First Look: D&D Monster Builder

I spent a lot of time Friday playing with the new D&D Monster Builder beta. This program comes pre-packaged with all the D&D 4th Edition monsters that have been released in virtually every source deemed official. It's nice actually, because it even includes NPC's and other creatures from the RPGA adventure packs.

The program is smooth in browsing through and searching for monsters and allows you to print out stat blocks, or even copy them as rich text or even an image. DM's that do a lot of preparing ahead of time will be able to make great use of this and only need to reference the Monster Manual to look up the results of a knowledge check.

However, the real meat of this app is customizing monsters for your game. Maybe you want a monstrous spider for your group, but they're too low level for those presented in the source works. Perhaps you want to enrich your setting with a creature that doesn't exist at all as released by Wizards. The rules presented in the Dungeon Master's Guide are fairly straight forward for assisting in this level of customization for creating richer fantasy worlds but consume a whole lot of time, as I found out when I created some dire rabbits for a group that was new to 4e this spring.

So, I went to make dire rabbits again with the Monster Builder. All the options for monster level, type, role, difficulty, etc. are there. Based on these options, things are set automatically such as the hit points, stats, and XP reward for the monster. These can all be tweaked of course, but this should set you at a well balanced starting point. Then you can begin adding powers and other features to the monster. Attack values and damage dice are again automatically balanced but fully adjustable.

Probably one of the most powerful tools in the Monster Builder is the search feature that allows you to view existing monsters and their powers while working on your baby. You can then actually drag an existing power into your monsters power space and edit all the options to tweak it to your intended purpose.

This was smooth and easy, and took relatively little time to create a dire rabbit. Then I decided to make a young version to be a minion that can be added to encounters. Of course, I didn't want to type all the little details about the rabbits again. This could get really repetitive if I had to do that for making variants of monsters. Brilliantly, Wizards included a Copy and Edit button. Set the new one to minion with no role and take away all the powers except the bite attack. Within moments I had a minion version ready to go.

One significant issue I have with the Monster Builder is the use of the templates presented in the Dungeon Master's Guide. I couldn't, say, take my dire rabbit and set it to be feyborn and it just use the existing template to make a fey version. I did, however, look at other fey creatures in testing this and make a fey rabbit as well.

I, of course, have to play test these guys to check for balance, but I believe they should be as challenging as I intended even having been created with relative ease. Overall, this tool will allow creative DM's the ability to easily spin tales of adventure with an ever increasing number of dangerous monsters and other foes. And I believe that once we see more of the Adventure Tools released, the tool will really begin to offer something grand to home campaigns and maybe even to how Wizards releases the adventures they create.

Ruff D&D