D&D 6th edition (or One D&D) (or 5.5?) is a go! You can get the first playtest packet here.

Although the packet ranges over races and feats and more, while reading the packet, I laser focused on one thing: the new grappling rules. Partly because I’m not that interested in dnd races and partly because, as a frequent DM and monster designer, grappling is one of the rulesets that I’ll actually need to know. Plus grappling is one of the areas in the playtest packet with lots of sneaky changes from 5e.

For old-school players, grappling is a bit of a joke, synonymous with “needless complexity.” If a 1st edition or 3rd edition fighter player announces he is grappling a monster, everyone at the table groans. Every D&D edition reinvents grappling, trying to fix the broken or inadequate design of the last. 6e continues that trend.

Designing grapple rules is tough! For one thing, most people have a good visceral idea of how unarmed combat works, so you need to stay somewhat true to reality. For another thing, grappling is something you can do any time you want – in 4e parlance, it’s an at-will power. You can’t declare that people can grapple only x times per long rest. That means it needs to be perfectly balanced with melee attacks. You can’t make it weak or it will never get used (or only get used as part of an annoying specialized character build using special feats). You can’t make it too strong or all the melee classes will use it every turn, which changes D&D combat in a bonkers way.

In my opinion, grapple is a bit on the weak side in 5e, without the addition of special character abilities to back it up. In 6e, have they hit the mark? I’m not sure without more playtesting, but I’m leaning towards “this looks pretty fun.”

The 5e Rules

In 5e, you initiate a grapple by making a Str (Athlethics) check contested by the target’s Str (Athletics) or Dex (Acrobatics) check. Then, to escape, a creature must use its action to repeat this contest. That means that, especially at high levels where proficiency bonuses get high, a grappler who is trained in Athletics is at a huge advantage against someone who is untrained. Most monster are never going to escape from a creature with proficiency (or god forbid expertise) in athletics. They’d be dumb to even try, since it uses up their action to do so. HOWEVER, being grappled doesn’t really do much on its own, except stop a creature from moving away from their grappler.

The 6e Rules

In 6e, everything about grappling has changed! It’s now an attack roll just like any other: an unarmed melee attack, with proficiency bonus, against a monster’s AC. On a hit, the monster is grappled.

The effect of grappling has changed too. It used to just restrict movement. Now a grappled creature makes all attacks with disadvantage, EXCEPT those against their grappler. Grappling now has a huge effect compared to 5e, where being grappled was really not a big deal. It’s very reminiscent of the 4th Edition fighter’s Mark ability, which incentivized monsters to attack the fighter.

At first blush, this seems too powerful. A fighter or monk with a super high Armor Class can grapple a creature and then tank very effectively, putting a serious debuff on the enemy while using their high AC to avoid the monster’s attacks. Imagine locking down a legendary monster or other boss this way! Since you can grapple a creature one size larger, a Medium fighter can grapple some pretty big adversaries.

However, this big boost to grapple comes with a big nerf. Whereas in 5e you had to use up your action to try to escape, in 6e it’s now something that you can do automatically at the end of your turn, after taking your normal actions. And it’s a Str or Dex saving throw instead of an opposed check. That’s a big advantage to the grappled creature. They don’t need to waste their turn to escape a grapple, AND more creatures (and characters?) have a Str or Dex saving throw proficiency than are trained in Athletics or Acrobatics. AND, since it’s a saving throw, legendary creatures can succeed automatically using legendary resistance (assuming legendary resistance is unchanged in 6e.)

Taken all in all, it’s an interesting change. Grapple is faster and easier to use (just an attack roll instead of a fairly complicated opposed roll that’s unlike the rest of D&D’s combat rules). Its bite is worse: at the least, it probably means a turn of attacks with disadvantage. And it’s harder to lock someone into a permanent grapple, so it seems less abusable.

Of course, the devil is in the details. Will other abilities built on top of it – like monk abilities – make it too powerful? We’ll see.

Of interest to fans of grappling: the playtest packet also includes the Tavern Brawler feat, which we should check for grappling synergy. Nope, nothing there that breaks grappling wide open. Tavern Brawler has two features about punching, one about shoving, and one about using furniture as weapons. We’ll have to wait to see if there’s an updated Grappler feat.

When should I grapple?

Assuming I’m a tanky character with high HP and/or AC, when should I grapple? Always? Sometimes? Never?

It seems to depend on your level and number of opponents. At level one, you’re giving up your only attack, so the reward (shutting down one enemy’s movement and nerfing their attacks for at least one turn) better be worth it. You only want to do this if you’re fighting a single opponent, or a boss monster that makes up most of the combat’s threat. You’re not going to want to give up your turn to grapple one of three identical goblins.

At high level, grappling looks more and more attractive. If you’re a fighter or monk with three or more per turn, you’re only giving up 1/3 or less of your damage output in exchange for shutting down an enemy. (And grappling is specifically written as part of the Unarmed Strike rules, making me think you’ll be able to do it as part of a Flurry of Blows.) As long as you can find a boss foe that’s small enough to grapple, it becomes a better and better deal. It might even be worth doing against a non-boss foe: it’s probably worth a single one of your attacks to basically remove an enemy from the fight, especially if you have driven your AC to astronomical heights (pretty easy at high level). Added to that, your grapple might become more and more effective as you gain levels. Your proficiency bonus keeps climbing as you gain levels, and monsters that aren’t proficient in Dex or Str saves are going to have a difficult time escaping you.

