I currently have, on my bookshelf, two books by Keith Amman: The Monsters Know What They're Doing, and How to Defend Your Lair. They sell themselves as tactical guides for the DM (as both are most definitely written with D&D 5e in mind), for individual monster combats and the task of building and defending a home base, respectively. Right up my alley, I thought - as would anyone that reads this blog - but while the books were enjoyable enough reads in and of themselves, I found them far too specific.
The first, titled after the author's blog, concerns itself with picking apart the individual stat blocks found in the 5e Monster Manual, using them to construct playable tactical advice for the GM. (If this sounds like a lot of work for the average 5e DM, you would not be surprised to learn that the foreword reveals that Amman cut his teeth on GURPS, only agreeing to run a 5e game at his wife's request on behalf of her co-workers - a conversation all GURPS GMs have had.) This isn't a trivial task by any means, especially as many of the stat blocks aren't especially internally consistent, and many of the abilities are hard to use in combat or actively unhelpful. Indeed, I suspect that Amman put more effort into justifying these monster abilities than the authors of the Monster Manual did, and I'm by no means trying to put the man down. It just wasn't quite what I was searching for.
What I was searching for - as are many GMs, I imagine - was generic advice. The D&D combat system blurs out many of the identifiable combat tactics that we see in real life, on occasion reintroducing them as feats (such as Battlemasters have available) or animal traits (such as Pack Tactics). This leads to a very undifferentiated "core" combat experience, which teaches some odd habits. Carrying these over to GURPS, or other similarly tactical games, can lead to absurd results - frequent misses, combats that end within a second or two, wolves diving onto the party's blades face-first. This essay is for GURPS GMs (or anyone running a tactical system) who want their monsters to behave like thinking beings rather than XP dispensers.
