Ok, everyone break out the popcorn and kick up your feet...let the flamers fuel up their flame throwers.
(puts on asbestos lined suit)
One thing that I will give DnD 4th is their Monster Statblocks are very user friendly. It is great to have all their abilities right there for easy reference. I would like to see Pathfinder start taking this approach if possible. I am not sure this is feasible with some of the creatures having many abilities, but it would be big help when trying to throw together a quick encounter and needing to understand exactly what the creature can do and if it makes sense for your current adventure party as a decent challenge.
I honestly agree with this...
I tend to copy over the monsters I commonly use into my own Stat Block and hunt down their abilities. It takes time but by a few years I should be able to get every current Monster done.
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I also do my own stat-blocks and I include -- usually short-handed -- explanations of any abilities I don't know off the top of my head. (That includes feats, for instance.)
This has a couple of stealth benefits: (1) I can see as I'm transferring stuff and cleaning it up how the designer wanted to creature to work, which is often not completely obvious when scanning the stat-block casually, and (2) I get the chance to make changes to make a creature more interesting for me and for my group. (I made Jorgan the Axe, from JR2, into Jorgan the Bruin ... and made him much, much scarier for my large group.)
Including enough stuff in the text to run a fight without looking anything up would just take up too much space. It's not gonna happen.
But I'd be happy with a compromise: for each AP book or module, provide a link to download the full stat-blocks, everything included. That would be sweet.
Until then, though, I'll keep making my own stat-blocks. I sort of enjoy it, because I am an OCD masochist.
What would anybody flame the OP? I see nothing controversial in what DGRM44 said.
But I'd be happy with a compromise: for each AP book or module, provide a link to download the full stat-blocks, everything included. That would be sweet.
This would be a great start...maybe have a link in the PRD for each monster to the list of all abilties with details of each? Or just include them right there on the web page and let us use the browser scrollbar.
What would anybody flame the OP? I see nothing controversial in what DGRM44 said.
You never know...some people can be very sensitive when saying something in 4e is better than Pathfinder, even if it is just your own opinion, which btw is what most of the posts on this forum are.
putting links to every little thing would be difficult and would require the books all to be linked.
but on the PRD/d20srd it would work. If they haven't already done it.
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This would be a great start...maybe have a link in the PRD for each monster to the list of all abilties with details of each? Or just include them right there on the web page and let us use the browser scrollbar.
What I actually had in mind was a nicely formatted PDF packet of all the (complete) stat-blocks in the AP book or module. I don't use a laptop or tablet at the table, so I need hard-copy.
(In the same vein, BTW, I'd love it if the art were similarly PDFed and packaged for download. Right now I use Acrobat (Extract Images) or Snipping Tool to grab the images I want to hand out to my players. I'd be nice if that were already done. It really doesn't seem like a big deal, either of these things. Maybe two or three extra man-hours, and I bet the response would be overwhelmingly positive.)
a possible answer, in the NPC DB on d20pfsrd.com there is a column called fulltext which has html mark up of the npc, this combined with the Pathfinder css file (which is on the same page) will give you a Pathfinder styled stat block.
If I am clicking on the correct link I just see a huge list of NPCs. I don't see a format CSS file on this page. I don't see how to get any of these into a statblock similar to what we were describing.
chopswil is correct. Though honestly I have yet to get it to work reliably on my computer...
Formatting. I can't get it to work consistently.
This might be do to my HTML(and other programming) skills being horribly rusty do to it being around 3-4 years since I really went into it.
Ok now it works... Hmm just shows you how much rust I have on my skills.
Well I had it for a while... Now all I can get is the Top line with the name and CR...
Reopened the file to double check to see it again...
Ok it seems to be working fine now... Seems the program messed up when I reopened it.
Once I recopied it it worked.
This is helpful, however this is still short of what I originally described. But I do appreciate the info and will try to leverage this to create my own statblocks.
Hopefully Paizo will offer more details in the PRD sometime in the near future. To reiterate, the DnD 4e monster statblocks are very GM friendly and it is something we should leverage in Pathfinder.
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If all else fails you can use it to put into your own Stat Blocks and put whatever you need in them.
If you want a Word 2007 Stat Block Template I have one.