One of the things we really haven't gotten much of in the One D&D playtest is a sense of what the monsters of the Monster Manual are going to look like.
So, let's consider that.
I suspect we're going to see most of the current entries in the Monster Manual reprinted in some way - I believe they've even said there will be more than there were in the 2014 one, which is already a pretty hefty tome.
Broadly speaking, the only ones I suspect are going to be removed might be stat blocks for playable species - your Orc Eye of Gruumsh or your Drow Priestess of Lolth, given that they're trying to distance these species/lineages/peoples from specific settings and cultures. Even in the Forgotten Realms, Ed Greenwood revised the Drow to not all be Lolth-worshipping bastards, but that that is specifically the culture of Menzoberranzan.
Now, might we have stat blocks instead that are, say, Spider Priests or War Priests? After all, for the most part, the current version of an Orc Eye of Gruumsh is just a stat block with the Orcs' Aggressive feature, the Orc NPC's Gruumsh's Fury feature, and some Cleric spells.
Likely, instead, we're going to get spellcasting stat blocks more in line with the designs from Monsters of the Multiverse - taking out most of the player-facing spells and letting them do damage primarily with bespoke abilities.
But we've written tons about spellcasters. What about other aspects of monster design?
One of the things I'm most curious about is Resistances, Immunities, and Vulnerabilities.
In 5E as it stands, there's this sort of weird thing that happens with weapons. The vast majority of monsters who have any sort of resistance or immunity to the three main damage types associated with weapons - bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing - will only have said resistance or immunity to this damage type if it comes from nonmagical weapons.
So, martial characters (and here I simply mean any character that deals most of their damage through weapons) kind of have to hit this graduation point at a certain level. Usually, by level 5 or 6, you want to have a magical weapon. Once you have a +1 weapon, all your damage is going through in the vast majority of cases. Indeed, some of the very least resisted damage is when it's these three types coming from a magical weapon (I think Force still beats them).
However, if we are to look at class design as a guide, we see a few notable omissions. Druids do not get any feature that gives their Wild Shape's form's natural weapons the "counts as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance" rider that the 2014 Druid gets at level 6.
So, what does that mean?
Likely, it means that we're going to stop seeing this blanket resistance or immunity for powerful, magical creatures. And I think we can all say good riddance, right?
What was the purpose that such resistance/immunity served? It did mean that some monsters could be absolute terrors, or even basically unvanquishable at low levels, but only for groups that relied on weapon damage. Any spellcasters could basically never worry about this at all, so instead this became a tax purely on the damage output of martial classes.
Ok, so we then sort of have weapon-based characters graduate to being able to do full damage once they have magic weapons. And at that point, we basically just ignore these resistances/immunities.
Like, look, what tier 1 party is going to be expected to fight a Lich and not just automatically die? And what tier 3 party is going to come at a Lich without magical weapons? So why do they have this immunity?
I think, also, there's some potential here to make the more interesting immunities/resistances come to the forefront if we get rid of the idea of separating magical and nonmagical weapon damage.
Lycanthropes and Devils are both resistant or immune to weapon damage unless attacked with a silvered weapon... or a magical weapon. I have to imagine that 99% of the time, the party just has a magic weapon to attack with, and you never worry about getting something made of silver. That's part of what I love about the Loup Garou design. The Loup Garou (which is also much higher CR) can only have its health regeneration stopped if it's hit with a silver weapon (or Chill Touch - I could write a whole post about how I think Chill Touch needs a nerf).
Whereas your standard werewolf will easily go down if they're just hit by spells if your party does't have access to silvered weapons or magic weapons, the Loup Garou can take endless punishment from your Akmon, Hammer of Purphoros, because unless you can get some silver through that hide, that wolf is getting right back up.
Likewise, you could imagine making Adamantine weapons more appealing if they were truly the only way to harm a Golem.
But let's also imagine that we could do more interesting things with these mechanics.
One thing is that vulnerabilities are extremely rare among monsters. That is, of course, sort of necessary for design, because monsters go down pretty quickly as is - giving players an avenue to do so in half the time means you're only going to get a single turn to use the monster in a lot of cases.
But that might also be kind of the backdoor to the real thing here: we need some monsters to live a lot longer.
I think monsters in the tier 1 range are actually pretty balanced in most cases. Player characters are so fragile before level 5 (which is also when Clerics and Druids get their first resurrection magic) that monsters need to be limited in the damage they can do and also go down fairly quickly so they can't unleash too many attacks.
But I'd say that in tier 3 and, I assume, in tier 4 (because I've thrown a bunch of tier 4 monsters at an admittedly large tier 3 group and they've gone down pretty easily) monsters tend to die before they can really threaten the party that much. It does depend a lot, of course, on the group makeup, and given that I've been running a larger group, there are a lot of ways that they can shore up one another's' weaknesses (Flash of Genius is an oft-used feature that basically means it's pretty hard for anyone to fail a saving throw).
But I think a lot of monsters just seem shockingly easy to kill. My prime example is the Lich. The Lich is one of D&D's most iconic monsters, and admittedly, its whole deal is that it's an undead wizard, and thus it makes sense that it's something of a glass cannon. There is a lot of work you'll want to put in to making sure the Lich is ready for the party (spoilers for anyone in my campaign, but I'm currently looking at how to make use of one) but the fact is that if the party finds your Lich and just goes whole-hog on them (as they would be wise to,) its 17 AC and 135 HP mean that thing is going down fast. Yes, resistance to cold, lightning, and necrotic damage. Yes, immunity to poison and nonmagical weapon damage (though the latter here, as we discussed above, is basically irrelevant.)
A tier 3 (say level 13) Warlock with 20 Charisma and Agonizing Blast will be hitting on a roll of 7 or higher (70% of the time) and dealing 1d10+5 (10.5) damage per hit, three times per turn, so even if we ignore crits and any non-cantrip spells the Warlock is casting, that's about 21.35 damage per turn, meaning that a single, very lazy Warlock could take down a Lich in 6.3 turns. If we assume that the rest of a 4-player party is doing comparable damage per round (which, conservatively, is not unreasonable,) that Lich is going to get at most either 1 or 2 turns in combat, depending on how good their initiative is.
Surely, surely they should be able to last a bit longer. There's glass cannons, and then there's cannons made of bubble solution.
Now, granted, I often look at these things from a DM's perspective, and while I always want my party to succeed, I'd prefer if they feel like they really had to be clever and burn a lot of resources in order to achieve victory.
We don't want battles to drag on interminably, but I do think that my general sense is not so much that the monsters aren't doing enough damage or harming the player characters enough, but rather that the monsters go down before they can do most of their cool stuff.
The other thing I'd look into is balancing legendary monsters. A legendary monster, theoretically, should be able to threaten the party on its own. But it's very rare that you can actually just throw an appropriate-CR monster at the party and have the fight challenge them. Interesting encounters basically only work when you have a lot of monsters on the field.
And that can be fun, but on a thematic level, I'd like to be able to throw my party up against a single monster with no minions and let that fight feel like a real challenge.
How do we fix this? Well, we could look into refining the legendary action system. We could also just give the monsters more actions on their turns.
I haven't really played much with the "multiple reactions" alternative to Legendary Actions we've seen on the Eldritch Lich or the Vecna stat block. But I'm curious to see if that works better.
I honestly think, though, that the solution might simply be to bump up HP. If the dragon only gets one chance to breathe on the party, they're not going to be as scary. But they last a bit longer, and a second breath is far harder to recover from than the first.
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