Preview VOLO'S GUIDE TO MONSTERS

Polygon has scored a look at the upcoming Volo's Guide to Monsters from WotC - six full pages, in fact, which give a very clear idea of what we can expect from the book when it arrived next month! From the looks of their article, it seems that WotC is using this as a testbed for the way they handle future sourcebooks. Polygon confirms the overall product description - 96 new (to 5E) monsters, tons of rules for monster PCs (goblins, orcs, firbolgs), and a buch of deep dives into some iconic monsters. The beholder section is nearly 14 pages on its own. Check out the article at Polygon for more!

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[Sacrosanct]

My 5e books are all 1st prints, I believe (?)

Barring some of the orange spine madness, my TSR era hardcovers both 1e and (early) 2e have held up quite well, considering.

My 5e books are all 1st printing, and they've all held up. The worst books in my experience that have fallen apart the fastest were:

1e UA
2e PHB (first printing)
1e OA

every other book from every other edition I've ever owned still to this day have no issues. In fact, my 1st printing Deities and Demigods seems to be bulletproof (because it's been abused badly and still isn't falling apart).

 

[Grainger]

There's a right lot of old moaning in these comments! This content looks great - really inspiring. I was going to put off getting the book, but I can't wait to pick it up now - there are tons of campaign ideas just in the first page.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

My 5e books are all 1st prints, I believe (?)

Barring some of the orange spine madness, my TSR era hardcovers both 1e and (early) 2e have held up quite well, considering.

My 1e books are in amazing shape. My 3e books are OK, and my 5e look OK but I have worries. We do have pages falling out of books at the table though, I've been the lucky one. But those 1e books are tight, I've got 4 PH copies, both covers, and they are just rock solid, same for the monster books. Now one DMG has a slight separation from the cover, but the other copy is rock solid. Never had pages fall out since I think they stapled them together.

Then you have my GURPS 3e books which largely exploded as soon as I got them out to the car the day I bought them.

 

[Mercurius]

Looks great. It seems safe-ish to assume that: Ongoing work on psionics + lots of aberrations in Volo's Guide = upcoming aberration/psionic story arc.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Here's my thing:

How many unique monster stat blocks did you use last session?

Last session of D&D I played, it was one. Rocs.

I've seen more - sometimes maybe 5-7, if we're having a very diverse kind of night.

D&D's been out for 2 years now. If I ran a session every week and used, say, three distinct stat blocks every week on average, no repeats, no homebrews, no templates, not counting racial modifiers (so "dwarf scout" = "orc scout"), I've used 312 monster stat blocks.

That's not even every monster in the monster manual. And it's not counting running the official adventures and using their stat blocks (which, by far, has been my personal experience - I'd be surprised if I've used half the monsters from the MM).

I might be atypical...but how many monsters from the MM have you used? Like, do you have a %? A weekly average? Is it especially high?

If so, Here's 250 more. And here's 400+. Here's a load more, on the cheap.

How long do you think those would last you? Because me, I could play with these stat blocks for decades and not use them all.

5e's got more of a glut of monster stat blocks than it does any other product. There are perfectly good monsters in these products that I will just never use. Hell, that last session of D&D? It's the first time in ever that some of the table fought against Rocs! These guys have been playing for 20-30 years!

What I've got less of is inspiration, setting material, useful plot threads. Context. My campaign doesn't need to be set up to accommodate them already, they inspire me to use them in my campaign. I didn't know I'd have ceremorphs in my game until I really liked the idea of making one an antagonist!

I don't need 1,000 stat blocks (though I've got 'em!).

I need maybe 5-10 stat blocks and 100 awesome ways I could use them.

"More Stat Blocks" is a solution to the problem of "I don't have enough monsters!"

I don't fully understand why someone would have that problem at this point in time in 5e, unless they're running a really unusual group for one reason or another ("Oh, I can't use undead or humanoids or beasts, so once you remove those...." / "Oh, I'm philosophically opposed to non-WotC stuff" / "Oh, my games feature 30 monsters every night and we meet 3 times per week, so I run through these books in like, three months")

My problem is more, "Why should I use Mind Flayers when I've got 1,000 stat blocks to choose from?"

That one page gave me at least a small handful of reasons to do that.

