The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Monster Manual Concerns – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 13 Jan 2025
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 00:01:11 Kickstarter Spotlight: Monster Vault 2 by Kobold Press 00:08:23 Product Spotlight: Crit Happens iOS Dice Roller 00:10:32 Kickstarter Spotlight: Free5e 00:15:54 Product Spotlight: Sly Flourish Newsletter Adventure Generator and One-Page 5e 00:20:49 Commentary: 2025 Monster Manual Videos 00:44:24 Commentary: What Do I Want From WOTC After the Monster Manual? 00:49:07 DM Tip: When and How to Fudge Your Game 00:59:41 Patreon Question: Monster Dials for Non-5e Games 01:01:47 Patreon Question: Alternative Initiative Options Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Monster Vault 2 Kickstarter by Kobold Press Crit Happens iOS Dice Roller Free5e Kickstarter
today on the lazy rpg talk show we're going to look at the monster vault 2 kickstarter from kobold press i found a new iphone dice roller actually a no iphone dice roller was recommended to me built on the design that i had done for the free dice roller that i talked about a few weeks ago we're going to talk about free 5e a new project being done by dale over at wormworks gaming we're going to he's just getting started that we're going to talk about that
D&D Beyond posted some videos about the D&D 2025 Monster Manual. We're going to dig into those previews a little bit, talk about what we're excited about, and talk about what else Wizards of the Coast can do for us this next year. Today's main GM topic is going to be how and when to fudge without dice.
And we're going to cover more questions from the Patreon Q&A all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show. I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games. The Lazy RPG Talk Show is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish.
Patrons get access to all kinds of tips, tricks, tools, adventures, scenarios, source books, and other materials to help you run your fantasy RPGs. You also get to join the Lazy RPG community over on Discord, and you help me put on shows like this. To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support. Monster Vault 2 by Kobold Press.
Kobold Press has been running Tales of the Valiant. Oh, it shows that I'm a backer. Tales of the Valiant is a 5e version, the 5e house guide, the 5e house RPG for Kobold Press. Very popular publisher in fantasy role playing games and for 5e. And they have done the full Tales of the Valiant suite, which was the Tales of Valiant Monster Vault, Game Master's Guide, and Player's Guide.
And now they're doing the Kickstarter for the Monster Vault 2, a new book of monsters. People love monster books. I have a couple of disclaimers. I have numerous, numerous disclaimers before I dive into this. Disclaimer number one is Kobold Press did compensate me to talk to you about this project. Total truth. I'd have talked about it anyway.
So that disclaimer number two, I was also paid to write two sections of the monster vault to one of them, a monster, which I like to do whenever I have the opportunity to write a monster for a monster book. It's, it's pretty straightforward for me to write a monster. But they also commissioned me to write a section of the book about doom points. We've talked about doom on the show.
I talked about expanding doom points. They saw the video I did about doom points and liked it and said, hey, would you like to write about doom points for us? And I said, sure. So they also commissioned me for that. So I have two pieces of this book that I wrote and was paid to write. And I was also paid to help promote this to you. I would have promoted it anyway.
I think you know how much I love Kobo Press. Tales of Valiant Monster Vault 2, new monster book. They seem to be doing pretty well. 2,300 backers with 25 days to go. And they have, check it out. Are you ready for it? One-click preview. Look at that. One click, you get to download the PDF.
That is always, I would have, even though they compensated me, I would still have given them crap if they didn't have a one-click preview. But it's a really good preview. And a 25-page preview shows you what's going on and lots of cool things. So, of course, big piles of monsters. I really like the Kobold Press design of monsters.
It is my favorite physical design, like what the stat block looks like. Let's go pull up a stat block here. Let's see. We'll go with this dust cloak, right? I really like their style. It's clean. It's easy to run. It focuses on the important stuff.
I love that they have combined ability scores and ability bonuses and saving throws all into just one line rather than three lines, which is what the 2025 Monster Manual does. We'll talk about that. We'll complain about that later. Really good design. Really strong monsters that hit hard, that's for sure. You're definitely going to get poked in the eye when you fight monsters from this.
And the Monster Vault 2, of course, is going to have lots of cool new monsters. But it's also going to have a bunch of sections about running monsters in it that are really cool. And one of the things that was a complete surprise to me is the idea of monster bundles. I was really excited about monster bundles.
One of the things that monster books, I think, could do a better job at is telling you what monsters work well with other monsters. It's one of those angles that's kind of hard to do. In Forge of Foes, we actually have a section that talks about this. We have monsters by environment.
But in those lists of monsters by environment, we also include groups of monsters that you can theoretically put together. That's one way to handle it. The other way is this idea of monster bundles. I'm hoping there's a bunch of these. A monster bundle is essentially sort of like an environment or a group of monster types and then what monsters work in well.
And so they have example are forged lords, which would be mountains, clockwork, mechadrons, robots and stuff like that. And it talks about what are the groups that would exist at a various tier. So a tier one Forgelord group. Forgelord uses statistics of a dwarf mechanist and works out a massive forge of the mountain home. Three clockwork watchmen act as personal guards.
Two robot wardens act as lieutenants, leading and protecting scouts of groups of soldrons, duplicrons, I don't know, duplidrons, mechadrons connected to and executing the plan for the Forgelord's mind. So it gives you like a full scenario, right? Right. You kind of have like an adventure ready to go in a paragraph of text, which I think is really cool. They do them for four tiers per group.
They have like an invasion of the sea, which says like deep. And it's a whole like little scenario. Right. Deep underwater, dark blue waves of sea, a sentient magical relic that has long been forgotten, forgotten, slumbered. An amulet of the fallen Chul Empire. It was awoken when a scavenger stumbled upon it.
The artifact sees the creature's mind set to rebuilding the ancient empire from its memories, aiming to bring the seafolk up from the depths to become rulers. These are like mini campaigns, right? Like there's a lot going on. Tier one, the true artifact controls Sahuagin monarchs, whose lair is a collection of interconnected underground underwater caverns.
Puppet monarchs advisor is a sea hag and Sahuagin captain leading small tribes of Sahuagin to dig through ancient ruins in the monarch's command. A swarm of chule broodlings draws in the artifact to protect the monarch. The tribe sends its hunter sharks and reef sharks out of the caverns with a few sahooigan as scouts to recruit others. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then there's multiple tiers, all the way to tier four. The chule artifact controls a kraken who is protected by a trio of chule potentiates. So I guess there's a bunch of chule types that are going to be in here.
The artifact surrounds itself with a council of underwater peoples who command its armies, an abyssal naga, merfolk, archdruid, sahooigan, archmage, cilia, dragon turtle, serves as the kraken vanguard and primary sage, weapons against nearby ships and coastal cities, paving the way for its chul, merfolk, merrow, and sahooigan armies. Pretty neat. Right.
And this reminds me of the campaign seeds that I, or the campaign threads that I have in like city of arches where I have these like, you know, one to 20 or one, you know, sometimes there's one to 12, a couple of two of them are one to 20 where it's like a campaign arc and like two pages.
And the intention is like, here are the locations, here are the monsters, here are the kinds of things you could deal with. This one's clearly focusing on monsters and focuses on types. Now what's neat is that this is, can be used in lots of different ways because a, you could use it as like, Oh, this is a good idea for a campaign. Right.
