Episode 226 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: Monster Manual Design! We review the latest monster previews and continue to examine how 2024 has changed monster design. News: ENNies Changes AI Policy, Dimension 20 Rocks Garden, Kickstarter Breakdown, and more! Contents 00:00 Dimension 20 Rocks Garden 03:11 How Restart Campaign? 10:23 Emergency Takeoff Scenario? 20:46 Do You Fudge Dice? 29:50 New MM Previews 37:53 ENnies AI Policy Change 43:33 Kobold Press on Kickstarter Business 50:01 Keith Baker on Fiendish Gnolls 54:33 MM Design Comparisons 55:18 Empyreans 01:11:48 Ancient Gold Dragon 01:19:44 Semi-Alphabetical Actions 01:26:47 Vampire Familiar 01:34:48 Gargoyle 01:37:02 False Appearance Changes 01:39:10 Mimic Shapeshift 01:41:27 Which Mini Wore It Better? 01:42:34 Shout-Outs Thank you for listening! Get the full show notes with links on Patreon. Show Search Engine: https://mdsearch.alphastream.org/ Our intro and outro music is Metropolis Fanfare, provided royalty-free by Tabletop Audio (https://tabletopaudio.com) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). MP3 file metadata populated with Online MP3 Podcast Chapter Editor, built by Dominik Peters. https://mp3chapters.github.io/ and customized for Mastering Dungeons by Vladimir Prenner from Croatia.
hello and welcome to this week's episode of mastering dungeons your favorite tabletop role-playing game news interviews reviews and game design show i'm sean merwin here with teos abadia hey teos what is the happenings
Sean, how are you doing? I had two things that really blew my mind. One was I got my little like catalog in the mail of like what the U.S. post office thinks you should buy stamp wise, the USA philatelic. And D&D is still prominently displayed in there. There's all sorts of like, you know, things and Year of the Dragon. They're, you know, transitioning to Year of the Snake.
But but yeah, you know, it's not on every page like the last issue was, but it's still a number of pages. And they remind you that you can buy the stamps and the journals and the T-shirts and all that is still available, which is awesome. So if you need a gift, you know, if your birthday is coming up, it's amazing.
Yeah, that's one D&D out in the larger world. But we have number two D&D out there in the larger world. This weekend, Dimension 20 did their show at Madison Square Garden. And there is a review of it in Variety magazine. And they filled Madison Square Garden.
Yeah, I saw some videos online and I thought, OK, you know, there's going to be like the like black fabric that they put, you know, at the end of the area to kind of hide a third of this area or, you know, an eighth something. No, no. It's like this tiny area in the center of Madison Square Garden where the players are.
And then they show these videos and it's like the entire place just full of people. And people are cheering and going wild. I mean, it's like total rock star situation. And in fact, the videos I saw, they were like light shows and fireworks going off from around the where the players are seated. It's bizarre.
It is it is a different world than you and I grew up in where people are cheering and watching and celebrating a group playing a role playing game. Not to mention Dungeons and Dragons.
I love it. I mean, this is great. Where can we take it next, right? Like, this is amazing. Like, yeah, it's great. I do not want to be, you know, the geeks in the basement and the, you know, ultra rare hobby that everybody's afraid of. Like, I'll take the mainstream. Like, bring it.
Yeah. Bring it all the way. And you know who brings it to us? Our listeners bring it. Our listeners bring it each and every week, even more than we bring it, I think. Because they are excited. They're talking to us. They send us questions and comments. And we like to grab some of those and talk about them here. And we're going to start this week from our Patreon Discord.
David B. asked this very important question. My campaign has been on hold since November due to the holidays, moving house, and job stuff. How should I, as the DM, approach the restart? Are there any essential steps to re-inject the excitement and magic of the game after a series of rescheduling and cancellations? It's an excellent question. I leave that in your capable hands.
Well, I mean, so I had something a little bit like this. It wasn't mid campaign, but, you know, I'd been running a campaign. I finished that. I ran another campaign. And then it was like pandemic and busyness. And I had years off. Yeah. And so then it was like rebuild from the ground up.
And what I found was really useful to kind of re-inject everything rather than start right back into a campaign and pretend everything was going as it had been before was to do a couple of one shots. And we did a number of them actually of various lengths that just kind of got us warmed up and excited and interested.
And so something to think about is sort of that approach, but maybe tailored to the fact that you're mid campaign, right? So you can do things like, hey, Let's do a reset. Let's go back and play with pregens the, you know, NPCs you helped out back in this important scene that you all enjoyed, you know, three months ago, whatever it was. And let's play those NPCs when they did the previous thing.
Sort of the way a TV show does like, you know, go back and see, oh, that's how that ended up there. That could be a lot of fun, right? Something like that. That's just a one shot. So people don't have to pretend that they're right back in it and fully warmed up and all. It's a nice way to acclimate them with this kind of side one shot.
It can fill in holes, create new mysteries, get people going with it. And especially there, the key that I would look at is. What about the campaign was something that really resonated with people and where they might have more questions, but sort of not won't be jumping right back into it. It's this kind of other side piece. What do you think, Sean?
I like what Scipio, our listener Scipio, said on our Discord. Treat it as if you're launching a new campaign. Start with a recap, but then go bigger picture and focus on the main theme rather than narrowly on just that last session and remind them of big revelations or key info that they've learned, which they've probably forgotten.
I mean, my group will forget it an hour later, much less a session later, much less months later. Have the first session just focus on those storylines and themes, even if it's not where you left off. And that sort of goes with what you're saying, Taos.
I see it as sort of, if you're watching a series on television and you see previously on, and you get the 30-second to one-minute thing, this is last season on, and then you'll get the three-minute thing. to take out even longer. And of course, Jeff Mueller, show backer, says TPK them and start fresh.
And that'll teach them. Jeff is in my home campaign, so he should be careful what advice he's sharing there.
What I do when this happens, and it does happen from time to time, is talk to the players or talk to myself and say, we haven't played in three months because of various reasons. Could possibly one of those reasons be I'm not interested? or as interested as I should be, or the players aren't. Because it's one thing if, you know, oh, we can't do it.
If you're only scheduled once a month and you cancel two times, all right, that's one thing. But if you're like a weekly campaign and all of a sudden you find yourself not playing for three months, there is a chance, not a great chance, but at least part of that might be, you know what?
I just don't have the enthusiasm to take that step when there's this other thing happening that's going to draw me away. So I would just say to everyone, hey, let's be honest with everyone here. You guys want to keep playing this?
Yeah, it's worth checking in.
Noah's a fine answer.
Yeah. I agree with you. And it's also a time when you could assess the campaign and say, hey, where are some things that weren't working that should just drop, you know, like that faction system I was using isn't working. Let's get rid, you know, not go back to that. Like, yeah, you can reset that way. Sort of like what Jeff said, but you murder parts of the campaign rather than the characters.
I was reminded when you were talking about TV shows and the recaps they give, I read an article that was talking about our memory and how it works and how today's sort of stream everything, binge watch everything really works against the way our memory works. And so if you think of like the old TV shows where, you know, it's Thursday night, the next episode comes out.
um this was a thing that your brain wanted to hold on to and so you think about it and the next thursday comes along and the next piece when you binge watch all these shows in a row you kind of don't learn to hold on to it and that's how if you end up you know it's like been it just a year since the previous you know whatever season of the mandalorian or something and you're like wait what where did we end what happened so
The way to beat that is to force people to think of yourself, whatever, to think about it periodically. So if you can give them little bits leading up to your first session that get you back there, right? Like you could just write up quick scenes, right? To remind them of the locations, the NPCs, the whatever, the stakes, so that you start kind of, oh yeah, putting it back together.
Rather, you don't want to be there, sit down and try to resume as if, you know, everybody remembers everything when they don't.
That is so true, and I never even thought of that. The shows that I've binged or my wife and I have binged over eight to 10 episodes over two or three days, when the next season comes out, I will say, did we watch that? I don't even remember watching it because of that.
But if it's something that you watch every week or every, you know, once every few days, it does linger and it does stick in there a little better.
Yeah. We had a hilarious thing where we wanted to show someone a Bridgerton episode. We were like mid- I think whatever the last season was. And we somehow ended up on the previous season and we watched easily 15 minutes before we realized, wait, wait, this is the wrong season. And we have seen all of this, right? And it's just like, wow, we retained none of that.
But one of the other ways to remember is telling people, right? So the more that you tell people the story, tell yourself in the mirror, whatever, it'll start coming back to you. And that helps a lot.
