The statblock used in Dungeons and Dragons has evolved over time. It is still evolving. I’ve been looking at statblocks for weeks, hoping to adopt things from either old versions of the game, or third parties, in my products going forward. In addition to the blocks themselves, I’ve been looking at the entries.
As you’d expect, keeping it all straight in my head is more than I can handle! Rather than just keep notes for myself, I thought that some others might find a study of statblocks and creature entries over time interesting.
Original Carrion Crawler
Not sure what to call this version of the game, but here is a picture of a monster entry from the earliest versions of Dungeons and Dragons.
That’s it. That’s the entire entry for the Carrion Crawler! We get speed, hit dice (always d8 for monsters), Armor Class, Treasure, Alignment, Attacks and Damage. Note that it does, um, zero damage! It produces paralysis, but you need to read the entry to know that. It mentions no save, but I think there is one? I can’t recall, frankly…..
There isn’t much here to love, other than the simplicity. I thought we got “number appearing” in this version of the game, but I guess not!
First Edition Carrion Crawler
That’s a lot more information than the previous block or words. We get the basic combat stuff we got before, but a lot more information about how they fit in the world. It seems odd we’d get frequency and number appearing before the combat information. It will be awhile before the designers realize MOST monsters are used in combat, and DMs want the combat information up front.
We do get some more standardization here, with size for example. I think quite a bit of this is about helping DMs figure out how/when/where to use creatures. Number appearing, frequency, alignment, % in lair…..those are all about world building.
Note that it still does no damage other than paralysis! I do like the write up here, as it tells us a bit about the nature of the beast, as it were :).
The biggest issue is that non-standard attack information is still buried in the text (which, how is there only one paragraph there!).
Frankly, I think the world building stuff is really good, and should be in future statblocks. I’d like to figure out how to do something similar.
Second Edition Carrion Crawler
This is very similar to, but made more clear, the first edition block. Note the line between the world building and combat information. That’s a good touch, and the organization is good. Even size is as much about combat as it is world building. We still get too much of the combat details in the paragraphs, but at least they are paragraphs.
An issue, or a good thing, is that there is a NEED to take up a whole page. That gives us an awful lot of words for a big centipede, IMO. There is A LOT of world building, but almost none of it will ever see use in any game. This was both a plus and minus for 2e. It was great to read! It had a ton of information that just wasn’t useful.
In the description, we do get a useful bit of design and layout that makes it easy to worry about the things most important to you, though. You can skip the non-combat stuff if you want. In looking at the world building stuff, I’d keep most of that in the block, though I’d move it under the combat stuff, I think. Let’s see what we get later..
OK, that’s enough for one entry. We’ll look at 3e and 4e in the next entry. Then we’ll do 5e (official and non-WotC versions). In the final post, we’ll look at options for how I might make statblocks going forward.
One more thing: I vastly prefer the first edition art to the second for this creature. Like, what even is that thing with a longer neck than body?
Don’t forget to check out my items on DMs Guild!