So that’s a worry. Grapple looks fun and fairly balanced at low level, but will it become a no-brainer at high level?

One more question: Can multiple creatures grapple you at once? I have this question in 5e too actually, but it becomes more important in 6e where grappling has more of a mechanical effect.

A fighter faces a horde of goblins. They try to pin him down with weight of numbers, using multiple grapples. Once a goblin has grappled the fighter, can a second goblin do so? If so, against whom does the fighter have disadvantage: everyone? Everyone but the two grappling goblins?

Not sure of the answers to these questions, but I’m excited for a playtest.

EDIT: For completeness (in case you thought this post wasn’t a complete enough discussion of like five sentences in a playtest packet), someone pointed out that, since grappling (and pushing) are attack rolls, they can be used for opportunity attacks. This is a huge upgrade for tanks and defenders who want to defend their friends, specifically for multiattackers like fighters, rangers, and barbarians. (It’s an upgrade for monks too, though not as big because they could already use Stunning Strike on an opportunity attack.)

For high-level multiattackers who divide their damage among several attacks, getting a single extra hit from opportunity attack really doesn’t change the battle equation much. HOWEVER, stopping a creature’s movement does! It’s really what you want out of an opportunity attack. And now you have two options to stop an escaping monster’s movement (or escaping player if you’re a sadistic DM).

-You can grapple the foe, completely shutting down their movement as well as giving them disadvantage on attacks. However, since this attack probably takes place during the target’s turn, and they make a save vs grapple at the end of their turn, the grapple may only last for a fraction of a turn.

-You can knock them prone. They can then stand up, but it uses up half their movement so they won’t be able to get far. And if they’ve already used up half their movement, then they can’t get up from prone until their next turn, which means that everyone makes attacks on them with advantage and they make attacks with disadvantage for one full round – which is pretty much game over for nearly any monster. If a monster has used up half of its movement already, knocking a creature prone is an incredibly powerful play.

As a side note, I’m on board with the grapple on an attack roll, but I don’t love the rule that you can knock down a monster with just an attack roll. In the 5e Monster Manual, an ogre has an ac 11. An ettin has an ac 12. Both are incredibly easy to hit, which means they’re now incredibly easy to topple over, even though they’re big strong meaty enemies. In the 6e MM, maybe both monsters will have higher AC to account for the knockdown rule, but that means that this rule is distorting monster stats to prevent this kind of exploit. I’m fine with grappling as an attack roll, since you can use a Str save to escape a grapple; but the current push rule doesn’t make any use of the defender’s strength, so the mechanics don’t match the story.

I’ve been talking a bit about my book Dungeon Delver’s Guide which is being published by EN Publishing. Well, it’s done and the kickstarter is launching later this month!

Get notified on launch!

(I’m crossposting this post about my Dungeon Delver’s Guide from enworld, because why not have all my D&D theorycrafting writing together on my D&D blog? The original article is here.)

You’ve baited your story hooks. You’ve got your dungeon map. Now what do you put in all those rooms?

Creating an adventure’s worth of interesting features at once can be challenging. You may encounter writer’s block, or find yourself filling each area with repetitive challenges. (A dungeon where every room contains hostile monsters is one of the most common ruts to get stuck in!) In these cases, it can be helpful to have a checklist to make sure you have varied adventure elements: something for the puzzle solver, something for the story lover, something for the combat fan, and so on.

In Dungeon Delver’s Guide, we introduce a new tool for adventure design: the NODES system. Although we apply it to dungeons in this book, it’s applicable for any type of adventure design. Your scenario comes alive when it’s filled with Novelties, Obstacles, Discoveries, Escalations, and Set-pieces.

Novelties

Novelty is the driving force of tabletop RPGs. Every dungeon should offer something that the players haven’t seen before in the campaign, or a twist on a familiar idea. (Don’t worry: your dungeon idea doesn’t have to be totally original—just new to your game table.)

One of the best ways to introduce novelty into your game is with a fantastic vista.

I want to share a post I wrote for enworld: “It’s a Trap”, an adapted excerpt from Dungeon Delver’s Guide, which I’m writing for EN Publishing. It’s a continuation of my thoughts I’ve posted on my blog here.

Check out “It’s a Trap” here, or, if you don’t feel like clicking, just read it below.

It’s a Trap!

In EN Publishing’s upcoming Dungeon Delver’s Guide, we’re giving you every tool you need to build story-driven, atmospheric dungeons. And that means we have got to get traps right. Today I want to share the book’s trap-building philosophy, along with a few of the more than a hundred traps you’ll get when you Kickstart the book later this year.

Traps are a defining characteristic of dungeons. But too often, they feel like an arbitrary tax on the characters’ hit points. Done poorly, traps cause play to bog down as paranoid players poke and prod every door and passageway for unseen dangers. For these reasons, GMs and Narrators are often advised to use traps sparingly, or even steer clear of them entirely.

Throw that advice out the window!

