Customer Reviews
Opaque, arbitrary, inconsistent, unimaginative and uninspiring - By: X. Gallagher, 16 Jul 2008 
Sometimes you read a book that stuns you. Not often, as after 28 years of role playing you have pretty much seen it alll, but sometimes.
With this, the 3rd core rule book for Dungeons & dragons v.4.0 the apotheosis of DnD from a role playing game to a table top, product dependent (miniatures & rule supplements), combat 'system', is complete.
First the good stuff. There are a wide variety of monsters (many of the old favourites, however,are missing) & most have multiple variations to reflect the 'role' the monsters fill (such as skirmisher, minion, brute, solo, etc) in 'Encounter groups'. Encounter Groups are predefined lists of between 1 & a dozen or so creatures that you simply select as a whole & drop in to your adventure. Everything is worked out for you. You, the DM, don't have to worry about hit points, XP, weapons, powers, feats... It is fast, easy, simple.
This is the 'WOW'factor, it reallly is useful.
After this, it alll goes wrong. The 'system' ceases to make any sense whatsoever.
Is a Drow priest a cleric to Lolth? If it is, why doesn't it have the same number & variety of powers (such as utility powers) as a cleric? Why would it's hit points change when it's role changes when a clerics do not?
Are cyclops a race with the racial power 'Evil Eye', is Evil Eye one power or 6 (there are 6 different versions of Evil Eye, alll different), a feat, racial ability, or what?
Why do Hydras & Chimeras, both multi-headed monsters have different & somewhat cheesy named 'powers' to describe the same basic action of attacking with alll heads?
Why are Carrion Crawler tentacles treated differently to those of a displacer beasts & both differently to a Grell?
Talking of Grells, why does a level 11 elite controller Grell lose the venomous bite that a level 7 elite soldier Grell possess?
Can a lich cast arcane rituals?
These & many, many, many, many other questions will NOT be answered in this book.
Moving on...
The monster descriptions are brief. There is 'lore' that give players bare bones information & a few words for the DM. Each monster/role combination has a short paragraph on tactics. The monster stats block is itself crowded & squashed, & clearly do not cover everything. Racial traits are off in a section by themselves, not in the text describing the monsters.
It's brief. it's enough to run a combat, & that is it. If you want something deeper go look at a car park puddle.
Combat itself should be mentioned. It's incredibly positional & a lot of monsters powers push, slide, pull, shift, teleport or burst one or more targets. To be fair the players get the same, but alll in alll you need miniatures to track what is going on. Who makes those miniatures...
So, to be frank. What you have here are rigidly (but opaquely) defined creatures, with access to large (but unpublished) lists of powers, rife with internal (and inexplicable) inconsistencies, & alll reduced to a set of condensed statistics & a tactics block. Oh, & the creatures 'enjoy' different systems for such things as recharging powers, healing surges, numbers of powers, etc, skewing the encounters heavily against them.
There is a lot wrong with this.The DM cannot easily reverse engineer the creatures & it is not clear that substituting one power/weapon/whatever for another will lead to predictable results. There is no mechanism for creating monsters & applying feats (indeed racial traits come in the form of feats in this 'system', so without alll the racial traits being published the DM is stuffed & has to make arbitrary rule callls). The lack of a clear mechanism leads to greater dependency on more monster manuals & officiallly published books.
When the DM & players start to wonder about the inconsistencies there is no way to work out what should happen & what has happened. When the inevitable happens & the players & the DM decide fair play should exist in the game (that is, NPCs, monsters & player characters are alll governed by the same rules) a lot of reworking will need to be done to the system, reworking that the rule books are incapable of supporting.
This, therefore is an extraordinary book. Utterly stunning. Opaque, arbitrary, inconsistent, unimaginative & uninspiring.
It's needed if you are going to play DnD 4.0, but it's still a turkey. One star.
