D&D 5E Your campaign Monsterdex

[Puddles]

As a player, do you think you have fought every monster in the Monster Manual? Or as a DM, do you think you have you used every monster in the Monster Manual? If not, what sort of percentage do you think you have used/fought? And do you keep any sort of log?

These are questions that interest me.

If you’re familiar with Pokémon, you’ll probably know about the Pokédex. As you play the game you keep a log of all the monsters you have seen and captured and one of the goals of the game is to “complete” it, (for example, in the original game there are 150 monsters to capture).

I’m two sessions into DM’ing a new D&D campaign, and one of my goals is for my players to encounter as many different creatures from the Monster Manual as possible. As they are all new to the game I especially want them to encounter the classic D&D monsters (so Dragons, Beholders, Gelatinous Cubes, Mind flayers, Owlbears etc etc).

So I thought it would be fun to keep a log on here of the monsters they encounter from session to session. If other players/DMs get involved too, I think it will be fun to compare stats and see which monsters are particularly popular. I’ll be sticking to the Monster Manual, but you don’t have to. I did a quick count of the number of monsters in it and came to 396. (That’s including the beasts at the back but not the NPCs. And counting the 4 ages of each dragon type together.)

So with that number, we can start tracking our monsterdexs. Even if you’re midway through a campaign, you can still take part, either start counting from your next session or list out all the monsters you or your players have encountered so far, (that you can remember, at least). Feel free to comment and discuss too

Here’s my current log:

MONSTERDEX
Sessions: 2
Party Level: 2
Monsters Encountered

1. Goblin (5 defeated)
2. Wolf (1 defeated)
3. Ice Mephit (2 defeated)
4. Yeti (1 defeated)

4/396 (1.01% complete).

There’s a long way to go! Next session I have some Animated Armour and some Will’o’wisps planned.

Update 1

Here it is after 5 sessions:

MONSTERDEX
Sessions: 5
Party Level: 3
Monsters Encountered

1. Goblin (5 encountered, 5 defeated)
2. Wolf (3 encountered, 1 defeated)
3. Ice Mephit (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
4. Yeti (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
5. Ancient Red Dragon (1 encountered)
6. Gnolls (100 encountered, 4 defeated)
7. Abyssal Dwarves (3 encountered, 3 defeated)

7/396 (1.76% complete).

Update 2

Here it is after 10 sessions:

MONSTERDEX
Sessions: 10
Party Level: 3
Monsters Encountered

1. Goblin (5 encountered, 5 defeated)
2. Wolf (3 encountered, 1 defeated)
3. Ice Mephit (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
4. Yeti (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
5. Ancient Red Dragon (1 encountered)
6. Gnolls (100 encountered, 4 defeated)
7. Abyssal Dwarves (Duergar) (3 encountered, 3 defeated)
8. Hyenas (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
9. Animated Armor (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
10. Imps (5 encountered, 5 defeated)
11. Bearded Devil (1 encountered, 1 defeated)

11/396 (2.77% complete).

Update 3

Here it is after 20 sessions:

MONSTERDEX
Sessions: 20
Party Level: 4
Monsters Encountered & Defeated

1. Goblin (9 encountered, 9 defeated)
2. Wolf (5 encountered, 2 defeated)
3. Ice Mephit (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
4. Yeti (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
5. Ancient Red Dragon (1 encountered)
6. Gnolls (100 encountered, 4 defeated)
7. Abyssal Dwarves (Duergar) (3 encountered, 3 defeated)
8. Hyenas (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
9. Animated Armor (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
10. Imps (5 encountered, 5 defeated)
11. Bearded Devil (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
12. Goblin Boss (1 encountered)
13. Owlbear (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
14. Monkey's Paw (Crawling Claw) (1 encountered)
15. Animated Swords (4 encountered, 4 defeated)
16. Mimic (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
17. Homunculus (1 encountered)
18. Black Pudding (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
19. Roc (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
20. Zombie (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
21. Basilisk (1 encountered, 1 defeated)

21/396 (5.30% complete).

Update 4

Here it is after 22 sessions:

MONSTERDEX
Sessions: 22
Party Level: 4
Monsters Encountered & Defeated

1. Goblin (9 encountered, 9 defeated)
2. Wolf (5 encountered, 2 defeated)
3. Ice Mephit (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
4. Yeti (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
5. Ancient Red Dragon (1 encountered)
6. Gnolls (100 encountered, 4 defeated)
7. Abyssal Dwarves (Duergar) (3 encountered, 3 defeated)
8. Hyenas (2 encountered, 2 defeated)
9. Animated Armor (4 encountered, 4 defeated)
10. Imps (5 encountered, 5 defeated)
11. Bearded Devil (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
12. Goblin Boss (1 encountered)
13. Owlbear (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
14. Monkey's Paw (Crawling Claw) (1 encountered)
15. Animated Swords (4 encountered, 4 defeated)
16. Mimic (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
17. Homunculus (2 encountered, 1 defeated)
18. Black Pudding (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
19. Roc (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
20. Zombie (3 encountered, 3 defeated)
21. Basilisk (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
22. Flesh Golem (1 encountered, 1 defeated)
23. Helmed Horror (1 encountered)
24. Mage (1 encountered)

24/396 (6.06% complete).

