The new Monster Manual boasts over 500 monsters, combining revamped classics with a host of brand-new foes to bring excitement to your games. In this trove of ferocious foes, each creature has been fine-tuned to balance them for the updates in the new Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide and features a streamlined stat block designed to make them easier to run.
In this article, we’ll break down the changes in these new monster entries, highlighting how they save you time and effort at the table while making combat smoother and more intuitive!
- New Layout Highlights Crucial Information
- More Information About Monster’s Habitat and Treasure
- Monsters Are Easier to Run
- Exciting Updates for Legendary Creatures
Claim Your Free Copy of Hold Back the Dead
Hold Back the Dead is a single-session adventure part of D&D's yearlong 50th-anniversary celebration. In this adventure designed for four to six level 4 characters, players are tasked to defend Ironspine Keep against the looming horde of the sinister lich, Szass Tam.
Dive straight into the action with stat blocks from the new Monster Manual, a full map of the fortress defense zones, details on siege weapons, and pre-generated character sheets!
New Layout Highlights Crucial Information
The new Monster Manual contains a trove of new and revamped tools to fuel your imagination and streamline your encounters:
Initiative
Initiative is now explicitly listed at the beginning of a creature’s stat block. This includes the monster's Initiative modifier and its Initiative score, so DMs can either roll for Initiative using the monster’s Initiative modifier or use their static Initiative score when deciding the order creatures will go in Initiative.
Ability Scores and Saving Throws
You’ll find the section for ability scores and ability modifiers is no longer a list of scores with modifiers in brackets. It’s now a table that lists the ability score, ability modifier, and corresponding saving throw bonus, including Proficiency Bonus where applicable, in a simple and easy-to-read format. This makes some of the most crucial information about a monster more clearly visible when glancing at the stat block.
Immunities
The next change you’ll notice is that Immunity to damage types and conditions are grouped under a single “Immunity” list. If a monster has Immunity to both damage types and conditions, Immunities to damage types are listed first and Immunities to conditions are listed second. A semicolon separates the two lists to avoid confusion.
Gear
Gear is a new feature in some creatures’ stat blocks that highlights notable, non-treasure items they carry. This can include anything from weapons and armor to items like a Spellbook or Wand.
If a creature has equipment that can be given away or retrieved, those items are listed in the Gear entry. However, not all of a creature’s equipment is necessarily included. For instance, clothing appropriate for the creature is assumed but isn’t listed. Similarly, unusual or monster-specific equipment that isn’t detailed in the 2024 Player’s Handbook is left to the DM’s discretion.
More Information About Monster’s Habitat and Treasure
At the very start of certain monsters’ entries in the new Monster Manual, you’ll see two new pieces of information: Habitat and Treasure.
This helps you see at a glance, a monster’s native environment and what rewards may await characters that defeat–or assist, depending on their disposition–the monster.
The habitat information corresponds to the Monsters by Habitat lists found in the appendices of the new Monster Manual, while the listed treasure types correspond to the Treasure Themes found in chapter 7 of the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide. With this information, you’ve got everything you need to decide where in your world your party might encounter the monster, brainstorm additional suitable monsters for your encounter, and develop what types of treasure to include.
Monsters Are Easier to Run
Running combat is hard enough without combing monster stat blocks for pertinent information. The design philosophy behind the new stat blocks in the new Monster Manual was to make the information you need to run encounters easy to find while in the heat of battle.
Consolidated Actions
The Monster Manual simplifies monsters’ abilities by grouping related actions. This change reduces clutter and keeps the action flowing smoothly while still making monsters varied and exciting in combat.
For example, the 2025 version of the Ancient Gold Dragon now has a single Rend attack that consolidates their attacks in a concise package with less repeated information. This means there’s less text to parse as you’re using a stat block, making running the monster more streamlined.
Clearer Language
The new Monster Manual follows the new Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide in improving the game’s language to make playing easier. For monsters, this covers a lot of small changes that add up to make things more accessible. Here is how the consolidated wording makes this monster easier to run at a glance:
Fire Breath (Recharge 5-6). Dexterity Saving Throw: DC 24, each creature in a 90-foot Cone. Failure: 71 (13d10) Fire damage. Success: Half damage
This new wording is more concise and places the key information upfront. You’re immediately told that a saving throw is required and how it targets creatures. The effects of the ability are split into Failure and Success sections, clearly laying out how the action works.
Bonus Action and Reaction Spells
Spellcasting monsters now cast spells in ways that are easier to utilize in combat. A monster's spells might appear as options in the Spellcasting action, or they might be specially highlighted as Reactions or Bonus Actions, helping you spot when to use these spells. Some monsters might even cast spells at specific levels or faster than normal.
Each spell-related action, Bonus Action, or Reaction highlights how to use spells in the ways most appropriate for its caster.
Exciting Updates for Legendary Creatures
Higher CR creatures often have more complex stat blocks due to their propensity for more powerful and varied abilities. The new Monster Manual has streamlined these stat blocks, so even if you’re running a cataclysmic final battle, you’ll still be able to focus on the fun.