But it also just tells you what monsters work well together. You don't even have to use the rest of it. You can just look at the bold parts. I mean, like, oh, yeah, it'd be kind of cool to have these, you know, swamp stuff together. I think those are really neat. I don't know how many they're going to have. I hope there's a whole bunch of them. But of course, it's not a book about these.
It's a book about monsters. So it's going to have lots of other things. But these are like good GM tools that we can use. That are really cool. So I'm very excited for it. I think it's a neat idea that the Monster Vault 2 isn't just another big book of monsters, but is also taking a look at other ways to do it.
And knowing that they commissioned me to write 2,000 words about Doom Points means they're expanding it in other ways too. So I think we're getting sort of a miniature expansion of a Game Master's Guide that's being put inside of a monster book as well. I think that that is going to be a very useful...
very useful thing and that's the so that's the monster vault 2 by tales of the valiant looks really cool a couple things i just recorded a show with kendo the community the the the the streamer for cobalt press i did a talk with him last week that's going to be up on the cobalt press channel and i actually i think i have two segments on a couple channels coming up and i'm doing a live stream with him in a few weeks where we're going to talk about it as well
So kind of fun to talk to the Kobo Press folks about the work that I did for them and about these ideas. We had a big long talk about Doom Points. It was really fun. So exciting times. So that is the Monster Vault 2 Kickstarter coming out. So I put out an iPhone dice roller before we're going to try some space age technology.
And Jonathan Petra out to me and said, hey, you know, I took the design idea that you had for that and built an iPhone app for it. And I was like, oh, let me try it out. And it's free, free to download, doesn't steal all your personal data, doesn't require an internet connection. And it's really cool. So it's absolutely free to sign up or free to download this app.
It's a standalone app that sits on your phone. Very, very cool. I took a couple of screenshots of it from my iPhone. So here's, this is really the one that you need to see. You press on the buttons and it rolls the die. You can increase or decrease the number of dice that you roll by pressing the plus and minus keys. You can increase the modifier and you can create custom dice of any set.
This is exactly the same kind of stuff that I had in the free, that I still have in the free dice roll at slideflourish.com slash dice. And a couple of tricks for this that I used it and I was like, this is great. You should do these things. And he's like, I already did those things. And I was like, oh, I should have read the instructions.
So I'm going to tell you the things that I didn't know that one is when you hold down the plus button, it goes really fast. So that way, if you need to do like 24 D4, you can hold it down to get to 24 really quick. That's one big one.
The other one is you can reset any of those three things, dice, modifier, customs, by pressing and holding in the middle and it will drop back down to one or zero or whatever. So it's a real quick way to, you know, if you want to do, if you do a 24 sided custom die, you know, you can hold down the button and it'll get to 24 pretty quick. And then you can roll your D24.
And then if you hold in the middle, it resets it back to whatever the default was. So the default is one for die, zero for modifier and three for the custom die. So really cool. I'm using it on my phone. I like it a lot. And it's a far easier way to have an offline die roller. This is for iOS, right? This is for your iPhone device, iOS device. I don't know if there's a Chrome one.
I don't use an Android phone, so I can't say if there's a Chrome one or not. But I thought it was really, really cool. So you can find a link. It's called CritHappens is the name of the dice roller. CritHappens, available on the App Store. I will have a link into the show notes so that you can do that. Free 5E. I have certain house rules for how I cover crowdfunding campaigns and things like that.
There's a few different ones. One of my house rules is that I don't promote a crowdfunding campaign until it's actually going. I don't think there's a lot of use in trying to do... I mean, people who run crowdfunding campaigns... Unless it's my own. If it's my own, then all bets are off.
People who run crowdfunding campaigns definitely want people like me to talk about them as many times as possible. But generally speaking, I talk about it once. I do one segment on a show to talk about it. And I don't do it before the crowdfunding campaign is going because I don't think it's real valuable for you when you can't really do anything.
Now, of course, with notifications, stuff like you can't. I'm making an exception for this one because I think it is an outstanding idea. So Free 5e is what it's called. Free 5e is going to be a Kickstarter. You can launch and support and be notified of this Kickstarter. Free 5e is being done by Dale at Wormworks Gaming.
Dale is a fantastic dude, fantastic creator, who has a big focus on accessibility in gaming and trying to expand gaming out globally. to lots of areas where gaming typically doesn't reach, particularly with marginalized people. And that includes people in other countries where their costs, where their economies do not necessarily support big $50 books for them to buy for RPGs.
Free 5e is going to be taking...
the best components from various system reference documents for 5e including the 5.1 srd including the level up advanced 5e system reference document and including like my own stuff from the lazy gm resource document which is released under created commons license and our our lazy gm monster document material that we put together from forge of foes which are also available
in a Creative Commons document.
And because they're all Creative Commons, he can put them all together and build pieces out to build a full version of 5e, a fully playable version of 5e that goes beyond just reading system reference documents and that is designed for accessibility in a bunch of different ways, which includes having a markdown version, having a PDF version, having a version that's available in Braille, having versions that are available in EPUB so that they scale to your phones.
So the idea behind it, I talked to him about this. So I don't know if all this is on the site, but he and I have had conversations about this, about how to get it out there.
And then, oh, and the other one is the PDFs are going to be specifically designed to go to print on demand shops, which means you pay for a print on demand version in whatever the economy is of the country that you happen to be in. So that makes it far more accessible for people all over the world to be able to download and print and or buy a print-on-demand version of this role-playing game.
And Dale is looking for funding through Kickstarter and stuff like that with a bunch of rewards to help them do the editing and pay for the layout and pay for all the different design ideas that need to go in there. They're still talking about exactly what the components of all of it are going to be. You know, with an intention of making it as big as possible.
But a lot of that is going to depend upon funding. So he and I have been talking about I offered to him to offer unsolicited advice, sometimes solicited, sometimes unsolicited advice about where I think that this can can really work out. And he and I have been talking back and forth. And even this morning, we were talking about it.
Regardless of how all that goes, I think it's an outstanding project. I think it's a great way for the whole world, for everybody to be able to get a hold of this RPG with no tie back to any one single company or source.
The thing about this is the entire results of this work are also going to be Creative Commons, which means that Dale himself loses control over the project as soon as it is published. right? Loses as in, you know, you no longer have to worry about what he's doing with it because you now can do whatever you want to do with it.
So I think it's a really great way to think about 5U that goes beyond like companies, big companies that are putting out their material in system reference documents in the creative commons are outstanding. Like that's a really good way to make sure it's a, it's a, it's a great Ulysses pact, right?
You're saying that whatever else happens, this is out there and you can use it to publish your own games. In this case, it's not even just about publishing games. It's about having the freedom to put it on different websites, having the freedom to format it in different ways and then share those formats out with people.
Examples are, I can't take a markdown version of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide and give it to anybody. But I can with the 5.1 SRD. If I go through the trouble to make a Markdown version of like, let's say the 5.2 SRD that's coming out or the Black Flag Monster, this is one that actually did, right?
