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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 9573491" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Let me start by partially agreeing with the last points, then address the others briefly.The main problem with the 2014 DMG monster creation rules is organizational. In that sense, they are a microcosm of the 2014 DMG in general. All of the stuff is there, but if you aren't very familiar with it you may miss it or not know how to find it. And even when you are very familiar with it, it can be a struggle to find exactly that rule you know was in there...somewhere, kinda by that other rule, what was it called?But, that isn't really the argument I was responding to, and that some people have made. The argument I was responding to was to the effect that the math doesn't match up to the created monsters, that the rules "don't work" mathematically to create the sorts of monsters that the 2014 MM gives us. This isn't accurate, and appears to be based on not being sufficiently familiar with the rules, such as only looking at the table at the beginning and expecting it to make sense in isolation. Again, the failure of organization makes this understandable. But, in fact, it does work once understood. Calculus "doesn't work" for me, because I never learned it, and would probably require a pretty big learning curve to do so at this point. But I am pretty confident that the math absolutely does work for those who have taken the time to understand it.Why does this matter? If these are simply advanced rules that work for the highly experienced DM who reads and retains the information, then surely we don't need them (as WotC seems to believe). (Although I would propose that better organization would make them more accessible to less experienced DMs--maybe I'll attempt to put a better presentation together.)It matters because the alternative presented in the 2024 DMG (which is just an expansion of some guidelines already given in the 2014 DMG just before the actual monster creation rules) is wholly inadequate to actually create novel monsters. How could I have ever come up with my Tremor Beetle using the 2024 guidelines? Bulette is the obvious starting point, but there is no way I could have tweaked the bulette according to the 2024 guidelines and come up with what I wanted. And that's a monster that has something not too terribly statistically removed from itself as a starting point. If I were to make something completely different than anything that already exists, I would have no starting point, no way to develop it, and no way to know what CR it is.What will the 2024 DM do without access to these rules? Sure, you can go on ebay and find physical copies of the 2014 books still, but WotC isn't publishing them anymore (even in digital format), so a DM that starts in a few years and want to make monsters is pretty much out of luck. (I'm veering off of the point of this thread now, so I'll stop).I'm going to end this reply and post the next monster: the Yuki-on-na.</blockquote>

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