While I'm generally a big fan of the revisions that have come with the new core rulebooks, there is maybe one omission from the new DMG that bothers me the most: the loss of the "quick monster stats" table.
In the old DMG, this section of the DM's Workshop chapter has been invaluable in aiding in the creation of brand-new monsters from scratch. The new DMG has some idea for customizing monsters, but it really seems almost to discourage actually creating new creatures wholecloth.
Let's talk about this on a philosophical level:
I've watched a lot of Matt Colville's D&D videos on YouTube, and find his insights interesting enough that I do genuinely want to try out his company's upcoming fantasy TTRPG, Draw Steel, amidst a sea of other D&D competitors coming out.
While I don't always agree with his takes on how a game like this should be played, I do think he makes a good point when talking about the way that corporations like to control their IPs. D&D is an inherently creative game - the game encourages you to come up with your own character, and for DMs to come up with their own stories in which those characters will struggle and strive.
But corporations really like to have control of a narrative. They would much rather that you play in their spaces. In video games, this is basically inherent, except when you get into the world of modding, but in TTRPGs, the analogue nature of the game means that there's not a lot of control over what the game really should be.
The designers of D&D get it, I'm sure, because you couldn't work on a game like this without loving it for its grand potential, but I think that the larger company really likes the idea that these rules are there to get you to play through their published adventures.
In particular, I think the Spelljammer and Planescape box sets didn't really give players and DMs what they really wanted out of it (and it hurts me to say this, because I think that the Planescape book did actually have some very cool stuff in it. The Spelljammer one... well... Plasmoids and Thri-kreen are cool?) Overall, though, these campaign setting products felt like they were built less around opening up a broad new world for DMs to create in than they were about setting up a single adventure for a party to play through and then move on to the next thing.
This is in stark contrast with my favorite 5E product, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which was entirely about "here's how to make this your own."
So, the absence of this "here's how to build a monster from scratch" guidance not only disappointed me, but made me worry a bit about the direction the publishers are taking the game, despite my enthusiasm for how things have been revised and updated (though I'll also say, we got a revised Bladesinger already. Maybe focus on the brand new stuff).
Which brings me to my purpose here.
The Quick Monster Stats table in the 2014 DMG has helped me create lots of fun and challenging monsters. I had been hoping that we'd get an updated version (that, if nothing else, didn't cap Armor Class at 19 - it's patently absurd to suggest that a CR 28 monster would have an AC under 20) but we got no such thing. And so... I decided to build it up myself.
The way the old one worked was this:
There were 34 rows, from CR 0 to CR 30, showing what an average monster of each CR should have when it came to Attack Bonuses, average damage (if all attacks/abilities hit), saving throw DCs, AC, and Effective HP.
The latter of these is itself somewhat complicated, as various coefficients are applied to the actual total HP if the creature has resistances or immunities, but the coefficients change depending on the creature's target CR.
You can just use these to build your monster around, but if you want a tanky creature that doesn't deal as much damage or a glass cannon, you ultimately want to calculate the Offensive CR and the Defensive CR (OCR and DCR) for each and try to get their average to hit your target. And how do you get those? Well, you average the CR of their attack bonus (or save DC if they use abilities that call for those more) with their damage output (also accounting for AoE attacks by assuming they'll hit two targets when calculating the damage output) to get their OCR, and then averaging the CR of their AC and EHP (effective HP) to get their DCR, and then averaging both.
In other words, you have some sliders here to really customize your monster. Let's say you want to build a "Spike Devil" whose role is to strike down heavily armored foes, you might lower its damage output to raise its attack bonus.
All of this gets nuanced and complicated - attacks that inflict a condition will require you to lower their overall damage to keep the same CR value.
But with the redesigns of classic monsters, what are those values?
Well, I'm going to take the new Monster Manual and see if I can find out.
For this post (and we'll see if we do more of these) I'm going to start with the creatures of CR 1/8. I'm skipping CR 0 creatures largely because they're designed to be trivial even to first-level adventurers, often only doing 1 damage on a hit and having 1 HP. Depending on how laborious such a process is, I might continue on to 1/4 and 1/2 monsters in this post, but I'm going to try to keep this manageable.
Because we're basing this off the revised rulebooks, we only have one truly, fully up-to-date source, which is the Monster Manual.
Let's talk methodology: to start off with CR 1/8 monsters, we're going to take their average damage (assuming everything hits/isn't saved against,) their average attack bonus, their average AC, and their average HP, unless they have resistances or immunities. Notably, there is a potential to skew things here if a particular CR has, for example, more glass cannons versus more tanks, but we'll go in with the potentially naive assumption that each selection of creatures at every CR (especially the low ones) has a broad enough selection to give us a healthy mix. There are also passive benefits like a Kobold's Pack Tactics that could skew things - potentially making their attack bonus effectively higher - but we're going to ignore it (perhaps at our peril).