Next question from DT Norris via our Patreon Discord. I've got a GM scenario creation question about the following. My Rime of the Frostmaiden game is just finishing, pilling their way into taking over the... Spoilers for Chapter 2 of Rime of the Frostmaiden. Give us 10 seconds. Okay, we're talking about taking over the Illithid ship here in Chapter 2 from the It Ascendant. Okay, spoilers off.
I'd like a time-bounded challenge to get this ship repaired and airborne. With mechanics where there is an overwhelming cold light walker horde approaching, these would overwhelm the ship if they can't get the ship airborne in time. As I'm happy to give them the ship as a feature of the campaign going forward.
Any suggestions for adventure templates or gameplay mechanics that would allow for this kind of, quote, get the ship off the ground now, fun and challenging scenario? Unless, of course, the party decides to bail on the ship because they could just run away. Yes. So this is a very astute, very good question that a whole show would not be able to answer if we do it justice. I will start with this.
If you want to do something like that just in an encounter, you're going to want to do lots of playtesting. Let me step back even further. Do you want this or do we want this as we create this encounter to seem like a threat?
have it be on in the background as you are doing what is a sort of normal encounter, because that's very different than making it an actual threat with mechanics that work in enhancing the threat. So in other words, you could just take a die and you could set it to one. And you could say, you're trying to do blank, and it could be ships, it could be defuse a bomb, it could be whatever.
And every round you go to two, every three. That gives them the feeling of the threat. But you don't actually have to have any mechanics behind it. And that can get that feeling across beautifully. The players never know that you don't have a set thing in mind. So that's the, I was going to say cheating way, but that's not cheating. That's just good storytelling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right?
It's using a prop to get a reaction out of your players. It's the experience. Now, if you actually want to make it a challenge that they could easily lose, that takes balance, that takes time. And usually we call these things clocks or timers. And they can be great. But if they're used in a specific combat encounter, where as the clock ticks, more enemies come, that is much more difficult to do.
So here's an example. Every tick of this clock, the characters take 1d6 cold damage as it gets colder and colder. Okay. That's very easy to think about. You know that every other, every third, whatever, a set amount of damage is going to be done. Easy to quantify, easy to qualify.
If you say that four zombies arrive every three rounds, that can get much more complicated based on what the characters are having to do because there is big swings in made or missed checks. And adding a monster is much different than adding 1d6 damage. So that's where the sort of playtesting, thinking it through happens.
And I want to talk about those checks, but I want to give Teos a moment to step in here.
Yeah, so a couple of thoughts. One is there's a fourth edition adventure that appeared in Dungeon Magazine issue 176 called Dead by Dawn for second level characters. And it involves kind of waves of undead coming into a temple and you've got to survive them until the light comes up. That's a pretty neat model.
And I've also got a version that kind of does that as a free adventure, my website involving veg pygmies and other threats that are attacking you in the jungle. So I see this as a, you know, like if you were doing this for publication, there's a lot that can go wrong with it. And it is a very hard scenario to do this whole sort of.
prep, set up, accomplish before all these bad things happen, to have it feel like the threat is right there. It's like the cinematic thing you're thinking, but that it feels that way gameplay wise is tough. But I think for a session, you know, where you're just shaking things up, I wouldn't be, you know, I mean, this is me, but I wouldn't be so worried about it. And I just go with it and have fun.
What I would do is I would think about what feels realistic in terms of things they must do and engaging. And so I would probably think to myself, well, on a ship, you have to go to various areas to do things. You've got to warm up the doohickey and cross blah, the juba dupe, right? Insert your terms from one of those space games.
So you've got to go to various stations and accomplish these things. And I think through if that doesn't work or if only partially works, what does that mean? And that could be interesting. Right. And then so that so there's success and failure in what they're attempting to do. And it feels satisfying and meaningful to go off and do these things. And so you spread out.
But if we're spreading out, then I've got to take that account into counterbalance. I would probably because I'm the kind of person who does use a spreadsheet for their encounter balance and encounter design. I would think about how can I have waves of foes that are interesting but are not going to overwhelm as I add these because I want to ratchet it up. So having one or two at first.
and then you know more sizable numbers of them maybe they're weaker and you could explain that like they've been frozen in the ice so they're stiff and they're not moving capably but maybe over time they will get faster and faster as they start approaching or there's some boss off in the distance that is
making them be fully functional or whatever empowering them so you could do something like that that allows you to ratchet things up but you want that feel of of of things going on if you like chaos you could have some random things that happen right like fail a check something random happens like another system blows somewhere else or they find a zombie crawling out of a part of the decking right something like that and that could be fun too
And that's a question of how much chaos you like. Like, if you like, let the chips go where they may fall out, how they do, you know, then you may be OK with like and everybody gets TPK or you have to run away. And so it's important to think about, like, you know, when you've got a movie director. You know that they know that at the end, everyone will get away.
Yeah.
Teos took most of my answer, the rest of my answer, so that's good. That's good. No, what I was going to say was the tighter that you make the checks to get the thing done before blank happens, the tighter you make it, the smaller you make it, the harder it is to adjudicate. So I was going to suggest doing it as a full adventure rather than just as one encounter.
And we've talked before about the problems with the as the fights going on, make these checks because the characters will either fight everything and then have plenty of time to make the checks. Or it's it's amazing. You will not believe how quickly characters can make checks if they put their minds to it. Yeah.
So you could say, oh, I'm going to do... I have five characters, so I'm going to do... I'll do six checks and hope that might take them four rounds. And then they'll just like, okay, five of us go and do these checks. Oh, we've all got guidance. We all, you know, whatever. We help each other. Oh, we're with advantage. Oh, you've already made four. I'm a monk, I can move everywhere. Right, exactly.
Exactly. So... That's the hard part. So if you make it the full adventure where you do have to explore this area to find the parts to fix the ship, then there's still that idea of a clock, but it's not so granular that you need to perfect it.
And something I'll say is you can put in sort of stop, think through some stopgap measures that'll help you troubleshoot this on the fly. Right. So one I would think of that that can kind of be cool either way, but that at some point the ship could just suddenly burst forward moving and then stop again. So it moves, you know, 100 feet in the snow.
which gives you the reason why nothing, you know, all these things aren't just overrunning the ship, like they managed to move it. They didn't get lift off, but they managed to move it. But maybe that calls for a piloting check or, you know, brace yourselves for impact and already take some damage. And you can adjudicate that on the fly. Like if this is going super easily,
Well, they moved the ship 100 feet, so there's a little bit of respite from the enemies. But hey, everybody roll to see if you took damage. Everybody roll to see if your system suffered a setback that you're currently working on. So you've got to rejigger it, right? If you needed more, you could do that. So you can put in these kinds of stopgaps to get you back where you want.
And similarly, you can do things that are on the threat side where you can, you know, have some way that if it's too easy, if it's too hard, right, you can calibrate it, have those little emergency bits there.
Mm-hmm. And the final question we'll take today is from Chris G8989 via YouTube. I'm going to sort of truncate this, read parts, and then summarize parts. So Chris asks, where do you stand on the fudging dice argument? Personally, I'm a firm believer in letting the dice tell a story. Chris uses laptop and mouse, but no DM screen, so rules are all in the open.
I believe that if you are making a dice roll where you need to potentially fudge the dice or setting yourself up for failure, if you are making a dice roll, you need to be able to live with both potentially good and potentially bad outcomes.
Chris suggests some alternatives to fudging the dice, such as capture the party instead of TPK, have monsters run away after knocking a PC or two out of the fight, provide a way for the party to retreat from an overwhelming challenge. I personally would rather have my PC die by the dice than live by the DM fudging dice.
So a perennial topic, always good to check in every now and then to see where we stand on this. I will start with the standard, every group, player, and DM is different message. And then I will give you my initial thoughts. So here's the conundrum I see, Chris. You say, I am a firm believer in letting the dice tell a story. And I've said this many times myself.
the problem is dice don't tell stories. Furthermore, rules can't tell stories. Only people can tell stories. So I'm going to highlight this even further by taking a couple quotes from the question. Chris says, here are some things you can do instead. Capture the party instead of a TPK, or provide a way for the party to retreat from an overwhelming challenge. And You say overwhelm the party.
If you're going to overwhelm the party, and it's obviously going to be TPK, you can have the enemy capture instead of kill. So are the enemies doing medicine checks to stabilize the characters if they're down? Are you making them roll every single death save to make sure they do? If you don't, you're fudging the rules, which is, for me, the same thing as fudging the dice.
So you are stepping in as a storyteller to change the way things are supposed to work in order to make a better story. For me, you've answered your own question there. Just take out rules, put in dice, and you're doing the same thing. So I get that it's not extremely equal, but the thought there is the same sort of thought process. Teos, what do you have?