 

[Hriston]

My current game is set in a large city surrounded by a swamp. Encounters have taken place in the city, the surrounding bog, and in a dungeon under the city. The PCs are still first level, and it's a PbP game, so the concept of sessions isn't applicable. Here's the list of encounters so far and their outcomes. I'll try to update as more get added.

1. Drunken revelers (evaded)
2. City watch (evaded)
3. 2 Brown bears (evaded)
4. 6 Giant toads (defeated)
5. Giant lizard (defeated)
6. Tribal warrior (evaded)
7. Tribal chief (evaded)
8. Catoblepas (evaded)
9. Zombie (defeated)
10. 12 Halflings (befriended)
11. 3 Piercers (defeated)
12. Ghost (evaded)

 

[aco175]

I remember when I was younger keeping a list of all my kills, but that was in middle school. Today, I do not really keep track, but have a Word doc. that I type all the monsters into that I have used or made for the adventures I run. Not sure how many are official from homemade, but there is around 90 pages of 2 columns.

 

[the Jester]

I've probably used most but not all of the PH monsters in my 5e game, but it would take a lot of going back through my notes to verify that. I don't recall using pit fiends, nothics, or giant owls, for instance, but I may have- there have been a lot of games since 5e rolled out!

 

[Voadam]

I had a similar thought a while ago so I thought back over my DMing career and the recurring character I have played in various games since the 80s and started to track the variety of monsters. 3.5 srd/MM is still the most for me, but that is only 86 entries from there. For the 5e MM it has been a modest 23 entries I have used.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

It's one of those things I started and haven't gotten back to. Because I have session records in a database, it shouldn't be terribly hard to make sure I get the majority of them, even from years ago. I do want the party to run into most classic monsters at some point. I use random encounters and random treasure outside of adventures.

A funny thing that has happened is that party has randomly encountered criosphinxes twice recently, even though they are really rare on my random encounters tables. (Using the stats from the free Plane Shift: Amonkhet pdf, which work as reasonable 5e updates to the classic monster.) I like those fun random things.

 

[Puddles]

It's one of those things I started and haven't gotten back to. Because I have session records in a database, it shouldn't be terribly hard to make sure I get the majority of them, even from years ago. I do want the party to run into most classic monsters at some point. I use random encounters and random treasure outside of adventures.

A funny thing that has happened is that party has randomly encountered criosphinxes twice recently, even though they are really rare on my random encounters tables. (Using the stats from the free Plane Shift: Amonkhet pdf, which work as reasonable 5e updates to the classic monster.) I like those fun random things.

Random encounter tables seem like a great way to get players to encounter many of the monsters in the MM, especially the benign wild creatures like Unicorns that I would struggle to put in an encounter otherwise!

Out of interest, do you let the players see the random encounter tables you use? So far I haven’t shown my players the table (because there is no table ), but once they get to a higher level and are able to take on a bigger variety of creatures I have thought about make the random encounter table public to them to see if it adds to the immersion of the world or not.

 

[Puddles]

My current game is set in a large city surrounded by a swamp. Encounters have taken place in the city, the surrounding bog, and in a dungeon under the city. The PCs are still first level, and it's a PbP game, so the concept of sessions isn't applicable. Here's the list of encounters so far and their outcomes. I'll try to update as more get added.

1. Drunken revelers (evaded)
2. City watch (evaded)
3. 2 Brown bears (evaded)
4. 6 Giant toads (defeated)
5. Giant lizard (defeated)
6. Tribal warrior (evaded)
7. Tribal chief (evaded)
8. Zombie (defeated)
9. 12 Halflings (befriended)
10. 3 Piercers (ongoing)

A very interesting and varied list indeed! I’m going to add the numbers into mine, as that’s another nice stat to record

Your players seem to do a lot of evading too. Are you playing quite a stealthy game, or have you set expectations that they may need to avoid a lot of fights?

 

[Hriston]

A very interesting and varied list indeed! I’m going to add the numbers into mine, as that’s another nice stat to record

Your players seem to do a lot of evading too. Are you playing quite a stealthy game, or have you set expectations that they may need to avoid a lot of fights?

It's mostly that they decide it's something they don't want to deal with. That reminds me. I forgot about the catoblepas. I'll update my post.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Sessions: 46 (they are "double-sessions" which last about 10 hours on average, so think more about 90 "normal" 4-6 hours sessions...)
Encounters: over 300

Well, I am not bothering with subspecies because there are just too much things, but here's everything crossed out our party has either fought and/or encountered peacefully:

Plus tons of stuff in MToF and VGtM.