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Choosing Monsters for your 5e Game

by Mike on 2 December 2024

My simplified encounter building guidelines for 5e games breaks down into two steps:

Select the number and type of monsters that make sense for the situation.
Determine if this encounter might be inadvertently deadly by using the Lazy Encounter Benchmark.

This second step is optional. Our goal isn't to design perfectly balanced encounters. Once we have enough experience running our games, we can usually tell if something's going over our expectations for a given combat encounter.

But for that first part – how do we know what monsters make sense for the situation?

There's a lot that can go into answering this question but I'll give you an easy tip. Find some random encounter tables like those found in Xanathar's Guide to Everything or Level Up Advanced 5e's Trials and Treasure and choose the most suitable list of random encounters for the environment that most closely matches the one you're trying to fill.

The Level Up Advanced 5e Trials and Treasure book and the Monstrous Menagerie work well together for this step. Trials and Treasure has large general-purpose random encounters and each monster in the Menagerie has a small table of detailed encounters for that particular monster. The two guides are intended to work together to make interesting encounters and show you which monsters tend to band together with other monsters in a given encounter.

You don't need to roll on these tables. Instead, skim the list and see what jumps out at you. Jot down some of the monsters you think fit well in the environment you're looking at. Sometimes these monsters will be typical dungeon-style monsters like ropers, bulettes, and otyughs. Other times they'll be intelligent monsters – humanoid bandits, veterans, mages, goblins, bugbears, orcs and so on. Sometimes humanoids have monsters with them.

If you're having trouble thinking what kind of inhabitants might be wandering around the location you're preparing, find a good set of tables of random monsters by environment and go down the list until you find a few creatures who work well for your game.

There's another non-lazy trick, though. One that requires work up front but pays big dividends in the end.

Read Your Monster Books

We tend to focus our attention on the stat blocks of a monster but the lore in those books is really valuable. That lore tells us where monsters hang out, what other monsters they hang out with, and how they react when adventurers show up. That lore matters.

Read those monster books, fill your head with that lore, and you'll build some knowledge of which monsters make sense for a given situation.

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Use your current favorite TV show as a collection of NPC archetypes.
Use Staedtler medium point wet erase markers on your Pathfinder basic flip mat.
Keep generic monster tokens on hand for improvised combat encounters.
Index cards are one of the most flexible and useful tools in TTRPGs.
Keep a list of the characters in front of you throughout your game.
Add a touch of variance to static monster damage by subtracting 3 and adding 1d6.
Use 10 + dex for static monster initiative. This way some players go before them and some go after.

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