The Monsters Know What They're Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters

Whole lotta fun to read about the monsters inside the game of TTRPG's. If you lack strategy in your games and just throw monsters at your party, then I recommend this book 💯 percent. It allows you to not only control the horde better but it gives fun extra surprises when your monsters are paired up. If you're always asking how to make X better. Then this book is for you.

Great book! This has help me create better encounters for my players. I am able to provide higher difficulty without just throwing more monsters! Plus we also get out of encounters faster when I am not playing the monsters to their end!

Very very cool book! Great reading and gives some great insight!! Very entertaining and useful!!

Full disclosure I am only about half way through this book so this review is not a review of the entire book. With that being said I am enjoy this book a lot. It has a lot of great info about how to effectively run different monsters for you D&D games. As a DM I sometime forget about social dynamics and planning for the monsters my players encounter. This book gives you advice on how to run your monsters more realistically and how they might act in certain situations. Since I have been reading this book my encounters have become more fun and both I and my players are enjoying the battles even more. Its a great book for both beginners and seasoned DM's alike, it's also hard bound and packed full of useful information, so at $13.99 (USD as of the writing of this review) IT'S A FREAKING BARGIN! Hell the Digital version is more expensive than the hard back so you better grab it before Amazon realizes they have lost their minds. Well worth the time and money. 10 out of 10 would recommend.

Monster encounters and combat are the building blocks of Dungeons & Dragons, going back to the very first edition with it's spotting distance and monster reaction rolls. Sadly, encounters can also end up being bland and repetitous. Despite the Monster Manual having dozens of weird and interesting monsters, it's just too easy for fights to end up feeling the same. Kobolds, Goblins, Lizardfolk... they can all feel so interchangable at times. 'The Monsters Know What They're Doing' helps you think about monsters in new ways. The Author looks at each monster,and considers how its stats, flavor, and abilities change the way it fights. How does a small creature with low hit-points get advantage in a fight? How does a Beholder protect its lair? How do the Sahuagin use its shark telepathy, exactly? In addition to practical, useful information about monsters, 'Monsters' sends you on a path of thinking about encounters in a new way. Instead of looking at monsters as bundles of stats, you start to look at them as unique entities, with motivations and strategies. There are some downsides. The biggest one being that most of this book is available online, in the form of the Author's blog; the physical book is mostly just a nice shelf piece. I do wish the book would go a little bit farther into non-combat encounters: Can we try to bribe a Beholder? But I also understand why that has less of a focus, considering the book already has a hefty page count. Overall, a good book. I'd recommend it to anyone who is serious about running Dungeons & Dragons.

This is a GREAT resource! The author explains how the stats and abilities influence the way the monsters attack. Each monster has notes like, "A, B, and C are their combat/magic options. It will only use A if there are 3 or more allies with it. B is of no use. C is always used to target ranged PCs." My players will certainly NOT appreciate how helpful this book is.

This book is a great inspiration when designing encounters. The general approach by the author is to analyze the statistical scores for a monster (or category of monsters) together with the special abilities and attacks to provide a profile - how would they behave in different circumstances. Just as an example, Phase Spiders cannot cast Web (unlike their Giant Spider cousins), but they have more powerful poison and can enter/exit the ethereal plane as a bonus action - therefore they tend to ambush the more powerful party members rather than trying to take out the weak ones first as most predators do. (A simplified description of the author’s longer and more detailed analysis.) I’ve found the book a helpful resource as I’m thinking through what monsters to populate in an area (dungeon, forest, whatever) and it facilitates creation of unique encounters. Combine this book with Matt Coleville’s concept of “action oriented monsters” (search YouTube - well worth the time) and you can come up some really fun and challenging encounters for your players - while also making it easier for you as a DM to put yourself in the mindset of the monsters.

The real value of this book lies not just in the information it provides but the fact that it augments the Monster Manual (MM) so beautifully. While the MM gives you stat blocks for the monsters, this book gets you into the monsters' heads - they're fighting tactics, their self preservation (or not), and how you might encounter them (or how they'll encounter you). The latter pieces are what DMs, historically, have had to come up with on their own. Of course, as the DM, you can do whatever you want. The objective of D&D play is to have fun. But if you're a DM (seasoned or not), I think this book is a MUST have, especially for combat purposes. As the person who controls how monsters behave in combat with PCs, DMs should consider this book required reading. Of note though is that this book is not a continuous narrative. While the MM is organized alphabetically by monster/creature name, the author divides the book into sections based on the type of monster/creature and the entries in those sections are not alphabetized. However, there is a nice index in the back of the book that is alphabetic, making it easy to find what you want. For example, if you don't use the index, you'll need to know that a Golem is in the Constructs section and Mind Flayers are in the Aberrations section. Overall, a fantastic book and highly recommended.

Libro ben fatto. Aiuta a comprendere meglio come utilizzare i mostri nelle avventure. Direi che è un ottimo prodotto per i DM. Così da avere incontri/scontri molto più interessanti

Wow this book is great!!! It tells a lot of things about enemies. I recomen it completely: 100% It is a shame it does not contains monsters of the multiverse od DND. But it is a great treasure to have if you are DM

Dmlerin mutlaka alması gereken bir kitap.

Perfect for what it was written for. There is a new edition monster manual out, though so some information might be outdated.

I bought a load of books to "up my game" as Dungeon Master, and put this one off until now as I thought it was a little over-priced, and also most of the content was available online. How wrong I was! The book is beautifully put together, the hardcover is fantastic, and the sheer size of the thing is way beyond what I had imagined. But most important of all is the fact that this is all really well written. It's really easy to read, like a good "page turner" story where you don't want to stop reading. I think it's fair to say that most D&D books fall into one of three categories: - essential source books that are a little dry, but (mostly) necessary for the tables and information in them; - skinny pamphlets posing as books that have great content, but would be better as a laminated A4 handout; - books written with good intentions, but the author just isn't a very good writer. This book stands far above all of the rest in my opinion. The information in it can be read from cover to cover, or dipped into to prepare a specific encounter. There's some general ideas that cover any monsters not covered in detail, and then a wealth of information for all of the common monsters that I would expect to see in a campaign. I honestly don't know how I have been running combat without this book as a resource, and I would heartily recommend reading this to any Dungeon Master, experienced or brand new to the hobby. My players knew something had "changed" the last time we played, and I had a number of post-game messages to confirm that this was one of the best combat sessions they had ever played. I can't wait to put more of the ideas in this book into practice.