D&D 5E Am I the Only One Not 100% Impressed with the Monster Manual?

[Nebulous]

It's better looking, better organized and makes better use of its space.

Yeah, i kinda agree. I'm flipping through PF 1 and 4 now and it just has a better flow to it. That said, any monster can be adapted from it and changed to 5e stats with just a little work. Lol. There's an undead skeletal whale in here. That is cool.

 

[machineelf]

I guess I'm just glad that WOTC made the monster manual (and 5th edition in general) with me specifically in mind. Because I love it. Big art? Love it. Right blend of monster abilities with not too much so as not to be over-complex for no good reason? Love it.

Sorry they didn't make the MM with the rest of you in mind.

(And on a side note, I don't mind that they could have squeezed some more monsters in but didn't, because I fully expect a Monster Manual Volume II at some point. I hope it's just as beautiful.)

 

[Henrix]

The descriptions of the monsters are too short. Flavourful, but short.

3e had longer, for the most part, and 2e had a lot of text to make them interesting.

(Not all of them were good, naturally, but so are not all in the 5e MM either.)

 

[Nebulous]

yeah, it is definitely not my favorite TSR/WotC monster manual. Good...but not the best. The stat block leaves out some things that i feel would have rounded it out. But mostly more varied abilities. Fortunately, the toolbox nature of 5e makes this easy (and arguably FUN) to fix.

 

[Xorne]

154 entries with 456 stat blocks. Enough text to give me an idea about the monster, but not 7 pages dedicated to kobolds (I'm looking at you, 13th Age Beastiary). Every monster is in the index. Monsters by CR isn't there, but it's going to be in the DMG... I'm actually fine with that. They already had to add pages to the binding. If they included it, as soon as the DMG was out there would be complaints about recycling content in one book or the other.

Is "needing my DMG & MM" to plan encounters really a legitimate complaint to make? I mean... who doesn't have their PHB, DMG, and MM in their bag at all times?

Anyway, I love the 5E MM. It's my favorite D&D MM of all, and possibly for any RPG to date. I really liked the 13th Age Beastiary, but after reading the 5E MM I realized that less is more in an MM. (52 entries & 202 stat blocks in that book, by the way, most of which are just different tiers of those 52 entries, since there's no bounded accuracy.)

 

[Nebulous]

There's some small things that actually really bug me though. Like no initiative line. No environment or organization group or a Special Qualities line. In the sprite entry, for example, you have to read the entire ranged attack entry to know it can make a target unconscious. I know the designers (and many others) found that redundant, but for a quick glance at "Special" i would love to see "sleep arrows". Again, it's not a huge deal but it does annoy me.

 

[Dausuul]

I'm pretty solidly in favor of the 5E Monster Manual. I do share some of the OP's complaints, especially the lack of an index by CR and the odd organizational choices (the apparently random selection of creatures to put in the appendix--why is the Death Dog stuffed in with normal animals?). Those are minor nitpicks, though.

As for the art, it does take up a lot of space, but it also saves space because they don't have to devote a paragraph to describing what the creature looks like. The art giveth and the art taketh away. And I really appreciate being able to show the image to my players.

I'm hoping we will see a Revised Monster Manual in a year or two, better organized than the current one but otherwise similar. In the meantime, I'm happy with what I got.

 

[Mistwell]

I like 95% of the book. The only bit I feel is a bit of wasted space is all the good dragon entries. We're unlikely to fight those guys, we dont really need them. I would have preferred some more higher level bad guys in that space.

Yeah I am liking the work that Zak Smith is doing hacking the Monster Manual. He made Angels suddenly usable for our group when they initially are unlikely to be used, with a fairly simple-looking tweak (I say simple-looking because often the simple-looking changes are complex in the creation process, as brevity is often hard).

 

[Selkirk]

mm is a good resource ...but it fails as a bestiary for me. the art is boring (and some of them are just bad...why is the bullywug wearing a tunic? the cambion just looks like a bad cosplayer...all of the sphinx art looks like lion king leftovers ^^;...the minotaur looks cuddly not menacing). everything is too 'painted' in that digital style where you can feel and sometimes see the pixels. adding insult to injury they put the great lineart illustrations on 2 pages of the index...should have used the lineart style pretty much everywhere with perhaps a few 'painted' pieces.

in the absence of good illustration the book reads like a national geographic tour of some vague fantasy land. how do these creatures tie together in one land? of course it's fantasy but why not 10 pages on drow and double up other monsters on single pages? not enough flavor...and do those demons and devils really look demonic? crowd sourcing monster design is a terrible idea...one can feel the 'art direction' at every turn (and again the ridiculous clothing on these fearsome beasts...im loving the merfolk lady wearing a belt and a skirt-cause you know when your underwater...).

phb is good value (despite the same artistic shortcomings) because it offers a relatively coherent vision...you could see most of the characters (not you dragonborn ) interacting in some version of one world. with the mm it's just everything together with roughly all things having equal value...

 

[Ratskinner]

having finally received it...

I like the critters and mechanics in general, but man there's a lot of art-as-filler going on. I realize that BA means that they don't need variants across multiple levels, but I would have gladly traded some art for more "sideways" variation (especially for humanoids!)

In any case, I don't feel ripped off.