D&D 5E What the Monster Manual is missing

[Eejit]

It's missing Were-Penguins.

 

[Mistwell]

I have been cranking out custom monsters with just what has been released in the pdfs. Pick a starting creature as a base template and tweak from there.

We didn't have ANY rules for monster creation with B/X but that didn't stop the flow of monsters one bit. One thing I'm hoping the slightly more relaxed rules of 5E will accomplish is the opening of the floodgates of creativity without reliance on oodles of exhaustive official support.

So just make up a monster. If you like it and its fun for your game then you did it right.

Yeah last night, spur of the moment I decided to throw a mummy at the party when they opened a crypt. It wasn't the original plan, in fact the crypt was just an accidental artifact of a random map I had pulled up. But they made a huge deal out of checking for traps and preparing positions and coming up with a plan for whatever certain evil lurked inside, and I didn't want to disappoint.

Except a Mummy is a CR 3, and my 6-person 5th level party would have crushed it before it even got out of the crypt in an anti-climatic way.

So I grabbed the nearest CR 7 creature (a Giant Ape I think), switched the Mummy's HP and AC and Attack Bonus and DC to match the CR 7 creature (actually I think it had no DC so I used a CR 6 creature for that), bumped the number of dice of damage it did with each hit up by one die each, and gave it a pseudo-legendary power of getting basically two turns per round (so I just had it go on two different initiative counts - which surprised my players in a good way).

That worked perfectly. Party still beat it, but at least it lasted several rounds and made them nervous with that gaze and those disease rolls, and the party took enough damage to feel like it was a real fight.

I am firmly of the opinion that DMing is more of an art than a science, and you just can't sweat the small stuff. Don't be a slave to the rules. It doesn't have to be perfect, you can vary from what the rules say, and your job is just to make stuff that is fun to play with, and not to be a computer program that must fit within the boxes.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I wish there were cave fishers in it.

As far as monster creation rules, they aren't really needed as it's super easy to come up with your own. People have been doing it since the first playtest. Heck, it surely hasn't stopped me

 

[Li Shenron]

It's great, but it's also missing a physical description of the monsters! A pretty big omission. At least, this is true for some, e.g. the Troll. While there's always (or nearly always) a picture of each monster, that's only one artist's interpretation, and for many monsters one individual may look very different from another. I could have done with a short description of what the monster actually looks like (in fact, personally I'd rather have that than fluff about where they think it should fit into your game-world).

I have only seen the previews, and to me the overall written material per monster seemed a bit too small. The stat block is smaller, and that's a good thing IMO, but that could have opened room for more info about the monster's story, place in the world, in-combat and out-of-combat tactics, environment etc. Not that this info is missing, just that it feels like it could have been richer, with a more judicious use of page space. Honestly, I like the artwork and I believe great art is essential in a RPG book, but the book would have been more valuable to me with smaller pictures and less blank spaces traded for more "fluff" (and occasionally some more "crunch" for some monsters, since I'm hearing we get many without any special feature at all).

BTW, are there really any monsters who don't get a picture? That's quite disappointing... Which are they?

 

[Thalionalfirin]

It's missing Were-Penguins.

WHAT?!!! No Were-Penguins?!!! This is an outrage!!!

/ragequit

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Just learned this from the front page.

"WotC's Jeremy Crawford says "The CR index is in the DMG (and an upcoming PDF) with the other encounter-building tools. Also monsters by environment!" "

 

[ExploderWizard]

Just learned this from the front page.

"WotC's Jeremy Crawford says "The CR index is in the DMG (and an upcoming PDF) with the other encounter-building tools. Also monsters by environment!" "

Awesome!!

 

[Grainger]

BTW, are there really any monsters who don't get a picture? That's quite disappointing... Which are they?

I haven't got the book in front of me, but if there are any image-less monsters, it must only be one or two. Hey, I'm glad to get even 10% of monsters with pictures... I'm a BECMI veteran, and that iteration of the game included only a few monster illustrations!

 

[SilverfireSage]

Just learned this from the front page.

"WotC's Jeremy Crawford says "The CR index is in the DMG (and an upcoming PDF) with the other encounter-building tools. Also monsters by environment!" "

Makes sense to me. Seems like they're really making the DMs guide just that, a DMs guide. So you can make adventures and encounters with just guide!

 

[Li Shenron]

I haven't got the book in front of me, but if there are any image-less monsters, it must only be one or two. Hey, I'm glad to get even 10% of monsters with pictures... I'm a BECMI veteran, and that iteration of the game included only a few monster illustrations!

It's just that ~10% or ~80% or even ~90% would sound like a design choice, while "all except 2" sounds like a mistake. Which sounds very strange to me... unless those missing pictures are for "submonsters", for instance I don't think anyone is expecting different pictures for each dragon age category of course.