So many monsters, so many choices, how does a Dungeon Master know what to do? They could read all the stats in the Monster Manual, crunch all the numbers, and brainstorm all the possible tactics for both practicality purposes and roleplay purposes, and then keep all that information handy for their sessions. Or they could read this book and follow its advice.
This is a third-play supplement for Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, and it is designed to help DMs run monster encounters in their sessions. It is specifically for combat encounters. The author is very clear on this point. He only considers monster traits that are useful in direct combat, so if a monster has something like Clairvoyance, which has no combat utility, he is going to ignore it. However, if a certain monster is set up so that it is likely to avoid direct combat, then he will mention that. Night hags, Rakashata, and Succubus/Incubus are mentioned to be more like sub-plots rather than single encounters. This is due to their written lore.
That's one of the great things that the author, Keith Ammann, has done in this book. He doesn't write purely optimize encounters. This is not a book of "the most effective way to kill your players with monster x". No, the book has the title that it does for a reason. The Monsters Know What they're Doing, because the lore states that they behave in a certain way. Mr. Ammann looks at the written lore, considers the stat block, and then deduces how a given monster will fight. Then, once he has the framework of the monster's mindset, then he looks for the optimized way the monster would fight from within that mindset.
Night hags, Rakashata, and Succubus/Incubus don't have much going for them in straight-forward combat. The lore states that they accomplish their goals outside of combat, and their traits support this perception. So, Mr. Ammann writes their entries that way. These monsters will avoid combat, only resort to it when cornered, and attempt to escape instead of fighting to the death. That, by the way, is another great thing about this book.
D&D is not a video game. Not every monster will fight to the death in every occasion. Humanoids, for instance, will typically attempt to parley or retreat when their HP gets too low, as their lore dictates. This is because they are mortal creatures that have evolved over time, so they have survival instincts, and so they will try to avoid death. That is the standard Mr. Ammann uses, a mortal creature that has evolved over time. When such a creature becomes badly hurt (lost a specific percentage of their HP), it flees in a manner appropriate to it. Goblins will scramble in a disorganize rabble, hobgoblins will retreat in as organized a fashion as they can manage, and mind flayers will cast plane shift.
Avoiding combat, fleeing from combat, now we come to the meat of the matter, how the monsters will act in combat.
Each monster has a goal it wants to achieve. According to lore, few creatures will attack the party unprovoked just to kill them. Beasts and monstrosities will want to eat them. Fiends will want to corrupt them or use them in an evil plan of some kind, or they will come into conflict when the party tries to stop their evil plan. Elementals are forces of nature, and so the player party might just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I will focus on that last one because it is one where I have experience. I am a dungeon master myself, and so I've read this book thinking about how I could use it in an actual session. In one of those sessions, I attacked the party with a water elemental. I followed the book's advice on running elementals.
As forces of nature, the elementals don't have needs or desires like physical creatures. They don't need to eat, have no use for possessions, and don't have survival instincts either. In fact, fighting to the death actually helps them get what they want. They are creatures consisting entirely of supernatural energy from an elemental plane, so the only reason they would appear on the Material Plane is if some spell-caster summoned them to it and forced them to take on a physical form. If they "die", then they just go back to their home plane, which is exactly what they want. Until that happens, they follow their nature.
A fire elemental, for instance, will want to set as many things on fire as it can. So, it will use its full movement on every turn to run to creatures and objects so it can set them on fire by touching them. Not attacking, just touching them. They will ignore opportunity attacks to do this. Now a water elemental will attack differently. It wants to flow. So it will try to engulf as many targets as it can using its Overwhelm feature in its attempts to drown them.
I followed that advice for my session, and it worked out very well. The party failed their DEX saves, which meant they took damage and were at risk of drowning from the start of the encounter. By the way, they had an average level of 4 and lacked magical weapons. It was a dangerous situation. They desperately freed the trapped party members and then escaped before the elemental killed them all. It was an exciting encounter.
This book has great advice, and it is written in a friendly manner. Keith Ammann doesn't deliver his advice in a manner that suggests "my way is the best way" or that a DM should be antagonistic to the players. It is rather the confidence of someone who has crunched the numbers, read the lore, and considered long and hard about how a particular monster would behave in combat. The goal here is to deliver challenging, interesting and diverse combat encounters, so that everyone can fun playing D&D.
Trickster Eric Novels gives "The Monsters Know What they're Doing" an A+
Click here for my previous book review: A Certain Magical Index - light novel volume 2
Brian Wilkerson is a independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).
His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.
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