Building Better Monsters for 5E

From 2010 to 2012, I was a Narrative Designer for 38 Studios, the video game company that was working on R. A. Salvatore’s Kingdoms of Amalur where we were designing a MMORPG that was intended to be competition for World of Warcraft (the fact that the company collapsed in epic fashion before the game was released remains one of my major professional disappointments). At the time, they conducted a great deal of market research in an effort to build a better game, and one of the biggest complaints about WoW was how grindy combat was. To this day in WoW, thanks to level scaling, you might not be seriously challenged by the opponent but the fight takes a long time because it takes a long time to wear them down and defeat them. After the Cataclysm expansion in December 2010, the ability to miss your opponent was greatly diminished, and that went away completely in the Warlords of Draenor in 2014.

I bring this up because when it comes to combat-heavy TTRPGs, the same philosophy has been dominant for the past decade or so, particularly the world’s most popular roleplaying game, D&D 5E. If you examine the math on both the player’s side and the DM’s side, you’ll see that the game was designed for the average character to hit a monster 70% of the time. The thinking behind this is that it’s more fun for your hits to land when you roll the dice than it is for them not to land. If you’re decent at min-maxing your character, the odds of hitting improve significantly.

The unintended consequence of an almost guaranteed hit is that combat becomes grindy. In my research into the complaints 5E players have about the game, the most common response I get are that monsters don’t feel dangerous and individual hits don’t feel consequential. This is because even though they have buckets of Hit Points, you almost always hit, and the monsters don’t deal enough damage to really threaten your character unless you’re regularly up against “Deadly” encounters

The reason monsters are currently designed this way can be found in the ‘Creating a Monster’ guidelines in the back of the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide which contains the “Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating” table (you will note that this section was omitted from the 2024 DMG, but it was confirmed to me by a designer currently at WotC that the same table remains in use). If you follow the official guidelines when you design a new monster, you will make a perfectly grindy monster that’s easy to hit, has buckets of Hit Points, has a reasonably low chance of hitting, and doesn’t dish out enough damage to be a serious threat to reasonably well designed player characters. So far, alternate versions of 5E (those made by third party publishers) seem to have felt that the solution to this is higher Armor Classes and more Hit Points, which inevitably leads to even longer combats with more grind. A character who attacks six times and hits five times isn't necessarily having an exciting combat experience. A character who attacks six times, misses twice, lands three solid hits, and then lands a critical hit that finishes the monster can have a much more memorable sequence, even though the character actually dealt less total damage.

About a year ago I decided it was time to embark upon the Daring & Dread Roleplaying Game. Like Pathfinder and various other RPGs on the market, rather than it being a wholly original RPG, it’s derived from a version of D&D (something originally made possible by the Open Gaming License, and currently the 5^th edition SRD released under the Creative Commons License, both of which are graciously provided by Wizards of the Coast). When I took this idea to Kickstarter, my marketing slogan was “Stop Playing 5E in Easy Mode!” My design goal is not to punish the player character, but to nerf the things that are broken, reward more strategic playing, and make it less easy to simply walk through adventures. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not knocking 5E. It’s a well designed game that has connected with a record number of players, and it has become the most popular version of the game of all time. But it doesn’t connect completely with everybody, and I decided to take a shot at making significant improvements to the play style.

My adjustment to monster design involved creating a new Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating table, as well as reworking every monster in the SRD with the goal of making monsters scarier but not punishingly so. The idea is to take the game out of Easy Mode, but not move it all the way to Nightmare Mode. After coming up with the new monster creation table, I took it over to one of my best friends who happens to have a doctorate in microbiology and is a complete math-head. Together, we ran the numbers and established that the math produced the results I was looking for. (by the way, unless you’re a math and probability expert, my advice for all game designers is find one you can talk to when designing large-scale systems). Since then, I’ve been using it to create adversaries in the games I run. The result? Combat has been less grindy, more challenging, more dynamic, and more fun.

The changes I’ve made specifically are: Armor classes have been adjusted up across the board, making the standard rate of connection closer to 50% than 70%. To balance this, Hit Points for most monsters has been decreased. Damage per Round for most monsters has increased, and Save DCs has also undergone a slight increase. I’ll explain my rationale for each of these changes:

Increasing Armor Class: Why make attack rolls at all if the game is designed for you to hit at least seven of the ten times you roll the dice? The joy of a success is only satisfying if there’s a realistic chance of missing.

Decreasing Hit Points: The big buckets of Hit Points were necessary to ensure that the average combat lasted at a couple rounds on average (believe it or not, by their own design guidelines, most WotC designed monsters are a little low on HP). By increasing ACs across the board monsters don’t need as many Hit Points to last the desired two rounds of combat. So now, hitting feels like more of an accomplishment, and each hit feels like it’s made an impact in defeating the monster.

Increased Save DCs: Monster abilities are one of the more fun parts of running combat, but the DCs are low enough that player characters usually have the upper hand in avoiding the worst-case consequences of monster abilities. Sure, an unlucky roll can be the great equalizer, but the law of averages says that only a small number of player characters will suffer these effects. By making the DC a little higher, this increases the overall scariness of monsters… but not by so much that they’re designed to be TPK machines.

Increased Damage Per Round: The biggest complaint about monsters is that they just aren’t scary enough. There’s also the fact that the average party can punch way above its level in terms of the monster Challenge Rating they can take on and come out on top. By allowing the monster to hit harder, all monsters are a bit tougher, and the characters really need to think twice and strategize if they want to take on a monster five or more challenge ratings higher than they are.

The goal of these changes isn’t to make every encounter more punishing. It’s to make combat more dynamic and exciting. When monsters are harder to hit but don’t have enormous pools of Hit Points, every successful attack matters more; when they hit harder and have greater capacity to deal damage, players have to think about whether an encounter is worth the risk. The result is combat where characters can still feel heroic, but victory comes from good decisions, smart tactics, and a little luck rather than simply grinding through another enormous pile of Hit Points. In other words, I’m not trying to make 5E harder just for the sake of difficulty. My goal is to make the fights more fun and memorable.