Continuing to play catch-up, we’re on to one of my favorite topics in Legends & Lore: Monsters. The most interesting bit to me in reading Mike’s post is tracing the lines of influence that lead to a monster. It speaks to the diverse goals of D&D Next and why the stat blocks seem so scattered. The first thread is the fiction. This is maybe the easiest to understand as well, it’s the part of the monster that defines the fictional thing that we all imagine when dealing with one (and the artist imagines while drawing it, etc.). The fiction accounts for all the points in the first step of Mike’s post, one point...

I’m obviously pretty far behind on posting my thoughts about Legends & Lore, which I should have seen coming what with the stupendously successful Kickstarter, big work announcement, and my wedding. Well, it’s time to play catch-up, so let’s take a little jaunt back to Rodney Thompson’s post from over a month ago on Bounded Accuracy. I found Rodney’s entire post very interesting mostly because it described something I really like in terms that make it sound pretty obtuse. Rodney’s post describes this entire system as a patch on how certain things are handled—a way of making something that was...