D&D (2024) 2025 Monster Manual All You Need to Know video link is up.

But I would counter that having less monsters, and a straightforward and easy way to modify those monsters or use their parts in brand new monsters, would be far more useful to the typical DM.

Eh, I'd bet more pre-made monsters and variations on monsters are much more useful to your typical DM. Especially if they can be easily re-skinned. In fact I'd also bet that your typical DM rarely if ever creates monsters from scratch. Of course this is all just my conjecture that said WotC probably has some data around how often monsters creation takes place among DnD Beyond subscribers that likely influenced their decision on whether to publish updated rules in 2024.
 

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This is close to a dealbreaker for me for 2024. Missing monster creation rules sounds like "play with the toys we give you, do not make your own" to me, and that's not why I play D&D. It doesn't sound like the kind of thing they'd do, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a discussion, but them not mentioning it yet has me on edge.

There are many hundreds of monsters DMs can use as templates for new designs. Not putting math in the books isn't stopping people from making their own.
 


This is close to a dealbreaker for me for 2024. Missing monster creation rules sounds like "play with the toys we give you, do not make your own" to me, and that's not why I play D&D. It doesn't sound like the kind of thing they'd do, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a discussion, but them not mentioning it yet has me on edge.
While I want to agree with you on principle, I think there are two reasons why they didn't...

1. Monster design is far more art than science and I bet a bunch of the monsters in the book would not adhere to their own guidelines, which was a common complaint regarding the 2014 version. WotC itself admitted they didn't use their own creation rules. Yet the creation rules were often used as the yardstick when people complained about monster design.

2. The rules themselves were based on some odd assumptions and were a pain to use. Creating a new monster was a laborious game of guess and check based on the chart and averaging defensive and offensive CRs with certain variables raising CR and others not. The results were often very bare bones and often required you to finesse the numbers anyway (see 1).

The end result was that building from scratch was not as intuitive as the DMG would make you think. And a strict reading of them could make some very OP creatures "legally" (condition riders on attacks didn't up CR, so you could make a creature that inflicted poisoned, charmed, feared, paralyzed, prone and exhaustion in one hit and it would be the same CR as one who did nothing extra). If the charts were only ever a thumbnail sketch, were they even worth using?

I would have loved WotC to include better rules for monsters, but I think they probably felt the rules weren't useful to new DMs (they require a heavy amount of system mastery to understand) and weren't all that useful to veteran DMs because they often created widely varying results. Maybe they will update them in some future book, but if not the 3pp community has already put out far better systems to do it with.

As an aside, the two biggest uses I had for them was raising and lowering CR for NPCs and existing monsters, both of which the MM including more variety of monsters will help.
 

I doubt that having 495 instead of 504 monsters would even get noticed, not having building rules does get noticed… of course at 495 marketing cannot say ‘over 500…’
The 2014 DMG spent around 10 pages on how to create a monster. 10 pages out of a 384 page book would be around 15 monsters cut on the high end.
 

While I can understand this approach working for an experienced DM/group, it doesn't sound like a particularly helpful approach for anyone with less experience.
My guess is because there still is not an actual mathematical formula for CR, and teaching “it’s art, not science” is difficult, but at the end of the day “it’s art, not science.”
 

I doubt that having 495 instead of 504 monsters would even get noticed, not having building rules does get noticed… of course at 495 marketing cannot say ‘over 500…
Noticed by what percentage of their playerbase? Better yet what percentage of their playerbase actually used the creation rules vs. Grabbing a pre-made, reskinning or slightly modifying monsters?

Which is to say 10 pages of rules you know are only used by less than x percent of your playerbase is a waste if x isn't high enough to justify it.
 
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Noticed by what percentage of their playerbase?
0 for the lower number of monsters, no idea about the missing rules, but more than 0 is not all that hard…

Which is to say 10 pages of rules you know are only used by less than x percent of your playerbase is a waste if x isn't high enough to justify it.
I am not sure we know either way, and I don’t have much faith in WotC’s decision making.

By your logic they would always be a waste and we should not see any in the ‘of everything’ books either, guess we will see
 


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