Lair Bonuses
For more powerful monsters, such as the Ancient Gold Dragon showcased in this article, there is a chance your players will encounter them in their lair, where such monsters are at their strongest. To reflect this, monsters gain bonuses to certain features while within their lair. For the ancient gold dragon, this manifests as additional Legendary Resistances and Legendary Actions.
Updated Legendary Actions
Speaking of Legendary Actions, those have also seen some exciting changes.
Many monsters’ Legendary Actions are now more varied, featuring more options allowing them to reposition or cast spells in the midst of combat. Overall, this makes Legendary Actions more versatile and gives these powerful monsters more flexibility during encounters.
Monsters with Legendary Actions have a certain number of uses of their Legendary Actions, plus an additional use when the monster is in its lair. Each Legendary Action counts as a single use of a monster's Legendary Actions—none cost multiple actions to use. Expended uses of Legendary Actions are still regained at the start of each of a monster's turns, encouraging you to use these actions frequently—and potentially to devastating effect.
This reduces bookkeeping on the DM's part and also allows these monsters to show off more of their abilities over the course of an encounter.
Lair XP
If the prospect of epic loot wasn’t enough, the 2024 Monster Manual offers an incentive to player characters willing to face ferocious foes in the seat of their power. Taking on monsters in their lair now offers an increased XP reward that represents the additional difficulty that comes from facing a monster with access to more Legendary Resistances and more Legendary Actions.
For example, defeating an Ancient Gold Dragon provides 62,000 XP, but defeating the dragon in its lair offers 75,000 XP. Do you think your players are ready to rise to the challenge?
Get Your Hands on These New Stat Blocks
This rounds out our overview of the changes you’ll be seeing in the stat blocks found in the new Monster Manual. With a slew of quality-of-life improvements, running fun and challenging encounters for your players will be even easier. Grab your copy of the new Monster Manual and start preparing for epic encounters!
Davyd is a Dungeon Master living in the south of England with his wife Steph, daughter Willow, and two cats Khatleesi and Mollie. In addition to D&D, he loves writing, 3d printing, and experimenting home automation, often combining all four with varying degrees of success.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025That's partly where I get confused. Some monsters don't add PB to initiative, some do, and some add Expertise. I'm hoping the book will explain why this is. It's already been said that we're not getting monster building rules so I'm curious for the reasoning behind how the initiative works the way it does.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025"Unnecessary changes" like "making the creature more different from other dragons outside of stats, breath weapon and colour".
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Every legendary monster I've seen and a good few others as low as cr 6 have expertise in initiative. Not just profeciency but expertise so universally? That bonus that is just ludicrously higher than anything possible for most player. Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of initiative if nearly everything goes before the players nearly always even if players invest into initiative improving feats and subclasses?
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Seem to have built a fifth of the statblock around guiding bolt and forgot to include the to hit modifier of the spell attack. Whoops
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Correction: new hide actions dc is always 15 and is no longer determined by passive perception
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Other people have already said a lot, but let's sum up all the problems here:
- Giving boss monsters a massive boost to initiative is cheap for PCs who don't choose subclasses/feats to gain initiative bonuses, all but guaranteeing such PC will never get a chance to act before a boss monster. This is especially dumb when legendary actions already give a boss monster means to act before its turn.
- Speaking of actions, note the removal of lair actions, simply making them an extra legendary action. This is actually a drop to complexity of boss actions and to fighting a boss monster in its lair. Previously, it would gain a variety of shifting effects; here? One more use of legendary action/resistance, nothing new.
- The lair action for banishing a creature here was previously DC 15, a more reasonable value, and could only be used every other round. Here, it is a DC 24 save that can be used every round, meaning one PC just gets kicked out of their turn with little recourse.
- They claim to simplify creature abilities and spellcasting, but then have to have a huge chunk of text following one spell to explain how it functions for that specific creature. (Which creates a glaring disconnect with how the Banish action doesn't just crib from the Banishment spell in the same way.)
- The original Weakening Breath simply halved damage. Here, you're required to roll an extra, but separate, d10 every time you deal damage. It's a great way to slow down combat.
- Despite the power creep in 2024 5e, the dragon's HP is unchanged, even though player damage outputs are significantly higher.
- But most of all, despite all the changes, nothing stops you from hitting it with a summoned quasit or Ray of Sickness, thus inflicting Poisoned with no saving throw, them hitting it with a conjured undead, inflicting Paralyzed with no saving throw. This is something that 2024 5e introduced that boss monsters like this statblock have absolutely no way to prevent, outside of being completely immune to the conditions in question—and even then you can just reduce anything to zero speed with a single hit from a different summon, without any saving throw.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025That is to initialize hide. But it can be broken when a target succeeds on Wisdom (perception) check against the rolled stealth. Passive Perception is that by the rules definition.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025That is to initialize hide. But it can be broken when a target succeeds on Wisdom (perception) check against the rolled stealth. Passive Perception is that by the rules definition.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Awesome!
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Posted Jan 15, 2025When is there going to be a humanoid stat block reveal?
