D&D General The Revised Monster Manual was released 1 year ago today! How have you liked facing down and using the new monsters?

[Sulicius]

Almost 1 year ago today I went by my FLGS to pick up the beautiful alternative cover Monster Manual for the revised 5e Monster Manual and enjoyed paging through it.

Now we are all 1 year later, and have gotten ample time to experience them at the table. What are your thoughts?

Here are some notable changes we saw in the revision:

Layout & Organization

• Monsters are (pretty much) sorted alphabetically!
• Stat Blocks: The ability score spread has been turned into a matrix with all saving throws listed. Interestingly they are ordered different in the book and on D&DBeyond!
• Inspiration Tables: Some monsters saw a small random table with unique plot hooks or flavoring.
• Habitat and Treasure: Each monster now received their habitat and treasure table, though some less specific than others.
• Initiative scores are added to the statblock, with a passive initiative score you can use. A lot of creatures, especially legendary monsters, gained a proficiency or expertise in initiative.

Art

• Monsters are now featured in scenes and with backgrounds, showing more of their personality.
• More art than ever?
• Representation of monsters in masculine AND feminine forms

New additions

• High CR monsters of almost every creature type.
• More NPC statblocks
• Additional versions of creatures like revenants, salamanders, azer and gorgons.

Balance Changes

• Removal of resistance to nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage
• Creatures at higher CR's are stronger, but some at CR1 and below got nerfed.
• Most attacks that forced a saving throw now skip that step, but there have also been attacks turned into saving throws, like the vampire bite.
• Most incapacitating effects now only last one turn, like a mind blast
• Spellcasters have very powerful multiattacks that are not spells, but replace most damage spells on their spell list
• Spell lists are now uses per day, and have been seriously reduced.
• Lair actions have been turned into mostly harmless passive effects, but legendary creatures gain a legendary action and resistance in their lairs.
• Legendary Actions have been much improved, a lot of them allow for movement and an attack, casting a spell or some powerful debilitating effect.
• A lot of monsters gained additional abilities to make them more interesting.

Removals?

• Stat blocks for drow, duergar and orcs have been removed and there is a page of redirections to other NPC stat blocks. The drow stat blocks have seen a return in the Forgotten Realms books.
• With the increased amount of art and additional stat blocks, there has been less lore for a lot of statblocks.

That's a lot of changes! Are there big changes that I missed?

What do you think about these changes? What have you enjoyed, and what disappointed you?

 

[tetrasodium]

Almost 1 year ago today I went by my FLGS to pick up the beautiful alternative cover Monster Manual for the revised 5e Monster Manual and enjoyed paging through it.

Now we are all 1 year later, and have gotten ample time to experience them at the table. What are your thoughts?

Here are some notable changes we saw in the revision:

Layout & Organization

• Monsters are (pretty much) sorted alphabetically!
• Stat Blocks: The ability score spread has been turned into a matrix with all saving throws listed. Interestingly they are ordered different in the book and on D&DBeyond!
• Inspiration Tables: Some monsters saw a small random table with unique plot hooks or flavoring.
• Habitat and Treasure: Each monster now received their habitat and treasure table, though some less specific than others.
• Initiative scores are added to the statblock, with a passive initiative score you can use. A lot of creatures, especially legendary monsters, gained a proficiency or expertise in initiative.

Art

• Monsters are now featured in scenes and with backgrounds, showing more of their personality.
• More art than ever?
• Representation of monsters in masculine AND feminine forms

New additions

• High CR monsters of almost every creature type.
• More NPC statblocks
• Additional versions of creatures like revenants, salamanders, azer and gorgons.

Balance Changes

• Removal of resistance to nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage
• Creatures at higher CR's are stronger, but some at CR1 and below got nerfed.
• Most attacks that forced a saving throw now skip that step, but there have also been attacks turned into saving throws, like the vampire bite.
• Most incapacitating effects now only last one turn, like a mind blast
• Spellcasters have very powerful multiattacks that are not spells, but replace most damage spells on their spell list
• Spell lists are now uses per day, and have been seriously reduced.
• Lair actions have been turned into mostly harmless passive effects, but legendary creatures gain a legendary action and resistance in their lairs.
• Legendary Actions have been much improved, a lot of them allow for movement and an attack, casting a spell or some powerful debilitating effect.
• A lot of monsters gained additional abilities to make them more interesting.

Removals?

• Stat blocks for drow, duergar and orcs have been removed and there is a page of redirections to other NPC stat blocks. The drow stat blocks have seen a return in the Forgotten Realms books.
• With the increased amount of art and additional stat blocks, there has been less lore for a lot of statblocks.

That's a lot of changes! Are there big changes that I missed?

What do you think about these changes? What have you enjoyed, and what disappointed you?

