First of all, welcome to a new site. As you may or may not have noticed, Substack leadership has come out in favor of Elon Musk. The United States federal government is trying to cut back all programs, as if Musk is in charge, with deadly consequences. So I decided that it’s time to leave Substack. If they endorse people who run government so badly that it is killing innocent people, it’s time to go. (I will get into how evil it is to endorse a Nazi who goes out of his way to vilify trans people at a different time.)
For now, let’s try to move away from how our day-to-day lives feel increasingly haunted to talking about a hunted house. Wizards of the Coast has revealed several new monsters for the upcoming Monster Manual, and one of them is a giant walking house who wants to eat your party!
Go big AND go home.
— Dungeons & Dragons (@dndbeyond.com) 2025-01-14T23:06:10.704Z
Seeing this on my feed reminded me of the first time I thought about game design in any way. It was in the middle of high school. I had run out of math courses to take at the local community college and needed something for my young brain to do. I wasn't ready to think as much or put as much effort into anything else but math and Magic: The Gathering at that point. (Yeah, I was as well rounded as a needle.)
I played a bunch of Civilization 2 and its space cousin, Master Of Orion II. I still have Master of Orion II. Designers of both games realized that there was a limit to how well they could program the computer's AI to challenge a player, but they wanted to offer a range of difficulty settings. In each game, difficulty largely amounted to adjusting a few core mathematical levers.
In Civilization 2, growing your cities and building armies or granaries had a cost that was based on a multiple of 10. At lower difficulty, the computer would have a multiple of 11 or 13, making it harder for them to do things. At higher difficulty, the computer's multiplier decreased, making it easier for them to grow cities and produce things. In Master of Orion II, Hard and Very Hard difficulty rewrote some core rules as well. Each of the 13 species in the game got 10 points to spend on abilities, but the computer got a random extra ability or two and was more likely to betray you. Even the game's random events were rigged to go against the player more times than not.
No one batted an eye at these difficulty sliders. That's not to say everyone was happy. Back in the mid 90s, most of our video games didn't have any sort of difficulty sliders! Sliders in games like Civilization 2 felt like the most reasonable option we could expect from programmers at the time. Master of Orion II's difficulty settings weren't as well received because the added randomness could make absurdly powerful combinations that live on in message board lore.
Reading the 2024 Monster Manual reminds me of some of these things I felt playing Master of Orion II decades ago before I gave up on Hard difficulty. In preview videos, Jeremy Crawford kept talking about wanting to make sure monsters "bring the hurt." But the damage of these new monsters isn't all that much higher unless the original was behind on the power curve back in 2014. (Many monsters were behind the curve.)
Instead, we get monsters like the Haunting Revenant, a CR 10 haunted house. I could talk about every little detail with this monster, but I want to focus on the main things that makes this monster different than all other monsters in the 2014 Monster Manual. First, it has Invitation, a ability to swallow a group of characters into it, at range. Second, it has a trait called Haunted Zone, which forces all creatures inside to make a high DC Constitution Saving Throw before casting a spell or their spell fails.
Thinking Like A Playtester: Is This Fun
I've been playtesting adventures and monsters since that start of 2019. Been playtesting my own work and others' work. I'm usually a DM but occasionally test as a player. I've been doing it so long that I advise new designers on how to run playtests. I always tell them the most important question is "was this fun?" After all, at the end of the day, we play games to have fun!
Of course, different people enjoy different things. Even if everyone in a D&D adventure or monster playtest loves D&D as a game, they probably won't all agree about liking a particular adventure or monster. I DMed an adventure for charity last weekend that was 100 percent combat. Literally. Players showed up for 5 minutes of intro, 3 hours of fighting, game over. I like a bit more balance but Doctors Without Borders got money as a result of me chipping in so I’m happy to help.
A major part of why you playtest is because playing is an experience. Things that seem like they might be fun in a creator's head might not actually fun at the table. In my first adventure, I wrote a fight off in the distance where demons attacked the cultists who summoned them. My initial expectation was that the fight happened in the distance, then players had to choose which captive to rescue as they were carried away from the fight. Instead, both playtest groups wanted to charge directly into the fight. Lesson learned, encounter changed, ENnie nomination for best adventure in Organized Play earned.
I like telling this story because I can clearly see in retrospect that my initial idea was terrible. Terrible. Creators can get attached to our ideas. Sometimes we need other people to come in and give us an honest opinion about whether our ideas are fun, because we get so attached to our ideas that we lose objectivity.
