Quote from: Banjo Destructo on December 18, 2024, 09:04:56 AM

Quote from: kosmos1214 on December 17, 2024, 08:51:48 PM

Quote from: Banjo Destructo on December 17, 2024, 05:06:37 PMI think if you're making a game, you can choose what to focus on, but you should ask your audience what they want and try to supply it to them.

If your customers want splat books, provide them. If they don't, focus on what they do want. You can't try and force a certain audience to be interested in what you make , so you might as well focus on making what they do want (something the current heads of WoTC haven't learned, or have forgotten)

So like, me personally? I used to like books like the monster manual, but now I feel like they're a waste. I know some people like them, but I feel like time would be better served doing monster entries in the adventures you write so that those adventures can be sold as stand-alone products.  And maybe having some general guidelines on how people can make their own monsters for your game. Of course as your library of monsters increases, the temptation rises to put everything you have already made into a new compilation/product to try and sell, so you have to resist that urge, or roll the dice to see if it ends up being worth it.

Personally I think not putting monsters that are needed for a given adventure in the adventure is a big miss step. Or at least border line assinine.
That said I know one splatbook that has been missing from 5e from what I've heard was rules for makeing monsters.Not haveing baseline rules to make gm driven content is an obvious flaw if for no other reason then it increases the load on the gm.

I don't even think a splat book is needed for rules on to how to make monsters.  Elegantly I think these could fit into 2-4 pages of rules in the main book.

And I don't disagree about the length or where they are placed. My understanding is that they where generally absent. One of the things I tend to think that as A rule gm's need options that let aid them in making things because table top role playing games Are at the end of the day driven forward by Gm creation. To some extent all ttrpgs drift from published content. If for no other reason then the needs of Gm's to deal with the situations that pop up in  there own games. To try and explain my thoughts better a number of palladium games feel like monster of the week tv shows to me. In that vain the Gm needs ideas and options to work from in building the monster of the week.
Sort of my thinking is that the more and better fleshed out the options are in a given system for the gm to work from the easyer time the gm will have building the tool set they need out of the parts provided.

Yeah I'm not a fan of optimizing splat books. Expanding on class options or settings? Sure, but not adding layers of complexity or adding "power creep" to an existing class. The only condition is if it's to fix an initial design flaw.