The Black Flag Monsters are available in PDF, but I went through the trouble of getting them in Markdown. I can share those out in Markdown because they're under an open license. In this case, the Ork license, which is a little more restrictive than Creative Commons, but not for that particular material. This is that example of,
It makes it easier for all of us to use this material in whatever format works well for us from an accessibility standpoint, but also just from general use. So I'm very excited about this. You'll find a link in the show notes.
Be notified when it goes live and support it because I think this is not just a fantastic project that's going to result in some really great products that you can use, but I think it's actually really working to make the world a better place through role-playing games directly. And I think it's outstanding. I talk about subscribing to the newsletter.
You totally should subscribe to the newsletter. There is a link down in the show notes to subscribe to the newsletter. It is totally free. One of the things I talk about when I talk about the subscription is what you get for subscribing. So I wanted to show you what you actually get for subscribing to the newsletter, which what you get is the Sly Flourish Dungeon Adventure Generator.
This is a short six-page product, six-page PDF. You get it instantly. As soon as you sign up for the newsletter, you get an email sent to you that has a link to it, and you can just download it, and that's yours forever. Download and keep it. And it's in the same format as all of the products that are released on the Sly Flares Patreon.
So this is actually similar to a product that I would be giving away on Patreon, but it is intended for me to give it to you for free. And its intention is to have... On three sheets of paper, front and back three sheets of paper, an entire role-playing game with all the stuff that you need in order to run it. You'd have to be experienced with RPGs. You'd have to know what you're able to do.
But, you know, you have to know how to run it. Like, it's not going to give you everything. But in three sheets of paper, you could throw it in your bag. You know, you throw it in your go bag and you could go and run an RPG. Yeah. And it also offers materials that you can use even if you're using another role-playing game. And it doesn't matter what role-playing game you're running.
If it's a fantasy-based role-playing game, it can help. And it starts off by, it has things like a lot of random tables, quests, chambers and monuments. What are the kinds of different chambers that you might run into or monuments that you might run into? Monsters and bosses.
One of the tricks here is the higher the die you use, the higher the roll of the die you use, the more powerful the monsters are, up to about CR 3. So this is intended for low-level play. The whole thing is generally intended for low-level play. It's not tier 2 and above.
Mummies and hellhounds and green hags and basilisks are about the hardest of the monsters that you're going to face if you're using the monster tables in this. Traps and hazards. And I'd say like, you know, typical traps and hazards, DC 13 and inflict between five and 12 damage, uh, five and 11 damage. And, uh, there's a bunch of different kinds of traps.
And what's really fun is you can roll a couple of times on them and come up with combinations of traps. That's one of my favorite things to do. Treasure. Uh, I talk about anything from gold bag, bags of gold coins to wands and rods, light magic weapons, heavy magic weapons, stuff like that. So you can quickly roll up treasure, helpful discoveries, things that you might pick up that are nice.
If you're traveling through a dungeon, uh, Environmental effects, things that could be going on that are weird. These are sort of weird effects, aura of hatred, chaotic magic, lava pool. Sometimes they do damage. Sometimes they offer advantage or disadvantage, things like that.
My conditions and origins table, smoky, bloody, illuminated, and origins are like human, elven, goblin, celestial, fairy, shadow. So, you know, neat things that you can have here. Spells and items. Spells, or maybe like what magical spell might you find in an item or might be tied to a magic weapon or something like that.
We have 20 spells, starting with Bless and going up to Lightning Bolt, and then items including keys, knives, brooches, tiaras, a die, lanterns, and things like that. All intended for you to be able to roll and generate stuff for your game very quickly.
Then I have a thing called One Sheet 5e, and One Sheet 5e is a super streamlined version of 5e, doesn't have levels, doesn't have subclasses or anything like that, and intends to give you a character that you could run, that you could very quickly improvise and play with people who have never played before. It is built on 5e rules. So if you understand 5e rules, it works out.
And you build a character in it. You start off by setting your ability scores, which are 3, 2, 2, 1, 0, minus 1. You pick an ancestry, and then you pick a class. And you get some equipment. And the equipment is basically like, here's a common list of equipment that you have. But it's intended to be first level.
The intention is that you can build a quick first level character off of a single sheet of paper. That was the intention here. It's really two sides of a sheet because then you have a little description about how combat works. Combat uses theater of the mind, what resting does. And then we have a list of monsters and their stats. The monsters start with like a giant rat and go up to gray ooze.
Very straightforward monsters because you're only level one characters, so we don't really want to have much. Another little section on traps and hazards and another little section on treasure and magic items. And then I included five Dyson maps. Right. And we have four maps in one and then a fifth map. That's a whole sheet. That's kind of a big dungeon.
And I thought these just were good representative dungeons that are relatively small in size, but still have lots of options that you could then mix with all of the other stuff in this adventure generator to build a quick adventure.
So the intention is on three sheets of paper, if you were running a one-shot with some friends, if you just wanted some ideas for your game, if you wanted to teach someone how to play, that you could print these off double-sided and you'd have three sheets of paper, six total pages, that give you everything you need in order to run an actual game. So that is available for free, absolutely free.
All you need to do is join the Sly Flourish newsletter and you will get a copy of this Dungeon Adventure Generator, which I think is pretty fun and pretty cool. This past week, Wizards of the Coast has fired up their marketing machine for the 2025 Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. They've had a couple of big videos. One they did was an overall video. I think it was a little bit more than an hour.
It was a pretty long video. And then they did one about dragons. Shockingly, they haven't shown a lot of stat blocks. They've shown a lot of the art and they've had a lot of discussion about it, but they didn't show a lot of stat blocks. I had thoughts and opinions that I wanted to share. You of course have your thoughts and opinions and that's cool too.
But I just had a few things that kind of grabbed my mind when I was looking at this. Part of which was like, I don't think we should get bent out of shape about the fact that we didn't see stat blocks because we're going to be seeing stat blocks in the pretty near future anyway. Like I'm, you know, we're going to see him within a month and then we're going to have 600 stat blocks.
And also like how soon, this is my cynical, my cynical joke, prepare for my cynical joke. Why am I looking forward so much to opening a book, reading it and going, well, that's not how I would have done it. which is almost certainly what I'm going to do. And not because their design is the worst, but we're all tinkerers. Many GMs are tinkerers.
And then those of us who have gotten now familiar and comfortable with designing stat blocks or changing monsters and stuff are immediately going to open up and go, well, that's not how I would have done it. Oh, four new vampires. Very cool. Well, those aren't how I would have done it. So it's very unlikely I'm going to look.
I already know it's not the case because I have seen some of the stat blocks and you're like, oh, okay, I guess that's a thing. You know, it's not how I'd have done it. So that's kind of my little joke, right? And it's not, I mean, that's not a knock on them. That's just how, I mean, it's true with everything.
And there's never been a monster book I haven't opened up and go, well, that's, you know, I'd have done it differently. The great thing is we can, we can do it differently. You can modify things all you want in this game. It's not like any other game, any other video game in the world. You're like, oh, I wish I hadn't done that boss that way. What am I going to do? Because they made the boss.
I get to do whatever I want. You get to do whatever you want. That's what makes this game so awesome. We can do whatever we want. So yeah, so I'm eager. I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I'm not like, oh, we should be seeing stat blocks. No, I don't really care. That's fine. They can do what they want. They did have a conversation about how challenge rating works in 2025.