Yeah, I agree with that. There are... There are times when the dice just don't achieve what you want or not just even the dice, but the setup of what's there doesn't achieve what we want for a fun experience. And it's because of the dice swinginess. It's because designers aren't perfect and characters are valuable and players are variable. And there is no truth to design, right?
If I design an encounter and And you then are running it. What I wrote isn't true. It's what I came up with at that time. And if I had worked on it another hour, it might have been different. Or if I work on it today, it would probably be different. Right. We it's just there. And I don't care if it's Monty Cook or anybody like whoever wrote that.
it isn't perfect it isn't some sacred thing and any designer i've talked to that's at that level will tell you yeah i mean i don't it's not perfect change it if you want right make it yours and so there just isn't a truth behind the scenes to it the truth is the outcome it's the play that you have together and so if that's veering in the wrong direction i'm absolutely okay with changing and that includes shaving hit points off of monsters uh rolling something and saying it misses
lowering the creature's armor class you know explain it in a narrative way so it makes sense right you know actually broke with that blow you break their their plate mail you know they they look like they're easier to hit now just you know explain what you're doing when it's when you would need to um but it's totally fine things i would not do you know don't
make a critical hit or something like that that could possibly take someone out. Don't do something like that because that can lead you down a path that you'll regret and can seem cruel because it's not necessarily fun. Extreme peril is seldom fun when it's being done behind the scenes rather than
surprise outcome for everybody um the other thing is when there are big exciting moments i will always roll in the open because that is itself fun right you know you are in this tough situation and the assassin's gonna get three blows against you and you are you know unconscious this could kill you let's see those dice right because it matters and and that is important to do i think in those big big moments
And everyone will have their own threshold for when it's appropriate to step in to change the story. If I'm doing a tournament play, organized play, where there's things at stake outside of the game itself, then I will not fudge and I will roll in the open.
When we talk about that ludonarrative dissonance, the conflict between the rules of the game and the story that comes from those rules, there's actually a third thing that's there that we don't talk about a lot. But that's the play experience, which is completely separate from the story and the game. And so what is the experience like for me as the game master and the players?
If I deem that changing something will make that experience better, without even thinking about the story or the game, I will definitely do that as well. And only you know the players, only you know yourself, and when it is right to do that. And I don't begrudge people who say, I will never fudge an eye roll. That's not wrong, especially if your players are on the same page as you.
And I also don't begrudge a player that says I fudge everything. I roll a die and I do whatever the hell I want. If your players are down with that, I'm down with that too.
Yeah, and at the end of it, what players are looking for is a confidence that this is going to be a fun game and that your style will be fairly consistent. I think they're less concerned about how you achieve that as more that you're going to pull it off. Something I do often that I think is a monster power in Forge of Foes is when...
uh when the characters are just you know they they start off really strong they just start tearing into everything one of the things i'll do is as a reaction allow my monsters to attack back attack back if it's a strong monster right like a boss or somebody that looks like trained important feral you know super aggressive whatever and that will always surprise the players right because they're they're in this super upper hand moment but then they just get hit for some damage
doesn't change anything, right? It'll really never change the outcome of the venture, but it's one of those, oh, and it creates excitement. It's that kind of gameplay thing. We don't change the story at a big level. It's just a fun interaction that makes them take it all more seriously and get into it and, you know, maybe spend bigger resources and so on to just dig into it more, right?
One area where I always fudge the dice is initiative. If I have three sets of monsters and there are six players, and I roll all three and I get 20, 20, 19, and the players all roll low, I don't want all my monsters going first. But I do want the monster that can impact the story the most to go first. So I will make that go first and then I will intersperse or vice versa.
If I roll one, one, two and the players all roll high, I'm gonna get one of my monsters in there because the game flows better and the story flows better if we're going back and forth between the game master and the players.
And it's great when the ogre goes low in initiative and the mind flayer goes early, right? Like that just it's a better experience when that happens. It makes more sense. It delivers on the promise of what's there. And so, yeah, I will absolutely say a three for the super brilliant mastermind boss. No, that's going to go earlier.
All right, thank you for those questions. We've got more in the queue, but we're going to have to wait till next week to get to those because we have news and commentary. Starting with the D&D Monster Manual previews continuing to roll out. Now they are talking about lots of different creature types, undead, monstrosities, aberrations, and fey.
These videos were put out to discuss these particular monster types specifically. Let's start with undead.
uh what did they say about undead tales yeah and important to note that by the time you hear this uh the embargo will be lifted for creators who got an early look at things so you'll start seeing some some things getting shared out there but these previews are by the official team and so they don't always show you the stats but they talk about things at the higher level
one of the things we hear over and over again across all of these categories and it's true of the undead is new types right so we've got new types of vampires uh we've got things like crawling claws but also a crawling claw swarm which i think was also in fourth edition shadow dragons have another age variant so you can have different crs right so where they saw a monster and said you know you would want this to also face it at a different level of play then we get an extra version that's a different cr either lower and higher than usual
Monsters with more capabilities, where they looked at things like, does this need some enhanced mobility compared to the 2014 version? And sometimes you get a table, they talked about this in one of the videos, where you can roll on. So for example, for the Banshee, why did this thing become a Banshee? And so they provide you a table you can roll on for some options.
Since the embargo will be lifted by the time this video comes out, I'll say that in looking across these tables, Sean, and I don't know if you've looked at them or not, but I found some of them are great and some of them I'm like, this isn't a thing that I can use right now. Right.
And we talked about this when we were reviewing the monster overhaul book, but you know, is a table really creating creativity at the moment when I need it? Or is this sort of the wrong table for the job? And sometimes I think these tables are so-so.
Yeah. I haven't looked at the table for like the Banshee. So I can't really tell you. And I, You and I both are of similar minds on tables, right? They're great for very specific situations or for certain kinds of game masters at certain steps. I would rather see a... I treat them as lists.
I treat them as lists of potentials that I don't always need, but if they're helping someone, then I do not begrudge them that space. What do we know about monstrosities? Well, monstrosities, we are told, are used as sort of a catch-all monster category, but also to cover the classic mythological monsters. So with 2024, the team considered these to be mutated or combined monsters. So the owlbear,
would be an example of an owl and yes, a bear coming together. I assume a chimera would now be there because that's both mythological and combined. The team also made various humanoids like lycanthropes part of this group. At one point they mentioned that the team reviewed the type of every monster. Okay.
I know that we celebrated at Ghostfire, we celebrated lycanthropes becoming monstrosities because it solved a design issue for us and made life a little better. Oh, what was that issue? The issue was with our monster hunter. Because we didn't want monster hunters to hunt humanoids. But lycanthropes are definitely something that a monster hunter would be specialized in hunting.
So as we were waiting for the monster manual, we're like, please make lycanthropes monstrosities. Please make lycanthropes. And they did. And we celebrated. And I went and revised the monster hunter.
That's interesting. Well, you know, again, since the embargo will be lifted by the time people hear this, one of the things that's really interesting is looking across all of these humanoids that they have changed out. And, you know, they kind of hint at it in these various videos of, oh, we made this this type for this reason, this other.
But to me, what seems pretty obvious is that this sprang from The concept of what kind of things should we be killing and what kind of things should be what are monsters versus what are cultures. And so you do not find drow in the monster manual. You will find a drider. You will find lolf. You will not find a drow. You will not find an orc.
And there's an interesting table that does these conversion things. And so like the stat block for the orc did not go away. It became the like thug, which is now not an orc. It's just a, you know, so it's like we didn't lose the monster, but it is no longer that humanoid that it was.
and and so to me this is just a very concerted attempt to to change this which hey you know some people have been calling for um so kudos there you know recognition for the importance of that job um but it's also you know you lose the fact that if you want to battle with some orcs you're not supposed to in the 2025 methodology go and find some orc stats you're supposed to find
other humanoid stats that could be what you know is it an elf thug is it an orc thug that doesn't matter right uh which is which is interesting and i'm sure that's behind a lot of these types being assessed as we're really not just thinking i think the primary driver was that right yeah
What else do we hear about monstrosities? As with the other videos, the examples were given of new versions of monsters like a Bulette pup and a stronger primeval owlbear.
Yeah. 4E also had a young belay. The design quirk that I really stuck out with me was they discussed how the primeval owlbear, they were thinking about how they wanted it to glide out of a tree or off a cliff to attack you. And they said they went through various iterations of giving it some sort of glide kind of capability.
And then they said, you know, what we did was give it a five foot fly speed so you can jump and then glide out of the fall. And I thought to myself, wait a minute. Is that really clear in the rules that if you have a flying speed, you can at the end kick it in? And I don't know that that's obvious. So we had a fun discussion on our Discord about that.
