Five Takeaways From the 2025 Monster Manual

The 2025 Monster Manual is the missing puzzle piece for Dungeons & Dragons' recent Fifth Edition revisions, with reworked monsters that hit harder and make combat more exciting at every level. Released in February, the new Monster Manual drives home many of the design choices made in other parts of D&D's core rulebooks. Building off of a decade's worth of lessons about how DMs use statblocks and how players tend to handle combat, the Monster Manual features creatures with streamlined abilities meant to speed up combat without sacrificing the "fun" of fighting in the game. Plus, the book includes a ton of gorgeous new artwork that depicts D&D's iconic monsters at their most threatening. Here are five of my biggest takeaways from the new Monster Manual.

1) Revamped Legendary Actions, With More Power Than Before.

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One of the big goals of the new Monster Manual was to redesign monsters to have them punch harder but simultaneously make them easier to run. This design ethos can be seen in many revamped monster statblocks, especially at higher Challenge Ratings. Lair actions are now incorporated into the statblock, with monsters typically gaining access to an additional Legendary Resistance and Legendary Action while in their lair. Additionally, many of the Legendary Actions are much more powerful than their 5E equivalents, with creatures usually gaining more dangerous options.

For instance, all of the dragons have lost their functionally worthless "Detect" action and instead have access to new spellcasting options or more powerful attacks. The Adult Blue Dragon, as an example, can cast Shatter as a Legendary Action or it can cast Invisibility on itself and then move up to half its speed. While not as strong as the dragon's standard actions, the Adult Blue Dragon can now do a lot more over the course of a round then simply deal moderate amounts of damage and soak up hits from opponents.

2) Either Attack Rolls or Saving Throws, Not Both

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Another major streamlining within rulesets is that monster attacks with effects are either triggered with a failed saving throw OR a successful attack roll. This should significantly speed up combat by reducing the number of rolls made during a game. As an example, the Bearded Devil's 2014 statblock included a Beard attack that damaged on a successful hit and forced its target to make a Constitution saving throw or be Poisoned. In the 2025 Monster Manual, the Bearded Devil's Beard attack deals damage and automatically inflicts the Poisoned condition on a successful attack.

There's two major consequences to this. The first is that only one dice roll is needed to determine the success or failure of a certain attack or ability. The second is that a creature is more often able to threaten player characters at their intended level. By having a creature's full attack trigger based on a single success instead two successes (or I suppose a success combined with a separate creature's failure), it radically changes the dynamics of many D&D combats.

3) Yes, The Art Is Fantastic

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Keeping with another theme of the 2024/2025 Core Rulebooks, the artwork in the new Monster Manual is frankly fantastic. There are a lot of D&D players, myself included, who love to look through the Monster Manual and other bestiaries primarily for the art and lore. Those players should be more than happy with this new book, which contains artwork for every single monster in the book. What's more, much of the artwork shows the monsters in action. The Chasme, for example, looks much more threatening in the 2025 Monster Manual, with art showing the demon hunched over an adventurer with its probiscus covered in blood. Compare that imagery to the 2014 Monster Manual, which just has the chasme standing in profile.

One comment made to me by Jeremy Crawford was that Wizards had found that monsters without art tended to be used less often, so I'm expecting the trend of more art to continue in future books.

4) A Handful of Interesting New Mechanics

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While not found widely in the new Monster Manual, there are a handful of new (or at least very uncommon) mechanics. The Empyrean, for instance, has a Sacred Weapon attack that deals damage and Stuns its target. However, the target can choose to bypass the Stunned condition by taking additional damage. Meanwhile, the Arch Hag has multiple abilities that curse their opponent, taking away their ability to use Reactions or spells with verbal components. Additionally, the hag has a bonus action that deals automatic damage to anyone cursed by the witch.

Finding new mechanics in the Monster Manual is rare, but they represent some interesting innovation that hopefully will be incorporated with future statblocks. Not every creature needs stacking abilities, or "pick your poison" choices, but I love these and want to see them more often in the future.

