There's a trope listed on TVTropes, called "The Conservation of Ninjutsu." The idea is that, dramatically, one ninja is actually a lot scarier than two dozen ninjas. Obviously, in the real world, being attacked by a giant crowd of coordinated foes would be worse than just having to deal with a single adversary, but in a narrative work, big crowds of foes, be they ninjas or enemy soldiers or monsters, can often feel lower-stakes because we don't get to really focus on any given individual threat.
Horror, as a genre, often makes a single monster its focus. Slasher movies are usually about one relentlessly terrifying killer who tends to strike victims when they're isolated. The genre often gives these killers some kind of supernatural resilience - Michael Myers just gets up after seemingly being killed - but their ability to sneak up on their victims and avoid anyone who might be able to stop them is the main thing that makes them so daunting.
Horror does sometimes give you a collective monster - zombie movies are the clearest example. But zombies as individuals are usually not that hard to deal with. As long as you see them coming, you can probably outrun them and maybe even kill them by bashing their skull in, and it's when you're surrounded by a massive crowd and there's no clear path to safety that they become a major threat.
But I think it often works the other way - the singular threat that is faster, stronger, and infinitely malicious.
In D&D, it can be really hard to build a challenging fight with a single monster. There are tools for it in-game - Legendary creatures are given Legendary Resistance in order to avoid being taken out by a single spell (and the changes to the rules for Grappling, Shoving, and even Counterspell let them use this to avoid being shut down by the party this way). They're also given Legendary Actions to allow them to act more frequently during combat. I even think the general move to give them proficiency or even expertise in Initiative rolls is to make sure that they get to do something scary and menacing before players' abilities can come into play and disrupt them.
But even with these tools, it can sometimes feel that a monster doesn't really live up to its potential.
When you look at a creature with 150 HP, for example, that seems like a fairly large amount. But against four characters (and this problem is exacerbated in larger parties) this means that each party member has to do, on average, 37.5 damage to kill it. And that means that you're probably lucky if you get two rounds with the monster once the party is at level 5 or higher.
Now, the 150 number is a little bit arbitrary, though the Relentless Nightmare that I talked about in my previous post has 144 HP, and has a CR that implies the party ought to at least be in high tier 2 to face it.
I will say, it's probably better game design to give both players and monsters higher damage output compared to HP. It makes combat faster and it makes each turn that much more impactful. D&D combat can drag when players have lots of options (I ran my very-occasional backup campaign after our DM cancelled my usual Wednesday game, and boy, going from running combat at level 18 to level 2 was profound. We got through like 5 or 6 rounds of combat in maybe an hour as the geriatric adventurers - they're called The Prune Platoon - faced off against some maddened farm animals).
But it also means that things can swing widely. Part of 5.5's redesign tamped down a bit on the ability for players to land massive nova damage (though designer Mackenzie de Armas pushed back on the notion that this was a broader philosophical goal in an interview with D4) and I think that helps a solo monster to have its impact. (Generally speaking, I've liked using the new monsters.)
However, I think there's a whole other aspect of this discussion I haven't really gotten to yet:
In a horror campaign, like one set in Ravenloft, you probably want some fights against things that aren't the big bad (or a big arc-plot villain). These might not be legendary creatures. But can a non-legendary creature ever work just on its own?
In Van Richten's, the Unspeakable Horror was a somewhat unwieldy monster - more of a framework with varying features that you could roll on tables to determine. This is a design we saw in other places, like the various Horrors from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. And while I like it in theory, I think that it's generally better to give us a bespoke stat block for a given concept of a monster. Similarly, I was happy to get dedicated Dracolich and Shadow Dragon stat blocks in the new Monster Manual (though I'd have liked to get higher-CR versions of both - it feels like there should be a Dracolich that is at least as tough as some of the ancient dragons).
Anyway, 5.5 has moved on from these variable stat blocks, which I think makes the life of a DM easier (we can always just make adjustments we need to tweak the monster). The Unspeakable Horror now has a single stat block.
Weirdly, despite its truly Lovecraftian appearance in the art, it's still a Monstrosity rather than an Aberration. That's probably fine given how many of the straight-out-of-Lovecraft monsters we got in the book. But we now have a bit more focus on this swirling mass of... protoplasm?