But I thought that was a really wild design choice that I don't think is obvious without any text to support it.
So I'm going to make an executive decision. I'm going to move the rest of this discussion, aberrations and fae, into the second part of this episode, since we're going to be talking about the Monster Manual anyway, and we've got a lot of other news to get to. So I'm going to do a little magic here, a little magic.
In progress, folks, you are seeing this live as I scroll down and put this stuff at the end. At the end of this episode, it's amazing what technology can do these days.
I'll like copy or cut and paste. I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah. Cut and paste live. I'm going to sell Madison square garden as I copy showing that off. Yeah. Yes. Again and again. So what, what other news do, uh, the YouTube channel that discusses all these things is youtube.com at D and D wizards, uh, slash videos. So there you go. We have some news about the, any awards. as we get into our AI section here.
So last year, the Any Awards added language to clarify their AI policy. This sort of flew under the radar, but this year it caused some backlash, including people removing their Any Award logos and saying that they wouldn't even submit this year unless something changed. The policy prohibited products from being eligible for the award for which AI was used.
So if you used AI art, you couldn't win best art. If you used AI writing, you couldn't win best writing. But you could still use it in other parts of the book. And so the Ennies also said that this was basically an honor code sort of thing, since they would lack the ability to confirm whether something was AI or not.
And so this prompted everyone to say, or not everyone, a lot of people to say, Ennies, we're done with you. If you're using AI or allowing AI stuff to get awards, we don't want to win an Ennie. And so the Ennies said, that's the past tense, said that they were working on a response and they locked the page on their site.
And they said they won't be able to make any changes this year, but they're listening and considering. And just moments before we started the show, literally as we started the show, there was an update. Teos, fill us in.
Yeah, so the Ennies have said, you know, it's too late to change this year because people have already submitted things. But for next year, we will not... allow products that contain AI. And they posted on their website saying, quote, feedback from the TTRPG community has made it clear that this policy does not go far enough.
Generative AI remains a divisive issue, with many in the community viewing it as a threat to the creativity and originality that define the TTRPG industry. The prevailing sentiment is that AI generated content in any form detracts from a product rather than enhancing it. So that was a really nice statement.
And they say in response to this feedback, the any awards are amending their policy regarding generative AI. Beginning with the 2025 to 2026 submission cycle, the any awards will no longer accept any products containing generative AI or created with the assistance of large language models or similar technologies for visual, written or edited content.
Creators wishing to submit products must ensure that no AI-generated elements are included in their works. They can't change it this season, but they recognize the importance of celebrating human creativity that's at the heart of the community, and they thank everybody for the feedback and so on. So the full quotes in our show there. But yeah, what do you think of that, Sean?
I think it was probably inevitable, and we're getting to that point where I don't want to say war, because that's a very strong, loaded term, but it's pick-aside time, right?
Yeah, I mean, I know creators, Jeff Stevens was saying in a forum the other day that, you know, the DMs Guild is just suffering under the weight of all this AI generated content that, you know, you just you can't compete with. There's too much, right? It just drowns out all the other creations because it's so easy to say to something, hey, make me a wizard subclass.
chuck it on there and see if anybody buys it, right? It devalues everything. And I think behind it, you know, we've talked about this before, all the issues of AI, but you've got all your water consumption, energy consumption at a time when we critically need to fight climate change. It feeds into all of this tech bro harmful culture, this crypto enrich yourself at the expense of others.
We've got situations like the stability of Taiwan and all of the Asia Pacific region rests on how we look at generative AI and crypto and technologies like this. It's massively impactful, right? Like it could literally rewrite Taiwan, right? If not other places. And so it's just, it is fundamental, I think, to take a stance because of all of the associated issues.
And it's larger than AI as a technology. It goes back to whether our governments and our and we people are willing to stand up to that kind of corporations first type mentality and even corporations built on a house of cards that we anyone smart knows it is right that it's just fake uh yeah yeah that's that that's that's the real issue for me is
We've seen all of this, Web3, NFTs, all the hype. And it captures people who would otherwise not fall for it because of the technology, because of the details, because of the granularity of it. You see the trees and love the trees, but you don't see the forest for it. And anyone can be subjected to that. Sure.
sort of thing, if it touches the right part of your brain that focuses in without seeing the bigger picture. So kudos to the Annie Awards, and we'll continue to keep an eye on AI on how things go. We get word from Cobalt Press about the state of pay. Kobold Press and how they use Kickstarter in their business. What did Wolfgang have to say about Kickstarter and Kobold Press, Deus?
It's pretty neat. You know, Kobold Press has had a back and forth on their blog recently with everything from how terrible the Dungeon Master's Guide is to really positive things. And I like this. I like this look where they're trying to inform you what their business is like so you have a better understanding of it and also in a way that can be helpful to other companies and creators.
And so they break down how they approach Kickstarter and what it means, I think sort of in two ways. One is to say, hey, you might think that when you see us make hundreds of thousands or a million or whatever, that this is like we're swimming in money, right? Scrooge McDuck kind of thing.
And so to educate us as to that's not the case, but also to say, hey, here are all the places where money goes. And you can understand that and maybe also think positively and feel trustworthy around, you know, you'll have trust in Kobold Press for their approach. So they talk about, hey, Kickstarter launched in 2009. We've had 32 projects since then.
We've raised 15,000 from 306 backers in our first project, right? So low beginnings and then climbing higher. And they have a three-step process. Number one, fund design and development first. Number two, put the funds in escrow and spend as costs accrue. Three, count your chickens only after the game has shipped, which is kind of a funny way to say it.
And then they go in and share an example of the project math. Do you want to chat about this? You want me to?
No, I can take a little bit of this. So Wolfgang shares an example of this project math and how the funds aren't necessarily what they look like to an average person taking a look at the Kickstarter. So he provides this fictional example of a project that funds for $100,000 from 2000 backers.
each backer paying $25 for a hardcover plus a PDF book or $100 for a deluxe hardcover and PDF or a hardcover and a virtual tabletop implementation. So first the money goes to the platform, the creatives, marketing, manufacturing, shipping, staff, business expenses, and taxes. He breaks it down this way. Kickstarter takes 9% to 10% of the total right off the top. So already $100,000 is $90,000.
Creating a Kickstarter first means that you've created a game design manuscript to know what you're going to be putting out. You have to show everybody. So this could take like $20,000 or more or 20% of this project, leaving around $70,000 now. Editing needs to be done. Art, layout requires about $10,000 in costs for Cobalt Press or 10% of the budget. So now $60,000 is left.
And I can tell you right now, if you're creating new art for all of this, it isn't 10%. It may be 30%. It may be 40%. Cobalt Press has a backlog of art that helps them be able to fill their books with art without having to always get new art. So keep that in mind for other Kickstarters. Then we have printing and software costs, getting the PDF ready, getting the virtual tabletop stuff ready.
So that costs 25 to 30,000 or 30% of the budget. Now you have 30,000 of that $100,000 left. But you have products. You have a book. You have PDF. You have VTT. Now we get into shipping. Shipping to the US and Canada for 1,300 hardcovers costs about $17,000 and may cost a lot more if these tariffs that we're hearing about kick in. or they may not, we don't know.
It costs even more to go to the European Union or Australia, even with a local partner that requires additional payments too. So now you're talking maybe 12% of the budget. So you're leaving left with $18,000. And that's maybe profit except for taxes. And you won't know about that amount until you know all the rest of your business, how it did, because you pay based on how much profit you got.
So you have 80% of your budget left to cover that. Anything to add to that, Teos?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good accounting of a possible project. I think that in general, it is possible to do better than this example provides. But when you have an audience, when you have that reach, that...
changes all the dynamics of it right when you print enough that your cost per per book printed goes down your profit goes up and now you can cover it um you can you can have enough actually to put a number of books that are in your warehouse and get sold over time so income continues you have your pdfs you continue to sell so income continues and you know so i think
realistically cobalt press ends up with more than 18 000 because of the scale at which they operate but this advice is very important for the smaller company or the individual creator who may think that they're going to end up with a hundred thousand and the reality is for them at their levels of printing you're going to end up either having made very very little money if at all and we hear this all the time from folks or you
ordered so much product in order to make a profit per unit that you now have a bunch of books sitting in a warehouse that may never get sold. And we also hear that from creators. So it's really dangerous to get that right when you don't have a huge audience that kind of covers up the mistakes. Right.
