The 2014 DMG Monster Creation rules were really, really bad.
But why? There was all this math and all these long lists of features and calculations and tables?
I am a monster tinkerer by heart, have been since I was young. When I started DM'ing back in 2018 I loved the complex building guide presented in the Dungeon Master's Guide. It was very crunchy and helped me understand what features were strong and what to look out for. I tinkered and counted and made a bunch of monsters.
They sucked.
They consistently underdelivered and were stomped by my party. Now, we all know that the encounter building rules were bogus and even WotC's monsters are often weak, but this really, really discouraged me. I started to reskin monsters more and more, saving me time and delivering better results.
Now with more experience, I still mostly use reskinning, and even when I make sweeping changes, I only look at the Forge of Foes stats by CR. And it works!
If I think of the time spent for terrible results using the old way of doing things, I would not wish that on anyone. I actually think the 2024 monster creation rules might actually be better than pages and pages of little features and what they mean for CR.
As a final thought, my gut feeling tells me there won't be more detailed rules in the MM since there was no reference to it. But for all that the designers have told us the books were all designed simultaneously, I doubt that they were done with the MM with the layoffs and setbacks, and the missing UA's that were promised.
Maybe they just didn't have the final version of the monster math ready yet, and they are still finalizing it instead of publishing another hard to use tool. Even if they have the tool for themselves, they can't share it because it's not usable for us. For them they only need a tool that works, for us they need to design it so we can't get it wrong.
But why? There was all this math and all these long lists of features and calculations and tables?
I am a monster tinkerer by heart, have been since I was young. When I started DM'ing back in 2018 I loved the complex building guide presented in the Dungeon Master's Guide. It was very crunchy and helped me understand what features were strong and what to look out for. I tinkered and counted and made a bunch of monsters.
They sucked.
They consistently underdelivered and were stomped by my party. Now, we all know that the encounter building rules were bogus and even WotC's monsters are often weak, but this really, really discouraged me. I started to reskin monsters more and more, saving me time and delivering better results.
Now with more experience, I still mostly use reskinning, and even when I make sweeping changes, I only look at the Forge of Foes stats by CR. And it works!
If I think of the time spent for terrible results using the old way of doing things, I would not wish that on anyone. I actually think the 2024 monster creation rules might actually be better than pages and pages of little features and what they mean for CR.
As a final thought, my gut feeling tells me there won't be more detailed rules in the MM since there was no reference to it. But for all that the designers have told us the books were all designed simultaneously, I doubt that they were done with the MM with the layoffs and setbacks, and the missing UA's that were promised.
Maybe they just didn't have the final version of the monster math ready yet, and they are still finalizing it instead of publishing another hard to use tool. Even if they have the tool for themselves, they can't share it because it's not usable for us. For them they only need a tool that works, for us they need to design it so we can't get it wrong.
