D&D (2024) Why No Monster Creation Rules in D&D 2024?

[MonsterEnvy]

I would have liked to have them, but I don’t need them.

 

[Remathilis]

You know who's supposed to have some knowledge of game design? The game designers at WotC. You'd think they have the know-how you put together some rules in the books for their game, especially after 10 years of iteration.

C'mon Micah, you know game design isn't a formula you plug numbers in and get results. 10 years of Unearthed Arcana should tell you the whole process is art more than science and FAR more complicated than 20 pages in the DMG can teach. One need only look at how much chaff exists amongst the wheat of fan designed stuff on the DMs Guild to see that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

C'mon Micah, you know game design isn't a formula you plug numbers in and get results. 10 years of Unearthed Arcana should tell you the whole process is art more than science and FAR more complicated than 20 pages in the DMG can teach. One need only look at how much chaff exists amongst the wheat of fan designed stuff on the DMs Guild to see that.

That's no excuse to give up on providing anything alltogether.

 

[Remathilis]

The argument that it's not a problem because there are other rules that weren't included isn't compelling in the slightest.

I think monster creation is as least as complicated and hard to balance as species or feat design. The DMG rules created a false sense of procedure to a process that was often complicated and prone to failure. It's the illusion of process that ended up basically being "write down numbers and compare to the MM"

 

[Azzy]

I think what gets missed in all this back and forth is that it's not that some of us want monster creation rules per se, but a tool for deriving a monster's CR so that that homebrewed monsters are consistent with the CRs in the MM. It's not really a big ask.

 

[grimmgoose]

WOTC doesn’t make the game for DMs. DM tools are an afterthought (if it gets thought of, at all).

 

[Imaro]

My suspicion is the dnd beyond numbers showed them that the number of people who both homebrewed and actually used the monster creation rules RAW was miniscule enough that for them it would have been a waste of effort and space to include them.

 

[GMMichael]

Because five is math was not built on a very stable easily managed math model, It would take 15 to 20 pages including artwork in order to fit in a monster creation system of the quality that the D&D fan base would desire.

Grayhawk, Bastions, and Planar stuff ate that additional page count.

And too bad - planar stuff is a complete waste of time.

With you pivoting away from what you said before I'll take as your point being indefensible even by you.

So I stay with my statement -- it has been demonstrated in similar games that it is clearly possible to give strong guidance in order to help GMs who want to create their own monsters have guidelines towards fitting in the math.

The idea that you can only reskin is false.

I'm not sure what you're reading or whose points you're contesting, but I never said that you can only reskin, nor that it's impossible to give strong monster creation guidance.

I suspect you're worried about the "art not science" comment, and I'm not sure we're thinking of the same "science" if you think that creating monsters falls into that category.

 

[Hussar]

My suspicion is the dnd beyond numbers showed them that the number of people who both homebrewed and actually used the monster creation rules RAW was miniscule enough that for them it would have been a waste of effort and space to include them.

This. Right here. It keeps getting repeated and ignored.

The reason there are no monster creation rules in the 2024 DMG is because they were not being used in the first place. Yes, yes, I know YOU used them. I know that YOUR monsters were all bespoke works of art that epitomized the unique nature of every single individual.

But, the most likely truth is that most of us (and I'm certainly including myself in here) didn't use the rules. You either ran the monster as is from the book, or maybe tweaked a bit here or there, or you picked up one of the bajillion monster books out there and then used that.

I am honestly baffled why this is even really a question. Why did they pull 20 pages of rules from the DMG? Because not enough people used them. Why did they add 40 pages of planar stuff? Because people are using that material. It's not rocket science.

 

[Echohawk]

That's no excuse to give up on providing anything alltogether.

It is true that that outcome (them giving up) doesn't give the result you or I would like to see. I would love some working monster creation guidelines, and while we're at it, also spell, magic item, feat and class creation guidelines. I would love to see these, even though I'm not likely to use them much or ever. I'm simply curious about seeing under the hood.

However, as excuses go, the one we seem to be hypothesizing here doesn't really seem like a bad one: "Our market research indicates that very few people ever used the thing, and our efforts to come up with a new thing that will be better received than the old thing aren't giving us good results" seems like a pretty good excuse to give up on a thing. Or at least suggests making that thing a lower priority, perhaps to be revisited later.