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

[Zaukrie]

This is all fine and well until you get to the part where you need to assign them a CR. How do you determine a suitable CR for your made up monster based on the stats you've given them?

Build it off and existing monster. I don't get why anyone would look at anything other than existing monsters and start there. The rules are confusing. The implementation is right there, easy to see.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

This is all fine and well until you get to the part where you need to assign them a CR. How do you determine a suitable CR for your made up monster based on the stats you've given them?

Compare with existing monsters.

The 2014 guidelines were worse than having none at all.

 

[Imaro]

0 for the lower number of monsters, no idea about the missing rules, but more than 0 is not all that hard…

Zero? How are you coming to that conclusion when there have been players asking for and designing variants of already created monsters since 2014? The fact is you don't know.

I am not sure we know either way, and I don’t have much faith in WotC’s decision making.

You're right... we don't know but through DnD Beyond WotC has more data than we do around this... which means I'd bet on their decision making vs. yours or any other random internet poster espousing what WotC should do with 5e.

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

Nope. If topics that have an estimated greater popularity of usage have been produced and sold... of course you have room to then cover less popular topics...

You're claiming my logic states just because the Rune Knight is less popular than the Fighter it should never be published... when my point is actually... you cover the Fighter (and other more popular classes) first.

 

[mamba]

Zero? How are you coming to that conclusion

that is easy, the question was how many people would notice that the book has 495 monsters and not 504… the answer to that is that no one would, as no one was initially expecting 504 monsters to begin with

495 is still an increase, 10 monsters more hardly make a difference. There are plenty of books that provide increased variety far beyond the 85 new monsters, let alone the then ‘missing 10’. Monster Manual Expanded solves the lack of variants more thoroughly than WotC ever will

 

[Imaro]

that is easy, the question was how many people would notice that the book has 495 monsters and not 504… the answer to that is that no one would, as no one was initially expecting 504 monsters to begin with

Why would you assume this. There are people expecting all kinds of things from WotC without any reason to. We don't actually know is pretty much the only correct answer.

495 is still an increase, 10 monsters more hardly make a difference. There are plenty of books that provide increased variety far beyond the 85 new monsters, let alone the then ‘missing 10’. Monster Manual Expanded solves the lack of variants more thoroughly than WotC ever will

So your point is if you buy another book you'll get more than 85 monsters? You should have to buy another book for some more variety? At this point why not just buy another book if you want monster creation rules? Either way someone's not getting what they want and sn experienced DM is more likely to know about 3pp and their monster books.

I'm really having a hard time parsing your point here?

 

[mamba]

Why would you assume this

that is pretty simple, if you have no idea how many monsters there will be, you won’t be missing / noticing anything if there were 10 less

So your point is if you buy another book you'll get more than 85 monsters?

no, not at all. My point is that 10 monsters do not add a lot of additional variety to 490+ ones

 

[SteveC]

that is pretty simple, if you have no idea how many monsters there will be, you won’t be missing / noticing anything if there were 10 less

This is one of the things that I find hard to understand. Let's say we had the "how to build monsters" and rather than add page count, they took out 10 monsters like you're saying. How would anyone even know? Unless WotC said, "Well, we could have had 505 monsters, but you wanted design rules, so you're only getting 495! You monsters!" ... how would we even know?

I'm sure there are more than a few pages in the book that aren't monsters. Couldn't we have even more monsters if those pages were removed? How is this even an issue?

 

[mamba]

This is one of the things that I find hard to understand. Let's say we had the "how to build monsters" and rather than add page count, they took out 10 monsters like you're saying. How would anyone even know?

that is my point, hence the 0% noticing it

 

[dave2008]

Compare with existing monsters.

The 2014 guidelines were worse than having none at all.

Completely disagree. The 2014 guidelines were great and I've made hundreds of monsters with them.

 

[Azzy]

The 2014 guidelines were worse than having none at all.

That's not my experience. ¯\(ツ)/¯