Making choices and exploring the unknown are what make a dungeon fun. Telling players that their passive Perception has caused them to trigger, or avoid, a trap offers them neither choice nor the opportunity to explore. Traps are most fun after they’re discovered but before they’ve been neutralized. Should the rogue disarm the device? Should the wizard cast a spell? What does that inviting-looking lever do? With uncertain but probably dire outcomes on the line, every success and failure feels earned.

Just as combat tests both a character’s abilities and their player’s tactical skill, good traps allow for multiple solutions. A character invested in high Perception and Investigation, trap-specific abilities, and a set of thieves’ tools should be able to disarm any trap they encounter. At the same time, a clever player should be able to bypass the same trap simply by paying attention to their surroundings and playing a hunch.

Making a Dungeon Delver’s Guide-style trap is pretty simple to do. You can make traps fair and fun if you remember to telegraph every trap.

Telegraphing Traps

Players can’t see through their characters’ eyes or hear through their ears. As the Narrator, it falls on you to supply them with the information they need to make choices for their characters.

Besides the sensory information your descriptions provide, the level of detail you offer gives your players valuable information. The more details you lavish on a given location, the more important that location seems. This can work against you, such as when the players read too much into an offhand detail and as a result waste time investigating a random piece of furniture. But you can make it work to your advantage, as well. An area containing a trap or other hidden feature should be described with specificity, so that your players know it’s intended as a location they should explore, and not just an empty space that needs to be traversed on their way from A to B.

If possible, a location’s details should relate to the trap that it conceals. You don’t need to give so much information that you completely reveal the trap, but you should offer enough that the players can make the connection after the fact. If a trap has claimed the lives of previous explorers, there may be bones or other remains nearby—possibly charred if the trap creates a fiery explosion. If the dungeon’s denizens know how to avoid a trap, or need to visit it frequently to reset it, they may leave footprints. A trail of footprints that ends abruptly tells another story entirely! A good clue instills caution and increases tension, but doesn’t necessarily tell the players how to proceed. Instead, it asks a question: what do you do next?

What happens if you don’t telegraph danger in any way? Players learn that every location, no matter how seemingly insignificant, might harbor another such trap. Thus, their only sensible course of action is to examine every door, room feature, and length of hallway. The game can become a slow-paced grind.

Solving a Trap

Once a trap has been discovered, the real fun begins. How can the adventurers bypass the trap without triggering it?

Nearly every trap can be disabled with an appropriate ability check or two: characters with thieves’ tools proficiency, high Perception scores, and trap-sensing class features will get their chances to shine. Many traps can also be bypassed or disabled without a check. For example, pressing a hidden button might automatically disable a deadly device. Similarly, a character might use mage hand or a 10-foot pole to trigger a trap from a distance, staying clear of the trap’s range.

Our traps’ descriptions specify actions and spells that let a creature automatically avoid a trap’s dangers. Players might also think of other ways to bypass a trap. Based on how appropriate the solution is, you can decide that it doesn’t work, requires a check, or automatically succeeds. For instance, the description for a hidden pit trap lists avoiding or bridging the pit among its possible solutions. Casting fly and floating over the trap isn’t mentioned, but such a solution should automatically succeed. Walking over the pit on a tightrope, on the other hand, might require an Acrobatics check.

Want to try out some Dungeon Delver’s Guide traps? Here are some examples. These use Level Up’s Exploration Challenge format. To run them, you need to know the following:

Every ability check made while investigating or disarming a trap uses the DCs listed at the top of the trap description. The number before the slash is for solo checks, while the number after the slash is for group checks.

Attempting to disarm a trap can result in a critical success or a critical failure. A roll of 1, or a group check in which everyone fails, is a critical failure, while a roll of 20, or a group check in which everyone succeeds, is a critical success.

The italicized text, the description of the room, is the “telegraph”—the hint that something might not be quite right. You can read this text aloud or paraphrase it.

Reverse Gravity Trap

1st tier (constructed trap)

Challenge 4 (1,100 XP); DC 15/14

The walls are covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. On the ceiling, metal spikes hang down like icicles.

Gravity is reversed in this room. An unsecured creature or object that enters the room triggers a Failure. (Note: If this room contains creatures, they stand on the ceiling.)

Exploration. A Perception check or an examination of the bookshelves reveals that the books are shelved upside down against the tops of their shelves. The ceiling is 30 feet high. The bookshelves look easy to climb.

Books. As an action, a creature can make an Arcana or Investigation check to scan the bookshelves. On a success, the creature notices a spellbook (containing levitate or another 2nd-level spell) on a shelf across the room.

Spell Effect. This is a transmutation effect created by a 7th-level spell. A successful dispel magic disables the trap.

Possible Solutions

A creature can make an Athletics or Acrobatics check to climb along the bookcases. The check is made with advantage if the creature is upside down (i.e. right side up relative to the room’s gravity).

Critical Failure or Failure. The creature or object falls to the ceiling. Creatures that can levitate or fly don’t fall. The room’s ceiling is 30 feet high, so a creature that falls from the floor takes 10 (3d6) bludgeoning damage from the fall. A creature that takes falling damage also takes 10 (3d6) piercing damage from the spikes on the ceiling.

Once on the ceiling, a creature can move around the spikes safely but treats the area as difficult terrain.

Success or Critical Success. The creature moves through the room safely until the end of its turn.

Reverse Gravity Trap Variant: Random Gravity Trap

This room is identical in appearance to the Reverse Gravity Trap except that it has an upside-down door on the wall adjoining the ceiling.