Yeah. So all of that can be found at Cobalt Press dot com on their blog. More blog news, we have Keith Baker talking about fiendish Knowles in Eberron. So this article sort of gets to the heart of what an addition change can do to a setting, which is super fascinating to look back over since first edition to fifth edition, how the rules have changed, how the worlds have changed to meet that.
And Keith goes into a very specific part of the world he created, Eberron. with this when he talks about gnolls and them changing from humanoids in previous editions to fiends in the 2024 version of 5e. Keith says that at various points there have been edition changes that touch on Eberron's unique aspects.
When that happens, he and Watsi have worked to integrate the change whenever possible rather than just rule it out. He provides an example of when lycanthropes changed.
Yeah, that was from 3rd to 3.5.
Yeah, right. From 3rd to 3.5. Lycanthropy in 3rd edition could spread very easily, whereas in 3.5 it didn't. So he had this... organization called the Silver Crusade, which got rid of lycanthropes because it was an existential threat. So when 3.5 came out, lycanthropy didn't spread.
So now the Silver Crusade, which at first looked like these noble and world-saving people were like, yeah, we're just out there killing lycanthropes even though it can't be spread. So that made them seem evil. Give me a werebear child. Right. So they decided that lycanthropy could have been spread in the past, but something about it has changed and now it can't.
Yeah. And I think he even said like through the actions of the Silver Crusade. So they did such a good job that lycanthropy itself was sort of beaten back because of the sort of gods involved and so on, which is a neat way to look at it.
Right. And so now, as gnolls turn back to their fiendish ancestry, what do we do with them? I love Eberron's use of all different types of humanoids. I love the goblinoid empire. I love orcs. I love all of that. And the way that it all worked. So what does Keith say about gnolls?
Yeah, so he has a neat way of saying, you know, the gnolls had turned away from their fiendish influences. So making them now fiends seems to sort of collide against that. But what he says is actually, he would actually lean into it harder and say that for those gnolls who are foes, they are truly, they have this fiendish spark inside of them. And so they are truly fiends.
ravenous butchers who are out there fighting for whoever it is that they're aligned with, whether it's, I think he says, Rak-Tul-Kish in the demon wastes or the wild heart in the Eldin reaches. This is where he would learn and lean in and say, absolutely, these are fiends. But if you're gnolls of the Znir Pact, now those who are playable should be humanoids, right?
Because they have turned back on that fiendish spark and sort of excised it out of their bodies. And this actually matches something that in one of the videos Jeremy Crawford talked about where he said that a monster's type...
is not indicative of what it's like when it's a playable species and and and he gave multiple examples around this where he felt you know you can be different when and so really keith is happens to be on the exact same page here where he says when they're a member of this near pact and they are that kind of playable good guy well they're humanoids
And that can be found on Keith Baker's blog at keith-baker.com slash fiendish dash goals. Knowles, not goals. Sorry. So that is our news and commentary section. this week here on Mastering Dungeons. In our main segment, we're going to continue our look at the 2025 Monster Manual, comparing the design of the 2014 monsters with the 2025 versions.
Last time we talked about a few monsters, but we didn't get even close to as far as we wanted to. So we are going to dig right back in right now and start talking about Imperians. For those out there, Teos, who aren't already thumbing through or looking at or studying the videos that have come out about the Monster Manual, what are Imperians?
Well, they're defined. Now monsters have this little abbreviation. So we get scions of the gods and they can be found anywhere and their treasures are relics. They are the spawn of deities. While not gods themselves, they possess divine influence and powers related to their divine parents. And this was a preview that went out to one of the creators that they got to show it off on their YouTube.
So we got to see the actual full page description. There is a table of features, 1D6 features, like Number one is balanced, naturalistic or suggestive of watching eyes. Or number six is morbid, menacing or monstrous or that embody the viewer's fears. Okay.
And we get a CR1 version of this normal. The main Empyrean is CR21, I believe. CR23. But we get a smaller version, a baby Empyrean, if you will, called an Empyrean Iota. And these are really fascinating to me. These CR1 monsters are just the tiniest wisps of the divinity of a thing that focuses on a particular belief or theme.
If a deity has this thought of, I wonder what's going on with this follower of mine, this iota would spring forth and go and find this person. And I love that idea. I think that idea, not only story-wise, but mechanically, you could have so much fun with. So can we start with the iota stat block since it's the smaller one?
Yeah, and the first thing that I thought was interesting was it says medium celestial or fiend, then the type is Titan and neutral. So one thing I thought was, okay, you gave it an alignment... which I wasn't sure if this would be like the kind of creature that says typically, well, I don't see the word typically anymore for alignment. Uh, it's also not unaligned or varies. It's just neutral.
Uh, and it can be a celestial or a fiend, which is an interesting way to do this. What else did you see?
Yeah, that's the first thing I noticed is that if it's embodying the essence, some small thought, memory, or indirect attention of a deity, it would have a worldview. Not only would it have, it would have a serious worldview, right? It did.
If this was the, yeah. In 2014, it was chaotic good 75% of the time or neutrally evil 25% and it was considered a celestial in both cases. So that's a change there.
Yep. And so I wanted it to not have an alignment. Well, I don't want any of these alignments. Oh, interesting. Because it's otherworldly. As a game master, I want this thing to... This thing should be memorable. If it is the attention of a pit fiend or some demon or devil powerful, it would have rage, it would have avarice, it would have something that would make it memorable.
So as I'm going through and looking at what it does, Incorporal movement. Makes sense. It's not a physical thing. It can move through other creatures or objects. Great. Magic resistance. Makes sense. It's a powerful, magical thing. So it would have advantage on saving throws. Otherworldly strike. Okay.
When it's next to you or from a range of up to 30 feet, it can hit you for necrotic or radiant damage. Makes sense. If it's a fiend, it will do necrotic. If it's a good deity. What about neutral deities? Eh, who knows. But then we get spellcasting, and this is where it got a little weird for me. So spellcasting is once per day, it can do one each of these, Bless and Lesser Restoration.
And I went, what if it's a demon or a devil? What if it's a fiend? Would it bless? Why would it bless? Why not Bane? Why not have Bane as a choice? Or even if it's from a god, but it's from a god who doesn't like what you're doing and wants to stop you, it should have a way to do that other than seven points of necrotic or radiant damage.
Yeah, blessing its allies doesn't seem like the move it would make.
No, no. And so I understand why it's there, I just want that one more thing. And then I saw as a bonus action, so spellcasting of course is now under actions. Let me go back to that. Spellcasting is under actions, so it can do Bless and it can do Lesser Restoration. And after Lesser Restoration it says, as an action, And I'm like, okay. Wasn't lesser restoration always an action?
No, lesser restoration is a bonus action now. But it can cast it, or it has to cast it as an action. And I'm like, why? Why not as a bonus action? Since that's what the spell is. Is there a reason I'm missing?
no and i mean it's not like uh i don't believe we had the empyrean iota before this is a new again that sort of idea of a different cr and if we look at the empyrean itself which was also shown off in the video it does not have these spells before so it's not like they had to try to preserve it or something not that they took that approach but you know they decided to put this on here for this specific guy
And it is weird, this idea that, like you said, it could be a celestial or fiend, but it's doing less restoration on you. What fiend sends its agent to do that? I don't know.
Right. Yeah.
And as an action for no reason whatsoever. Okay. Yeah. And the thing is, it's not like it doesn't have bonus actions. And that one's also interesting, right?
Yeah, you know what I'm saying here. So we have a bonus action section, which I'm cool with, and it says healing word once per day. The Empyrean casts healing word using the same spellcasting ability as spellcasting. So I wondered how they were going to do this.
If they have a spellcasting section, but one of the spells there is a bonus action, would they leave it under spellcasting or would they put it under bonus action? And they are separating it out. And I'm of two minds about this. Mind one says, yes, please. Everything that's a bonus action, put under bonus actions. Everything that's action, put under action.
I can totally get with that to make it very, very simple for DMs to go, okay, I can do one action, I choose that. Okay, I can do one bonus action, I choose that. I don't want to have to look for my bonus actions in actions. However... By separating it out, there's one, two, three, four, three lines plus a header.
that you're adding to a stat block that you could just put that spell up under spellcasting and maybe do parentheses B next to it.
And they did say lesser restoration as an action, so it's not like they didn't take the words to tell you when something is a different action economy type, right?
Right. Yeah.
Literally in the same stat block. They could have just said healing word as a bonus action. Right. And especially because it's useless. Well, and maybe it's because, no, I guess it doesn't matter because spellcasting is using wisdom.
I think the bonus action thing is also interesting because all these words, healing word once per day, cast healing word, using the same spellcasting ability as spellcasting is useless to the average DM. You already said spellcasting uses wisdom up above. And none of that really helps me if I don't have healing word memorized and I don't know what it does.
