I was watching some RPG YouTube, and of course there was talk about Monsters. And with the recent OMG CONTROVERSY with the newest Monster Manual, I got to thinking about something that is more inherent in D&D and in fantasy games in general, why so many monsters? I’ve played various other games, and read many books, watched many movies, but it seems that fantasy games, with D&D leading the charge, seem to have more monsters than any other medium in the genre, or other genre’s in particular. So yeah, why are there so many monsters?
A) because the fantasy setting lends itself to actually having monsters.
B) the often slower-paced gaming style can make a better use of a diverse “cast”, as you have the time for Monster analysis, e.g. elemental resistance, magic resistance, etc.
C) it didn’t plop out of the writers pen all at once. It’s a vast “ecosystem” which has grown for decades, with a myriad of writers adding to the environment, as compared to a single writer who’d have to keep track of all of those monsters in one go. Compare it to let’s say Egyptian or Greek mythology, same story.
Compare it to let’s say Egyptian or Greek mythology, same story.
Also DnD likes to add in monsters from different mythologies so there is that. Lots of inspirations to draw on
I personally think it’s three things.
- D&D is fucking old. Like, people who grew up on OD&D are dead now. It’s had a lot of time to accrue clooge and gunk as the genre of D&D shifted from 1st Person Wargame to Dungeon Crawler to Epic Fantasy to Heroic Fantasy to whatever 5e is, and this means a lot of different monsters to serve these different genres being carried forward into future editions because Gen X gets weird when the things they grew up with get changed or disappear.
- D&D has always fundamentally been about going out into the world, seeing weird things, and killing them. There’s only so many times you can kill zombies before you get bored of zombies. Also, a number of monsters have gimmicks that get old fast, like rust monsters eating your weapons as you hit them and gelatinous oozes being nearly invisible. The only counter to that is more monsters.
- Different monsters serve different purposes, even when they fill the same niche. For example, goblins and kobolds both are tiny little mooks that attack in large numbers and are inherently evil so we don’t have to feel bad about slaughtering entire families of them, but one is more likely to ambush you with ranged fire and Explosives while the other is likely to set up traps for you to wander into. Very different styles of play. Orcs and hobgoblins are both basically people, but while orcs allow you to hold up a mirror to the party by being essentially normal people but ugly, hobgoblins lead tactically complex multi-pronged attacks and are make very good scheming bad guys. Also, not every monster belongs everywhere. Imagine finding a stone golem in the middle of the feywild, or a treant in a dungeon. Attempting to make a monster for literally every situation is how AD&D ended up with the Monstrous Compendium’s fifteen volumes and appendices, so in reality the Monster Manual is an exercise in restraint.
D&D is fucking old. Like, people who grew up on OD&D are dead now.
What?! D&D isn’t thát old. It’s from 1974. So people who grew up on it are in their 50’s and 60’s.
Assuming they started in the crib, yes. If you were about 10 like in stranger things, that’s 60’s/70’s.
Gygax died in 2008, Arneson died in 2009, I don’t know how many of their cohort have gotten cancer or heart attacks or other stuff that generally get listed as “natural causes” on a coroner’s report. We are slowly losing that first generation of gamers who had to argue at length whether players should be allowed to read the rules, whether players should choose their character’s race and class, and whether they should roll their own dice.
Yes, however, to appease the pedants out there, saying Gygax and Arneson and the rest of the Geneva Lake crew “grew up on” DnD is a bit of a misnomer. They didn’t grow up on it, they invented it, and they were well into adulthood at the time.
Attempting to make a monster for literally every situation is how AD&D ended up with the Monstrous Compendium’s fifteen volumes and appendices, so in reality the Monster Manual is an exercise in restrain
I love the strange monsters from AD&D. Its fun to see how weird they got. I am a big fan of having lots to draw on for inspiration
Agreed. It’s why I have all of Kobold Press’s supplemental monster books. Variety is the spice of life, and I’m constantly trying to find ways to make combat more engaging than just slugging it out with my players. Quirky stat blocks help me come up with scenarios.
Supplement books or make your own monsters. I love making a custom monster. I had really fun encounter with a custom ooze that could use engulf as a legendary action. Fun to have it chase the players around the map
So I have been DMing a DnD campaign from level 3 to level 15 at this point. At this point my players have killed ~900 “monsters” at in around 40 different adventures. This doesn’t even count the numbers that were in an adventure they didn’t kill because they ran away, avoided or were NPCs with monster stats. They have killed at least 10 in all categories except plants, fey and celestials so having lots of categories helps as well.
So we need a lot of different options to keep everything fresh and interesting for the players and myself. Some of these are nuanced adventures with complex interactions and moral dilemmas while some are basic hack and slash. So I need a lot of different monsters to use that fit different flavors, use different mechanics and cover different difficulties. I have created some from scratch but it helps to have templates to start with. I won’t use everything in the monster manual but I have used a lot of it so far.
