Making Headway

Had my first class as a TA. My heart was pounding in my chest with terror at the start. By the end, I felt the same thrill that I feel when DMing: "This was fun, let's do more of this."

So that's cool.

Meanwhile, I'm now up to the point where chapters 1–3 of Engines & Empires (3rd edition, imagine that) are pretty much done. I'm now working my way through chapter 4, technology, which is probably going to be the easiest chapter to revise. I was pretty happy with it during the last go-around, and so I don't need to do more than tweak the text to bring it in line with other changes. (The biggest change here, in fact, is the encumbrance system. I have to switch things over from the 8×8 encumbrance "grid" to the four-column table, so all the encumbrance values of items and gadgets become simple kilograms. E.g., if a thing was EV 2×3 before, it's now just "6 kg" and takes up six cells in a column.)

But when I get to chapter 5, monsters, whoa-Nelly. Previously, monsters took up about half the book's page count. I love monsters, and I love the variety, but I do not need to keep this giant bestiary in the book. It's far too easy to slap some basic monster stats together on the fly, or to re-skin what's already there, and so I really want to trim this section down. (Especially the enormous section on animals.) In fact, I'm starting to feel like the best possible monster stat format is the one used by OD&D's little white booklets, where there's a big table with all the monsters' stats, followed by a very brief description of what each monster is and what it can do.

But, I'm not sold on this. My hesitation comes from a question of usability. Certainly, the big table followed by short descriptions is compact in terms of page-count, but is it functional at the table in those moments when you need to quickly flip to a monster stat-block and remind yourself what it can do? I kind of feel like it would suck (no pun intended for this example) if I had to flip to page 101 and look up the table of "undead monster stats" to see a vampire's AC or move speed, and then flip over to 103 and find the vampire's monster entry to remind myself how the gaze attack or the regeneration worked.

Then again, maybe that's just not a big deal. But I would appreciate some input from other DMs out there. Given the choice, do you prefer monster stat blocks to be whole and expansive (as they are in Holmes, B/X, BECMI, the Rules Cyclopedia, and the various Monster Manuals) or split up into a table of stats and then a block of descriptions (as they appear in the original little booklets, the 1e DMG, and many, many early OD&D and AD&D modules, especially the B-series)?