As I write this, I have just finished a Let’s Read of the first D&D 4 Monster Manual and Monster Vault in parallel, which took me about one year and four months to complete and and around 2 years and 2 months to finish posting here. This means it’s time to start up on the Monster Manual 2!

Published in 2009, this book includes both more varieties of monsters that appeared in its predecessor, and those that are new either to the game or to this edition of it. There’s not much in the way of preamble in its text: after explaining the same thing I just did in the previous sentence, it launches into a description of the stat block format and then goes right to the monster list.

Before I do the same, I’m going to use this post to describe some useful information for people unfamiliar with either D&D Fourth Edition, or the conventions I’ve adopted over time while going through the first Monster Manual.

Fourth Edition Encounter Basics

While you don’t need to be intimately familiar with Fourth Edition D&D to understand my writeups, it helps to know some basic terminology.

4e uses the same level scale for monsters as it does for PCs. Monsters of the same level are all worth the same amount of XP, and you calculate an encounter’s level by adding up their XP values and adjusting it a bit for the size of your PC party. The game’s platonic ideal of a “balanced encounter” is one where the party faces a group of monsters of the same size and level as themselves. Note that “balanced” here means a fairly easy fight of the sort the PCs can go through several times per day. To make it harder increase either the number or level of monsters, and vice-versa. A “level+1” or “level+2” encounter is challenging, a “level+3” or “level+4” one are boss battle material. A difference of +5 or greater is one of those situations where the PCs might be better off running away.

Levels go from 1 to 30, though some rare monsters meant to be “final bosses” for epic campaigns go a bit beyond that. It’s perfectly possible to have an entire campaign where the party never fights a “balanced”, same-level battle.

Some monsters are “Elite”, which means they are more powerful and are worth two regular creatures in the encounter building formula. Others are “Solos” and are worth four regulars - but despite the name might not make for a fun encounter all by themselves. Combat is a team sport! Last and least, a few are “minions” which do less damage and go down in one hit. Four of these are worth a single regular.

What this means is that you should never evaluate a monster in isolation. Always assume it’s going to fight alongside a team of other opponents with complimentary roles and abilities. This is true even for a lot of solo monsters.

Monster Roles

A monster’s role describes both the sort of tactic you should employ when using it, and acts as a “class” of sorts. A monster’s attack bonuses, defenses, and HP all depend on its level and role, not on what type of creature it is like in 3.x.

  • Skirmishers have baseline stats across the board and abilities that make them highly mobile.

  • Brutes hit hard in melee and take a lot of killin’. They have high HP, high damage, and reduced AC.

  • Soldiers are also melee combatants, but have high AC and tend to have abilities similar to that of a PC fighter, being good at preventing the enemy from targetting their more fragile buddies.

  • Lurkers have attacks that do a lot of damage but require some setup. A typical lurker will have some sort of “routine” where it makes a big attack one turn and spends the following turn setting it up again. This makes them good for ambush scenarios.

  • Controllers have stats similar to those of a skirmisher, but their abilities are a mix of ranged and melee attacks that also inflict negative conditions on the PCs or shape the battlefield in other ways.

  • Artillery monsters are fragile and have lousy melee attacks, but their ranged attacks are stronger and more accurate.

When designing an encounter, you’re usually supposed to mix and match the roles so that they complement each other. In general you want a “front line” made up of soldiers and brutes, with artillery and controllers hanging back and providing ranged support, and with lurkers and skirmishers running around the edges trying to get past the PC’s own front line. The exact composition of your Team Monster will of course alter this in all sorts of interesting ways.

The existence of monster roles means we’ll often encounter monsters with several different stat blocks, which allow you to do something like an “all-bullywug fight” that’s still tactically interesting.

The Dreaded Math Bugs

While the foundation of the encounter design system in 4e was really solid, it took a bit of time for the writers to fine-tune the math. Monsters from the first Monster Manual generally did too little damage. Elites and Solos also had defenses that were too high, and high-level solos in particular had ridiculously large HP totals. All of this could lead to fights that were both too easy and too long to be fun.

In the Monster Manual 2, some of these problems were fixed: Elites and Solos lost their defense bonuses, and Solos have about 20% less HP than they would have under MM1 rules. Brutes and soldiers also had their accuracy fine-tuned (the former missed too much, the latter were too accurate).

From this point on you also start seeing minions with roles: where a MM1 monster might have been described as a “Level 10 Minion”, here you might get a “Level 10 Minion Brute” for example. Role affects a minion’s defenses and damage, but not their HP, which is always 1 with a “minions can’t be damaged by missed attacks” condition.

One problem still remains: damage is still too low, by an amount that increases with monster level. So a level 1 or 2 monster doesn’t suffer from this at all, but a level 25 epic threat will hit like a feather pillow when it should be hitting like a speeding truck.

If you’re preparing a 4e adventure and you need to fix a MM2 stat block yourself, the famous Monster Manual 3 on a Business Card post from Blog of Holding has a wonderful summary of the definitive formulas, which you get in a longer form in one of the DMG update PDFs that WotC published back in the day.

An even quicker fix is to add half the monster’s level to all of its damage rolls, as outlined in this other Blog of Holding post. So, for example, add +5 to all damage rolls for a level 10 monster. This should get you close enough to the “correct” figures.