And I've had some people that are like, ooh, are you going to be changing the forge? This is a question that I actually discussed previously. Are you going to change the forge of foes monsters by challenge rating sheet or the lazy encounter benchmark to account for new 2025 stuff? So far, I haven't seen anything that tells me that I need to for a few reasons, and I've talked about that.
But until we actually have it in hand, until Paul Hughes has done his crazy PhD thesis about what the math is behind all of the monsters, I don't think we could really say for sure. But it was interesting for them to talk about how challenge rating works in the new one. And they talked about how challenge rating worked in the old one, which I thought was a really good, it's like an explanation.
I kind of wish they had said 10 years ago and they have said it in different places, but I don't think we've ever seen it this clear before, which is in the olden days, in the 2014 monster days and the design of 2014 monsters, uh, The challenge rating of the monster was based on its optimal use.
In other words, when you used its strongest features in exactly the right way, the challenge rating was based on that, which meant if you used it in any other way, the challenge rating would be significantly reduced.
The example, my friends Sean Merwin and Teo Sabadia talked about this on Mastering Dungeons, and they mentioned it was very kind of them to credit it back to me, where they said that there was a conversation I had with Jeremy Crawford, which I did on a show that I ran a long time ago, where I made fun of the Winter Eladrin that was in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, where it was like a CR 11...
winter eladrin so this like you know kind of cold winter eladrin that did four damage with its bow it had like a single bow attack and the because its dex was terrible it was a low to hit and it did four damage it was like a d6 it's like a d6 plus one And I was like, this is a CR-11 monster. He should be doing cones of cold every time he fires that bow. Why is it that?
And the answer really was because the art had a bow in it, and so we needed to add a bow to the stat block. I don't think he said that on the show, but that is almost certainly what happened. The art had a bow, so the monster needs a bow. But in the design, it was like, well, the expectation is that you're not going to use the bow, right?
And the mind is like, well, then why the hell is the bow there? Like, why make your stat block more complicated with a thing that is like, oh, wrong, stupid DM, you used the wrong thing. And that has now propagated. I don't think I could take any credit for this at all, other than maybe pointing out this weird discrepancy that the new way of doing challenge ratings is no matter what path you pick,
through the actions of a monster, it will hit on par for its challenge rating. And that would be the equivalent of the Winter Eladrin does Cones of Cold every time it fires its bow, right? That if there's a bow in there, it doesn't matter that the Winter Eladrin has all these other features that do damage and status effects and everything like that.
Whatever path you take through a stat block, if you think about like a monster stat block, And there's multiple paths. Does it do ranged attacks? Does it do a breath weapon? Does it do multi-attack? What does it use its legendary actions for? There's all these little decision trees that a GM can make when they're running a monster, right?
And sometimes that decision tree is really simple, like I walk up and I hit you with a big club, right? But even like the ogre might be, well, do I throw a rock or do I hit you with a club? And then there's like a path. Well, you don't want to have it where the rock does hardly any damage, but the club does a lot. And I don't think it was ever the case that a rock did it before.
But the new design is that whatever your path you traverse through a monster stat block to act, to do things, whatever those actions are, according to the stat block, should all be equally effective to the challenge rating of the monster. That makes perfect sense. And honestly, I'm kind of like, well, why didn't you do that the first way?
the first time but you know whatever so here we are now and i think it makes a lot of sense and that's why you see things like monsters that do a lot of extra elemental damage on certain attacks we started to see this propagate its way through other one through other monster books and monster products that we've seen from wizards of the coast but i haven't heard it articulated quite that way before which which really makes sense it doesn't necessarily mean the monsters are more powerful
They might feel, I think they are at the higher challenge rating. So I think they've recognized it again. We'll see. We'll have to see what their higher challenge rating monsters look like. But they did say, oh, higher level monsters are now higher challenge rating monsters are definitely going to be hitting harder than they used to.
But it sounds like all the other monsters are going to be generally hitting at the challenge rating they were hitting at. Just now, it's a lot harder to not hit at that challenge rating. So that's going to be pretty interesting. And so I'm going to have a look at that. That'll be kind of interesting to see. I am worried about how spells are going to work. I was confident.
And it's funny because they convinced me of this. In the old 2014 Monster Manual, you had creatures like the mage. Why don't we pull up a 2014 mage? This is the 2014 Mage stat block, which is available in the 5.1 SRD and also available in the 2014 Monster Manual. And it's a CR 6, right?
And this is that perfect example I was talking about of like, you know, if you have your Mage go up and stab someone with a dagger for plus 5 to hit for 4 damage, they're not hitting at a challenge rating 6. Right? 4 damage is not the damage that you would do for a CR 6 monster. Neither is 40 hit points, really, or 12 AC. That's really, really... Mages are kind of low power.
Until you get to their spells, and then you look at Cone of Cold, Fireball, Greater Invisibility, Ice Storm, Counterspell, Shield... You know, magic missile, right? When you get into the spell listings, now this guy's hitting pretty hard. If you have one that's using shield, it has mage armor already.
Well, now it's got an effective AC of 20 and could use counter spell instead of shield to negate spells and could have greater invisibility. So you can't really see it or target it. And it's hammering you with spells like fireball and cone of cold, which you get if it's one cone of cold and then three fireballs, unless it's using fireball. unless it's using like greater visibility or fly.
And it has misty steps so it can zip around as a bonus. It does a lot of stuff, but all that stuff is locked up in the spell listings. The problem with this design, a lot of people had trouble with this, was that that meant you had to know what the spells did in order to run the mage at an effective challenge rating. And that meant looking up the books.
That means like you have your monster manual, you have your monster manual, you open it up to the mage, you're like, oh, I'm going to cast Ice Storm. I don't know what Ice Storm does. I don't remember, right? Now I've got to go get the player's handbook and open up the player's handbook and read Ice Storm.
So they recognized that difficulty, which meant in, if you look at Mordenkainen's, if you look at Monsters of the Multiverse, So if you look at Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse, it's not a mage. This one's beefed up. You have the Evoker Wizard, right? And the Evoker Wizard still has spells like Ice Storm and Lightning Bolt and Mage Armor and stuff.
But it also has this Arcane Burst attack. Makes three Arcane Burst attacks, plus seven to hit, 25 force damage. So it does 75 damage just by bursting. Then it has Sculpted Explosion. It unleashes a magical explosion of a particular damage type, gets to pick the one, It erupts in a 20-foot radius. It's essentially like a fireball, DC 15.
A failed save, it does 40 damage of a type or half on a failure, right? Which is very effective. That means that for it to act as a CR 9 with 121 hit points, it is able to effectively act at that challenge rating. It's still a little weak. Using arcane bursts and sculpted explosions alone. That means you don't even need to know what the spells that it has are.
I'm a little worried that they're going to revert back to having the spells in just listed and that we, you have to look them up in the player's handbook again, and that they might not act at their challenge rating without using spells. So how a big question, a bit outstanding question I have is how do spell casting monsters work in the 2024 monster manual?
