Click to get it full-sizefront and back! I m the guy who does monsters on a business card posts, and I just started at MCDM, so I should probably do a Draw Steel Monsters on a Business Card, right? Well it turns out I don t have to! Amber over at amby.navy did it for me! If [ ]
If I ve been quiet on this blog for a while, it s because I ve been filling my hours with a lot of RPG design: D D, A5E, Pathfinder, and, increasingly, Draw Steel (I ve been doing freelance work on the game back from when it was MCDM RPG). And now it s official! I m starting a job as Draw [ ]
A kind of crazy in-game explanation for D D psionics occurred to me. I haven t seen it before so I figured I d share it. The canonical explanation for psionics is that they re from the Far Realms: weird Lovecraftian planes beyond mortal comprehension, where squidgy creatures use psionics to do squidgy things. I think this doesn t tell [ ]
As a d20 monster designer, a question I often have is how D D is this distance? D D has certain speeds, distances, and ranges that it likes more than others. Will I look like a country bumpkin if I give someone a speed of 75 feet? (Answer: Obviously not. I must follow the monster s story. The [ ]
One of the more puzzling non-changes in the D D 2024 edition refresh is that they didn t make any changes to damage vulnerability. In 5e D D (both 2014 and 2024), resistance to a damage type means you take half the damage. This is fine. Conversely, vulnerability to damage means you take double the damage. This is [ ]
In my post 2024 Monster Manual on a Business Card, where I tried to extrapolate WOTC monster building rules from the 2024 Monster Manual, I have a lot of chart and graphs slicing up the data in various ways, one of which had a key error. When I tried to determine whether there was a [ ]
In my post 2024 Monster Manual on a Business Card, I figured out the average base statistics (HP, AC, damage per round, etc) of 2024 monsters of each Challenge Rating. Using this as a starting point, you can start to design plausible monsters with the most common stats for their CR. But of course, a [ ]
(v2: edited 2/25/2025 to fix a data error for legendary monsters, read more here on that fix) The 2024 Monster Manual is out, so we can finally answer all the questions we have: are 2024 Monster Manual monsters tougher than 2014 monsters? How much? How does WOTC design 2024-compatible monsters, and how can I do [ ]
When I m writing rules for D D 2024, it annoys me not to have an official style guide. In its absence, I made my own style guide so I can quickly answer my own questions: Is it action and bonus action, or Action and Bonus Action? (neither, it s action and Bonus Action ) Am I knocked Prone , [ ]
As a monster designer, I m interested in seeing where the 2024 Monster Manual takes monster design. How compatible are 2014 and 2024 monsters? What are the benchmarks for a monster of a given Challenge Rating, and has it changed? I wrote about this before when we had a very small handful of monsters. By now [ ]