pragma wrote:(1) relying on function calls
On the contrary, I'd say that relying heavily on function calls was the second greatest* innovation of the 3e monster system, for two reasons: information density and consistency.
For the former, AD&D, 4e, and 5e all showed that you simply cannot achieve acceptable levels of well-roundedness and interesting tactics if you try to shove absolutely everything in the stat block. AD&D has sleek and compact stat blocks followed by muddled overly-verbose paragraphs of flavor mixed with mechanics, while 4e and 5e have bloated stat blocks that take 100 words to say what can be said in 20, but in both cases the monsters are limited to whatever you can fit in the allotted space (with the singular exception of spells, and even then those editions avoid giving spells to too many monsters), so you either dramatically restrict monster depth and options (hello, 4e dracolich or 5e balor) or you need to give a monster an entire page or two instead of half a page to get the necessary detail (hello, 1e dragons and githyanki).
3e stat blocks, meanwhile, not only rely on function calls to spells and feats but also do things like "have standard rules for Full Attacks instead of printing a 'Multiattack' ability in every goddamn stat block ever." Seriously, having this:
3e Glabrezu wrote:Full Attack: 2 pincers +20 melee (2d8+10) and 2 claws +18 melee (1d6+5) and bite +18 melee (1d8+5)
instead of this:
5e Glabrezu wrote:Multiattack. The glabrezu makes four attacks: two with its pincers and two with its fists.
Pincer. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10ft., one target. Hit: 16 (2d10 + 5) bludgeoning damage.
Fist. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (2d4 + 2) bludgeoning damage.
...is
also a function call, it just doesn't seem like one--because of
course players know the rules for full attacks, right?--whereas Flyby Attack is mostly DM-facing and therefore not as familiar.
For the latter, since you never ran 3e you probably don't appreciate how radical the 3e standardized monster abilities are. Things like Incorporeality and Frightful Presence and such are allowed to be kinda complicated because they occur over and over again and have their own nice long descriptions in the DMG, allowing DMs to internalize them over time. The details are still repeated in the stat blocks so there's no more up-front effort to figure them out than there is for AD&D/4e/5e monster abilities, but once you know them, you know them and they don't change. Likewise, there are lot of feats out there, but most monsters use the monster-specific feats (like Flyby Attack) so you pick those up quickly as well.
If I, a longtime 3e DM, tell another longtime 3e DM "this monster has a Poor fly speed, Improved Grab with its claws, and Flyby Attack" or "this monster has claw/claw/bite, Darkvision, Pounce, Improved Grab, and Rend," that can actually be enough to convey its basic combat tactics because those are known quantities; for monsters that aren't as straightforward, being able to gloss over the known abilities and focus on the unique-to-that-monster thiings makes it much easier to figure things out on the fly.
(Of course, as amethal notes this requires said other DM to actually
know all the rules, but knowing what Readying is and reading a feat description you're unsure of shouldn't exactly be a high bar.)
* The greatest innovation was the change to make monsters use the same rules as PCs, as you alluded to. Even if the actual monster type system wasn't the greatest and one might prefer to use different types or use monster classes or whatever, the very fact that you don't get a Divide By Cucumber error when you put a
belt of giant strength on an ogre (like in AD&D) or convince an ogre to switch sides and tag along on your adventures (like in 4e) or try to build an ogre cleric (like in 5e) puts it head and shoulders above the rest.
(2) Our discussion of feats reveals that either listing them is useless (already factored into stat block) or really important to dig into. I like that the designers used consistent rules to put monsters together in 3e, but that information can be pulled into a separate section or design document
[...]
I think I'd like more descriptive text about behavior in the 3.5 stat block, and just fewer numbers to pick through. I'll confess that part of my reaction may just have been the dense presentation.
Yeah, every edition (3e included) could stand to have two stat blocks for every monster, the full-on block with everything included and all the math laid out for when advancing monsters or dealing with edge cases and a much-abbreviated block that can easily fit four to a page for use as a combat quick reference.
Whenever I use homebrewed monsters or NPCs in my games, I prep quick blocks like that, and I can usually get things down to 20% or less of the normal size. Not quite AD&D's highly compressed "Lizardfolk (3): 2 HD, sword and shield, CE" inline stats, but still pretty good.
This power-based design starts to look a little like 4e, which I don't consider terrible. I thought the combat abilities in 4e were specific and often somewhat interesting. (This isn't an endorsement of the whole combat system, which was a terrible padded-sumo numbers treadmill, or of the whole system, which was sparse.)
While the 4e philosophy of ensuring every monster had a unique schtick was good, the power formatting and information density were abysmal. As with the Multiattack example above, your sample 5e wyvern takes 91 words/numbers to say what its 3e equivalent would say in roughly 14.
Think of it this way: for every block of unnecessarily repetitive rules text that's compressed down to half a line, you can fit one or two entirely new monster abilities in the same space, making the monster even more interesting and differentiating it even more from similar monsters.
Frankly, 5e's "quasi-natural language" format is a crime against rules design, having all the repetitiveness and rigidity of 4e's heavily-keyworded system without the benefits of actually using lots of keywords and all the excessive verbosity of 1e's freeform monster abilities without the variety or immersion. The entire 5e design staff should've been slapped upside the head by a whole team of technical writers before the 5e MM went to print.