With the changes to monster stats in Monster Manual 3, it’s now so easy to create monsters that I can fit all the formulae I need for attacks, defenses, and hit points on a wallet-sized piece of paper, and I’d still have room on the back to sell adspace (targeting the coveted 18-34 “people who are photo ID” demographic). In fact, I’m thinking of replacing MM3 with a business card.

Note: Through April 10, you can get MM3 business cards as a backer bonus for my Random Dungeon Generator poster!

I like to come up with my own monsters on the fly. Once I come up with the idea of a giant roc with four elephant heads, I don’t need a Monster Manual to tell me that it has a fly speed, can make four grab attacks, and that it drops armored PCs onto sharp rocks to get at the food inside.

What I like the Monster Manual for is that it provides me numbers. If I want to run my Crowliphaunt as a level 12 elite brute, I can open the monster manual, look up a level 12 elite brute (flesh golem, for instance), and use its attack bonus, defenses, hit points, and damage expressions, swapping in my own damage types, status effects, and bizarre special abilities.

Really, though, there’s a lot of excess poundage in the Monster Manual that I don’t use every session. A while ago, I started running monsters using a cheat sheet listing the average defenses, hit points, etc. of each monster role, along with the damage expressions from DMG page 42. This cut down the Monster Manual to about a page.



With Monster Manual 3, the algorithm for building monsters has gotten even easier. There is less variation between the roles: for instance, every role has a to-hit bonus of around 5 plus monster level. Here you can see Greg Bilsend’s reasoning for the change.

The change to monster damage, though, is the big improvement in Monster Manual 3. It’s been upped by about 1/2 point per monster level, to 8-plus-monster-level damage, which means that I might not have to throw level-plus-four monsters at PCs anymore to challenge them. Lower-level opponents means lower opponent defenses and hit points, which should mean shorter, less marathon-like encounters.

Actually, I was already using a slightly different formula for upping monsters’ damage and reducing their hit points; but all things being equal, I prefer to use the rules as written instead of a houserule. (Like the Crowliphaunt, I like my monsters RAW!)

This math does lead to some problems…