The good news is it kind of doesn't matter because I now have monsters from multiple books, including level up advanced 5e. Let's take a look at theirs. So Level Up Advanced 5e has a CR6 mage as well. And what they did, what Paul Hughes did in his design, first of all, more hit points, right?
More than 50% still has the spellcasting stuff, but in the actions, it has listed the spells that it can use. Firebolts, Fireball, Dimension Door, Greater Invisibility, Kona Cold, Misty Step, Counterspell, Shield. They're listed in the block so that you can just use them right there. Tales of the Valiant, let's see, Black Flag. So the mage in Black Flag is more of the, like, use the arcane bolts.
Like, this case is CR6. Makes three arcane bolt attacks. Can replace one with a use of spellcasting. So what's interesting is it can cast two arcane bolts and then hit you with a cone of cold. Like...
that's meaty but also the dagger attacks makes three dagger attacks plus three to hit which is pretty lame but does two piercing plus 13 force damage so it's doing 15 damage three times 45 points of damage arcane bolts are six to hit 16 damage so it still hits at its challenge rating when you're just using arcane bolts which is a nice simple way to say hey i've got this but then you also have these spells i will say that the mage stat block and black flag still buries some of its best stuff
like Greater Invisibility and Cone of Cold, in the spell block. It's still pretty effective if you're just going to have the mage throw out Arcane Bolts, though. That still seems better. So I am curious to see what the 2025 Monster Manual does with the mage, as an example. And I hope they don't bury its best abilities inside spell listings. So we're going to have to see.
So what's really interesting to me is that we're in a very different state for D&D and for 5e now today than we were back, certainly back in 2014. In 2014, there were no other 5e monster books to use. You had whatever the monster manual, when it came out, that was what you had. And that's what you use most of the time. It was a while before there was any other monster book.
I know that like Toma Beast from Kobo Press probably took some time to do. I think it was years before we saw like another real core monster book. Because remember, the system reference document wasn't even out for two years. It was 2016 before we had the system reference document for 2014 D&D. But now we're surrounded by monsters.
You can use the ones from the 2014 Monster Manual if you like those. You can use them from many different books. We have everything from Flea Mortals by MCDM and all of the Tomes of Beasts from Kobold Press. We have the Monster Vault from Kobold Press. We have the Level Up Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie. We have so many different monster books. That really, like, we just kind of get to pick.
And then I, of course, and myself and Scott Gray and Toyo Sabadea wrote Forge of Foes. And Forge of Foes' idea was, here are the materials for you to be able to build your own monsters. So you don't even need those. And you could like all the different powers they have, but if you want to beef them up, you could just use the stats from Forge of Foes and you could beef up any monster you've got.
So, man, are we living in a wonderful stage of having so many monsters. And really, other than the idea that when Wizards of the Coast puts out the 2025 Monster Manual, that is almost certainly going to be the most popular monster book ever. published at once. Whether it eclipses the 2014 Monster Manual in overall sales is hard to say. We wouldn't know for years until that's the case.
But it is going to be a heavily used monster book, almost certainly the second most popular monster book, if not the first most popular monster book used overall. So it'd be really nice if they got it right. My feeling is it'd probably be fine, right? I don't think it's going to be, oh man, the design in this is better than anything I've ever seen in 5e space before. It's unlikely.
That seems unlikely. I feel it's equally unlikely to go, oh, this is total trash and it's the worst thing that's ever happened and nobody can ever run any of these monsters. I don't think that's likely either. I'm optimistic that it will be better than the 2014 one, which means we're in a net positive, right? And I think that that will be really good. So I'm looking forward to that.
500.
Okay, there's the number. 500 monsters in this book. And this is where they start to be like, it's like the TARDIS from Doctor Who. oh, it's got 80 more monsters than the 2014 Monster Manual had. And you're like, okay, it's got more monsters than we've ever published before.
Okay, it's got huge, like third of a page or half page art that shows monsters in context rather than just a flat, you know, diagram of a flat picture of a monster. It actually shows the monster in context, which means there's bigger and more art. Okay, what's giving? Oh, again, we know it's physically biggest in page count. It's 384 pages, but the old one was like 320.
And we know the font size is also bigger as well. In an analysis, Mastering Dungeons did a little bit about this, and myself and some friends did a little bit about this, trying to figure out page counts, or word counts. And what we figured is that the word counts of the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide are roughly similar to the word counts that the original 2014 books had.
So while the pages are bigger, while there's more stuff in them, the overall word count is about the same. And that's because they increase the font size. The font size of the 2014 books are smaller than the font size of the 2024 books. But it's about the same number of words.
But if the Monster Manual has 80-some monsters more and bigger art, and the font size is bigger, that's going to make up for any of those extra pages. What's going to give? What's not going to be in it? And they're not going to tell us what's not going to be in it.
One thing we learned from other YouTube folks, which many people are disappointed, I was not surprised, is that there is nothing about how to build a monster in the monster book. that the only material that Wizards of the Coast released for building a monster is inside the Dungeon Master's Guide, and that is really anemic.
Good news is there's a book, Forge of Foes, written by myself and Scott Fitzgerald Gray and Teo Sabadia, that gives you all kinds of stuff about how to build monsters. So if you want to build monsters for 5e, and it looks to be totally compatible with D&D 2024, if you want a great book about monsters, check out Forge of Foes.
and other publishers have also put out material for how to build monsters. Both Tales of the Valiant and Level Up Advanced 5e have excellent guides for how to build monsters that go way beyond what you see in 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. But I'm also worried that the lore for monsters are going to be less too.
I'm worried there's going to be fewer words per monster, certainly per monster, but even like fewer words in general. And that kind of hurts because what's the context they're giving?
And this is one where I really think like the Level Up 5e Monstrous Menagerie has done better than any of the other monster books I've seen, which is by offering table usable material that you don't see in typical monster books.
example section is hags right it has very typical discussion about hags this is from the level up advanced 5e monstrous menagerie it was my product of the year a couple years ago i still use it all the time i use it in all my games it's a fantastic monster book i really really dig it and it has like the typical write-up but i bet you were not going to see write-ups this long for a lot of the monsters in the 2025 monster manual because they don't have the room but then you get this stuff legends and lore
right when you roll an arcana or nature check here's information the characters can learn about hags very few monster books have stuff like this hag encounters this is what i was talking about like you got hags and you know what other monsters are there right sea hags with coral fish sea hag with chule killer whales marrow water elementals or willow wisps it tells you what monsters hang out with other monsters and it includes a specific treasure section
You know, what kind of treasure do you get? You know, three hard candies. Each acts as a potion of water breathing. That's really specific to hag stuff. This is super valuable, right? If they defeat this encounter, here's the treasure. You can use just the treasure if you want. Wilderness signs. What kind of information might you see about a hag while you're going and exploring?
You can roll a d4 and you get it. All of this stuff is not just... general description of the monster. This is table usable material to help you build and run your games. And it's all in the book. You don't have to look up a second book. Settlement sign. Boy, I picked the right one for all the cool stuff, right? Settlement signs. What show you that the nearby settlement is under a hag?
Underground signs. Things you might find if you're exploring. Behaviors. What is the hag doing? Hag names. Baba Chicken Bone. That's pretty funny. Grandmother Black Teeth. Really useful stuff. I think I picked, this is not representative of every single thing inside the level of Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie, but they do have a lot of these kinds of things for a lot of the monsters.