Roll initiative. Each round on initiative count 20, gravity reverses direction. Each unsecured creature and object in the room when gravity changes falls up or down, as appropriate. Creatures take falling damage and spike damage when falling up, and falling damage only when falling down. A creature holding onto the bookshelves when gravity reverses must make a Dexterity saving throw or lose its grip.

Once a creature has noticed the location of the spellbook, the next two successful Arcana or Investigation checks reveal the locations of other valuable books, each containing a spell, information, or a Boon or Discovery.

Sword Guardian Trap

2nd tier (constructed trap)

Challenge 6 (2,300 XP); DC 16/14

A black metal statue stands in the middle of a hallway. The statue depicts a woman with four arms and the lower body of a snake. The statue holds swords in three of her hands; the fourth holds out a basket in your direction.

Pressure plates cover the floor within 5 feet of the side and rear of the statue. Stepping on a pressure plate or jostling the statue triggers a Failure. The pressure plates are disabled while the basket holds at least 10 pounds of weight.

Floor. An Engineering or Investigation check, or an examination of the floor, reveals that the floor next to and behind the statue is composed of pressure plates. The statue can be approached safely from the front.

Statue. Any investigation of the statue reveals that the words “Pay Your Respects” are engraved at the bottom of the basket. A character that makes an Arcana or Religion check recognizes the statue as a marilith, a type of demon. An Investigation check, or an examination of the statue, reveals that the marilith has articulated arms.

The statue is an object with AC 19, 75 hit points, and immunity to cold, lightning, fire, piercing, poison, and psychic damage. Damaging the statue without destroying it outright triggers a Critical Failure.

Possible Solutions

A creature can make a thieves’ tools check to disable one pressure plate or one of the statue’s arms.

A creature can make a Strength check to break one pressure plate or one of the statue’s arms.

Critical Failure. The statue makes three melee attacks, each with a different arm. Each arm attacks with a +7 bonus, has a reach of 10 feet, and deals 9 (2d8) slashing damage on a hit.

Failure. As a Critical Failure, but only one arm attacks.

Success. One pressure plate or one arm is disabled. Disabling three pressure plates or arms triggers a Critical Success.

Critical Success. The trap is disabled.

Sword Guardian Variant: Sword Guardian Riddler

The message at the bottom of the sword guardian’s bowl is a riddle. An appropriate item placed in the bowl disables the trap; other items do not.

“Golden head bearing a crown, golden tail up or down.” The trap is disabled if one or more gold coins is placed in the bowl.

“Born in fire, formed in water, polished silver, end in slaughter.” The trap is disabled if a weapon made of iron or steel is placed in the bowl.

The Unusual Nature trait in Monsters of the Multiverse is a replacement for the old Undead Nature, Celestial Nature, etc, traits in previous monster books: these are all of the traits that allow a creature to not need some combination of food, drink, rest, and air. This trait used to be tucked away at the end of a monster essay; now it’s been moved to the stat block.

Talking with alphastream about the new trait has got me thinking about more problems I have with it. These are all minor quibbles, but minorly quibbling is a proud D&D tradition.

Its placement – in the essay or in the stat block – is not actually an easy call. As a piece of monster information, it’s neither fish nor fowl. It doesn’t really belong as a subhead in the essay because it’s technical rules text, not expository text. And it doesn’t really belong in the stat block because it’s not about combat – at least most of it isn’t. In the heat of combat, you might need to know whether a creature breathes, but you’ll never need to know if they need to eat. It makes a bit more sense to me to put the trait in the essay rather than the stat block, just because a lot of monster entries contain one essay and several stat blocks so you’d avoid repetition. But I can’t really fault WotC much for the placement of this trait as the trait is written now: it’s a proud nail either way.

Here are my two bigger objections to Unusual Nature.

It’s inconsistent. If it’s important enough to put into stat blocks, it should actually be in more stat blocks. Just going through the Monster Manual, does a dao need to breathe, or does it asphyxiate while phasing through the earth? does a modron eat (and if so what)? does a salamander or magmin need to drink even though mephits don’t? does a blight, death knight, fungus, or gibbering mouther need sleep? Demons and devils don’t have any such feature for some reason – do they really need all of these things? The pattern continues in Monsters of the Multiverse. An alhoon is an undead mind flayer lich and doesn’t eat brains: why doesn’t it have Unusual Nature? Elementals don’t need to eat or drink, but phoenix, elder tempest, and air elemental myrmidon do? Not only does a water elemental myrmidon need to breathe air, it doesn’t even have the Amphibious trait – it drowns in water! Same with the leviathan. The retriever, a robot spider construct, needs to eat, drink, sleep, and breathe.

My guess is the lack of these traits is not actually causing anyone problems – no one, except a theorycrafter or a nitpicker like me, has ever been troubled about whether a death knight or gibbering mouther is thirsty or tired. In that case – if their lack causes no problems – maybe we don’t need these traits at all. If a creature doesn’t need air or can breathe water, that seems worthy of going in the stat block. A creature’s need for sleep, food, and drink seems like an interesting aside that can be mentioned in passing in the essay if you need to fill up column inches, or else ignored.