A designer who is fully committed to a concept like the Haunted Zone might go to a playtest for narrow tuning like "should the DC for its Invitation and Haunted Zone be 15 instead of 17?" I start with first principles like "are these abilities fun in the first place?" "Will the majority of my players enjoy them?" It takes a lot of humility to be able to completely scrap an idea you spent weeks imagining in your head and growing to love instead of assuming that the playtester is a "jerk" who doesn't get it.
I've DMed for hundreds of players over the years. I've DMed for dozens in the last three months and it's been a light DMing load because there’s no convention. Sure, they have more things in common with each other than a random group of D&D players would have, but they are hardly a monolith. I've probably got a better sense of how these monster abilities will play out than most.
Based on my experience, I expect the Invitation ability to draw characters in should be popular with most groups. I dig it! Characters could still do most of their actions inside the revenant if this was the only ability at play. It's a real improvement over 2014 Monster Manual’s swallowing creatures, where you were blinded, so you couldn't even see the creature swallowing you. Letting the revenant attack creatures inside it at advantage is a reasonable penalty.
Haunted Revenant: Probably Not Fun!
The problem is Haunted Zone, a joyless penalty likely to trap many players. Once sucked in the revenant, if you want to cast a spell first, you have to pass a DC 17 Constitution Saving Throw or fail and waste your turn. Imagine how this feels. My level 8 Wizard Malnir has Charisma as a dump stat so he needs an 18 to pass the save or get sucked in the revenant. 15 percent chance. Once sucked in, he needs a 10 or higher on the d20 to cast a spell because his first level is in Fighter and he has 16 Constitution.
My Wizard Malnir, who is as optimized to cast spells inside the Haunted Revenant as possible, still has a 45 percent chance of having his spells fail inside.
I can make a coin flip every turn to have Malnir cast a spell, Dodge and rely on allies to kill the creature, or try to hit with Malnir's warhammer, doing 7 damage per turn if I hit AC 20.
It's even worse for my level 10 Druid Sariel. She has 12 Charisma so "only" a 75 percent chance to be sucked in. Once she's sucked in, she gets counterspelled 70 percent of the time. She's a Wildfire Druid, so Wild Shape doesn't do much.
Every swallowing monster in the 2014 Monster Manual and subsequent books had a damage threshold where if you did enough damage, the monster might vomit up everyone it swallowed. That doesn't exist here, so Sariel is stuck.
Even if players don't do the math, they can look at the Haunted Revenant and imagine how many spellcasters would be stuck with a high likelihood of their spells being cancelled and being left with nothing to do on their turns. If you poll players, not being able to do anything on their turn is one of the less popular experiences in D&D. It may be the least popular! Some players can tolerate it for a turn, but not indefinitely like we have here. If I tried to put a monster like this in my home game, or if I was playtesting something that someone else wrote, my players would stop the game to complain. I don't even need to playtest it to know how strongly they feel.
The Haunted Zone trait can also come across as unfair because it treats members of a party so differently. Sariel is screwed, but my barbarian Lady Lucinda is completely unpenalized as she'd use Reckless Attack. Game features that heavily penalize some players but don't affect others tend to be seen as less fun by the people I play with.
It's easy to imagine an alternative. Drop the Haunted Zone trait and add the following:
Digestion. If a character inside the revenant damages it or forces it to make a saving throw, they take 10 (3d6) necrotic damage at the end of their turn.
Everyone inside can take their actions as normal, but there's a cost. If you hurt the revenant while inside it, then it starts to eat you. In the 2014 Monster Manual, monsters that swallowed PCs tended to start digesting them regardless of what they did, so this is hardly a new concept. We just add some fun player choice, letting them safely heal or buff allies stuck inside if they want. A few groups won't want that small added layer of complexity, but I'd be willing to bet $20 that most groups would prefer this Digestion trait to Haunted Zone.
Does This Feel Right? Critical For Monsters
The second big thematic issue that comes up in playtesting, particularly for monsters, is "does this feel right?" If I create a fire tornado monster and all of its attacks do thunder damage, I'd expect complaints. Shouldn't a fire tornado do fire damage?
When I close my eyes and imagine a haunted house that can move on its own and attack people, I imagine a big lumbering oaf with average speed (big legs) and a magic ability to suck people inside. Let's see what we've actually got:
203 hit points. On the high side for CR 10, which is good. I might want more.
30 speed. Not overly fast or slow, which is what I imagine. I could also go with 40 speed because big creature means big legs. (Giants are fast too.)
