D&D’s 2025 Monster Manual Finally Makes One Of 2024's Best Changes Useful
' 2025 is out now in early access, and it's already made good on one of the best changes introduced in 2024. The has always served the same purpose: it's a physical rogues' gallery, giving a DM all the tools they need to design an enemy encounter from the bottom up. With statblocks and lore details for hundreds of monsters, as well as tips and tricks for organizing and running both appropriately challenging and lore-friendly battles, the is an invaluable resource for any campaign.
The 2025 edition of the brings a few changes to the table. These include bigger, more sweeping new ideas, like substituting several monsters for updated replacements, or reorganizing certain monsters into different groups. But it also changes a lot of the monsters' individual statblocks, and, taken together, these smaller changes make a massive difference when it comes to how encounters are run.
The Bloodied mechanic has made its return in the 2025 , and it actually has an effect on gameplay now. Bloodied was introduced in the Fourth Edition as a lore-friendly way for the DM to say that an enemy had reached 50% of their maximum HP. It referred to the enemy having a visibly battered appearance, with multiple injuries that affect their movement. Declaring an enemy "" was established as an alternative to flat-out stating how many hit points a monster has left, which can potentially break immersion and encourage metagaming.
The new sourcebooks and the focus of the new Dungeons & Dragons material seems to indicate that in 2025, the 5e is finally correcting a problem.
The Bloodied status was removed from the 2014 version of the 5e sourcebooks, at least in name. The does encourage the DM to give visual descriptions of how hurt an enemy looks instead of simply reciting their remaining HP; it just doesn't use Bloodied by name. However, Bloodied makes an official return in the 2024 , and it's expanded on even further in the new .
In the 2025, some enemies have special effects that only activate when
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