I have to open it up and figure out what the range is, how much it heals, do the math on how much it heals, right? Because I get my spellcasting bonus and all of that. Yeah, yeah.
I'm at least... seeing both sides of this. But it's an interesting, this is a conundrum that many a designer has when trying to reconcile space and word count, but also clarity, but also doing the same thing over and over and over. Even if it's not perfect for one situation, it may be good in another situation. So you still do it.
it's one of those things where I just like, okay, yeah, design is hard and I, I don't, well, I don't want to be the one that has to do it, but I know it's tough. It has to do it. Well, yeah.
And I, I talk about this in a video this week. Um, it's especially hard if you think of the 2014 monster manual is a really good book. And when you think of like what needs to change, um,
a small list it's a general sort of list rather than a specific one right most dms do not have a huge catalog of boy you've got to fix all these things it's a really good book and if you think about the things you might want to change you might say like oh more lore whatever but then you got to run into space issues right with any of these kind of big general things it's a tough it's a tough thing um
I'll pivot and say I do like how they at times innovate with some pieces. And when we get to the Empyrean itself, not the Oda we just talked about, but the larger CR-23, it has a really neat thing with this sacred weapon action it can take. And you roll to hit. If you hit, you do some force damage. And then the target is stunned. until the start of the Empyrean's next turn.
But the target can choose not to be stunned, and then it takes an extra 21 force damage that bypasses resistance or immunity. What do you think about that?
Let me say I cautiously approve of this, but only if it's used very rarely. One of the One of the things I'm always keeping in mind when I set up choices like this is how is it going to slow down play for not just the average table, but for the table that likes to discuss things.
And if we start getting this in every third monster where it's like, okay, you can fall prone, get that prone, or take five more points of damage. it turns into a one min-maxing game. Okay, wait, let me think this through. And if you're a quick thinker, it's still gonna take you 10 seconds. And if you're a slow thinker, it might take longer to figure out what is the optimal solution.
and and lord help us all if the whole table decides to no don't don't fall prone take the five because there are four more creatures going to attack you and that gives them advantage which is a 20 better chance of hitting you and 20 chance of better hitting you if they're doing 10 points of damage each time is essentially this which adds up to more than five points right just me making this random stuff off off the cuff has already taken a minute
And we don't want that. However, it's a cool thing when it's once and it's right.
Yeah, and it's nice. It's a sort of thing we haven't seen, I think, in 2014. At least I can't think of an example like it. I like seeing that sort of every now and then something that makes you go, oh, wow. And your players will react that way. They'll go, wait, what? Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, the other thing I've noticed from the Empyrean over 2014 to 2024 is the magic weapons trait is now gone. So before it would say that the creature's attacks are considered magical. And I think in more than one stat block that we've seen, that's been gone. So it looks like not only are they getting rid of that trait, but they're getting rid of this whole resistance to non-magical attack stuff.
They seem to be going with force damage as a cure-all to this must-be-harmed-by-magical-weapons-to-do-full-damage.
Yeah, you know, it all can drive play one way or the other. I'm already hearing people in the Adventurers League talk about how the brooch of shielding has gone from, you know, the useless thing you carried around to, wait a minute, I must have resistance against, you know, force damage. So it's all, I don't know.
And I get why we want, you know, every now and then we have a monster like the skeleton where it matters whether it's slashing or piercing or bludgeoning, but...
so often doesn't and then we're just always talking about what could just be weapon damage but we have to list all three out and we say it right you know you take five slashing damage when it almost never matters right it's like this thing you have to do for those few exceptions yeah
We just call it fighting damage. Well, we were playing once and I was DMing and somebody said, I do 20 points of damage with my sword. Well, what kind of damage? And he got all flustered. He's like, I'm fighting damage. And I'm like, all right, that works for me. It's fighting damage now.
Yeah, that's fair.
But yeah, that's one of those holdovers. the resistant to non-magical weapons, piercing, slashing, bludgeoning from non-magical sources, blah blah blah, that I understand why it's there and thematically or narratively it's been in our stories forever, right? You need magic to harm this creature. You need silver to harm that creature. You need cold iron to harm that creature.
But we've gotten rid of a lot of it. So I think this was just a logical step to that.
You've noticed the giant jump in initiative, right? Which I thought was interesting because so the 2014 Empyrean, you know, doesn't list initiative. That's a 2025 change. So it's the it's DEX is the same. It gets a plus five bonus added to something that would use the DEX in this case initiative. So it should be plus 15. But here it's plus 19, which is that's big.
It is. You're going to get at least a 20. Even if you're rolling with disadvantage, you're going to get at least a 20. Yeah.
The other thing I noticed was the parenthetical 29. So they show you the plus 10 initiative on these monster examples, which I did not think they would do that. Some folks like that. We talked about initiative in the earlier segment. I don't like just adding 10 to it.
I find that leads with a lot of monsters being all chucked into the middle because initiatives, while these are wild swings, they often end up all in the middle if you do that. Love the plus 10 method.
yeah and i'm i'm down with a higher initiative for monsters especially at that cr i think it's players i see players get into the 30s with certain builds uh and you know always wrote always in the 20s uh so i'm i'm good with that do you want to hit the ancient gold dragon next
Yeah, I'll try to hit it somewhat fast because it's an enormous stat block. Speaking of high initiatives, plus 16. The Ancient Gold Dragon is a CR24 monster, and it was kind of neat. It's a guy that all these links are in our show notes.
So D&D Beyond had a web page where they talked about the Ancient Gold Dragon and used it as an illustration of what's going on in stat blocks in 2025, what each of the sections are meant to do and how they've changed them up.
um the thing i wanted to know what the ancient gold dragon one is how it had changed from the ancient green dragon we saw before which as we mentioned the reactions are gone the legendary actions are back uh how it would do things like spells because it's got spell casting so one thing that happened that i'm really i'll just go since i just said spells let's talk about this right now
Mordenkainen, when that redid Monsters, right, which was sort of a soft redo of Monsters, depending how soft will be your perspective. We got these blog posts talking about the mentality and Jeremy Crawford would talk through, hey, you know, if it's an attack thing, it's not going to appear in a spell list. It's going to be down below as an action.
And you now will know what to do and you can use it easily because you don't have to go look this up. And I thought that was brilliant personally for me. Not everybody agrees. But then when Mordenkainen actually arrived as a book, that was sometimes true, but sometimes not. And the version that was in the action wasn't like, help me know what it is, it was sometimes something different.
It wasn't quite the spell and you couldn't counterspell it or dispel it or whatever. It was sort of weird. You know, it's like a spellish version. Well, here we get an example of how 25 is doing it, which is not like Mordenkainen's and especially not like that blog. So in our spell list, we have at will things, which includes guiding bolt in a level four version.
We have flame strike once per day as a level six, as well as various other things that are sort of more tactical utility, word of recall, zone of truth. And these what this does is when you're trying to be effective as a DM, it forces you to look it up. Right. And see whether you want to use this both situationally. You know, what is the area of effect of flame strike?
But also, should I do this instead of breathing or rending or whatever? And you've now got to look this up for all of your offensive spells, in this case to guiding bolt and flame strike. And sometimes these spells appear in these monsters because the point is to give them a ranged option. but you don't know that you don't know if this is a burst of damage or is it?
And while I say all paths lead to CR, they don't necessarily, right? I'll pause there. What do you think about that?
No, I, I agree. And I love the idea of anything offensive. Give it, give it a action thing. Uh, counter spell arguments aside, uh, I love the idea of, all right, we're out of combat. I can look up Word of Recall. I can look up Zone of Truth. I'll let the players roleplay amongst themselves while I flip through and look this up.
But in combat, I want to keep things moving, and I don't want to have to stop and look up the spell. So I would have loved to have kept it in the action section.
Yeah, yeah. So I'm glad... Yeah, go ahead.
It's worse because now guiding bolt is not just this one-off that you can cast, but it's part of multi-attack. Now, sure, once you look it up once, hopefully you don't close the book and have to look it up again, although that's something I would totally do. But, you know, that's something that's always going to be going off. So it becomes even more important to have access to it.
Yeah. And so, yeah, the multitask is three rend attacks. You can replace one of those with a spellcasting to cast the level four guiding bolt or be your weakening breath. And I like that as a tactical thing, though it does make things quite complex because now you've got to consider all of that, right? Your rend is 28 damage total.
Your weakening breath is not damage but gives disadvantage in a 90-foot cone. So is that worth it? Your guiding bolt is going to do less damage than your rend, I think. It's either that or the same, but it's ranged. It's close. But you've got to look this all up and what's the range of it and what happens when I'll get advantage if I hit, you know, all these things. It's a bit messy.