And then you get to the stat blocks, right? Then you get to see what the actual hag does. And then it even has a little like combat, what the hag does here. It has, you know, lots of stuff about hag. There's like five pages about hags. Now this is not fair really, but I did just sort of pick hag out of a hat and the hag happened to have five pages of stuff, six pages of stuff.
So there's lots of stuff about hags in here, but many of the, you know, even like Half Dragons has environments which include encounters, signs, behavior, you know, other things. A lot of the monsters, harpies, right? The harpies is not a crazy, you know, it's not five pages of harpy, but it still has legends lore. It still has the encounters. It still has signs and behavior.
Hellhounds has encounters, right? And it includes treasure and things like that. It still has signs and behaviors. Lots of the monsters have this stuff, and this is what we need. This is the stuff that helps us run our game at the table. I don't think we're going to see this in the 2025 Monster Manual.
One of the things that we already got a preview of, and I immediately made fun of it, and I'm going to make fun of it again when I have it, because I don't think they did this,
is one of the things they talked about was oh we also have treasure listings for monsters so on some of the previews we saw very few previews but we saw i think like some other youtube folks had a previews and one of them was like for the cyclops and what they said was oh we list the dragon we list the treasure with it and you're like oh that's cool so like there'll be some example treasure that this monster might have very useful stuff it turns out no it tells you which treasure table to roll on in the dungeon masters guide like armaments or like magic items or like stuff like that now we only saw one
But the one I saw said treasure colon armaments. And I think it was the half dragon they showed. And it said treasure comma armaments. And I was like, that is literally the second least thing you could do next to saying treasure colon treasure. Like, why not offer some examples of the kinds of treasure this monster might have?
Because then I can use that and I'll have to go to the other book to look it up. Don't make me look things up in other books. Too late now, right? The book's printed. The book's already done. We're going to have it in a month. But that was a missed opportunity. I think, we'll see. Like, I've only seen one monster. I don't know, but the one monster I saw did it that way.
I got to imagine that's how the other monsters work. And the idea of telling me what treasure table to roll on isn't really helping me. What helps me, you could do that. You could say armaments, colon, plus one long sword. You know, elven chain, whatever. Tell me what you've got. Like, that would be more useful, but it's too late. They already did that. How are they going to do it?
so that question of like what isn't in the book I think is interesting what's missing one of the things and you know we're going to have to do a deeper dive obviously we'll do a deeper dive on it when that book actually comes out but one of the things that's pretty clear to me is that stuff definitely is missing from these three books particularly when you compare it to the other 5e variants like level up advanced 5e and all the stuff it has tales of the valiant and all the stuff that it has and even in some cases the 2014 books and what they have
There seems to be less stuff in the 2024 books. There's enough stuff to be able to run your games, but there's a lot of things missing. And we're probably going to cover more about like what's missing and where you can get it in future shows. And particularly, we're going to look at the monster manual. What do you really need in a monster manual? You really need stat blocks for monsters, right?
Everything else is sort of, you know, you can kind of give and take. But some books are definitely better than others. And unfortunately, I don't think this is something where you can look at one book and say, that's the best book. And the reason why is like, I love Level Up Advanced 5e stuff. I think their monsters are fantastic and absolutely work well.
It's still my favorite monster book right now. But I do like some of the designs of the monsters of Tales of the Valiant monsters better. They hit harder. They're a little bit more streamlined. They have that more modern take on spellcasting monsters and stuff like that. There's things about those stat blocks I like, which means I like the Tales of the Valiant layout more with the stuff it's got.
But I like the design of the monsters in Tales of the Valiant more. And it would not surprise me at all if I like the artwork in the 20th Monster Manual more than either of those two. which means we're going to have a lot of different monster books. And I don't know that it's going to be super easy to be like, this is the best one. This is the one you should get. I'm not really sure.
It's sort of like the Dungeon Master's Guide. Which one should you get? I don't know. Level Up Advanced 5e Trials and Treasure is really, really good. 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is really, really good. 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide has a lot in it that I think was underappreciated. And Tales of the Valiant has a really great Game Master's Guide. Which one should you get? I don't know.
That's a really tough question. I think if you really held my feet to the fire, if you really told me you have to get one of them, I'd probably go with the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide. I think it's got the most table usable stuff in it, but it's missing exploration. Like the fact that it doesn't have a really good exploration section, I think is not fantastic.
I don't remember what the exploration system in the player's guide is good. So I don't know. So then another question comes up to me, which is what am I looking forward to after this? When the Monster Manual is released, which is happening very soon, I'm supposed to get, I don't know if I'm supposed to. Wizards did reach out to me and asked if I wanted to get a preview copy, a review copy.
And I said, sure. So I presume I will be getting review copies. I don't know when. I also pre-ordered a special edition cover version at my local game shop because I want to support my local game shop and I want to own a copy. So I have, you know, actual stake in this. And I'll probably be getting it on D&D Beyond. I will be getting it on D&D Beyond, certainly. And I'm going to buy it for Foundry.
So I'm going to have like five versions of the Monster Manual when we're done. I'm going to dig into it. But then what? Well, then the three core books are out. What are we really waiting for after that? Well, the big thing for me that I'm waiting for that I'm really...
I'm like, oh, is the 5.2 SRD, because that's the point where Wizards of the Coast can really make that Ulysses pact and really do good for the whole RPG community by saying, we spent a ton of time and a ton of money and a ton of energy building this system. And now we're putting it out to the world and you guys can grab it and run with it and do stuff with it. They did it with the 5.1 SRD.
They did it back in 2016. They did it again after the OGL fiasco and put it out in Creative Commons. And they have every indication that said that they're going to do it again. I even got, you know, I've heard recently that they said, no, we're still going to be doing that. Good. And that'll be really good for the community.
I'm looking forward to that a lot because that means the game can live beyond anything else that happens with Wizards of the Coast. And it means that you and I can do what we want with this game truly and share it with other people. And that's going to be fantastic. I'm really looking forward to that. Then what? Well, the next thing on my list is the starter set, right?
I think the starter set is an important product that Wizards of the Coast can produce and put out in lots of places that people will buy and that they can give to people who haven't played. I think getting that starter set right is really important. I think it's very strange that the starter set's not coming out for a year or not almost a year, right? It's coming out at the end of this year.
Fall, I think they said fall 2025, which feels like a long time for a starter set to come out. Hopefully it's fine. And I hope they don't do anything too weird with it.
And I hope it's just a good solid starter set that really gets people to understand what this game is like, because no one is in a better position than Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast is to get new people to understand what this game is like.
Once they get into the game, once they see how great this game is and how great role-playing games are, and once they fall in and they start watching YouTube videos and they start subscribing to newsletters and they start supporting people's Patreons and they start picking up other books, And that was all self, that was all the big advertisement for me. Then they're in our world.
And then we could share all of the other stuff. We could, Hey, there's other monster books. Hey, there's other design ideas. Hey, here's a bunch of house rules you might apply. Once they're in, we can get them right. We can get our claws into them and then share how great this hobby is. But it's really hard to get new people to see it at scale.