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Seems decent, even though there are a couple flaws. The biggest problem for me is that it looks almost the same as the stat blocks for 5e, and I see no need to purchase another 50$ book just to get the same material, but very slightly changed.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025although the response from neutrino was a complete exaggeration, i dont think what you said is the point here.
personally im a fan of the new PHB & DMG, i find they empower the creativity of players and DMs through clear and potent mechanics. the designers obviously tried to continue that trend with the MM, as a huge point Jeremy Crawford leaned on in the MM presentation video was the ease of use for DMs. hell, the very article and stat block diagram states that is the intention in multiple places.n by omitting something as simple as an attack modifier, it undermines that entire effort.
example: they added the initiative modifier, which will be used ONCE in combat, but not something that the monster can do every single turn PLUS in legendary actions?? if you want DMs to ably run a monster efficiently in combat, avoiding any unnecessary instances of math for one of the monster's core reusable abilities is a pretty good way to do that. forgetting to include that is indeed a major oversight, and is kind of ridiculous considering everything WotC themselves have claimed they were about for this book.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025I hadn't seen that poison paralyze combo yet.. That is.. Wow
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Claws and bites had different action profiles for a reason. You're really just going to stop at nothing to suck all the variety and soul you can out of this game, huh?
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Or, you can just subtract 8 from the Spell Save which is reprinted, right??
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Quality of the new books is very good, your hate for the sake of hate is not going to change it. P.S. my subscription stays active lol
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Okay, there's a lot to unpack, and I don't disagree with everything you said, but I feel like you're doing everything you can to call it bad.
Part of the game is picking areas to be good at and areas to be bad at. If you decide to go full Strength and dump Dex, or even just have decent Dex, you can't be upset that you don't go first sometimes.
On the one hand, I agree with you that I will miss the specific Lair Actions that actually interacted with the lair; creating terrain effects and the like really showed that this was their domain. But on the other, high level play especially has so much to track for the DM that I do somewhat appreciate the trimming of fat, as it were.
It's a CR 24 monster. Breaking the XP budget down, one outside of its lair would be a High difficulty encounter for 5 level 18 characters. In its lair, it's a High difficulty fight for 6 level 18 characters or 5 level 19. At these levels, there are plenty of abilities that give players crazy high bonuses to saves. But again, it goes back to "You chose to put your skills in certain things, and your CHA save wasn't one." Also, it can only be used once every round.
That said, it definitely would be on the DM to not keep banishing the Fighter with a CHA of 8, because that makes them a jerk. They could do it once or twice, and bounce around the table just to show how scary the monster is, sure, but to single out one character definitely goes beyond the bounds of the game.
I do agree with you here, especially because they could have either made Shapechange its own ability or erased the wall of text next to Banish and replaced it with "The dragon casts banishment. (Range 120 ft., no Concentration required to maintain the spell, duration ends at the start of the dragon's next turn). If the creature fails its save against the spell, it also takes 7d6 Force damage. The dragon can't take this Legendary Action again until the end of its next turn.
It's 1d10.
Sorry that 546 HP seems low to you. Just keep in mind that, as you increase monster health to extreme (extremer) degrees, combat drags on longer. If there aren't any mechanics that make Turn 5 any different from Turn 1, then you're doing the same thing 5 times in a row, which gets boring quick. My own design philosophy is that fights should be 2-3 rounds for mooks and double for bosses. And, because the dragon's offense has been seriously boosted, it gets its own chance to end the fight on its terms.
That is actually another good point. While I generally agree with the decision to remove or drastically reduce the amount of "If the attack hits, roll a save," it does come with the exact problem you mentioned: If a creature isn't flatly immune to it, it has no chance to stop it.
As a side note to that last point: thanks for bringing to my attention the combination of Ray of Sickness + Summon Undead (Putrid). Nice little combo.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025DND Beyond: could you make your article images clickable or soomable on your mobile app? Can't read the stat block changes image on mobile because I cant zoom in on it.
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Posted Jan 15, 2025Usually, it's whatever the spellcasting ability modifier is(in this one's case, it's charisma) plus the proficiency bonus, much like it is for characters. So in the Dragon's case, any attack roll spells it casts has a +16 to hit. This is REALLY powerful and even adds with the 24 Spell Save DC by adding 8
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Posted Jan 15, 2025To all of the people posting with varying degrees of "The spell attack is +16" or "It's literally so easy to find the attack bonus" are missing the point. The point isn't that we don't know or can't figure out the attack bonus; the point is that it should be printed in the stat block. They give us the Save DC, after all. It just shows poor quality control on Wizards' part, especially since they are using this graphic to drum up hype for the book. The fact that the stat block is missing something so minor and inconsequential yet easy to add shows that the book might very well have more of these errors, and thus might not be worth buying - not a good look.
As for me, personally, I'm still buying the book. I have thus far been very pleased with the revision, and my hope is that this preview is a fluke and not indicative of the book as a whole- either they see the response to this and are still able to edit the book (doubtful with production costs/timelines, but still possible), or this was just one "whoopsie" and the rest of the book is fine.