We'll list the values here before finding averages to let you play along at home:
Bandit:
Damage: 4.5, Attack: +3, AC 12, HP 11
Blood Hawk
Damage: 5 (maybe skewing closer to 6, but we'll say this for now), Attack: +4, AC 12, HP 7
Camel:
Damage: 4, Attack: +4, AC 10, HP 17
Cultist:
Damage 4, Attack +3, AC 12, HP 9
Flumph:
Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7 (with a vulnerability)
Flying Snake:
Damage: 6, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 5
Giant Crab:
Damage 4 (with condition), Attack +3, AC 15, HP 13
Giant Rat:
Damage: 5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 7
Giant Weasel
Damage: 5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 9
Goblin Minion
Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7
Guard
Damage: 4, Attack +3, AC 16, HP 11
Kobold Warrior
Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 7
Manes
Damage: 5, Attack +2, AC 9, HP 9
Mastiff
Damage: 4 (with condition), Attack +3, AC 12, HP 5
Merfolk Skirmisher
Damage: 5 (with condition), Attack +2, AC 11, HP 11
Modron Monodrone
Damage: 6, Attack +4, AC 15, HP 5
Mule
Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 10, HP 11
Noble
Damage: 5, Attack +3, AC 15 (with a reaction to make it 17, technically), HP 9
Pony
Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 10, HP 11
Slaad Tadpole
Damage: 5, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7 (5 damage resistances)
Stirge
Damage: 5.5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 5
Twig Blight
Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 7 (vulnerability)
Venomous Snake
Damage: 7, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 5
Warrior Infantry
Damage: 4, Attack +3, AC 13, HP 9
Now, we're going to take averages on all of these (for creatures with different attacks that do different damage, I found the average for them) with the exception of damaging attacks that impose a condition (I've included a 10-foot slow as a condition,) because we want to learn what penalty we should impose if we add a condition to an attack. Honestly, we should maybe do the same for creatures with Pack Tactics. Hopefully this will get us reasonable values for what a CR 1/8 creature ought to be doing.
Our sample size is 24 stat blocks. 3 have attacks that impose a condition.
Damage: The average damage here without conditions comes to about 4.7, which we will round up to 5. Our three CR 1/8 creatures that do impose a condition deal an average of 4.3, which we'll round down to 4. Does that mean we need to subtract 20% of the damage to justify the condition? We'll start using that for now, but because damage is so low at this CR, we might be dealing with a "pixelation" problem, where the actual penalty is not quite that amount. Still, we'll stick with 5 as our main number.
Attack: Here I got 3.7, or 4 on average. Again, this might effectively skew higher given the existence of things like Pack Tactics, but likely sticking around 4, rounded off.
AC: Here, I got 12.5, which we'll round up to 13. (I did initially get a lower number, so check my work, because the first time I think I entered fewer than 24 values when calculating the average).
HP: We're going to ignore the ones with resistances, immunities to damage types, and vulnerabilities to try to get a sense for how this might skew things, which again leaves 21 stat blocks to average. This comes to 8.7, rounded to 9. Two of these creatures have vulnerabilities, with an average HP for them of 7 (both have 7), which is, ironically, lower than the average for those without. The one with five different resistances has 7 as well. Not really enough of a sample size to see how these affect things.
However, let's say, for the sake of argument, that the average CR 1/8 creature should have the following stats:
+4 to hit, deal 5 damage on a hit, have an AC of 13, and 9 HP.
And let's compare that with some random choices. In theory, if a creature has a high AC and/or HP, they should have a lower attack bonus and damage.
Looking at the Guard, their attack bonus is +3 and their damage is only 4, both below average, if only by a little. They have I think the highest AC of all 1/8 creatures, with a 16, and 11 HP, which is a bit higher than average. So, while we don't know if this is quite balanced, it at least seems to fit with a lower OCR balanced by a higher DCR (appropriate for an NPC who is there to defend and endure).
Let's contrast this with a Goblin Minion - a stealthy skirmisher who is there to strike fast and get away. Their attack bonus is average, and their damage is actually a bit low at 4. Their AC and HP are both also lower than the average. So, what gives? Well, a Goblin Minion does have the Nimble Escape bonus action. Does this make up for being decidedly below-average on most of its primary measures?
As a last bit, let's talk about the Manes - a creature that should have zero sense of self preservation, as it's a gruesome demon who just wants to kill. I realize I messed up and forgot to account for its three typical demonic damage resistances (cold, fire, lighting) and its immunity to poison. Despite the fact that it has all these ways to ignore or mitigate damage, it has the average HP of 9. However, its AC is significantly lower, requiring only a 9 to hit (meaning a brand-new character with a +5 to hit is going to do so 80% of the time). Its attack does average damage but only has a +2 to hit. In other words, the creature is below-average on AC and attack bonus, but can be a problem for spellcasters (a tier 1 Fire Bolt cannot take one of these down on its own, as the damage would cap out at 5, though a Monk or dual-wielder at level 1 would probably be able to take one down pretty easily if they're doing 1d6+3 on both hits, the average damage of which would be 13).
The truth of all this is that there are a lot of moving parts. A creature having a flying speed, for example, can effectively make it much harder to hit, as melee-focused characters will have a much harder time attacking it, often doing suboptimal damage because they've switched from a hefty Greataxe to a Javelin or the like. And a creature with an aura that charms people nearby is also effectively harder to hurt.
Still, even if a table like 2014's monster stats is never going to be able to handle all those nuances, surely the designers at WotC have some formulas for creating their creatures. This is something that they need to make available to customers - both for those of us who like homebrewing things (no TTRPG publisher is going to make my New Weird/Urban Fantasy stuff quite to my specifications) but also for those 3rd party publishers who create content for their game. D&D Beyond has become a marketplace for 3rd party materials, which I think is fantastic, but help out those creators to keep things in line with D&D's design philosophies!
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