How D&D's 2025 Monster Manual Is Doubling Down On Balance Changes

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Dungeons & Dragons has undergone some balance shifts with the introduction of new core rulebooks in 2024, and it looks like those changes will continue into 2025 with the upcoming Monster Manual. As the primary compendium of D&D foes, the Monster Manual is essential to the overall picture of what playing D&D looks like, but not much has yet been revealed about the rework. The biggest promise of the new book is the inclusion of over 500 monsters, expanding significantly on the 300+ tally of the 2014 edition.

Quality is more important than quantity, however, and the Monster Manual has also promised changes in that regard. Monsters are gaining new abilities and attributes with the goal of making them more interesting to fight than before, although backward compatibility largely ensures that there shouldn't be a radical shift in difficulty across the board. Certain monsters will be getting tougher, however, a distinction that comes into play with the higher-level creatures found in the book.

D&D's 2025 Monster Manual Buffs High-Level Monsters

Finishing What The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide Started

Although details on the 2025 Monster Manual remain sparse, D&D Senior Game Designer James Wyatt revealed that the book will give a little extra juice to "monsters at a higher challenge rating" in an interview with Screen Rant. Just how many monsters might be affected by the balance tweak isn't yet clear, but it's unlikely to apply to much that parties beneath level 10 would frequently face. The change should help address long-standing complaints about designing challenging high-level encounters, something that's always been frustratingly difficult in D&D 5e.

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What's particularly noteworthy about the Monster Manual balance changes is that they're not being made in isolation. The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide changes the encounter budget for high-level fights, giving DMs more XP to deploy against their parties once they cross the level 10 threshold. It also removes the multiplier used to estimate the impact of multiple monsters in a fight, meaning far more can be tossed into a high-level encounter while still remaining within the XP budget.

D&D's Balance Changes Are Meant To Fix The 2014 Rules

High-Level Encounters Aren't Always Thrilling

Cover art for the 2024 D&D Player's Handbook showing a party of adventurers with a dragon looming behind.

The 2024 Player's Handbook does contain plenty of its own buffs for player characters, and a high-level Monk character is more likely to fare well against fearsome foes now. It doesn't contain any dramatic balance shift, however, and Wyatt clarifies that the balance changes in the Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual are "not because characters are more powerful now." The new approach is intended to fix what the design team views as a long-standing problem with the 2014 books, which erred too much on the side of caution when it came to the fundamentals of high-level encounter design.

A D&D spellcaster working at a cluttered desk full of books.

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Some of the new monsters will also be slotting into high-CR positions, with a powerful new ooze called the Blob of Annihilation being a particularly memorable reveal earlier this year. Ideally, the changes should make it easier for DMs to work with high-level parties and no longer force them to do extensive supplementary work to make encounters interesting. With D&D being a standard-bearer for the heroic fantasy genre, high-level play should be some of the best that it has to offer, but the late-game experience defined by the 2014 rules hasn't been able to achieve that.

What Difficulty In D&D's 2025 Monster Manual Might Look Like

It's Still Unlikely To Resemble Past Editions

D&D 2025 Monster Manual Art showing a mimic, displacer beast, and other monsters.

Despite the change in prerogative, the 2025 Monster Manual is still unlikely to commit to overwhelming power in the same way that some past editions of D&D did. 5e has maintained a challenge rating cap of 30, which pales in comparison to the CR 90 Great Wyrm Time Dragon that appeared in an official Dragon magazine for D&D 3.5e. That being said, taking stats beyond a certain point can simply become absurd, and making the small selection of monsters that are currently CR 30 even more powerful could still result in truly formidable foes.

The highest-level creature to feature in an actual 3.5e sourcebook was the Great Wyrm Prismatic Dragon, which appeared in the Epic Level Handbook .

There's no way to know how substantial the changes will be until more material from the 2024 Monster Manual is revealed, but it makes for something to look forward to at any rate. The 2024 Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks haven't shied away from adjusting the balance, and the 2025 Monster Manual has the chance to put all the pieces of the puzzle together for a memorable high-level challenge.