I love new monsters out of the books, but as I've run D&D over the years, I've gotten a lot more comfortable making homebrew monsters. Sometimes, you don't have quite what you want when you look at a monster's stat block, and making your own is usually the way to do it.
Now, a lot has been said about the problems with CR. I disagree with the notion that it's "useless," because a new DM should still have some rule somewhere that tells them not to send a Beholder against a level 2 party - it seems obvious to experienced players, but there's got to be a rule (even if it's more of a guideline) somewhere.
If you make your monsters according to the stat table in the "Dungeon Master's Workshop" section of the DMG, in my experience you'll have some pretty good monsters that will give your players a challenge when you use the Xanathar's rules for encounter building, without them being total pushovers.
One of the reasons for the revisions in Monsters of the Multiverse is to bring those more in line with the CR math found in the DMG - I've seen criticisms that some monsters still don't quite hit it (like Bael, the archdevil) but it seems like a good overall goal.
Here's how the table works, when homebrewing your monster:
The table has columns for things like attack bonus, average damage per round (assuming every attack hits,) armor class, total hit points (with coefficients to use when the creature has damage resistances or immunities) and saving throws for their abilities (which is sort of a different way of saying attack bonus).
The leftmost column is Challenge Rating, so the "average" monster of that CR should have the values in that row for each of the aforementioned attributes.
Because not all monsters are the same, you don't necessarily make all these match the row. Instead, you calculate an "offensive CR" and a "defensive CR." For the OCR (as I call it,) you take the attack bonus (or saving throw DC if it uses that more) and find the CR row it rests on, then find the average damage it does per turn (sometimes getting more complicated if it has recharge abilities or those that hit multiple targets, like a dragon) and find the CR row that rests on. You then find the average of those two CRs to get its OCR.
For DCR, you just do the same thing with the CR of its effective hit points (for creatures you assume have lower CRs, resistances and immunities put multipliers on their actual hit points to give the effective HP) and average that with the CR of its AC.
Then, you average the OCR and the DCR to get your monster's challenge rating.
It's not an exact science, of course - for example, a creature with resistance to acid damage is far less likely to be much more resilient against a party than it would if it had, say, resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage from nonmagical attacks. If your party's biggest damage dealer is a paladin, radiant resistance is going to play a much bigger role than it would in a party with no paladin or cleric. And a monster ability that paralyzes foes might not do any damage, but that can be a really devastating condition that might make up for less potent damage output.
Still, I think this kind of tool is really useful, and exactly the sort of thing you want in the DMG. I have one quibble, though: the AC column never gets higher than 19.
Yes, once you hit the row for CR 17, the armor class column never goes any farther, even though the table goes all the way up to CR 30, which is the highest CR of any monster in 5th Edition (currently held only by the Tarrasque, Tiamat from Tyranny of Dragons, and the Aspects of Bahamut and Tiamat out of Fizban's). These monsters all have either 25 or 23 AC.
In fact, if we look at high-CR monsters that could serve as tier 4 endgame bosses, very few have an AC that low - of all the CR 25+ monsters in 5th Edition, only Orcus has an AC of 19, with all the others having more.
Without having higher ACs on the column, it's harder to tell at what a high AC should count for when making a high-CR monster. Consider, for example, that your party might be fighting a well-armored knight with plate armor and a shield - something player characters can acquire around mid tier-2. The knight might have 80 hit points and just do two attacks that deal, say, 11 damage per hit (+4 strength and a greatsword,) which, damage-wise, would put it in the OCR range of a CR 3 monster (something a level 8 party could handle a couple of). But when calculating its DCR, its AC would be literally off the chart, meaning that even if the thing had only, as discussed before, 80 hit points (which the chart puts as a CR 1 number of HP - which seems a bit low) the DCR winds up being, essentially, infinity as even CR 30 is listed as having an ideal AC of 19. Even if we say that 20 AC is just "31," that still makes its DCR 16, and thus puts this monster that's supposed to be around CR 4ish at CR 9 - which in theory would be a solo boss monster, when in practice the party is probably going to fry him in one round.
So, I hope to see some revisions to this in the 2024 DMG - I think the system as it stands is still pretty useful, especially for mid-level monsters. But it'd be nice to get a bit more flexibility for things that are easily achievable without things like natural armor.
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