For me, I need more statblocks updating previous edition D&D IP monsters because those monsters exist in my world, and I want to be able to have them show up. I also have truly random encounters (not leveled for party, just by what should be in the locale), so I'm not always preparing in advance for such creatures. It's exactly the same reason people want stats for warforged or kender or whatever--because they are a part of the world and they don't want to have to make them themselves. This is especially important for those like me who have ongoing persistent worlds and don't reboot their setting for each campaign.

I have zero interest in monsters that are new to D&D. Zero. I just want updated monsters from previous editions.

On the other hand, I love fluff. That's part of what makes D&D in my opinion. So while I'd like about twice as many monsters as we are getting for this book, I'll love all the fluff they give us too.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

Looks great. It seems safe-ish to assume that: Ongoing work on psionics + lots of aberrations in Volo's Guide = upcoming aberration/psionic story arc.

Seems like a good bet to me. I think the next UA is supposed to be for the Mystic.

 

[I'm A Banana]

For me, I need more statblocks updating previous edition D&D IP monsters because those monsters exist in my world, and I want to be able to have them show up.

Oh! First link. That's Necromancer Games, who did the 3e and Pathfinder conversions of a load of earlier-edition creatures. The new book retains those converted creatures for 5e.

Also, I haven't done a LOT of this, but the little I've done has convinced me that converting a 1e creature to 5e is a walk of the cake. Don't even need to change numbers in most cases, you can just figure out what their Challenge is given their 1e numbers. Gotta flip AC, maybe translate a saving throw, sometimes translate an effect (no level drain), but most everything else can remain entirely as it was in the Fiend Folio.

And my goal isn't to dismiss statblocks, but just to point that more stat blocks can be "filler." Stuff that won't get used in play as much. More lore bits and plot hooks can be "killer" - stuff that is valuable to use in actual play.

The only way this applies in my opinion is if you actually treat most of those as independent entities worthy of consideration. Functionally there's very little between an ogrillon, an ogre, and a hill giant. They're all big bags of HP with high damage single-target abilities.

I don't think the proposition of "give me 300 new stat blocks so I can find 100 of them unworthy of inclusion in my game" is a winning proposition. Just give me 100 that are worthy of inclusion and use the rest of the pagecount on reasons to use them!

The thing is that I can make all of those interesting through lore, cultural, and personal traits, but I simply don't have the time or inclination to make interesting and semi-balanced opponents from a mechanical standpoint. That's ostensibly what I pay a game designer to do, not to tell me what stories to tell with their product.

And I'm the opposite. Any 5e stat block I could ever need is just a 10 minute monster-building session away. But plot threads, links, hooks, good ones? Rarer than shiny pokemon, and much more fun to play with!

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I think they have done a pretty good job of getting most of the creatures that appear in every edition, but they have a fair amount of work to do on the ones that appeared in many editions. Sadly, there are always some that drop away (if nothing else the demons and devils that don't make it from edition to edition: when was the last time a Styx Devil got statted up [and it was in the original MM2 for Lolth's sake]? I know it was in 1 and 2e, but I don't think it made it to 3e, and I wouldn't hold my breath for much out of 3.5's MM IV or V before 2020).

 

[Azzy]

For me, I need more statblocks updating previous edition D&D IP monsters because those monsters exist in my world, and I want to be able to have them show up. I also have truly random encounters (not leveled for party, just by what should be in the locale), so I'm not always preparing in advance for such creatures. It's exactly the same reason people want stats for warforged or kender or whatever--because they are a part of the world and they don't want to have to make them themselves. This is especially important for those like me who have ongoing persistent worlds and don't reboot their setting for each campaign.

So much this!

 

[Parmandur]

I think they have done a pretty good job of getting most of the creatures that appear in every edition, but they have a fair amount of work to do on the ones that appeared in many editions. Sadly, there are always some that drop away (if nothing else the demons and devils that don't make it from edition to edition: when was the last time a Styx Devil got statted up [and it was in the original MM2 for Lolth's sake]? I know it was in 1 and 2e, but I don't think it made it to 3e, and I wouldn't hold my breath for much out of 3.5's MM IV or V before 2020).

Yeah, I didn't even know the 3.X series went to five?