Strength, Charisma (force of will), and Constitution are its highest ability scores. Also what I imagine.
Two attacks with +9 to hit for 27 bludgeoning damage each. This feels ideal. Getting hit by a house should hurt.
Resistance to Necrotic, Immunity to Poison and a range of conditions. Normal for Undead.
Armor Class 20. Before I got into D&D, I heard the phrase "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn" over and over. There’s a reason I don’t play darts! I can accept that this haunted house may have some stonework, but a huge house should be easy to hit. 15 or 16 feels right. I'd also accept 17 from the outside and 15 or lower from the inside, but that could be too complicated.
Initiative +5. Are you kidding me? The big lumbering house has the initiative of a Rogue who maximizes their Dexterity?
The Object Slam attack can also be a ranged attack at 30 feet, or 90 feet at long range. Uhh, what object is slamming people in melee and 90 feet away? I can't explain this as a DM. Instead, I'd have the revenant spit bricks and magically have an infinite supply as a ranged attack. I also want this hulk to do less damage with its ranged attack.
I imagine a haunted house as a monster with a distinct set of strengths and weaknesses. I suspect this is going to be an ongoing theme of some of my early posts about D&D monsters on this site so I will save it for another time.
So…What’s Going On Here?
I have been a highly sought convention DM for high level gaming for 7 years now. I tried it at one convention and immediately surged up the ranks of high-level convention DMs because I had one simple trick: I thought about how to challenge my players while letting them play.
At my first convention DMing high level games, I had a vampire for a boss. Someone cast a Wall of Fire in a line, on top of the vampire. I had the vampire use a Legendary Action to grab someone nearby with an attack and then use his next Legendary Action to carry the them into the Wall of Fire spell. This was far more enjoyable for everyone at the table than giving the vampire the ability to Counterspell the Wall of Fire.
It takes a certain kind of poise and creativity to improvise this strategy for the vampire when someone else is running around with a Staff Of The Magi at level 15. I improvised the entire boss fight. I made monsters stronger and added trapped commoners whose lives were being sucked away unless a character freed them in a matter of turns. The prewritten level 11-16 adventure I was handed gave me monsters more appropriate for a level 8-10 game, let alone well optimized level 15 characters, so I wrote rough notes for what to do but not "we've got a Staff of the Magi and then some" notes.
As I have written about before back on Substack, high level DMing is hard. Characters are powerful. Just to give an example of the characters I have to choose from at levels 11-16 for my next convention in a few weeks. See if you can guess which one is the one I warn convention DMs about and see if they are cool with it before playing:
Enna. A level 16 Way of Mercy Monk who has a Belt of Fire Giant Strength, Dwarven Thrower, and 22 Wisdom.
Erky. A level 16 Divination wizard with a level of cleric. His resting AC is 26. He doesn’t use his Arcane Grimoire +3.
Jasper Hilltopple. A level 16 Barbarian/Fighter/Rogue dual wielder with a Fire Giant Belt, +6 to initiative and over 200 hit points.
Ozzie. A level 15 Paladin / Warlock dual wielder with a +6 Aura of Protection.
Victor. A level 15 Githzerai Twilight Cleric. He’s got AC 25 and access to the Shield spell from his ancestry.
Guessing time is over. The answer is…
Wait for it…
Enna! Even before all of the buffs to the monk in the 2024 rules, it was Enna. That much mobility plus damage output and proficiency in all saving throws was dominant in ways DMs didn’t expect. I rarely used Stunning Strike (but broke a playtest encounter with it.)
The point of sharing these characters is that if characters like Jasper, Ozzie and Victor are strong but in the expected range of strong at this convention, it’s probably not the kind of game that every DM would enjoy running. I don’t want to judge any DM for this. It’s very much an acquired taste. That being said, I think if you are a game designer, you have to design basic rules to work for this type of player and game just as much as the game where players don’t optimize and don’t have many magic items. The rules should be agnostic, as they were in 2014.
Got To Work With, Not Against High Level Players
The trick to successful high level DMing is increased collaboration. When players get the rare chance to play high level characters, they want to use high level powers and very rare magic items. DMs have to embrace that PCs are very powerful and feel as strong as a kaiju. Challenge them with another kaiju and minions. When everyone embraces the aesthetic of a kaiju fight and minimizes powerful spells or abilities to deny actions to the other side, high level play can be some of the most enjoyable D&D.
