D&D 5E How would you improve monsters?

Make venomous creatures venomous, rather than poisonous, in their name. Poisonous means it kills you if you bite them, venomous means it kills you if it bites you.

Get rid of legendary resistance. the first 3 saving throws made for free usually has resulted in PCs not even trying to use a saving throw ability knowing it will be wasted anyway. Maybe give them a flat resistance, like magic resistance was in 1e.

Emphasize the flavor text. Including how the monster would act in a combat, and what types of tactics it might use. Way too many people just look at stats and completely ignore the flavor text, then complain how the monster is too easy. They are more than just bags of HP. They are living, thinking creatures, and most would use the environments to their advantage.

Add variants to many of the commonly used monsters/races. We have such a wide range of CRs for some, like... a thug compared to a gladiator or berzerker, but then just a couple very narrow ranges for others, such as Goblins. Maybe give suggestions on tactics sure, if that can't be inferred from their abilities, but also would be cool to have legendary templates of some of these. Like a legendary Kobold warrior/king.

cmad1977 said:

I’d have a paragraph in the front informing the reader that the monsters within are NPCs with goals and motives and to run them as such. Problem solved.

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What was the problem that you solved?

Group by type and then have high quality pictures, possibly with a bullet list of physical appearance traits.

No one just sees an umber hulk. They see a large, brownish, lumbering creature with hard, chitinous (pronounced KAI-tin-us) skin, hands ending in razor sharp claws, four insect-like eyes, hornlike antennae (ANN-ten-nee), and huge mandibles.

The GM knows it's an umber hulk. The characters who have never seen one before don't know what it is.

loverdrive said:

I honestly don't understand how multiplication and division which are more complex operations that addition and subtraction, especially on double digit numbers that are pretty common on 5+ levels can make game easier to run.

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As far as I'm concerned, divisions are not harder, nor easier, than subtractions; both require that you know the total of each type. The hot mess you brought up as an example isn't so much about subtraction or division, it's about the fact that you need to track slashing damage separate from fire damage separate from radiant damage. Once you figure those out, halving or doubling isn't more work than subtracting.

A flat 50%/200% has the benefit of being consistent; either you get half, or double. Either you have resistance (or vulnerability) or you don't. I'd be very displease to go back to, say, fire resistance 5, cold resistance 15, electricity resistance 10, and so forth. For me this is one of 5e's best traits. I'm glad to sacrifice granularity for something less to track.

[edited for grammar]

Sacrosanct said:

et rid of legendary resistance. the first 3 saving throws made for free usually has resulted in PCs not even trying to use a saving throw ability knowing it will be wasted anyway. Maybe give them a flat resistance, like magic resistance was in 1e.

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For my high level boss encounters, I usually go with X-in-6 chance to ignore an effect AFTER a failed save, X per round. Its brutal, but there's no way my legendary ancient dragon will end up with 0 special saves after 1 round because of a monk spamming stunning strikes to burn my resistances.

loverdrive said:

I honestly don't understand how multiplication and division which are more complex operations that addition and subtraction, especially on double digit numbers that are pretty common on 5+ levels can make game easier to run.

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The real trick is making sure your players know to roll damage separate pools if they're doing more than 1 damage type. Halving or doubling a 2 digit number, compared to adding or subtracting a constant, are both fraction of a second operations; the difference in complexity is mostly irrelevant .

Istbor said:

Add variants to many of the commonly used monsters/races. We have such a wide range of CRs for some, like... a thug compared to a gladiator or berzerker, but then just a couple very narrow ranges for others, such as Goblins. Maybe give suggestions on tactics sure, if that can't be inferred from their abilities, but also would be cool to have legendary templates of some of these. Like a legendary Kobold warrior/king.

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Check out this guy over here trying to kill off the third party market for monster manuals!

I have MM.

I also have MM Expanded I and II. And I just pre-ordered one from a Kickstarter. I've got no real quibble with the so-called lack of variety. Just fiddle with a stat here and there and bust out a thesaurus. Or use a third-party monster manual.

billd91 said:

I'm going to go with a no there. 50% resistances make the game a lot easier to run and keep things from spiraling out of reach of characters who aren't optimized damage dealers.

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Barbarian: "I rage with my greatsword/greataxe/etc"...
rogue: I sneak attack...
Paladin: I smite it...
Most spellcasters: I cast my BigNukeSpell
You don't need "optimized damage dealers" to bypass things like dr2/dr5/dr7 or even dr20 at the levels they were used. It just means that classes that specialize in htting something fewer times than the eldritch blast warlock, fighter, & PAM whatever but hitting it harder. Those classes who make fewer harder attacks are directly harmed in order to shove aside all barriers for the classes that get to play the odds & average their damage out across multiple attack chances.

If by some chance you don't have a rogue, wizard, sorcerer, warlock with nukes, barbarian, cleric, druid, or paladin in your party made exclusively of the remaining 1/3 of the classes* you can pick monsters with a different loophole like how skeletons need bludgeoning damage &zombies slashing or make getting one or more holy/lawful, flametouched iron, byeshek, red steel, infernal iron, or whatever weapons a notable partof the campaign to go fight the army of things with DR.

5e applies resistant to nonmaggical b/p/s to nearly everything over a certain CR because it has almost no impact on fighting it. Back when you had monsters with flat dr & flat energy resist values they were not as overused & really not that hard to work around or just accept the occasional fight that was eating dr uncommon enough to find a weapon that bypasses it.

* going by the v2 levelup ranger you might be able to remove it from the list of classes without a big gun they can pull out to further shrink it.

Laurefindel said:

As far as I'm concerned, divisions are not harder, nor easier, than subtractions; both require that you know the total. The hot mess you brought up as an example isn't so much about subtraction or division, its the fact that you need to track slashing damage separate from fire damage separate from radiant damage. Once you figure those out, halving or doubling isn't more work than subtracting.

A flat 50%/200% has the benefit of being consistent; either you get half, or double. Either you have resistance (or vulnerability) or you don't I'd be very displease to go back to, say, fire resistance 5, cold resistance 15, electricity resistance 10, and so forth. For me this is one of 5e's best traits. I'm glad to sacrifice granularity for something less to track.

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Gadget said:

I like the resistances and immunities for the most part. Sure they could be tweaked about who gets what, but under no circumstances go back to a 3.x model here. There's a reason that was abandoned.

I would also echo those who are advocating a more 4e approach, which IMHO, had the best monster design: each monster was unique enough with its own abilities that fit well with its nature and role for the most part. No more having dragons that are basically arch mages with scales and such.

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Jut not a reason you can... you know... say? Got it.... great reason. How could anyone argue with such a slam dunk case.