My other problem with Unusual Nature is maybe more subjective: it’s not poetic. “Unusual Nature” is just an unlovely name for a trait. As a label, it is content-free. Every D&D monster has an “unusual nature” of some kind, and so do a lot of animals, especially ones from Australia. Wombats poop cubes. A trait’s name should say what it does, and “unusual nature” doesn’t say anything about what this trait actually does.

I think if I wanted to come up with a catch-all name for the old “undead nature”, “construct nature”, “elemental nature”, “ooze nature”, and so on, I’d use this:

Immortal. The creature doesn’t die of old age. Additionally, it doesn’t need to [any one of sleep, eat, drink, or breathe, depending on the monster]

That’s really what all of the Unusual Nature creatures have in common, and what the trait is grasping for I think. Undead, oozes, constructs, and celestials don’t really age. The fact that they don’t need various forms of mortal sustenance are side-effects of their immortality.

I’d extend this Immortality trait to fiends too. Sure, Graz’zt might like a gobbet of mortal flesh and a nice glass of Chianti, but I don’t know that he needs it to live. I don’t think that bearded devils travel with bedrolls so that they can sleep when they’re away from their beds, and I just bet that Juiblex doesn’t drown. Hell, I might give Immortality to some or all fey creatures too.

Besides, Immortality is a word to conjure with. It says something about the monster’s story in a way that “Unusual Nature” does not. And it could be used as a keyword. Spells and monster could key off immortality. Maybe a ghost’s horrifying visage can only age mortal creatures, and all the spells that list “celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead” can just say “immortal creatures”.

Heck, while we’re adding this new trait to a million monsters, let’s add “and its attacks are considered magical.” Then we can get rid of all that force damage. Two for one sale on Monsters of the Multiverse fixes!

I don’t know about you, but my mental image of gold coins isn’t based on, say, my experience with the Roman aureus or Spanish doubloon, none of which I’ve ever seen. It’s based on those chocolate coins, or Hanukkah gelt, that come in the little mesh bags. So when my players find a cache of gold coins, that’s what I’m mentally giving out.

Those things are pretty massive for coins. Just how much would they weigh if solid gold?

Here are some 1 1/2 inch-diameter coins from Party City that weight .183 ounces each. It’s hard to nail down the mass of chocolate and I found varying estimates, but like many plant-derived things I think it weighs 60 pounds per cubic foot, the same as water – compared to 1200 pounds for gold. So gold is just a shade off 20 times heavier than milk chocolate.

That puts one solid gold coin, with the volume of a 1 1/2-inch chocolate gelt coin, at 3.66 ounces, or almost a quarter of a pound. Which is insanely heavy… the weight of more than 10 D&D gold coins, and more than twice the weight of Gary Gygax’s often-mocked 1e weight of 1/10 pound per coin.

At 1/10 the volume of a gelt coin, D&D gold coins are way smaller than I picture them. They’re much more accurate and close to the sizes of real Earth gold coins… but the coins of fantasy imagination are bigger than the little nickel-sized gold coins of history like the Spanish doubloon.

Here is my incontrovertible proof that D&D coins are bigger than nickels. No one could dispute this totally reasonable take.

See! Airtight reasoning, and not off the deep end at all!

Now let’s pretend that D&D coins are big, thick, 1 1/2-inch thick coins patterned after Hanukkah gelt. We’ll scale down to the relatively restrained Gygax 1/10 pound per coin. Get those bags of holding ready: a 60,000 coin trove would weigh 6,000 pounds. That’s a 10-cubic-foot pile, not really enough for a dragon bed, but enough to nearly fill up a mimic. That’s a bit more like the D&D treasure of my imagination.

There you go: in Pauls & Dragons, coins are big, delicious-looking, heavy hunks of gold like Hanukkah gelt. It costs 15 gp – one and a half pounds of gold – for a 3-pound longsword. Kind of a crazy economy – but at least the coins are delicious.

The other day I did some Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse math to figure out whether monsters’ Challenge Ratings had been adjusted. Today I’m switching gears to look at the new monsters from a different angle.

As a lot of people have noticed, one of the big changes in Monsters of the Multiverse is in the damage types dealt by monsters. Force damage, once a rare damage type, is now everywhere. A lot of other melee attacks – poisoned fangs, lightning swords, and so on – seem to do just poison or lightning damage now instead of a mix of physical and energy damage.

Partly, this may be to solve a problem that occurs when monsters fight monsters. A lot of stock 5e monsters that deal bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage – “nonmagical” damage – need a way to affect creatures that can’t be hurt by nonmagical weapons. Rather than apply a “Magic Weapons” trait to each high-level monster, these new monsters now deal force or other energy damage instead of nonmagical damage. Of course, like any change, it pulls on various other threads of the game, changing the value of, for instance, items and class features that grant resistance to piercing, bludgeoning, slashing, and force damage.

I thought it would be fun to count up monster attacks and see which damage types reign supreme in the Multiverse. Are bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing useless now? Is force now a force to be reckoned with?

Here are the number of monsters that deal each type of damage, out of 260ish monsters total, in Monsters of the Multiverse. I’m not counting spell damage here: since monsters with damage-dealing spellcasting creatures are rare, that won’t make too much of a difference. You can compare this to the data from the Monster Manual that someone compiled in 2014. (Ideally I’d also compare the new monsters against their old versions to see what changed instead of versus different monsters from the Monster Manual. But after crunching through the new book, I can’t yet face doing the same thing again to the same exact monsters in Volo’s and Tome of Foes. Maybe I’ll get to that after I recover from this round of data entry.)

