The PHB was giving me hope. I was really liking the character creation system (even if I'm a little worried about HP).
Now that I'm seeing more monsters, both in the adventures, adventure suppliments, and the MM previews, I'm finding them to be rather boring. 4E spoiled me on it's varied, tactical combat; 4E had its own problems, but the monsters were interesting. Even the dragons now are boring; some nasty melee attacks, a breath weapon, and some out of turn actions. Oh, don't get me wrong, the whole Lair abilities are interesting, but it seems like each dragon will even play the same now.
Monsters in 4E were easy to design. The stat-blocks made them easy to run. There was variety among the same monster type, without having to bust out additional rules for adding class levels. Maybe the DMG will give me what I'm looking for. That's why I'm withholding my judgement of the entire edition until I get a chance to look at the DMG. I've already purchased the PHB, but I may find myself simply stealing ideas from it and going back to my house-ruled 4E.
How does everyone else feel about the monster design? Do you like it's simplicity? Do you like the descriptive, rather than prescriptive, nature of CR and level?
I prefer the 4e monsters (and PCs).
But, I like this monster design better than anything before 4e. As you said, it remains to be seen how customizable they are. I'd assume not too hard, as the stat blocks are really simple. The new Lich I saw on enworld BLEW my mind. It's actually finally powerful.
I am still upset that I'll have to look up spells in the PHB for caster monsters, though. Not that I mind with a CR 21 campaign-ending boss like the Lich I saw...But for weaker casters...Meh.
I will buy this MM, even if I never run 5e. I love the art, the look, the flavor, and such...I also just collect monster books from RPGs. Great toilet reading 
As someone who likes both 4E and Next, Next Monsters are for me.
Better than 3.5E by a country mile.
(No I don't want to look up your ability in another book!, no I don't want to work out the feats and skills and spells of a monster... why is this as much effort to stat as a character?! It only has to live for 5 rounds! What's your obsession with bizaare mathematical symmetry? WHY DOES THIS DUMB DINOSAUR HAVE MORE SKILLPOINTS THAN A CAT?!*
… but a step backwards from 4E in some ways.
4E had many critics but one thing that it excelled at was making monsters interesting and challenging in combat encounters.
For me it's greatest achievement was to make all the basic "evil humanoids" genuinely feel very different opponents with very different styles of fighting.
A goblins, hobgoblins and orcs had far more than very minor stats and equipment differences.
5E... has sorta kept this, although to a far lesser degree. It has some obvious inspiration from 4E
Gnolls have Rampage.
Goblins have Nimble Escape.
Hobgoblins have Martial Advantage.
Kobolds have Pack Tactics
Orcs have Aggressive
But none make quite as much difference as the 4E abilities.
But on the other side, alot of 4E involved tactical positioning and forced movement, and really required a battlematt or similar grid.
Given that 5E is designed to be far easier to play as "Theater of the Mind's Eye" style, it's a compromise.
*Technically 4E and 5E kinda have the same issue with ½ level modifier and Prof'' bonuses based off CR but... the skillpoints really rubbed it in for me.
Xeviat-DM wrote:
Yeah if I am going to DM 5e then having decent monsters is going to be a real must for me.
I think the monsters in 4E were fantastic, for a very complicated, balanced board game. I think the monsters in 4E were great for D&D Miniatures!
But I much prefer the simpler monsters of 5E. They have a core attribute that makes them different from other humanoids, but ultimately they know their place--a meat bag of HP filled with XP and Treasure! I mean, if I tell the players that orcs are attacking, they know that they are going to rage. If I say goblins, they expect them to shift around and hide, etc. Doesn't need to be more complicated.
It's not the simplicity of the monsters that I have a problem with - I don't care about that. One flavorful ability that they actually get to use and that impacts the encounter is worth more to me than a whole page of powers that go unused.
What bugs me about the change in stat block format from 4e to Next is going back to having to flip through books to run some of the monsters. Honestly, that tends to just turn me off of using monsters with spell lists.
I'm fine with simple monsters as long as they are easy to customize. Simple traits can be use to make interesting encounters. And I'm pretty sure that it'll be very easy to use 4e monsters, just change the numbers a bit and you're good to go.
Need to play a bit more but the PCs have hit level 4 and now they are past the danger zone things are starting to get quite easy due to the amount of healing available. No surprise there. The higher level monsters look to easy, the low level ones are brutal and I suspect we have another edition with a 3-4 level sweet spot much like 3rd eds lvl 3-6 or so, 4Es 1-4 and I suspect this one will be around level 4-8.
4E monsters were great if they were in a video game, but for a pen and paper game? No thanks. I like this approach much more. And you know *gasp* you can always give them additional special abilities if you are DMing. I really do think 4E killed the creativity of most DMs who ran it.
Atheosis wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
MightyZehir wrote:
Atheosis wrote:
Xeviat-DM wrote:
Xeviat-DM wrote:
I loved 4e's monsters. For me they incouraged creativity because I could focus on making interesting memorable boss monsters while filling a dungeon with lots of premade mooks that felt hand crafted and different, but that I didn't have to actually put any time in to. I feel like right now 5th's monsters are somewhere between 2nd and 4th and I'm okay with that. I just hope I'll be able to make memorable boss fights without having to have serious hp bloat especially at higher levels cuz it seems players can do some serious alpha strike damage.
Zardnaar wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
I'm in favour of monsters going back to their mythic roots with standard in combat and out of combat abilities that reflect the stories from which they come. I suspect that Dragon will make the most of customising the monster with optional extras to create things like kobold dragonshields and I prefer that to having widly different versions with different abilities. It's early days as far as customising goes.
I'm not a fan of returning to giving monsters spells like PCs but thankfully it's easy to just hand out spell-like abilities to emulate spell-casting like 4e. Again, I think Dragon will come up with guidelines to cover this.
I think the Monster formats are fine and quite usable for me (though looking up spells is a chore again).
What I'm not digging so much are the default flavour texts in the Monster Manual. Some are hits, but most of them are real misses with me.
There were so many elegant flavour changes in 4e that have been either rolled back or arbitrarily changed to something new. For example, it becomes really hard to do the Arcanaloth-Ravaasta-Rakshasa-Deva connection when Devas no longer take on mortal (but reincarnating) forms for the sake of their deities, when Rakshasa are now from the Hells and are essentially like a tiger-faced devil rather than fallen Devas, when the difference between Yugoloths and Rakshasa are really emphasised… the whole nature of Rakshasa reincarnation that was tied so elegantly into the Deva story has been tossed, so that Devas can join Planetars and Solars in being these LG coloured human-bodied angels rather than Angels being these terrifying archetypes out of Abrahamic religious lore that could be representing any deity. The Planetar preview was a SNOOZEFEST for that very reason. I was under the assumption that 4e Angels were one of the few monsters EVERYONE loved, and yet they too have gone the way of the Dodo (who incidentally, I can't help but see as back in the form of the Axe-Beak, due to various video games designing Axe-Beak enemies as looking otherwise like Dodos).