As a monster designer, I’m interested in seeing where the 2024 Monster Manual takes monster design. How compatible are 2014 and 2024 monsters? What are the benchmarks for a monster of a given Challenge Rating, and has it changed?
I wrote about this before when we had a very small handful of monsters. By now we have a surprisingly large number of 2024-style monster previews – I count about 60 between the PHB, Monster Manual previews, and the free adventures Scions of Elemental Evil and Uni and the Hunt for the Lost Horn. That’s enough to make some decent educated guesses, especially around Challenge Ratings 1/8 through 6 (I think we only have two monsters that are higher CR than that).
First of all, how have monster benchmarks changed? It seems like the biggest changes are to hit points and expected damage. Here are scatter plots of the 2024 hit points and damage numbers (blue), along with my 2014 Monster Manual on a Business Card math (red).
(As I did for earlier analyses, I use the 2014 DMG rubric for calculating damage: the average damage a monster deals over 3 rounds, assuming every attack hits, every area attack targets 2 foes, etc. I’ve tweaked it a bit for this analysis: for instance, I gave a bonus to an attack that’s likely to gain advantage – but I haven’t made big changes. I’m NOT using any updated formulas from the 2024 DMG because the 2024 DMG doesn’t include any real monster building guidelines beyond “you can reskin”.)
As you can see, hit points and damage have changed. Hit points have gone up a fair amount, and damage has gone up a lot. We’re still dealing with a linear increase by level, though.
I’m trying out a new formula for monster stats. This is provisional, and will probably change a bit once we get the full Monster Manual. It’s not as nice and clean as the 2014 one – it’s a bit harder for me to do the math in my head – but it seems to be the math they’re using:
Hit Points: 9 + 18 per CR
Damage: 3.75 + 7.5 per CR
In other words, for every CR you get 18 hit points and 7.5 DPR, plus a half-level bump as a bonus.
For CRs under 1 I just interpolated some linear values, keeping the 40% ratio between damage and hit points.
CR 1/8: 10 HP, 4 damage
CR 1/4: 15 HP, 6 damage
CR 1/2: 20 HP, 8 damage
How well does this formula match the data? Let’s draw it:
Pretty close, though it might be skewed by trying to match those two high-CR data points. Let’s just look at CRs 0 through 6.
It looks pretty good, although the data is incredibly noisy just because we have so little data to go on (60 monsters is not a lot). So these formulas are all quite provisional, and may change a lot once we see the full Monster Manual.
Based on this hypothesis, though, we can draw some conclusions:
Different Damage Ratio
One interesting change is that we have confirmed that monsters no longer use the “1 damage-per-round for every 3 hit points” rubric they used in 2014. Instead of a ratio of .33, the new key ratio is .4: 4 DPR for every 10 hit points. This means that 2014 and 2024 monsters have a fundamental incompatibility at their center. You can’t strictly say, for instance, that a 2024 CR 8 monster is equivalent to a 2014 CR 10 monster; it’s not. Its ratio of attack to defense is different.
Do I like this change? Yes. As both a player and DM, I like monsters to have more damage capability rather than more hit points. I’d rather have a monster hit hard, and not overstay its welcome, rather than drag out a foregone fight.
Now 25% Tougher!
Just as players are tougher in 2024, monsters are too, especially at high CRs. It seems like monsters are roughly compatible up until around CR 3 or 4, and then new monsters pull away.
Glossing over the incompatible damage ratio of new monsters, if you’re comparing or swapping 2014-style and 2024 monsters – for instance, using Monstrous Menagerie 2 monsters in a 2024 adventure – you’ll need to know how they stack up in order to make the encounter work. Here’s my provisional formula for doing that:
To convert a 2024 monster’s CR into 2014 and A5E-style CR, multiply by 1.25 and round down.
That means that monsters up to CR 3 will be unchanged (which matches our findings about their statistics). 2024 monsters of CR 4 to 7 should have their CR increased by +1, which approximately matches what we see in the data. After this, our findings are mostly speculative because of the lack of data. For CR 8 to 11 monsters, add +2 to their CR; CR 12 to 15, +3; CR 16 to 19, +4; CR 20 to 23, +5; and we have no data at all beyond this point. This means that the 2024 CR 22 ancient green dragon is, in 2014 terms, really CR 27 (with the caveat that its hit points will be a little low and its damage will be a little high).
Going the other way, to convert a 2014/A5E monster into 2024 CR, multiply by 0.8 and round up. So, for instance, if you use a 2014 remorhaz (CR 11) in a 2024 game, treat its CR as 9 for the purposes of encounter building and determining encounter difficulty.
The downside of this rough-and-ready conversion is that a monster’s CR is not just its damage and hit points. The 2024 green dragon might have the damage output and hit points of an old-style CR 27, but it has the AC, save DCs, and attack bonuses of a CR 22 monster. That’s not a huge deal because for the most point these numbers will only be about 1 or 2 points at the very highest CRs, so I don’t think it’s worthwhile making a big conversion effort to fix this. Still, it’s a bit messy.
Do I like this change? Not really. If they wanted to challenge players, rather than boosting the power of a monster of a given CR, they could have left the meaning of CR alone and changed the encounter guidelines instead. There are a lot of much-improved 2014-style encounter guidelines out there, including mine and Sly Flourish’s, they could have drawn inspiration from. This would have been a change WOTC could have made on a single page of the DMG rather than on every page of the Monster Manual. I would have been very happy if they had changed monster’s damage-to-hp ratios without also inflating stats in a way that made WOTC’s D&D 5E slightly incompatible with itself. But it’s WOTC’s choice to do whatever they want with their game; it’s our choice whether we want to follow their design decisions or not.
…but we gotta wait for the full book
As I said before, all of these numbers will probably get adjusted a little once we see the full book: once I have more data points, my stats for challenge ratings 7 and higher could see big changes. But if, for instance, you’re a monster designer and want to be able to make some provisional 2024 monsters, this might be good enough for now.
