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The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters (Volume 1)
£16.70£19.00 (-12%)
In the course of a Dungeons & Dragons game, a Dungeon Master has to make one decision after another in response to player behaviour—and the better the players, the more unpredictable their behaviour! It’s easy for even an experienced DM to get bogged down in on-the-spot decision-making or to let combat devolve into a boring slugfest, with enemies running directly at the player characters and biting, bashing, and slashing away.
In The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, Keith Ammann lightens the DM’s burden by helping you understand your monsters’ abilities and develop battle plans before your fifth edition D&D game session begins. Just as soldiers don’t whip out their field manuals for the first time when they’re already under fire, a DM shouldn’t wait until the PCs have just encountered a dozen bullywugs to figure out how they advance, fight, and retreat.
Easy to read and apply, The Monsters Know What They’re Doing is essential reading for every DM.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Gallery Books, Illustrated edition (11 Jun. 2020) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 560 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1982122668 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1982122669 |
| Dimensions | 15.24 x 4.57 x 22.86 cm |
by MR R M DODD
Very good book. I’m new to DMing and this helped me improve the game play for my players. It was good seeing them learn the difierent battle tactics in a game with a veriaty of different Monsters. It made them think more and get more ingrosed in the game. I love this book! It also help the DM make the Monsters come alive knowing them better.
by Amazon Customer
I have been playing and running D&D games for over 40 years. This book has given me new insights into old monsters and some potentially nasty surprises for experienced players.
by Jamie
This excellent book is a must-have for all dungeon masters. Especially if you are just getting started out!
It goes into great detail about HOW monsters should actually fight in DND 5e, and more importantly WHY they fight like this. It’ll really bring your combats to life!
I had been throwing many hard or even deadly encounters at my group, but they just kept wiping out all the enemies because I wasn’t using any sort of strategy for the enemies. But now, I just threw my first proper deadly encounter at them, and it was a great battle!
I use this book to create little decision trees using the website app.diagrams.net and this allows me to have a quick reference as to how a monster should act in combat.
It would also make a great gift for any DM friends you have!
by Zack
On the whole if you have played Dungeons and Dragons a reasonable amount, you should be able to work this out for yourself, but for new players or those like myself moving from 2nd Edition to 5th Edition, it is a bit of a shortcut. I haven’t finished it yet, but would now consider using some of the monsters I had previously avoided in 5e. On the whole, it is just a bit of common sense, but as a shortcut to understanding, go for it.
by Nazarene
This is a real Game Changer for DMs, by using tactics from this book encounters started to be more distinct from each other. Love It!
by Nazarene
So this book was much bigger than I expected, and I must admit I was little nervous about reading it at first. However, once I read through the introduction and useful overview of the monster’s goals, it became clear the book was then quickly split up into explaining the tactics of each individual monster one by one. This with a good index and contents page makes it incredibly easy to find the monsters you want, study them specifically, and then you can put down and pick up the book at your leisure.
My party just got visited by an old “friend” they disturbed some time ago, and I’d already built him up quite a lot before (a vampire). This book was brilliant with the tactics and helped me scare the players so much they were meta gaming their little socks off (for a party that rarely meta games at all, this was pretty hilarious to me). Even so, the vampire managed to escape to fight another day, so the paranoia continues for now. Just wait until the vampire sends his minions after them too (all carefully explained in the book as well).
I’ve gone through quite a few of the classic monsters now and always feel like the advice is easy to understand, makes a lot of sense and is very interesting to read. A lot of love went into this book and if there are ever sequels with monsters found in Volo’s and Mordenkainen’s I will happily purchase them too.
by Amazon Customer
Amazing product gives the dm everything they need to bring these monsters to life
by Mr. Richard Hansell
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.