And only Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro have the money and the backing and the connections and everything to get it to be introduced at scale. So I'm really looking forward to that. But honestly, at that point, to me, they become another publisher. And I know when we say that, it sounds like an insult. Oh my God, you're saying they're as bad as Kobold Press.
You're like, I love Kobold Press, but... Cobalt Press is fantastic. At that point, I am eager to see the products they put out in the same way I'm eager to see the products that every other publisher puts out. They have the new Forgotten Realms stuff that's coming out later on. I want to see what that's like. They're going to have the new Dragon Anthology book that's coming out.
I want to see what that's like. And I'm sure they're going to have other products I want to see. These were the important ones, right? The three core books, the starter set, and the 5.2 SRD. Those to me are all the real big impact that Wizards can have on the community. And I'm, you know, I mean, now we've seen a lot of it. And I think the good news is it's not a disaster. Right.
Some people will say I'm sure they're shock based videos talking about how is a disaster. I don't think so. I think it's pretty solid and I think it'll do the job. Right. And that's what we really need to do. But to me, it's that interesting question of and then what? What else are we looking for? And also, how else could they hurt us? And that's the other question.
And I don't, you know, that's kind of a black swan question where you don't know until it happens because I certainly didn't predict a lot of the other ways. But I know I'll have our books and I know we'll have the 5.2 SRD and I know they'll have a starter set out there. And after that, everything is gravy. So I think that's interesting. But that has been on my mind.
So probably the next time we talk about the 2025 Monster Manual, I will hopefully have one in hand or have it on D2 Beyond or something like that. And we can actually dive deep into it to really understand what's going on. There was a really interesting thread that popped up on EN World and then kind of went away. And I was sad because it was a really good question.
And the question was how and when to fudge. I've made a joke commonly. People say, do you ever cheat on dice rolls? And I say, I don't cheat on dice rolls. I cheat everywhere else. And, you know, it's kind of my little funny gag, but it's also how I feel about the cheating and fudging. And people are like, what do we call cheating? And what do we call fudging? What does that even mean?
And in which word is right? I'm going to go with fudge. I'm going to go with fudging that you're shifting things a little bit. You're moving things around. It's not cheating because you can't really cheat as a GM, right? Like rule zero, you can't really cheat. But, you know, you can, you can, you know, and you can't really cheat. You can't really, but you can fudge things.
You can kind of go against. So what is, when we think about this conversation, when and how and under what circumstances and how do you do it and why is, what is it even like? What even counts as fudging? And I think you can narrow fudging down to changing things in the game during the game. I'm pretty sure everyone would agree, you can't really fudge things during prep.
Even if you're modifying monsters, you're changing spells, you're deciding how many monsters are in or out, you're shifting layouts, you're cutting off parts of dungeons, you're changing your maps, pretty much everything you can do on the GM side during prep, I don't know that very many people... I would assume the vast majority of GMs would recognize that during prep, everything goes.
You want to modify a monster? Modify a monster. You want to change magic items? You can change magic items. You want to shift things around? You know, that's not fudging. That's just design. That's just GMing, right? A lot of people in the thread said, everything you said is fudging. I consider it to be good GMing. And they're like, well, they're not mutually exclusive.
Counting as fudging is really changing the game during the game, I think is where people start to talk about fudging. And what doesn't count is anything that you do during prep
doesn't really count and an interesting one is when you start to talk to the old school gaming group about what counts as fudging for them they do not consider rolling the dice and coming up with ideas by the die roll during a game as fudging either it's kind of funny though if you think about it it's like well if i come up with something out of my head that's fudging or cheating but
But if I roll a die and it comes up with something, that's just how the game works. And maybe that makes sense, right? Because you're building a stochastic system. You're building a randomly based world where none of us know how this is going to go. And I'm appreciative of that. I think that rolling random encounters is cool. I think the idea of rolling attitudes is cool.
The idea of rolling distances and whether or not who is surprising who. All those kind of things and using the dice to help determine that I think could be really cool. Sometimes that are, it's not cool. Sometimes you end up having a whole bunch of sloggy fights right in a row because you rolled a certain way. That would kind of suck, right? And now no one's having fun. You're not having fun.
The players aren't having fun. And that's where you might want to fudge. So that doesn't count. Why would you fudge is a good question. And I have some thoughts about this, and I'm sure you have some thoughts. And these are just my ideas. I'm not saying this is the way it is. You get to decide what makes sense for you. But I'm going to offer my own thoughts on it. Why fudge?
To change the fun and the pacing of the game is one reason why you would fudge. To keep things moving along, to move the game forward is a reason to fudge. And to help the mechanics of the game meet the story of the game. Sometimes the mechanics slip away from the story or the way things ought to be in the world because the mechanics are weird. And in that case, you might want to fudge.
Those are some reasons why I think it's okay. When would you not... want to fudge? What are some things where you don't want to fudge? And I would say you don't want to fudge to remove agency from a character or player. This is that idea of, oh, this monster's immune to all of your BS, right? Why? Because I say so. Because I don't want my boss to get hit by all your BS. That's not great.
You shouldn't fudge when you're mad. Just because something happened and you don't like it, you're fudging. And you shouldn't fudge because you can't. Right. Fudging is not something that you should just do. You should have a good reason for doing it. I would also say that fudging in order to force the characters down a particular path is not great either.
If you have an idea for the way the story is going to go and it's not going that way and you're fudging to keep making sure it goes that way, that's probably not great. You probably also have a bigger problem than the fact that you're fudging. You probably also have the problem that you overprepped down one path and that now you're kind of forcing everything down that one path.
So those I would say are not areas where fudging is great. So where do you fudge? Where can you change things? Well, there's a few different places. What does success or failure look like on an ability check? is an area where you can fudge. This isn't something that we think about commonly. But you get to decide what success and failure looks like.
And the example is, if the rogue is failing to pick a lock, maybe he still gets the door open, but he broke his picks. Or maybe he got the door open, but it was loud and now people have heard stuff. Is it fudging? I mean, I bet you that not a lot of people would think of that as fudging. They're like, no, that's just rolling with the game, right? You're supposed to come up with stuff like that.
But if you get to determine how brutal the success or failure is in an ability check is, you're really kind of changing things. Particularly if you had one idea before the roll and then you change that idea after the roll. That would be an example.
changing the result of random encounters if you're rolling on random tables but then you're like oh that's too many or i don't like that one well now you're fudging again like you know but there's probably a good reason for it oh god they fought zombies three times in a row am i really going to roll another zombie encounter maybe i'm going to change this to another encounter and a lot of games will tell you go ahead and roll again if you don't like what you get that's kind of fudging right that's kind of that seems like it's okay
In combat in particular, I have the dials of monster difficulty. I wrote about those in Lazy Niamh's Companion. I wrote about them in Forge of Foes. Hit points, damage, the number of attacks, and the number of monsters are dials that you can turn during combat to change the pacing of a game. I've talked a lot about this.
And one of the key points of those dials I'm going to get to in a moment, which is that those dials, you don't just turn them willy-nilly. You turn the dials when you need to, when you have a reason to turn the dials. You know, that's when you turn them. But they all spring to center. They should have resistance in them.
