After well over a year of development (Off and on; it was a side project), I’m ready to present an exciting new tool to improve your experience with Dungeons and Dragons:
The Monsterizer is, to put it simply, a monster builder. But it’s better than just that.
Maybe you’ve used the one on DnDBeyond. It’s fine. It’s basically a bunch of giant text boxes, but you’re on your own to do any actual math. And when you’re trying to build or modify a creature, the math is the scariest part. The rules for doing it span 8 full pages of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Sure, two of them are a gigantic table, but that doesn’t make it better. And even then, one mistake and your CR might be wildly incorrect.
How many DMs out there have thrown a homebrew monster at your players only for them to walk through it like an open door? Or worse, how many have resulted in a TPK in what you thought would be a fair fight?
Well, the Monsterizer is here to help.
With the Monsterizer, you can build your monster without opening your Dungeon Master’s Guide once. Based on the rules in the DMG (with some changes to address very real math problems in those rules), the Monsterizer does the heavy lifting for you. You don’t need to worry about the math.
You don’t even need to worry about formatting. Seriously, look at this beauty:
You can make stat blocks that look that nice without ever once needing to manually mark something bold or whatever. All the hard, boring parts are done for you.
Perhaps even better, you’ll see this right above your stat block:
The “Target CR” is the one that you’ll find in the Monster Manual and in the stat block. The rest tells you how close that number is to correct. In this case, the Air Elemental’s calculated CR is 5, but since their offensive CR is lower, they might be on the weak end of 5. There’s some “fuzziness” there with special traits like whirlwind, but it still gives you a good idea that this creature is on track to be CR 5.
The Monsterizer does all that for you. Want to add spellcasting to a dragon? It’s there. Regular, innate, even pact magic if you want a dragon warlock. Special traits? Every one of them that’s in the SRD. They’re all there pre-formatted and nice, or you can write your own. Give a demon petrifying gaze. Damage resistances? Conditions? They’re all there. Make your zombies two-headed. Make a skeleton immune to fire, then give it the ability to cast Produce Flame. Get creative.
I can honestly say that I don’t know of an easier way to build a monster, and I’ve never had more fun doing it.
Don’t see any props here yet so I’ll stand first… *ahem*
“You’re f*ing awesome. This tool is f*ing awesome. You’ve made it MUCH easier to get on with the point of playing a game of make-believe with you friend. You’ve wrested the creative exercise of it from the jaws of the hideously mundane weight of crunch, and I, for one, am endlessly grateful.”
That’s very kind of you to say! I’m enjoying this thing just as much as everyone else, and I’m excited to see how many people find my work valuable.
I’ve been looking for exactly what you created and now I don’t have to make my own. Thank you for making this so easy to use and automating the CR calculation for the DMG monster creation process
This is so exciting. You really give so much to the community. I often send my new players your way to read and understand the mechanics. Thank you!
This tool is powerful and it will forever cement itself into the DMs toolkit. It’s incredibly intuitive, easy to use and best of all, it works! I’ve seen this attempted many times throughout the years, but this is the first attempt that I can call a success. Incredible job and I’m excited to see what you will create next!
Slow clap into a standing o
You truly are the king of kings, my man.
This is awesome, and you deserve mad props for this. Well done!
This is excellent! Here’s a bit of feedback:
* I don’t see any way to create “swarm of” stat blocks.
* I’m not sure what the difference is supposed to be between “creature subtypes” and “creature group.”
* The formatting is missing italicization of trait names, action names, and “melee weapon attack” and “hit” from attack formatting.
* I’m not sure how Inventory is supposed to work; when I give a monster an inventory, it doesn’t appear on the stat block.
* Passive Perception currently does not appear on the stat block.
* Damage types are currently capitalized on the stat block.
* “Swarm” is a “Special Trait”. You’ll find those under the “Extras” step
* Subtypes are a specific game mechanic. “Group” is basically just how the creature would be organized in the Monster Manual. “Demons” and “Chromatic Dragons” are groups.
* I’m looking at reworking how actions are entered. I wanted to leave flexibility for people to define actions however they liked, but that’s making it difficult to enter simple attack actions.
* Missing inventory in the stat block is a bug. I’ll work on that.
* Capitalized damage types are a bug, too. Thanks for spotting that!
I’m always extolling the virtues of RPGBot. I can honestly say this just really adds to the already great resource in your body of work. I honestly wish official publishers would invest themselves in this level of tangibles for their systems.
Hey so there seems to be an error when trying to add legendary actions. I can provide a screen shot of the error from the debugger if that would help, but it an uncaught error “invalid action type”.
Thanks for spotting that! Looks like I misspelled “Legendary”. Apparently I need more test automation.
I’ll get that fixed very soon.
Hi!
I just want to say that I love the monsterizer, it is an incredibly useful tool. I was wondering if I could use stat blocks from the monsterizer in some of my published dmsguild.com products (I would make sure to give credit).
Thanks!
Yes, definitely!