One kind of surprising finding: sure, at 52, force is way up from 12 force-users in the Monster Manual. But the real champion here is PIERCING. There are more piercing monsters than bludgeoning and slashing monsters combined. More than half the book’s monsters deal piercing damage.

If you’re trying to decide between features that provide different resistances, and you’re using Monsters of the Multiverse to predict the way the Monster Manual 5.5 might go, you can divide the damage types into 3 tiers. Piercing resistance, though rare, is in a class by its own. It even makes you consider an item like the cursed armor of vulnerability, which could grant resistance against piercing in exchange for vulnerability to bludgeoning and slashing. Still not a good deal, but better than you might think.

Below piercing, there’s a tier for medium-common damage types: the already-mentioned bludgeoning, slashing, and force, plus necrotic, poison, and psychic (which gained a ton of ground: only 11 monsters deal psychic damage in the Monster Manual.) In this tier, force is the next most common type after bludgeoning and slashing.

The last tier is for the rarely-seen damage types: cold, lightning, radiant, and, surprisingly, fire, at only 24 (less than 10% of the monsters). For fire, that’s a drop from about 15% of the monsters in the Monster Manual. In other words, apart from poison, the “big five” chromatic dragon breath weapon types are not really generally useful. This is a big change from the Monster Manual, where, after the weapon types, the Big Five were all in the top 6.

Drilling down

This all seems like a reasonable surface reading, but could we perhaps be led astray by confounding variables here? Like, force damage is very common among fiends. Does that alone account for its prevalence? If you’re not going up against the hells, is force resistance still valuable?

Here’s the chart from above with fiends removed from the count.

Force is bumped down, but it’s still in the middle tier of usefulness, about as common as poison. Force resistance is still quite useful, although it’s beaten handily by psychic. In general, the chart looks pretty similar with or without the 40+ fiends in the book.

Do some damage types become more common in high-level play? This question was actaully one of the main reasons I started this analysis. If you’re choosing a damage resistance as a class or race feature, are there some “traps” that are only useful at low level or vice versa?

Jeez, look at piercing at Challenge Rating 0 to 4! It has everyone beat by a mile. I would expect claws would make make slashing damage compete better, but at low CR, where a lot of monsters only have one attack, that attack may be a bite. Besides, the Monster Manual might contain more of the basic types of monsters with claw attacks.

Poison is also quite well represented. Force damage is rare.

At CR 5-10, around the “sweet spot” levels, the damage type distribution looks a lot like the overall damage distribution, with the difference that poison has really tanked. A star at level 1, it now looks like a trap choice. Conversely, psychic and force damage have really surged.

At mid-high levels, bludgeoning beats out piercing as the most common physical damage type, as the creatures at this level tend to be Huge creatures that swing outsized fists, tails, and tentacles. Piercing and slashing are hanging in there, but force, necrotic, and psychic damage have almost caught them.

At epic level, the nonmagic damage types, piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning, disappear into the pack. Here’s where force damage makes its move. Of the 25ish monsters of CR 17 or higher, 20 deal force damage. At this level, investing an attunement slot into a brooch of shielding, an Uncommon item, is probably a good move. On the other hand, a barbarian that gains resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage isn’t getting as much bang for their buck. There are a total of 11 monsters that deal B, P, or S damage, with bludgeoning continuing to be the strongest option. All in all, about half as many monsters deal the nonmagic damage types as deal force damage. I bet this trend continues when the Monster Manual is revised. If you’re interested in D&D’s end game, that’s worth keeping in mind.

It might be worth looking at one more chart. Are fiends confounding us again? What if you’re fighting epic non-fiends?

There are only 10 non-fiend monsters of CR 17 or higher in Monsters of the Multiverse. From this small sample, it seems that force is tied with bludgeoning, with 4 of 10 monsters dealing each damage type. There’s only one slasher, and piercing is now nonexistent. Is this your king?

Takeaway

My big takeaway is: people are right, bludgeoning/piercing/slashing are nerfed and force is boosted in Monsters of the Multiverse – especially at high levels. But also the other damage types are rerolled a bit: the dragon-breath types are not well represented, and psychic damage is huge now too. If psychic damage were a stock, I’d say buy it now.

Here is an excel with my raw counts, if someone wants to slice up the data otherways, or add the data from Volo’s and Tome of Foes.

Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse is out, which means (for me) another excuse to do MONSTER MATH! This is a continuation of my 5e Monster Manual on a Business Card series where I statistically analyze 5e monsters, and it uses the same assumptions and methods, which are all documented there. This time I’m looking at Monsters of the Multiverse. Just a sample, for now, as opposed to the whole book, just to see what ballpark we’re in, and I can do more if people would find it useful.

