D&D's revised Monster Manual is tackling one of the game's biggest hangups—and adding a new menu of BBEGs: 'We wanted the Tarrasque to have some fighting buddies'
D&D is about to finish its big 2024 overhaul—and while I've got my opinions on the whole exercise, I've not been a complete curmudgeon about it. I even happen to think the Dungeon Master's Guide is downright good, if a little surface-level, but hey—it's an introductory document, we can leave the specific advice for content creators and harrowing in-session arguments.
The 2024 Monster Manual, which'll arrive February 18, 2025 (yes, it is a little confusing) brings 85 new monsters to the table when compared to its 2014 counterpart. What's more, the whole catalogue of mooks has been revised, as explained in a recent interview with Todd Kenreck hosted on D&D's YouTube channel.
Design lead Jeremy Crawford and senior designer F. Wesley Schneider went over the team's goals for this improved tome, and it's all honestly sounding quite good. The proof will be in the black pudding (that's a D&D monster, I don't just have a hankering for blood sausage), but I'm liking what I'm hearing.
Namely, Wizards is tackling one of 5e's oldest hang-ups—CR is a goddamn wonky system for balancing combat encounters at best. For the uninitiated, CR—or «Challenge Rating»—is a number that says 'four adventurers of this level should have a moderately difficult time fighting this thing'. For example, you should be able to throw a CR six monster at a group of four adventurers, who are each level six.
Problem being, D&D 5e is such an oddly balanced system that it was always difficult to work with for a number of reasons—action economy, magic items, power bloat with new subclasses, you can pick your poison. It's an issue that only gets more problematic the more complex, and powerful, the monster becomes. Luckily, with the game's biggest bads, the team has changed its design philosophy.
As Crawford explains: «A decade ago, the way we calculated CR was focused on 'if the DM chooses the most powerful option every round, here is the monster's CR'. Many of us as DMs found that sometimes we don't want to
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