And I, you know, I try to remember that a lot of these monsters, a little different with the ancient gold dragon, but in a lot of these monsters that have these kinds of features, they're not going to be around for that long. So do I really need all of these options? It's a bit complicated, right? I don't love it. The fire breath is huge, right? This is a 90 foot cone, 71 fire damage or half.
that's an enormous thing and so the idea of you know all paths lead to uh the same dpr well you need to get that fire breath in and you want to make sure you focus that on as many characters as possible if they need a threat if that's what's going to be fun it's not the same as doing a rend right now maybe all path leads because it is one of those rounds you're doing it because it's a recharge five to six but but that kind of thing there is is um
It adds to all of this. The other thing is it has legendary actions, right? So you've got your multi-tack, you've got your rend, you've got your fire breath, you've got your spell casting, you look up, you've got your weakening breath, you look up. Then we've got our legendary actions. We get three of them or four if we're in our lair. So that's a nice way to boost the being in a lair.
And your options are three. And they are banish, guiding light, or pounce. Pounce is simple. You move half your speed and get to rend. That's awesome because you get a little mobility if you need it. Your guiding bolt as well, if you can't get to anything, even with a pounce, I guess that's an okay option. But you'd pounce otherwise. And then you get banish. What do you think of that?
Well, the first thing I notice is there used to be numbers, like points that you would use, and you could use two points for this. Three points if it was a really strong thing, but you'd use all your points. Now it's everything I've seen, at least so far, it's all one action, one use of legendary action. And I've always been cool with legendary actions.
When they were going to get rid of them and instead give several reactions, I wasn't a huge fan. So I'm totally fine to go back to this.
Well, Sean, we do get that text, and this is something that's 2025 specific, where at the end, when they do what would have been a 3.1, they say, failure or success, the dragon can't take this action until the start of its next turn. So that means banish, you can only use once per round, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. I had a question going back to actions. Everything's alphabetical except when it isn't. So multiattack I think comes first no matter what. And then rend comes second. before fire breath. So it goes multi-attack and then rend, so the melee attack. Fire breath comes next, even though it's not alphabetical. So it's that.
But then spellcasting comes next, and then after that comes weakening breath. So they've separated the two breaths with spellcasting. Because it's alphabetical. But they don't do alphabetical anywhere else.
It's like alphabetical except the multi-tacks main thing or something like that. Wow.
Right. And so I prefer spellcasting at the end because then I always know where it is. If I need to look there, I'll just go to the next header and look up. And so I thought that was weird how they did it alphabetical, except none of it's alphabetical.
That's so interesting. Yeah. Well, and I do want to say that is fascinating because it contributes to that whole, you got to look all over the place to figure it out. I do want to go back and just say one thing about Banish, which is it's fascinating on a number of grounds in its tactical richness. One is it's DC 24, so that's rough. 120 foot range that a creature of the dragon can see.
When you fail, 24 damage and they are incapacitated and transported to a demiplane until the start of the dragon's next turn. When you get to that point, you now can choose to put it within 120 feet of the dragon at the target. So you can put them 120 feet up in the air if you're outdoors or ginormous cavern. You can put them above the lava. You can you know, it's really interesting.
You can put them in where you're going to breathe.
right uh so there's a lot of tactical angle to this banish that i really love and someone who play tested a combat with this they said the banish is the thing that makes this gold dragon brutal because you can take out that big damage dealer and you can put them wherever you need to right yeah i mean if it's a melee person that can't move very quickly 120 feet away might be a problem
that well you this is a cr24 monster sure so you're probably dealing with 18 19 20th level characters yeah but still you never sometimes right you run that table and you realize oh you know the fighter has no way to move closer than just their 30 foot movement or something you never know i'm wondering it says i'm wondering if space is is uh a game term
It's not capitalized, so I assume that they don't... Yeah, sorry. When I saw it, it says it puts you in a space and you sit up in the air. It makes sense unless... We are told that it can't be.
I don't believe there's anything prohibiting, you know, putting you in damaging terrain. I think there are some examples where it'll say something that suggests kind of indicates you can't put it in a place that's damaging or, you know, it's a safe and occupant. I feel like there's some wording I saw somewhere like that.
The only thing I see is playing on a grid where it says entering a square. To enter a square, you must have enough movement left to pay for entering. It costs one square of movement to enter an unoccupied square that's adjacent to your space. And it says orthogonally or diagonally adjacent. So I guess that
yeah i mean i think it all counts i think you can put them you know in the air above the lava pit for falling damage and lava damage um sounds like a plan yeah the the what i also did here and and if folks check out my videos uh that i'll be putting out uh i've broken down i've gone through the ridiculous process of adding up all the damage for all these monsters
And how you calculate this damage will vary on what you think about the area of effect, right? That 71 damage to each target. The old 2014 way was to say that even in that absurdly large 90 foot cone, that this flying dragon is only going to get two targets. There's no way I'm running this combat and only getting two targets in that.
So I calculate a little bit differently on the damage, and I'll talk about that in my videos. But when I calculated this DPR, it is an impressive 231. The 2014 guideline in the DMG for CR24 was 204. So this is, you know, about a 15% increase over the guideline. And the average found in published monsters for CR24 was only 120. So it's close to double what we found in the published books.
Forge of Foes also uses the guideline of around 204. So, you know, it is hitting harder than Forge of Foes, which is a fairly strong fight at high CRs. So that's really interesting, especially because your encounter rules allow for this dragon to be met earlier than it was under 2014 rules. So that could also make it even harder, right? You're meeting it at a lower level.
So that's really interesting. How does that measure against the characters being stronger? Boy, hard to say.
It is hard to say, and that's why it's going to be so interesting once the book is actually out and in widespread use as we see experiences and numbers and analysis start to come in, where we're actually using the player characters as the reference instead of theoretically or charts or what have you. I have a strong feeling that the characters are going to be even stronger than they were.
And so threats like this CR24 monster, it sounds great until everybody makes their saving throw every time.
Well, and that can be okay, right? Like, I mean, one of the big things about the Forge of Foes advice is we're telling you, you know, hey, for that difficulty your group is hitting, here's what you can do about it. And it just takes knowing where the new level is, right? We've got to figure out what that new math is so that we can work off of it.
The monster, understanding the monsters, the encounters, and the players, because all three have changed, and that requires then going back and retooling your approach. Yep.
I want to talk about the vampire familiar for a second. Cool. Because I thought, again, like the Empyrean iota, I thought this was a great story concept. We didn't have a Renfield-type monster with vampires. So I was happy to see this, that the vampire familiar is not a familiar as we think of them going with wizards.
thralls of a vampire who are humanoid, not undead, but humanoids, but who have this connection to the vampire and allow the vampire to do things through this familiar without actually being there. And so there are many times when we've told stories in previous editions of D&D, including 2014, where we sort of had to rely on the vampire spawn, which is okay except they're undead.
And they ding, ding, ding under scrutiny. Whereas this vampire familiar shouldn't. And I love that. I love that story-wise. I love that there's the ability to do that now. Sadly, within two years, everyone is going to have the stat block memorized. And so they will search for the umbral dagger that the vampire familiar has. But, you know.
Yeah, I mean, I checked this person. Do they have exactly 10 daggers? Oh, that's a vampire familiar.
It's a vampire familiar. Let's talk about it. What does this monster do? It's a CR 3 monster, armor class of 15, and its dex is only plus 3. But we don't get I don't think under gear we only get daggers, so I'm not sure where the extra plus two is coming from, but hey, I'm fine with that. It has darkvision even though it's a humanoid. Very stealthy and has good perception.
But its main trait is this vampire connection. So while the familiar and its vampire master are on the same plane, the vampire can communicate with the familiar telepathically, and the vampire can perceive through the familiar senses. I.e., the vampire can see you. And give you instructions.
And give its familiar instructions.
Yeah, it can give the familiar instructions, but it can see you play your character. The vampire has eyes on you. Now, if you give the vampire spells that rely on you being able to see, you have some interesting ways to interact.
Yeah, possibly. Yeah, yeah.
The only thing that I'm sad about is that it's a CR3 creature. So I'm like, okay, that's tough. That's not a pushover. It's not a guard, right? It's not a bandit. And it gets two attacks with its umbral dagger, which it can obviously throw or use in melee. But it does seven points of necrotic damage.
Plus five piercing.
What's that? Plus five piercing. Oh, sorry. Five piercing plus seven necrotic. Okay. So that's good. And the target is reduced. If the target is reduced to zero hit points, it becomes stable and has the poison condition for one hour. And it's paralyzed while it has this. So at low levels, if you're first level or second level and you're dealing with one of these things, okay, that's rough.