Right off the bat, I’m curious to know whether the monsters in this book are improved from their previous appearances (listed as “legacy” appearances in D&D Beyond) in Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes. By “improved”, right now I mean, do their statistics better match up with their printed Challenge Rating? In my previous examination of Tome of Foes, I found that the monsters in that book had damage output and hit points that were comparable to the Monster Manual overall, but its monsters tended to deviate more from expected values set by the Monster Manual – in other words, monsters were less consistent, with some underperforming and some outperforming their expected abilities by Challenge Rating. That matters to me as a DM because more consistency = less unpleasant surprises where a supposedly routine fight is a TPK or a supposedly climactic fight is a one-turn pushover. Dangerous monsters should have dangerous story trappings, and the threat of death should be telegraphed, so that players can make informed choices.

Before Multiverse came out, the WOTC team had talked about simplifying the monsters and taking out “trap” options so that all of a monster’s attack choices were decent; turning a lot of spells into built-in actions; and so on. I’m hoping for more, though. I’m hoping for some monsters with too-low hit points to have their hit points raised, some too-high damage dealers to be nerfed. Let’s see if I’m disappointed.

Rather than crunching the whole book, I’m doing a non-random but hopefully representative sample. I’m doing all the “A” monsters: the five abishai, archer, allip, annis hag, armanite, alhoon, alkilith, archdruid, amnizu, and astral dreadnought. That’s 14 “A” monsters, ranging from CR 3 to 21. To that I’m adding two monsters I’m really curious about from Tome of Foes: Hutijin, who was a pushover with about half the hit points he needs; and the duergar despot, which dealt about twice the damage it should.

Here is how I’m doing the analysis. First, I’m taking the “legacy” version of each monster and comparing its printed CR to its “Blog of Holding CR” – that is, what I believe its CR should really be based on the math I did on Monster Manual on a Business Card. This isn’t math I invented; it’s reverse-engineered math that I got from analyzing the Monster Manual, by which I determined that a monsters’ HP go up by about 15 per CR, its damage per round (determined according to certain rules specified in the DMG) goes up by about 5, and so on. So this step is all about determining how well the monster performs compared to MM monsters of its CR. A big difference between a monster’s printed CR and its “Blog of Holding CR” means that I think it’s statted wrong.

Next I’m doing the same thing with the new, Monsters of the Multiverse versions of the same monsters. Then I’ll graph all 3 CRs for each monster: its printed CR in red, its “legacy version” BOH CR in gray, and its Multiverse version BOH CR in blue. The closer you are to the red line, the better.

In almost all cases, the new monsters are as good as, or better than, the originals, in terms of challenge rating metrics. In other words, the monster’s Blog of Holding CR is as close or closer to its listed CR. The one exception is the CR 18 amnizu, which technically is a better CR match in its old version, but that old version isn’t particularly well-designed, dealing damage like a CR 25 and having the survivability of a CR 13. Technically that averages close to its printed CR of 18 but in a fairly terrible way. The new version might be underpowered but at least it no longer deals unexpectedly high damage for its CR.

In general, in Monsters of the Multiverse, damage-dealing is much improved, and indeed actions are what the team clearly worked most on. Among the 16 monsters sampled, 11 had their damage outputs altered in some way. Only 7 monsters had their hit point totals changed. This is an area where they should have done more; in the post-MM books, a lot of monsters’ hit point totals are too low, and a lot of the absurdly-low hit point totals were not touched. For instance, Hutijin, a CR 21 legendary monster, has 200 hit points, which would be honestly not impressive for a level 13 monster. Sure, he has regen 20, but he won’t have very many turns to use it – especially since it can be turned off with a single point of radiant damage. (I’m thinking you brought a cleric or paladin to take down Hutijin?) The amnizu and duergar despot both had sky-high damage-dealing capabilities in their original version which got tuned down. In both cases, they could have stood to have their damage reduced even more, and have their hp increased to match so that their presence in a fight wouldn’t make it so swingy on turn 1. (By turn 2 they’re probably dead. By turn 3, if they’re not dead, you’re dead.)

Of the 16 monsters, only one armor class got changed – they took away the archdruid’s shield.

About Monsters of the Multiverse‘s other promises, that they’d remove trap options and stop hiding a monster’s best action choices in giant spell lists? Indeed, there are fewer bad attack options – everybody’s multiattack is a good place to start if you don’t know what the monster should do on a turn – which means that spellcasters generally have some sort of non-spell attack that does decent damage. For instance, the CR 12 archdruid has a ranged attack and a melee attack, both of which deal 26 damage, and it can make three attacks per round, for a potential 78 total damage per turn from its non-spell actions. Compare that to the legacy archdruid who could hit once per turn with its scimitar for 5 damage.

There are many fewer combat spells within the new monsters’ Spellcasting actions, but there are still some, so characters will still have something to do with their counterspell. But of the monsters I looked at, none would be totally shut down by a counterspelling team.

All in all? I like what they’ve done here a lot. They’ve reduced the inconsistency, thus making it easier to plan encounters, and made it easier to run monsters overall. If this is what Monster Manual 5.5 is going to look like, I can’t wait to see it.

Of course, this is all based on a sample of 5% of Monsters of the Multiverse. Let me know if it would be useful for me to do more monsters, do any specific monsters, or share the data I used in more detail.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to graph another monster I wanted to look at: the Winter Eladrin, which I remember Sly Flourish noting had extremely pitiful attacks. I won’t do the full graph, but let’s just take a look at it and see whether old Jack Frost/Elsa here got a tuneup.

