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

The 5E version of the Battlezoo Bestiary (for which I statted up the 5e monsters) is out now, and you can buy it! The book contains more than 100 balanced, mechanically interesting monsters, plus a cool monster-parts magic item creation system which I worked on as well and which has been a ton of fun in my playtests.

check out this in-depth review of the Battlezoo Bestiary from Knights of Last Call, which is called “Move over Paizo and WOTC, is THIS the best monster book for PF2 and D&D 5e?”. Spoiler: they give the PF2 an A grade, and the 5e version got an A+ and was called “an oasis in the desert” of 5e monster design.

I’m proud of how it came out. Take a look!

So I could have been finishing up the hex crawling app, I could have been fixing Dungeon Robber to work without flash, but instead I became obsessed with an idea that came to me in a dream: writing a land-conquest AI for hexer, my hex-crawl mapping web app, in order to turn it into a strategy web game called Imperium. The mechanics are pretty much as I dreamed them. Pretty solid for a dream actually: on your turn you claim a swath of contiguous same-type hexes, or build a fortifications to solidify hold on a conquered area. (My dream actually had a cool idea I haven’t implemented – yet: around halfway through the game, you unlock the ability to choose a specialization, like forester or mountaineer, which gives you a 2nd action on your turn. You can only use it to conquer areas of the specialized type. Maybe in the 2nd edition.)

The game is a tad imperialist – see if you can spot it! It’s subtle but it’s there But it’s really fun. I was playing it obsessively for a few days.

There is a lot of luck in the map layout – you can get a random map that gives you a big advantage or disadvantage – but to win the campaign mode (claim and hold 4 provinces on different random maps) takes a bit of strategy considering how simple the rules are. Imperium is now one of my top timewasters. Play it!

Now that the feverish work of writing the Monstrous Menagerie is done, I finally set up a new printer for the Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map poster. You can now get it on Etsy (in time for Christmas I THINK). Here’s the store!

Over Thanksgiving I ran a hex crawl D&D game. I needed a map, so I decided to write pen-and-paper tables for generating wilderness hexes. It should be suitable for a pick-up game, so you can explore hexes one by one without having to prep a whole map beforehand – but you have to end up with a map that tells a story: big forests, jagged mountain ranges, rolling plains, and seas instead of a hexy mishmash.

I decided that it would be quicker to write a javascript map to instantly iterate over different ideas rather than roll lots of dice and scribble on lots of pieces of hex paper.

Of course, the project got away from me, and I ended up with a full hex crawling tool with hand-drawn graphics, settlements and roads, monsters and dungeons, autosave and save features, a map editing mode, and a note-taking feature so you can detail your world.

Use Hexer!

I’ve had fun generating lots of little wildernesses (or not so little! With 6-mile hexes, it’s about the area of Wales), and I’ve run two game sessions so far. We’ve leveled up from 3 to 5, battled lots of A5E monsters, and found a little village as a base of operations for future expeditions. Eventually I’ll convert this back from a web app into a set of D&D rules.

Just a quick note, if you missed the kickstarter and want to get LevelUp5e books (including the Monstrous Menagerie!) you can sign up now!