By Jason Campbell
The Monsters Know What They’re Doing is a book by Keith Ammann which helps new DMs run monsters and experienced DMs increase the effectiveness of monster encounters. It is focused on Dungeons and Dragons 5e, although a thorough reading will increase a GM’s effective use of opponents within any RPG. But let’s back up for a minute. The Monsters Know What They’re Doing began life as a web blog in 2016 (https://www.themonstersknow.com/) and grew to first be a book of the same name, and then subsequent books for players and GMs to help build effective tactics. This book is a great resource for DMs because it not only gives you tactics to use for specific monsters, but it can change the way you plan encounters and look at monsters within a TTRPG.
The premise of the book is to step through D&D monsters and analyze their stat blocks and determine why the creature is that way, and how the creature would use those abilities to achieve their goals. I’ll look at the entry for Displacer Beast as an example. There’s a short description of the monster including when it was first published. The author looks for its fighting style in the stat block, for instance because the range of its tentacles is 10’ it will try to stay more than 5’ away to avoid attacks of opportunity. Then he analyzes the disadvantage it gives to attacks against it and considers that compared to the likely level of the PCs who will encounter it, based on its CR 3. Then the author looks at how disrupting the displacement ability affects the beast in upcoming turns. This analysis shows that the most obvious strategy will not be the most advantageous all the time.
The assumption of the book is that creatures evolve by knowing the best way to use their advantages and minimize their disadvantages. The author uses this philosophy to deconstruct each creature using their stat block and flavor text to find out what is the environment the creature is likely to attack in and how it will probably use its attacks and actions.
The book is a great tool for any dungeon master, and will be an interesting read for players as well. There’s clearly been a lot of work put into the book(s) and the blog site, and I’d encourage DMs interested in raising the level of their D&D games to look at the site and purchase the book. You can find it through the web site https://www.themonstersknow.com/ or at your friendly local game store.