An excellent tool for the DM - By: insanodag, 20 Jun 2008 
The new Monster Manual for D&D 4e, continues the effort of making life for the DM simpler. It provides the game information for a variety of monsters, focusing on their role within encounters alllowing the DM to concentrate on plot & DM'ing. The big change between this & the two previous editions is the distinct lack of fluff in descriptions of the monsters. This may be disconcerting to some buyers, but personallly I prefer it this way. It puts less restrictions on the DM's creativity as the DM can then place the monsters in a variety of ecological niches & within more interesting social structures.
Monster Manual light - By: Christian Kroken, 19 Jun 2008 
After being impressed by Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition & the following 3.5 update I'm very dissapointed by 4th edition.
The art is very good as usual, since Wizard of the Coast has a lot of talented artists, so you won't have any problem with that. Lots of nice eye-candy indeed!
I agree with alll the points in the previous review by Simon Allen. This book is definitely missing something. It's basicallly a text book with mainly statistics & maybe a couple of sentences about the creature itself. Take the beholder for example. Here's a short summary:
Beholder:
Stat block {} Eye of flame. Covers ~60% of the page
Tactics: Three sentences each for two different kinds of beholder.
Lore: 9 smalll sentences about beholder lore.
Stat block {} Eye Tyrant (Solo creature). Covers ~80% of the page
Encounter group: 6 sentences
This alll there is about the beholder. All the info on this creature is on one page, the next page has a full-page picture of two beholders. Almost alll creatures have their pictures on the same page as their stat block(s). As you can easily see this doesn't give a good picture of a beholder at alll, except as a large piece of numbers & letters. This goes on for alll the other creatures. In my opinion I don't reallly have to say anything more to prove my point. The reliance on stat blocks to show alll the info makes this book look like an index for monsters in a trading card game or something.
This review is based on a thorough read-through at a gamestore, & I'm glad I read through it, because I won't be buying this one.
Dungeons and Half of the Dragons - By: Simon Allen, 15 Jun 2008 I think we alll expected Wizards to milk their new edition of the rules with a whole new suite of supplemental books, but I felt reallly let down with this. People are going to have to start throwing big cash at this game to get what they had in their hands from the three core books of previous editions.
Whilst the artwork & presentation can't reallly be faulted, the descriptions are sometimes very brief & oriented primarily towards combat. No ecology, no behaviourial or social traits, seem to take away some of the roleplaying possibilities. The tone of the text, like the other two books, suggests very much a younger target group. The 3.5 edition had a certain balanced maturity to its writing style that would not phase a mature gamer, but I expect this will be cause for complaint.
However, this is not my main gripe. There are huge gaps in monsters presented here that have been integral in the game since the beginning. No metalllic dragons (only chromatic) & many of the the giant species (scorpions, ants, centipedes) that traditionallly formed many of the challlenges at lower level are just not there.
There is a section at the back which presents a selection of statistics for use in character generation, but those used to the level adjustment in 3.5 will probably not find these easy to get on with. Is a 1st level 7'5" 350lb minotaur reallly balanced with other 1st level characters? Why do none of the races in the whole game have negative adjustments to their statistics? Everyone is pimped up! Was not Warforged promised as a core race in D&D 4 Characters & Classes, but has now been demoted to a short paragraph here?
It also seems that for most of the stats presented in the Monster Manual, unless you are around 10th level, you are going to get kicked around. Although with the new self healing phenomenon you don't need to worry about dying ;) The variety here is limited - you will be fighting zombies & goblins for quite a while. How about a giant scorpion huh?
The idea of updating the game is well appreciated, but pages are wasted here with rather abstract 'gibbering horror mound' type villains that will have no real part in many roleplayng campaigns.
I will stick to Pathfinder for the moment. Hopefully I will be persuaded by the new web tools to take more interest. Do we have to pay for those by the way?
Maybe I'll leave this in the dentist's waiting room, as it's not a bad at a glance.