5) Species-Free NPCs

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Over the past few weeks, Wizards has revealed several monsters with new creature classification types. Goblins, aarakocra, lizardfolk, kobolds, and kenku are all now classified as non-humanoids. It's interesting that non-humanoid species often have multiple statblocks with unique abilities, but that the humanoid statblocks are meant to include elves, dwarves, orcs, humans, and more. I'm assuming (given that Eberron: Forge of the Artificer is bringing back the Warforged) that D&D won't remove non-humanoid species as playable species, but it feels like there's a deliberate push to make all humanoids interchangeable, at least when it comes to these NPC stats.

It's a shame that Wizards seems to have done away with templates in the new Monster Manual because they'd be useful for transforming a generic guard or scout into a Drow guard or a Dragonborn scout. I don't think these would be hard to homebrew if necessary, but I do feel like this is one of the bigger misses in the Monster Manual. Hopefully, we'll see more specialization in the future, and the Monster Manual opted to focus on monsters instead of highly specific statblocks.
 

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Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer


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It is unlikely to happen, but a second, "advanced" MM including more high CR enemies, the inclusion of templates, and extensive monster creation and modification rules would be a welcome addition to the game.
Honestly 5E 2024 is going to need that, but my suspicion is it won't actually get it before 6E at this point.
I think high CR enemies are more likely to come in an adventure path that reaches high levels and includes new monster stat blocks.
That's a terrible place for them to be.
 

I'd strongly question the bolded assertion. Is that actually true? What's the basis for saying this?
Math.

If an attack has a 50/50 chance to land from a foe, and a save has a 50/50 chance of being made, then landing an attack AND failing a save only happens 25% of the time.

If you only need to hit, or only need to fail the save, it happens 50% of the time.

Double the power.
 


I sold it on as soon as it arrived, to be honest. I had made up my mind about the new edition (not a new edition) some time around Christmas after the DMG arrived. Ultimately, the game was no longer that appealing to me. I was just waiting for the last of the pre-order books to arrive. The MM preview blurbs and videos did nothing to make me feel the new book was enough to excite me. It all felt a bit tired to me, with an increasing power creep and stuff that appealed to….well, somebody that wasn’t me! After the game changed the Background rules, characters felt less interesting. The DMG at least had some good source material for the Greyhawk setting, but then I realised it wasn’t that interesting a setting and the new MM just seems to be utterly uninspiring.

For the record, I’ve drifted back into prefering Rules Cyclopedia/BECMI/OSE and Dungeon Crawl Classics (specifically the Dying Earth setting) now as my D&Dish fix (although I play other games anyway).
 
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Sorry for the possibly ignorant statement, I didn’t read the new edition after all, but I don’t like point 2 and 5 at all.
For 2 it’s nice to save a roll to speed combat, but then if a creature can poison a character on a hit, what’s the point of having the Save mechanic ?
And for 5, I can kinda begrudgingly see it for the more exotic species, but how on earth is a goblin non-humanoid ?

I may be wrong, I hope there is something I’m missing.
 

I agree with all the OP's points.

Five is the one that bugs me the most, and I don't understand why you couldn't have both the generic templates and a few specific creatures representing each of the major species (a dwarf warrior, an elf scout, an orc shaman, a human priest, and so on). It's very, very strange to have a MM that doesn't include orcs or elves.

And I would add a sixth point: I really, really dislike that they have stripped full spell lists away from every single creature, even full spell casters such as mages and lichs. As a DM, this is one area where I appreciated the extra complexity because I think that's what makes those sorts of encounters more fun - the unpredictability, and the ability to combine a full spell caster with heavy hitting creatures to force players to make more tactically challenging decisions.

I still have access to all the earlier versions, so it's not a dealbreaker. But it is a direction that I don't like, while recognizing that others prefer this particular simplification of the game.

That said, it's a gorgeous book and most creatures are improved and pose a more level appropriate challenge. So I still like the new MM. None of the MMs are perfect.
 
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