D&D 2025 Monster Manual Won't Include One Feature Missing From The 2024 DMG

The Dungeons & Dragons2025 Monster Manual is adding a lot, but one feature that won't be getting attention is monster creation. Following on the heels of the 2024 Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, the 2025 Monster Manual promises a selection of 500 monsters, over 85 of which will be new. Returning creatures and foes feature plenty of adjustments, although the book maintains backward compatibility with 2014 material.

A D&D press briefing for the 2025 Monster Manual confirmed that monster creation and customization don't appear in the 2025 Monster Manual. In response to a question about the contents of the "How to Use a Monster" chapter, principal game designer and Monster Manual co-lead Wesley Schneider explained that the chapter sticks to the basics of general use.

Wesley Schneider: If you want to get more into developing things, into tweaking things, so on and so forth, that's really where the [Dungeon Master's Guide] is going to serve you well.

The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide does include a brief section on creature creation, but it focuses on mixing and matching pre-existing creatures. The 2014 book featured more extensive guidance about how to build monsters from the ground-up, so there was some hope for more complex rules to be deployed in The Monster Manual.

Why Monster Creation Isn't In The 2025 Monster Manual

Keeping Dungeon Masters On Track

In a 2024 interview with Screen Rant, creative director Chris Perkins explained the absence of complex monster creation in the Dungeon Master's Guide as a prerogative of making an easy-to-use starting toolkit for DMs. The focus on reskinning rather than ground-up creation makes the process "quick" and avoids the possibility that DMs could "create a monster that was off-CR and potentially wreck their encounter." Senior game designer James Wyatt posited that "the best way to create a monster is by reskinning an old one."

Perkins didn't rule out the idea of revisiting the concept in future books, calling it "absolutely within the realm of possibility" that more could come on that front. Clearly, the 2025 Monster Manual isn't the place where that's going to happen, but rules expansion books in the vein of Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything could always cover the subject.

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Streamlining the options for custom monsters definitely helps to keep less experienced DMs from veering off course, but it would still be nice to see a robust system return in the future. I mostly stick to tweaking monsters when I find their basic abilities underwhelming, something that the 2025 Monster Manual may help with, or when I need to adjust them to fit my party's level. While I don't often build ground-up monsters like the 2014 guidance supported, I'd still like to see an updated take, and I'd definitely use it on occasion.

There are always options outside the new core rulebooks, whether that's returning to the guidance in the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide, taking advice from third-party supplements, or browsing suggestions online. Given the surplus of alternatives, I can understand the decision to keep the Dungeons & Dragons2025 Monster Manual away from complicated territory, but I hope future books do pick up the slack.