Hello, everyone! I wanted to take a bit today and discuss the newest Monster Manual, the changes I think are a positive development, and where the book falls short. For clarity’s sake, when I refer to this Monster Manual, I call it the 2024 Monster Manual in spite of its February release date; it completes the trio of core rulebooks celebrating Dungeons & Dragons’s 50th anniversary. Spreading the release of the three books over 6 months for a prolonged marketing cycle is one of those frustrating Wizards of the Coast quirks that we simply endure as consumers.

A Monster Manual is the most demanding of the three core rulebooks. One player class or subclass can last an entire campaign, while the Game Master must cycle through several monsters in that time. I don’t intend to comb through each statblock to discuss its minutia – there are a lot of great blogs discussing these changes already, and I don’t have enough to contribute to the conversation at this time. Instead, I want to take a structural approach and discuss how this new book would serve you as another piece of the GM’s toolkit.

Organization

Unlike the 5th Edition version of the book, this book’s monsters are arranged alphabetically, by their full name. Iron golems, for instance, are quite the distance from their stone counterparts. When it comes to organization, you simply can’t please everyone. For aesthetic purposes, I would’ve kept these monsters in their respective groups (“See Giant, Hill”) as the 5E version did. Common aspects of monsters could be illustrated before further differentiation. Strangely, a few monsters are organized by group instead, like the dense Fungi entry.

Monster Entries

New monster entries are arranged in a more modular way than before, which I can only imagine streamlined the task of creating a Monster Manual for the designers involved. Entries contain a tagline, habitat, associated treasure, narrative description, a quick table of relevant traits, special lairs, and their monsters’ respective stat blocks.

The taglines, also present in player options, leave a weird taste in my mouth as a reader. They feel vague and almost unrelated to their associated monster. For instance, the Flumph gets the cryptic tagline, “Strange Ally from a Strange Place,” which tells me nothing about what a Flumph is, and seems to be written from a player perspective rather than the GM who’s presumably reading the book.

Having habitat and associated treasure handy on the monster’s entry is a huge boon – One of my core tenets in game design is to reduce friction wherever possible, and having this information gathered feels helpful. Entries are arranged to be useful, and this shows.

Statblock Format

I see serious friction with the Monster Manual in its format for statblocks. Monsters’ ability scores are shown in a 3-column block – Column 1, the “raw” ability score, Column 2 the Modifier (the relevant aspect under most circumstances), and then finally that ability’s Save, which will often be the same as the Modifier. Tales of the Valiant has done away with giving monsters “raw” ability scores, and I think this is the right call – the scores are vestigial from D&D’s early days, and don’t serve much purpose in modern RPGs.

I’d prefer to see a monster’s Challenge Rating more prominently displayed in a statblock. Right now, it’s situated at the very bottom of what the book calls “Other details” – I think that it needs to instead be front and center for a GM to assess whether a monster is suitable for use. At the very least, since a monster’s Proficiency Bonus is derived from that Challenge Rating, the two should be placed closer to the ability scores and (if a monster has them) skill bonuses.

Appendectomies and Missed Potential

Throughout the Monster Manual, generic non-player characters get stats, like Toughs, Warriors, Mages, and Nobles. These entries are a great jumping-off point to introduce a nonplayer character with reasonable stats, but they are scattered throughout the book when they would have been more useful as an appendix like the 2014 version, or the section of real-world animals included in this book. Because entries are spread across the Monster Manual’s main body, the 2024 version lacks guidance to customize these nonplayer characters like 2014’s.

2024’s Monster Manual also shies away from templates and customization options from older incarnations of the game. Half-dragons have been simplified to a single creature, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide is the only resource for customizing monsters. 5.24 takes a “black box” approach to creating monsters – the Dungeon Master’s Guide only offers advice to adjust a monster on a cosmetic level, and neither book provides tools to create monsters for yourself. I worry that this reflects an attitude shift away from fostering creativity within the game system in favor of selling later supplemental books.

Conclusions

Will the 2024 Monster Manual be the crown jewel of your TTRPG library? I doubt it. It offers stat blocks generally in line with what would be expected of the player’s options introduced in 2024, nice illustrations, and has some interesting lore tidbits, but it suffers from consistency issues and quietly downplays the customization options that I feel should be present in a TTRPG bestiary. If you’re a new to the hobby, I think this is an appropriate starting book, but for veteran players and Game Masters, I would recommend older books in your library.