I think it helps to think of each adventure as its own little novel. So in one we are exploring the culture and cruelty of the Yuan-ti in a vaguely Mesoamerican inspired setting while the next they are exploring Bridgerton inspired high culture and dance that was infiltrated by both a rowdy fey and cosmic horror beyond the stars. It helps to have lots of inspirations to draw on since every adventure can be different.
Monsters are more interesting than animals and humans?
Are you asking why there are so many kinds of monsters, or why monsters appear so frequently in the campaigns you’ve played in?
It’s kind of a mixed bag question. But the big question is why is there such a huge emphasis on monsters in the first place? There are a ton of monsters in all editions of d&d, so why aren’t there monsters discussed in Tolkien by the characters like this? There were a few, and either a large creature from the depths of hell that only struck one place, a giant spider who was content to be in her home and not be bothered by Hobbits, and an army of orc/goblin hybrids. In a d&d game, we are supposed to be attacked by several monsters, all different types, at any given time.
So I guess that’s actually several questions, and they each have different answers.
Why does combat feature heavily in D&D? It doesn’t. Or at least, not necessarily. How much or little it features is dependent on your DM.
Ok, so why has it historically been featured heavily? Because of D&D’s lineage. The game evolved mechanically from wargames, where combat was the whole thing, and thematically from works like Conan the Barbarian and Tolkein, where fighting monsters featured prominently.
Why so many types of monsters, then, if works like The Hobbit only had a half dozen or so? Because The Hobbit is a single story, whereas D&D is a framework for creating lots of stories. Maybe one short campaign or a campaign arc has as many monsters as a Tolkein story, but then you go on to the next arc, the next campaign, and you need something new. You can obviously recycle lots; orc bandits are different from orc soldiers are different from orc cultists. But with (tens of?) thousands of games going on continuously, year after year, there’s always a demand for new content to slot in, and monster design is often a handy thing for DMs to outsource. Hence, there are a lot of kinds of monster because there is demand for them.
I think the simple answer is that DnD is a game focused on combat, so it’ll have a lot of cool hostile creatures, while Lord of the Rings is focused on exploration and drama, so it’ll have a lot of cool places and friendly creatures.
But when I compile a mental list of all the fights in LotR + The Hobbit, they do feature quite a varied assortment of monsters. Trolls, orcs, spiders, a dragon, a balrog, wargs, nazghuls, ringwraits, wights, the watcher, olifants. Then there are the non-hostile monsters like ents, eagles, ghosts, and shape-shifters.
So I’m not sure the enemy variety in DnD is that much greater in relation to the amount of time spent fighting.
Because it’s easier to throw the latest Monster of the Week at players than it is to craft NPCs and relationships such that there is compelling drama. Combat is easy. Drama is hard.
While the D&D Fight monsters ad nauseam is more an exception rather than the norm in RPG, it still has a couple of asset.
Monsters are easy bad guys, there is not much moral consideration in fighting giant spyder or “children eating satanic Goblins” while if you fight against other humans who live in the forest that the Duke want to cut-downt to get wood for his navy it make everything more nuanced and complex. It’s great in regular RPG where you can get tons of interesting moral dilemna out of it, but if you’re into dungeon crawling monsters are removing all of that, and allow you to focus on the manage ressources to fight monsters apect of D&D.
if you’re in zero to hero fantasy, you need opponent within that scale. so start with Goblins, then orcs, and finally dragon, and had a whole list in the way
A you mentionned, it’s pretty specific to D&D and in many RPG you don’t use much monster, or come with something unspeakable and too powerful for the PC to fight against
More stuff to kill in the kill stuff game. If you look at games that emphasize more narrative, there will be fewer pages dedicated to just monsters, like The One Ring 2e. The downside is having less varied combat and less freedom on crafting your own stuff
First, the new monster manual is atrocious… they people that worked on it should all be fired.
They made the weakest and lamest challenges, then threw in a lot of bad mechanics and obviously “bugged” creatures.
I think this is symptomatic of the larger problem that this new edition was pretty much only made to make money.
I’ve mostly read the new PHB, but I feel like the clarity of the updated rules make it obvious how needlessly confusing much of original 5e was.
Sure, charging full price for what is mostly rephrasing and polish does feel a bit rich.
But refusing to give the new edition it’s own damn name makes my blood boil. Trying to explain to my players that while most parts of fifth edition is compatible with fifth edition, some parts of fifth edition is actually not compatible with fifth edition, has significantly shortened my life span.
I just explain it as “LOL zombie apocalypse werewolf destroys your character if it puts them at zero hit points … but 2024 5e thinks it’s fine because they removed all its resists and regeneration”. Or
“It’s a Carrion Crawler, failing one saving throw means you are permanently afflicted … yes you get a new save every six seconds, but you automatically fail it forever”.
It draws from a lot of fantasy mythologies and needs a variety of monsters to populate encounters of all levels with lots of variety, plus intelligent species often have cultures which require more subtypes.