It's a Huge monstrosity, and I think that the concept of it - an... unspeakable horror that defies all comprehension - really suggests that it should be a solo monster. But without legendary actions, does it have the tools to keep up with a party that is fighting it?
The thing is CR 8, so a high-difficulty challenge for a 5th level party of four, in theory. It's got 126 HP, and a very low AC of just 13.
But here are the things that can help it survive:
First off, its Incomprehensible Form trait gives all attacks against it (as long as it's not incapacitated) disadvantage. Still a low AC, but now there's at least some chance that they'll miss it.
Next, it has Regeneration. I'm honestly a little surprised to see this, because in the Monster Manual things like Vampires lost health regen. In practical terms, it basically just adds 10 HP for each round it survives, so you could have just given it 20-30 more HP. Unlike Trolls, all you need to stop this regeneration is to get it to 0 HP.
Lastly, Terrifying Aura is a 15-foot emanation that imposes a Wisdom saving throw on creatures that start their turn in the aura (though not when they enter it) and can inflict Frightened, which then further inflicts Paralyzed (the reason they frame features like this this way is so that someone immune to fear also can't be paralyzed by it). A success on the save gives 24 hours of immunity to the feature.
Actually, I hate that kind of feature. I'd rather than it be some 1/day ability that the creature can use, especially because it doesn't give blanket immunity to every Unspeakable Horror's aura, which means we need more bookkeeping to track which Horror a character is immune to).
The point of these is that Incomprehensible Form and Terrifying Aura scale up with the number of creatures attacking them. (Well, ok, Incomprehensible Form is more like a bonus to its AC and an absolute Hoser for poor, poor Rogues).
But Regeneration, while it does give the Horror just a little more longevity, does not scale with the number of players. That 10 HP might undo the damage that a Wizard does with a Fire Bolt, but the three other members of the party will overcome it.
We've gone pretty deep on this one stat block. But I think we need to talk about the role that our monsters are serving.
One of the oddities of D&D as a game is that you're absolutely meant to win the vast majority of challenges. If the party "fails" a combat encounter, it could mean that the campaign is over. The way I play D&D, these are characters that players spend years playing and really grow attached to and identify with them.
Now, sure, I think a good session zero discussion to have is how lethal the players want the game to be. I think A: it's totally valid to say that a horror game might have fights that don't feel fair (and by fair I mean that we expect the players to win) though even in those cases, I think giving genre-appropriate paths to survival is a must, even if those don't mean just killing the monsters and B: I also think it's fine to say that you're playing a horror-themed/toned/aesthetic game of otherwise conventional D&D with the usual expectations of heroic victories.
In the latter case, it's actually fine if a solo, non-legendary monster does wind up being a bit of a pushover because of some lucky rolls (or unlucky on the part of the monsters). Just like normal D&D, encounters are there to risk depleting character resources (including HP,) but luck and good strategy both can lessen the impact of such encounters.
In the former case, though, I think your only real recourse to keep these monsters scary is just to... overtune combat encounters.
Overtune, I will say, is itself somewhat open to interpretation. I actually think that the 2024 DMG's combat encounter-building guidance is actually pretty generous to the DM. A high-difficulty encounter is probably going to feel quite hard. Naturally, as players level up, they get a lot more of a cushion to absorb those particularly dangerous encounters.
But we also need to not look at encounters in a vacuum. It can be tempting, often, to just come up with one big encounter each day. I actually think this does a disservice to your players, as some classes (particularly Fighters, Monks, and Warlocks) get some of their power relative to other classes from the fact that they get so much of their class features back on a short rest. A Warlock, for example, seems really underwhelming with their mere two 5th level spell slots at level 9, compared with a Wizard or Sorcerer of that level who has 14 total spell slots, but if you get one or two short rests in there during the day, that Warlock can have effectively 6 5th level spells, which is insane compared to other full casters. But if all of the action is concentrated into just one encounter, that advantage dries up entirely.
A single monster on its own can slot in very well as a kind of surprise random encounter, which can just be there to spice up the day. But I really would say that if you're throwing in a single monster, especially a non-legendary one, you should tune the difficulty a bit higher to make sure that it has an impact.
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