In its legacy version, the Winter Fey has a longsword that does 4 or 5 damage and a little longbow that does 4 damage. No multiattack. That’s for a CR 10 creature. More of its damage comes from its reaction (11 damage) and its 1/day spells cone of cold (36 damage to an area) and ice storm (23 damage to an area). It actually meets its damage expectations thanks to its two spells, though on turn 3 it has to plink away with that bow. But at 127 HP, it probably won’t get a turn 3 anyway.

In the new version: the winter eladrin now gets Multiattack, and each of its attacks deal an extra 13 cold damage. So instead of 4 damage, it now deals around 34 with its action, plus 11 with its reaction, for 45 damage total. A little lower than I’d like, though it does also have a debuffing aura and some debuff spells that might make it gain a little ground.

And its HP have been raised to 165, right around where they should be!

All in all, the winter eladrin is greatly improved, even though both the legacy and new ones grade out to the same BOH CR 9. I would have let the Winter Eladrin keep Cone of Cold as an attack spell or given it a cone of cold-like recharge 6 action, both to help sell its story and to bring it up to the CR 10 it claims to be.

ADDENDUM 2: if you’re interested in seeing more monsters the way I would have done them? Buy Monstrous Menagerie, which is marked down right now to an insane $15.99. It’s got the “the way I would do them” versions of all the classic 5e monsters.

ADDENDUM 3: Next post in this series: Monsters of the Multiverse and force damage.

While doing some monster design work this weekend, I wondered: what’s the baseline for the number and type of skills for 5e monsters? I know that Perception and Stealth are very well-represented, but just how well? Here are the percentages of monsters that possess each skill, broken out into monsters, beasts, and NPCs. Might be off by a percentage point or two here or there because I didn’t double-check the counts carefully, but it’s accurate enough to let me draw some conclusions. I just used the Monster Manual for these counts.

SKILL PERCENTAGE	MONSTER	BEAST	NPC
Acrobatics		0	0	5
Animal Handling		0	0	0
Arcana			6	0	10
Athletics		3	2	14
Deception		8	0	24
History			3	0	10
Insight 		9	0	10
Intimidation 		2	0	10
Investigation 		1	0	5
Medicine		0	0	14
Nature 			0	0	14
Perception 		54	46	24
Performance		1	0	0
Persuasion 		4	0	24
Religion 		3	0	14
Sleight of Hand		0	0	5
Stealth 		37	25	14
Survival		3	0	5

For monsters and beasts, you can see that Perception and Stealth are very well-represented, with about 50% of monsters having Perception, and about 30%ish having Stealth. Part of the reason that Perception and Stealth are so common is that they are virtually the only skills available to creatures with beast-like intelligence, but they’re also common across the board among smarter monsters.

If you’re designing monsters, it seems that you can scatter Perception around willy-nilly. Some creatures, like the mastiff, get Perception because their stories involve them having sharp senses, and some just have them because they do. For instance, I’m not sure why smoke mephits have Perception but steam mephits don’t.

Besides Perception, the other skills are “story skills.” If a monster’s descriptive essay suggests that it should be a good liar, it has the Deception proficiency; if it’s a priest, it has the Religion proficiency, and so on. There’s not really a math requirement that a monster needs certain skills in order to function correctly in combat.

Stealth is pretty common because the story “I like to sneak up on you” just happens to be a very common monster story. Other skills are much rarer just because other monster gimmicks are not as universal, with Deception and Insight the next most common at around 8% and 9% among monsters. And there are a number of skills that get no representation at all among monsters: Acrobatics! Animal handling! Medicine! Nature! Sleight of hand! And Investigation and Performance only have one or two monstrous practitioners each, which I rounded up to 1%. Among NPCs, skills are more plentiful and more evenly-spread out, as befits a selection of stat blocks that largely represent NPC versions of character classes.

So that’s a quick tally of what skills are common… now, how many skills does each creature get?

It varies a lot. While higher-CR monsters tend to have more skills, there are plenty of big tough monsters – especially bruiser types – with no skills at all, including the kraken, tarrasque, demilich, balor, and pit fiend, so it’s definitely not a necessity for a tough monster to have any skills at all. Smarter monsters tend to have more skills. Most monsters have a maximum of four skills. The two exceptions I noticed are the mind flayer and the spy, which have six skills each.

If you want to design the most typical monster possible, though, give it two skills — and make them Perception and Stealth.

My roguelike game Dungeon Robber was a casualty of the death of Flash. In the past, I took a couple of shots at getting it to work without Flash, and this weekend I finally succeeded. (It ended up being pretty easy with Ruffle!)

Then in the name of “playtesting” I spent all weekend playing Dungeon Robber. So far I’ve unlocked the thief, fighter, and cleric class. After several years of not playing the game, it’s more fun than I remember! My bad memory means that a little bit of mystery has returned to the game.

The major bug is that flash’s data saving process doesn’t seem to work – but the HTML client-side storage mechanism does. So every time you load up DR, you are prompted to choose the savegame that works. A minor annoyance but not really a big deal… and save games seem perfectly trustworthy so far. I’ve played and retired 5 characters and built out my town substantially. Hoping to get down to build out the whole town soon so I can send a screenshot to myself.

There are other tweaks I’d make nowadays, but that will have to wait till I get an old copy of Macromedia Flash installed somewhere.

PLAY DUNGEON ROBBER