But if you're a higher level character who's actually fighting a vampire, that feels too weak to me. I want this monster to work against first and second level characters and against 12th level characters fighting a vampire. And I feel like it doesn't do both. Well, can I blow your mind, sir?
Please. And again, now that we can, by the time this airs, we can talk about it. So the vampire familiar at CR3 does 12 points of damage twice, so 24 per round. Right. The vampire itself is CR13 and does 49 damage per round.
Okay.
So that's one of the things that I've been scratching my head about the most in the Monster Manual. And especially because they talked about vampires on one of their videos and they highlighted how these are better. And I would like to know how my CR 13 is. The vampire does only 49 around, including all of what it does. And the Vampire Umbral Lord does 142. So there's a giant difference.
Maybe I'm missing something and I'm looking at the Vampire stat block wrong. You know, once everybody can look at it and you can tell me where I went wrong. The Vampire Nightbringer does 38. It's CR 8. I don't know what happened to those. So they may need the Vampire Familiar to come in and fight for them.
It's true. Does that include a reduction of hit points from the maximum?
know maybe that's what's driving it um it could be that the vampire scene as a hit and run they do have some capabilities that are neat around that sort of hit and run type concept but you know how it is your players can surprise you with their ability to lock something down or prevent you from getting away and so and just also the idea to me is you have to be able to scare your players a bit hit them hard if you want to get away and run that's to me an encounter story type thing
Not that the monster should therefore be weak at attacking. And the vampire itself, it's an enormous stat block. In fact, it might be one of two full page stat blocks in the book. It's one of the few. There aren't very many that occupy the entire page, nothing else on it. And for all that the vampire does that, it just doesn't deal a lot of damage.
And it's a legendary actions don't, you know, make up for it. It's rough. Yeah.
Okay. I haven't looked, as far as you know, have not looked at the vampire. I know they're rough to make, having made them, a lot of them, or overseen the making of a lot of them for the Monster Grimoire for 2014. Those monsters that have a lot of legend around them are a tough nut to crack, but... That's very interesting.
I'll go back and double check it because it's on my list actually to go back and make sure I didn't get this wrong because it just shocks me how low the damage is. But all of the vampires sort of felt that way. It's multi-attack for a vampire is to do an attack that does 15 twice and then an attack that does 19. And yeah, that does reduce your hit points, but yeah.
And then maybe the idea is I'm just charming lots of people and, and, you know, that commanding you. So you aren't acting, but that's a lot of ifs. And I worry about that design.
Yeah. Well, we have time for one more monster. Is there one you specifically wanted to look into, talk about? Lead us off.
All right. So the Gargoyle is interesting because it was an absolute beast in 2014 because not only was it very capable, hit hard, did well, but it was taking, was it immune to non-magic items? Or was it resistant? I'll have to look.
I think resistant, yeah.
Okay. So it was, but that alone, you know, that was really, really a big deal. And that is gone. I will say that, and I'm going to look at the Gargoyle 2014 and pull that up here. Yeah, so it was resistant to non-magic. That wasn't adamantine. That was a big deal to it. So it has gotten a small hit point bump, but not enough to make up for that.
It now has a flyby, which is new, so it can attack without drawing opportunity attacks. But otherwise, it's making two claw attacks for seven damage each as a CR2. And that is a small amount of damage increase over what it used to do. It used to do 10, but it now...
you know loses that kind of defensive part that it had that was such a big part of it it also loses its false appearance which i thought was interesting To me, that's a very big part of a gargoyle. And I won't talk about how it should be called or grotesque, but people on my Discord have heard about it.
But I thought that was interesting because this is one of the ones that I was like, oh, gargoyles, man, you're going to be in fighting them for a while because of that half damage kind of angle. Which I also like because it meant that casters got to shine and that kind of thing and that's gone. Immunity to...
non-magic uh you know where you need non-magic and you're either immune or resistant is essentially gone in 2025 what isn't gone are immunities and resistances and the number of monsters with them is enormous um so there's a lot of that you know most monsters have one or the other if not both which is interesting yeah
Yeah, I'm interested in the gargoyle losing the false appearance but gaining stealth.
Yeah.
And I'm wondering if that's going to be what replaces it. Because I can totally see a game reason to do that. Because if you enter the library and there are all these statues, and the player says, well, I look at the statues to make sure they're not gargoyles. False appearance really doesn't tell you what to do with that.
I mean, it's indistinguishable, right? That's false appearance.
But what does that mean? Does that mean you can't even make a check? You can't make an arcana check, an insight check, anything? Yeah, because I think gargoyles are basically living stone. Hey, at least you can make a perception check to see if it's moving.
I don't... Yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, but to me that is, I like that because to me it speaks to the gargoyle's nature as being an elemental. It is stone. It's like when the Gallup door, right, is just sitting there as a boulder. If it doesn't talk to you or open its eyes, it's a boulder. and there's no reason to see anything else there.
And it, and it doesn't need to itch or blink or breathe, you know? So there is no perception to be made. I would argue, I think it's great. And same thing with a mimic. A mimic is just so otherworldly that if it wants to be a chest or a sword or whatever, it can be, and you're not going to figure out what it is. And so I actually liked false appearance, but, but I get what you're saying.
Yeah. I'm, I'm interested in if any creature will now have that false appearance, and I'm guessing not.
I think they don't. I think they have changed to address it in some other way that isn't the false appearance angle. I think the mimic, I'll look it up here. Which is interesting, right? And it goes to that whole 2024 versus 2014. You know, what are you trying to do with it and why? So the Mimic has now a bonus action shapeshift.
And this actually appears in a number of monsters with slightly different wording. But in this case, the Mimic shapeshifts to resemble a medium or small object while retaining its game statistics or it returns to its true blob form. Any equipment it is wearing or carrying isn't transformed. So now...
you can detect a mimic right you can just look at it from afar and go i want to make a check and i guess i don't know what it would is it in that case making i guess i guess for the mimic it has stealth plus five in 2025 2024 so you would roll against that
Well, you wouldn't just roll against that, Teos. You know what you would do? Oh, sure.
I would take an action to make a... It's not study.
Study is intelligence. Well, if you're going to investigate, you would study. If you are... What's the... Search. Search. There you go. Search.
Search, action, which would be your perception versus study, which would be your investigation. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess. Yeah, you make that action and you would. But, you know, I don't like it, right? I mean, I think that The mimic should just surprise you because it's that otherworldly. And I think the gargoyle, you can't tell.
And you can shoot it with an arrow and you're going to damage that rock. And then you can decide as DM, does my gargoyle decide to reveal itself because it doesn't like that you're shooting it with arrows. But it also could just sit there.
True. Yeah, it's...
You know, I don't think that's an enormous issue, but it goes into that whole concept of, you know, they have made changes. They have gone through every monster and truly changed these all in ways big and small. And so you don't know what a monster will exactly be other than if it was the same name, it will still be the same CR.
But aside from that, anything could have changed and you have to look at that new stat block if you want to run the new version. i will say one last thing which is i did pick up some 50th anniversary minis and uh you tell me is the fifth edition uh pit fiend better than the first edition pit fiend
I got to go with the first edition, I think.
Yeah, me too. Me too. I did, however, really, really love the one other one I'll show off is they had first edition versus fifth edition for this guy. So here's your first edition, right? Classic from the cover of the player's handbook. And then...
the guy who's standing up to attack you which appears in you know one of the books with the tradition and he you can see he's missing an eye he's getting up to punch you because you stole it you stole his gem eye and now he's upset i love it right this is great and his groin region is getting burned quite severely hopefully he's immune to fire because that would that would also cause me to be upset
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Go to patreon.com slash mastering D&D. Find out all the cool things happening there. You can also help us out by subscribing on our YouTube channel, which is youtube.com slash at Mastering Dungeons, or leave us a review wherever you listen to the show. go to YouTube, like and subscribe, leave a review, do whatever you can, spread the word, helps us out. Teos, what you been up to?
Ooh, I've been looking at this monster manual a lot. So you can come to alphastream.org and go to the YouTubes and find me there talking about my opinions of this here book.
And you can find me on the socials at Sean Merwin. You can follow the podcast at Mastering D&D. And, you know, join us wherever you listen. Send us an email. Scream out your window. Whatever. We love it. Teos, we have gone through even more monsters awaiting the real drop for this Monster Manual. So what are we going to do now?
Well, I'm going to go to the local newspaper and put an ad in the classifieds to become a vampire familiar.
And I am about to... Retake my normal blob form.