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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 5038010" data-attributes="member: 3146">One of the problems with the lack of fluff in 4e monster products is that, while it does render monsters very easy to re-skin and use as something else, the new monsters don't generate ideas. (I'm pretty sure the lack of fluff is real, not just imagined--back in 3.x, I would borrow monster manuals from time to time and read through them to see what new monsters were out there. Afterwards, I would often have a list of monsters that I wanted to use in an adventure or that had given me adventure ideas; reading through the 4th edition MM, none of the monsters do that). But this is not just fluff. While one previous poster claimed that 4e monsters have good mechanical hooks for combat such that the unique abilities of orcs, goblins, and kobolds give them unique feels in combat, what this misses is that all of the non-combat abilities have been stripped out of monsters. For example, in 3rd edition, I noted that bone devils have animate dead as a spell-like ability and that gave me the idea to write an adventure that featured an evil cleric who summoned a bone devil in order to create undead more efficiently. 4th edition monsters, on the other hand, do not have non-combat functions. Their stats and abilities exist only to allow them to fight and be killed. Net result: if you are writing for 4e, you come up with an idea first and then comb through the monster manual for creatures to fit into your boxes. You don't look at a creature and see a story develop from its non-combat abilities.</blockquote>

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