Overall the mm changes to creatures themselves were good, likewise with the part where setting specific creatures were removed from that core book so they could be slotted into their respective setting specific books. It should have gone further with dm support by setting out things like the old templates to add flexibility for the gm to do things like blur the level range a dungeon or adventure is appropriate for if their players rush the goal or meander around metaphorical side quests. The general lack of mechanical changes to .024 itself more than negates any good though.

 

[Sulicius]

I find templates to be very overrated, and love being lazy. I change a creature type and call it a day.

 

[tetrasodium]

I find templates to be very overrated, and love being lazy. I change a creature type and call it a day.

If creature type changes were all you saw templates for you would obviously find their poor returns less than notable. However those templates did more than change creature type.

The value of templates was that they extended the level range of suitability that monsters and the dungeon/adventure they were found in in addition to being capable of mechanically shifting their role through changes to their statblocks attacks defenses and abilities as appropriate to individual templates. That value is what I briefly described in my earlier post.

 

[Sulicius]

I think WotC saw more value in making a lot of solid stat blocks with those different roles.

 

[Cergorach]

I did not buy the physical version of the 5e Monster Manual 2024, I bought the digital version for Foundry VTT, so some of the things mentioned I have not experienced.

Overall: Simplifying the monsters overall, but specifically the abilities and writing them down more efficiently is imho the biggest advantage of the new MM. I can now quickly glance at monster and run it right out of the box. Making monsters simpler to run is a huge, huge bonus in my book!

The 'removal' of Lair actions I approve of (disregarding the mostly harmless effects), I found it extremely quirky and the added strength didn't add anything to the CR or the reward, which I found odd. I would expect that this would lead to a lot of D&D sessions being reduced to luring monsters from their lairs and slay them outside before claiming the treasures inside...

The art... I dislike quite a bit of it, and especially dislike the shared scenes in the MM. I do like scenes in general, but I don't if that's the only depiction of the creature in question. In some cases it's difficult to determine quickly what is what and showing players shows them everything in that creature 'family'.

The removal of drow, duergar and orcs in the MM I find particularly egregious, and the replacement stats are really bad, especially for the drow. Some claimed this was due that these creatures were no longer to be viewed as monsters, due to 'racist' perceptions. Imho that kind of reasoning made me facepalm, but OK, I can accept that to a certain degree for other people's sake. But then WotC came out with Adventures in Faerun: You want Drow stats? Here, pay $75 for this book! At this point I'm curious which $75 books in the future will feature the Duergar and Orcs (of course one per $75 book)... Sidenote: drow, duergar and orcs are in almost all settings, FR, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Eberron, Spelljammer, Planescape, Mystera, etc.

What I find annoying in this 5e 2014/2024 is the lack of simple treasure. You're telling me goblins or bandits don't have a few copper pieces on them? Also the changes to things from Humanoid to Fey for example really mess with some adventures, i mostly just ignore such restrictions.

 

[Remathilis]

Sidenote: drow, duergar and orcs are in almost all settings, FR, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Eberron, Spelljammer, Planescape, Mystera, etc.

Ackahullay...

Drow don't exist in Dragonlance, Dark Sun or Mystara. They are very different in Eberron. Orcs don't exist in Dragonlance, Dark Sun and until recently, Ravenloft. Duergar have no known existence on Mystara, Dark Sun, and I don't think Dragonlance.

But the reason they were moved out of the MM is the same reason elves, dwarves and tieflings were; they are player characters first now. The drow stats in Adventures in Faerun (and Forge of the Artificer) are supposed to represent specific types of NPCs rather than generic monsters. It's a fine distinction, but it makes sense if you would be equally chuff that there's no generic human statblock in the MM either.

 

[Reynard]

The ToV MM is superior in every way. It bugs me because it was the MM previews that made me give 2024 a shot, but in the end they did not do anything to make the vast majority of D&D monsters interesting to run or fight. They may be "better balanced for their CRs" but they are still boring bags of HP.

 

[GarrettKP]

Ran a full campaign using the 2024 monsters as well as a handful of sessions on a new campaign and various one shots.

The new monsters are fantastic. Challenging, easy to run, and with enough variety that I never feel I have to use the same creatures for similar encounters.

They hit hard, and I’ve had multiple combats where my parties have had to rethink strategy or even retreat from a fight to regroup. It’s make for very interesting encounters where they weren’t always there before.

 

[Sulicius]

The ToV MM is superior in every way. It bugs me because it was the MM previews that made me give 2024 a shot, but in the end they did not do anything to make the vast majority of D&D monsters interesting to run or fight. They may be "better balanced for their CRs" but they are still boring bags of HP.

ToV Monster Vault is great, but they commit the unforgivable sin of spreading stat blocks across multiple pages. Also, their legendary actions are still of the older kind, I much prefer the 2025 Legendary monster legendary actions.