it also has the drawback of assuming every encounter is a combat. That's not great. Also, it kills the page count. (This is not short descriptions of the monsters, this is their stat-block material; typically 1/4 of a page or more for each monster). As to a more expansive way of writing character descriptions as suggested by Chris Perkins? I don't like the example he gave that much, but it's not so bad when there's only one NPC in an encounter. Once you have several together, I think it doesn't work that well. Cheers! [/QUOTE]
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