Ive been thumbing through the SRD monsters recently, and noticed that many monsters have little if any descriptions. Some have illustrations though on certain sites, and some of those illustrations are contrary to descriptions.

For example - many, many sites show goblins as green - yet the text description doesn't mention it.

Another example - the wight apparently pummels his victims (+ level drain), yet Im finding the common illustration shows it with long claws.

Do you find yourself imagining (and presenting to your players) the common artist's renditions or do you go back and rely on the text, when its different?

I tend to go with the art, if such exists.

I usually have favourite artistic renditions of various monsters, and tend to go with those in terms of how I imagine and describe various creatures. However, I have also quite regularly strayed from those when I wanted to add an interesting twist to an existing monster. A wight in one campaign world might be very different from a wight in another, and an individual that is effectively (i.e. statistically) a wight but that arrived there by other means might appear completely different.

What do you think about the evolving appearance of elves from version to version?

A picture is worth a thousand words.  

But if I want to make a creature TRULY frightening, I'll focus on effective descriptions.  A player's imagination can fill in the details to make it even more effective than a picture on a page.

I noticed recently that many of the pictures in the 2e Monster Manual don't match the text descriptions at all.

Quote from: Lynn;638492What do you think about the evolving appearance of elves from version to version?

Elves are a bit of a special case for me; I've actually never cared much for most D&D representations of elves, as I encountered them in Tolkien's writing first. The mental image from that has always supereded most artistic renditions from the more vanilla (read: standard western medieval inspired fantasy) campaign worlds, my own included. Perhaps I'm unimaginative.

The places I've managed to let that imagery go have been the likes of Dark Sun, and a couple more unusual homebrews.

As for evolving D&D renditions of them, I can't really seperate that from my feelings about the overall drift in artistic style. Those are not really positive, especially recently, and I've liked it less and less since about mid-3.0 or thereabouts.

RE: elves, I'm kind of in the same boat as Bobloblah.  Elves are such an iconic fantasy element I've never really felt the need for an illustration.

Changing styles don't really bug me all that much, on the whole.  There's usually some commonality from one version to the next, the difference is in the artist's interpretation.

Quote from: KenHR;638656Changing styles don't really bug me all that much, on the whole.  There's usually some commonality from one version to the next, the difference is in the artist's interpretation.

Sure, the pointy ears.

Quote from: Bobloblah;638666Sure, the pointy ears.

Admittedly, I didn't keep up with D&D after seeing the 3E preview in Dragon (I was just coming back to RPGs that summer after a break of a few years...wargaming had pretty much taken over my game time), so I'm not as familiar with the newer artwork.

The art, unless the art in question makes no sense or is radically divorced from the stats.

RPGPundit

I read & look & any discrepancy I do one of two things;

a) choose whichever one I think is coolest & go with that

b) "Hmm, Ogres from the north look like the picture, Ogres from XYZ look like the text version."

Quote from: zarathustra;638889b) "Hmm, Ogres from the north look like the picture, Ogres from XYZ look like the text version."

Yes, I've sometimes done that one too.

RPGPundit