However, that's not how some people approach high level play. When DMs get overwhelmed by the kaiju-like player characters stomping all over their monsters, some try to "level the playing field" by taking away players turns unless they make high DC saving throws. The Haunted Revenant’s Haunted Zone is an example of this style of DMing.
Finding ways to challenge high level players without taking away their turns—particularly optimizers—requires a great deal of finesse. My "just grab your own kaiju" advice is much harder because you have to think about all the ways in which PCs can try to make it hard for the kaiju-like monster to take turns without going overboard with countermeasures.
My favorite example of a high CR monster done well is the stalker of Baphomet from Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. It is a demonic stone giant with 200 hit points (good but not excessive), a robust +11 to hit, both a melee and ranged attack, and an area of effect ability on a recharge for those characters with excessive Armor Class. It has just enough offense to always be able to take an effective turn and just enough defense to not be a pushover while still having real vulnerabilities. I've used them as bosses or mini-bosses in level 11-16 games and minions in my forthcoming level 20 adventure.
Taking away players' turns is the biggest, bluntest tool in the toolkit. WotC has been using it more and more in new monsters for their adventure books over the last few years. It's ironic, since WotC's two biggest competitors have focused on game design where players don't have to roll separate to-hit rolls. As they try to minimize the feeling of "I didn't get to do anything on my turn because I rolled badly" WotC is adding more of those feelings.
I could see someone at WotC trying to say "well, we are trying to make monsters easier to run," but I don't fully buy this. I've taught lots of new players how to play. PCs all have more mechanics than monsters. It's also a steeper technical learning curve because new players may be starting from nothing as they first get in to TTRPGs. The key to teaching new players is getting them a character class they like and can envision easily. Once they have the imaginative framework, it's easier to explain how numbers and rules fit into the imaginative process.
For a new DM, there are five main things to learn about running monsters.
Where is the technical information?
How do I read this jargon?
How do I keep track of things like initiative and how much damage has been dealt to a monster? (Every DM does this differently. It took me years of in person DMing to settle on drawing a semi-circle with my dry erase map and writing down everyone’s initiative based on where they sat at the table, along with monsters at the center.)
How do I use my monster's actions to help tell a story? This is why I hate WotC's trend of making monsters equally good at melee and ranged attacks. That's a boring story for me and many of my players.
How do I run my monsters so they feel fun and fair for the players? As we discussed earlier, the Haunted Revenant has real problems with this last point.
It is technically much easier to run this monster in a vacuum. The broken, limited tactical starship fighting AI of 1994's Master of Orion II would struggle with the stalker of Baphomet’s decision tree but could technically manage the Haunted Revenant about as well as I could. However, it's much harder to manage the haunted Revenant and make it a fun experience with actual human players.
Now it's time for the depressing, honest truth. Many DMs don't care about making fights feel fun or fair for their players. Some DMs want power over their players. I learned D&D at the most psychotic local game store I have heard of. Two of the three main DMs felt powerless in their own lives outside of the DM chair that they sought the DM chair to exert power over players who unknowingly wandered into the game store. They didn't let me in as a new DM. Yes, I played at the one local game store where DMs didn't want to try and get someone else to DM so they could play. Eventually they let me into their club. Once they played at my table, they realized I was a more benevolent, happier DM. From then on, they went out of their way to try and kill my characters.
An asshole DM is always going to find ways to be an asshole. However, there are many things in monster or adventure design that make it easier for a DM to be an asshole. It's like social media. Some people are going to be horrific on social media because that's who they are. But when Elon Musk let people pay him money to have their replies get prioritized on Twitter, the worst people on that site paid him money to make it easier to harass other users. Wise people blamed Musk as much or more than the people who paid him. Horrible users are a given, but leadership can try to contain them or empower them.
As WotC keeps rolling out monsters who take away players' turns, it feels like they keep giving the cruelest DMs more and more tools to be cruel. As much as I want to try and separate my hobbies from the malevolent chaos and cruelty happening in the United States these days, it's an incredible letdown that the 2024 Monster Manual seems designed for cruel DMs, not people like me, based on what they want to promote.
I keep going back to the feeling of how this all works. On a fundamental level, DMing combat at higher levels is harder on the DM. It feels like WotC is trying to limit how much brainpower the DM has to use at higher levels by giving monsters with these abilities to deny multiple players their turns. A DM doesn't have to think much, just use these abilities. It's like the programmers of Civilization II back in 1994, who knew a computer couldn't outthink a human player, so they gave the AI its own set of rules and tools to cheat on some level to compete.