D&D General 2024 Monster Creation

[dave2008]

Keep me informed. I definitely want a monster building system that uses character levels and eliminates CR.

The trick is, they need an extraordinarily high amount of hit points to survive a round of attacks from player characters, but cant deal too much damage or they will one-shot a player character.

But it is still possible to think in terms of character levels.

You can follow Mike's progress on his patreon, but I am not sure if he will end up sharing the whole process or not.

I am working through my system here: 5e Monster Stats by Level

I am mostly complete with the table, just doing a few tweaks. Unfortunately life has gotten in the way and I haven't had time to finish it off.

 

[dave2008]

I like those guidelines better than the 2014 guidelines which produced very very bad results.

Not in my experience. If you use the 2014 guidelines properly, they work really well I think.

 

[dave2008]

So they've been doing it wrong in your opinion for the last 50 years?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't remember monster creation rules in 1e, 2e, or BECMI. So it wouldn't be the past 50 years.

 

[dave2008]

I haven't compared the two in detail yet, but others have (like Ginny D) and the DMG rules have some significant differences than UA. I guess they tossed out a bunch of stuff in the UA.

Re: monster creation, I don't think it would have added too many pages. For example, this site is just the equivalent of one or two pages and has all the info you need for 2014. It would have been nice to have a chart like this.

View attachment 384426

That site (thank you for sharing) covers most of the nuts and bolts, but not everything. It also doesn't cover the nuance and art of making an interesting monster. I don't think you need 20 pages, but more than 2 pages to do it properly IMO.

Now, a set of quick creation guidelines could fit on 1/2 a page to 1 page at most.

 

[mamba]

You aren't getting a better version for the same money.

Business 101.

if you bring your car to the garage because the car makes funny noises, and the garage charges you $1000 and removes the engine rather than fixing it, explaining that the car no longer makes funny noises now, I doubt you would consider that approach a success… I see no difference between that and what WotC did with the monster creation

Unhappy customers are not good for business, also business 101

 

[Minigiant]

if you bring your car to the garage because the car makes funny noises, and the garage charges you $1000 and removes the engine rather than fixing it, explaining that the car no longer makes funny noises now, I doubt you would consider that approach a success… I see no difference between that and what WotC did with the monster creation

Unhappy customers are not good for business, also business 101

But it's not an engine.

Only 3e, 4e, and 5e provided rules to make monsters and only 4e didn't screw it up.

This is like family restaurant taking sushi off the menu because they lacked a sushi chef.

The customer was never going to be happy. Something was going to upset the fanbase regardless of what WOTC did. WOTC gets No benefit of the doubt.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Not in my experience. If you use the 2014 guidelines properly, they work really well I think.

Ok. I think they were a big miss. Too many HP at low level to be fun.

 

[Arilyn]

The D&D designers make monsters, a lot of them. If they can't give fans guidelines for creating new monsters, then something is off. Just tell fans how they do it.

13th Age has an excellent monster creation system because the book gives us procedures the designers used themselves.

 

[the Jester]

Actually they did give guidance on this once, but it is not in the DMG, and is also one of those things I hope they include in the new monster building guidelines. Here is how they explained it:

For any condition, find the spell that does just that condition (So for paralysis it is Hold Person). Then find the damage for a spell of that level (2nd level in this case) and use that when calculating DPR.

I've seen this mentioned a couple times. As I understand it, this is from some interview or online video, right?

If it's not in the books, you can't expect people to know this. I certainly didn't, and hadn't heard of it for the vast majority of the time 5e is out. "We told you in a video on youtube" is a terrible way to disseminate rules for a game that is played (at least by many) with actual physical books. If that video isn't directly linked to by the online rules, it's a terrible way to disseminate the rules for player who use the electronic tools, too.

 

[the Jester]

Sure

But the rules being asked for that would have no complaints would be 20 pages.

If that's what it takes, fine. Monster creation is one of the major aspects of DMing. It should be covered in enough detail for a novice dm to make a monster that holds up to scrutiny.