That idea of resistance in the dials is something we're going to talk about, but those are common ways to fudge. One common topic that comes up often when we talk about fudging is the idea that is known as the quantum ogre. The quantum ogre is the idea that you build an ogre encounter ahead of time, and then whatever path the characters take, they still run into the same ogre.
I had a situation where the characters were going down a bunch of different paths in the mountains, right? They were in these caves. And I knew I was going to run a serpent cult encounter. I had my mini set up. I had a beautiful Dwarven Forge set up. I had all this stuff. And I'm like, whatever direction they're going, they're going to run into this. And the players joked, like...
As soon as they peeked in and they went, wow, look at this crazy serpent shrine with all these people. We should go down one of the other paths. And I was like, you can. I bet you it takes you right to that same door. And they're like, oh, it's the quantum serpent temple. Whatever direction we go. And I'm like, man, I spent an hour building this dwarven fort set up.
And it was also like, you know you want to do this. You know you want to enjoy your characters fighting snake cults. you know, just do it. But there was this definite like metagamey joke about like, oh, I bet that whatever direction we go. But that idea of building encounters that then you force on the players by whatever direction they go is often a source of criticism.
I don't really criticize Quantum Ogre. I don't think that's so bad. I think building flexible encounters that you can drop into different places is also a very common GM technique that is often brought up many times as good advice for GMs. So I don't think there's anything about that. So the dials, right?
If we think about fudging as lever, like we are, you know, very common metaphor for GMing is we're the man behind the curtain. We're the great and mighty Oz. We're behind the curtain dorking with levers and wheels and turns. And there's a great big head that's saying things like it's true. And we're like, you know, messing with the dials and pulling the levers. That's a pretty apt metaphor.
I like it. And one of the things we can think about when we are pulling those levers and moving the dials is that they have resistance to them. They aren't just these floppy dials and floppy levers and dials with no springs and they're all over the place and everything's topsy-turvy. Who knows how many hit points monsters have? You know, we're just turning things left and right.
Instead, all of them balance to center. They all balance to the way that it is at first. And then we pull them and they have resistance to them. And they will spring back into place. To kind of expand this metaphor, it means that we shouldn't be changing monster hit points lest we have a good reason to do it. And many times we just use what it says. But sometimes we turn it.
And sometimes it has more resistance one way than the other. The hit point dial, for example, has more resistance when you increase it than it does when you decrease it. You should be pretty free about decreasing hit points for the pacing of the game.
increasing is really that idea of like this monster had a bigger tale to tell in this story and they just nuked it with alpha striking and it would be everyone will be disappointed if this monster drops too fast i'm going to go ahead and increase its hit points right that that's not an unreasonable reason but that's a stronger turn on that dial
So I often say that we should start first with what makes sense in the world. And that could be random rolls on the tables. It could be whatever the base stats are of monsters that we're dealing with. Whatever makes sense in the world is what we should start with when we're considering acting as a conduit to this world during our game.
But we should be willing to bend it for the fun of the players and for the fun of the game. That includes us, right? We should be willing to change it when it increases the fun. If the fun already looks pretty solid, then you just stick with what makes sense in the world.
But sometimes you're like, well, what's in the world is actually going to be lamer than if I just turn one of these dials or pull one of these levers in order to make things a little differently. And that's really what our job as a GM. Now, whether you consider that fudging or not is really up to you and whether you have a problem with that is up to you.
And I'm sure many GMs have different feelings about all of this stuff. I know they do. And I'm not saying my way is the right way, but I am saying that these are some considerations for when you're thinking about when and where and how to fudge, what fudging even is, and most particularly, why you do it.
So that's my thought on fudging, when and how to do it, and how to do it to make our games the most fun. Every quarter on Sly Flourish, we post a new thread for the Patreon Q&A. Patrons can ask questions all throughout the year. Every Friday, I answer these questions, and some of these questions I bring here to the show so we can dive in a little deeper.
Today's question is from Peter H., who says, What do you expect of the applicability of the Monster Encounter dials for non-5e RPGs? As an example, would changing the number of monsters be as effective as a dial in a system where the action economy is less important than in 5e, but maybe something else has much stronger effects?
Yes, I think that the dials of monster difficulty can work in many different RPGs and particularly work well in D20 RPGs. But of course, your results may vary depending on the system you're playing. And I think when you're dorking with the dials, it helps you to understand how the system works. Numenera as a D20 system operates very differently than 5e does.
And so increasing the number of attacks or decreasing the attacks or increasing or decreasing damage, Numenera is actually very flexible in all those things. It's not even considered like cheating. Like the monster level is a very flexible thing that you can drop in that does lots of different things. But you still want to understand how it's going to relate.
There are some games where the monsters don't even get turns. In your Powered by the Apocalypse games, monster attacks occur when characters fail. So you can't really increase the number of attacks. And some don't even have damage. It's just number of hits. Fate, for example, it's really like a number of hit thing more than something else. So the dials are still there.
And maybe there's different dials. And I think the concept of dials of difficulty is something that you have to bring to whatever game you're going to run and decide how they have that effect. And this is where we as game masters can kind of dive into the math and dive into the understanding of how the game operates before we start turning a bunch of dials that operate differently.
So yeah, it's not a one size fits all perfect solution, but I think the philosophy can work really well. I think the philosophy can work for a lot of games. Bro from Another Moe says, initiative DCs. I know you do static initiative. I was thinking about a way to shake up initiative when you have multiple kinds of monsters. Their initiative is their AC slash DC stat.
I run Forge of Foes one line stats with characters winning ties. That can work very well. I've actually been thinking about this as well. And one of the things I think we can do with initiative is quit worrying about tying the monster initiative to any kind of score for the monster. And instead ask ourselves, is this monster fast? Is this monster normal? Or is this monster slow?
You could even add like extremely fast for it. A fast monster operates on DC 15, a medium monster operates on DC 10, and a slow monster operates on DC 5. initiative 15, 10, and five.
And by splitting up monsters like that, when you have different groups, if you say like, these guys are gonna be the fast movers, these guys are gonna be the medium movers, these guys would be the slow movers, then your players are gonna better sort of shift into those different areas so that you're breaking things up a little bit more.
You might still have circumstance where all the characters rolled higher than a 17 and all your monsters are grouped together anyway, or vice versa, right? So that definitely can still be a problem. But it does give you this option to decide where they're going. And you can say very fast monsters operate in initiative 20.
And the expectation of initiative 20 monsters is that they are almost certainly going to act before the characters act. 15, it's like they're going to act, you know, you can think of like 75%, you know, 25% things like 100%, 25, 75, 50, 25, and so on.
But I think that idea of worrying less about tying things like initiative to the stats of a monster and instead just using as a GM tool the 15, 10, 5 initiatives, I think could be a pretty easy house rule. Something you could keep in your head. Treat it the same way you treat the DC ladder for operating DCs. I think that that can work really well. I haven't tried it much yet.
I've tried it a little, but I haven't tried it much yet. My thing has always been I had monsters default to 12. which kind of drop them right in the middle. And I think whenever I have one monster type, I'll still default to 12. But I might, when I have multiple monster types, I might start doing initiative at different levels to shake things up a little bit more. So we'll see how that goes.
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