So how many monsters are there?

Echohawk

Shirokinukatsukami fan
I've just about finished indexing all of the original D&D creatures now, so I'm able to fairly accurately count the total number of distinct D&D creatures that have appeared over the years.

And the total is... <insert drum roll>... 7856.

Of this total, 6179 (79%) have been updated to 3.X statistics, either officially or unofficially, leaving just 1677 (21%) left unconverted :cool:.
 
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I'm just curious, how many have been officially updated by WoTC or officially licensed products like Dragon or Dungeon?
 

What is your definition of "distinct creature"? Are dragon age categories "distinct creatures"? What about sized versions of a monster (elementals etc.)?
 

Shroomy said:
I'm just curious, how many have been officially updated by WoTC or officially licensed products like Dragon or Dungeon?
Hmm... let's see. Of the 6179 creatures that do have 3.X stats, 1765 are unofficial updates, so the other 4414 are from WotC or licensed sources.
silvermane said:
What is your definition of "distinct creature"? Are dragon age categories "distinct creatures"? What about sized versions of a monster (elementals etc.)?
Good question. The way I have them indexed in the spreadsheet, anything that has its own stat block counts as a separate creature, including all the different dragon age categories. However, to get 7856 I took the total number of "creatures" (8915) and removed 1059 dragon entries (leaving in only the oldest dragon as a "creature").

So that means different sized elementals are counted separately, but dragons of different ages aren't.

I actually did start looking through all the non-dragon entries to check which ones should really count as "creatures", but that's surprisingly tricky. Are "Aarakocra, Athasian" and "Aarakocra, Malatran" different enough from a vanilla aarakocra to be counted as separate creatures? And what about the aartuks? Aartuks are nomadic vegetables that eventually go through a "blossoming" to become an "Aartuk, Elder", complete with a new stat block. (This, incidentally, takes an entire year, and many aartuks die in the process.) Should they count as two creatures, or just one?

And that's just the creatures starting with "aa".

Eventually I decided that for everything except the dragons, stat block = "creature" was good enough :cool:
 


Hey echo hawk, any chance you could put that spreadsheet up or if not the the spreadsheet possibly a master list and sources with a rtf document? Just wondering, that would rock man seriously.
 
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You can find the latest version of the spreadsheet in this thread. That one doesn't include all of the creatures from OD&D products, but I'll post an updated version which includes those soon.
 


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