Worth noting that Forge of Fury has short stat blocks. Like "Orcs (2): hp 8, 6; longbow (1d8/x3), greataxe, 1dl0 gp, 4d6 sp," in the main text. There is an appendix with longer stat blocks, but that they are still abbreviated for standard monsters:
Is that just because it is a 3.0 and not a 3.5 product?
No that works for 3.5, I guess they stopped doing that though. I'm personally not a huge fan of monster rosters elsewhere in the product. I can see their utility, particularly if you're running a living dungeon where encounters are not necessarily attached to their room descriptions, but generally, if I'm trying to play the adventure right out of the book, I want the full stats with the description. The first abbreviated stats above are pretty much inline with OS esthetics though.
That second stat block though is in no way abbreviated. Crunch that into a two column format and it's going to form a large block. And, that's just for a simple humanoid with zero special abilities, defences, etc.
To be fair though, I'm looking at some of these 1.5 and 2e blocks, and they get pretty long after 5th-ish level as well. Sorry about the filthy whataboutism folks. Note, I did say 1.5 and not 1. I'm looking at S1-4 here, and things are pretty succinct.
Althoooooooough, I followed that up with a peak at Q1 and monsters with spells occupy huge chunks of page and that old paragraph style is fucking illegible for on-the-fly combat, so...
), and (b) I slow down party movement the same amount for pole use as for mapping, i.e. enough to make wandering monster checks meaningful, so if they do one they may as well do the other.
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