In a discussion recently, I saw someone make the interesting point that most 'monster' books are actually of little use to him because he tended to flick through the book and would maybe pick out one or two beasties to use, but would never touch the vast majority of them. As such, although one might say that a DM can never have too many monsters, the reality is that those monster books are shockingly poor value for money if you consider actual use.
Which, come to think of it, is very true - I have loads of monster books, none of which I particularly regret purchasing, but almost none of which I've made much use of. Over the years I've probably used most of the monsters in the "Monster Manual" (at least, the ones that get reprinted edition after edition), but for just about every other bestiary... not so much.
This triggered a comparison I had with another type of book of which people tend to have many, they tend to look through once, and then they tend rarely if ever to use again: cookbooks. (Hence the name of this post: my theory is that monster books are really the cookbooks of the RPG industry - they seem like items of great value, but the use they see is actually far less than one might think.)
And that, in turn, reminded me of my "Experimental Cookery" series on the other blog, which started out with a determination to buy and make systematic use of a cookbook - each week a recipe would be selected, originally simply by turning to the nexy page, and made up according to the method.
So, perhaps I need an "Experimental Monster Slaying" feature, wherein I select three monsters a post for use and build a short adventure around those monsters. Which may be an especially good idea if it does turn out that actual gaming becomes harder to come by...
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