The Monsters Know What They're Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters

by Keith Ammann

From the creator of the popular blog The Monsters Know What They’re Doing comes a compilation of villainous battle plans for Dungeon Masters.

In the course of a Dungeons & Dragons game, a Dungeon Master has to make one decision after another in response to player behavior—and the better the players, the more unpredictable their behavior! 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.

Genres: Fantasy, Role Playing Games, Dungeons and Dragons, Gaming, Games, Reference, Fiction

543 pages, Hardcover

First published December 3, 2019

About the author

Keith Ammann is the ENnie Award–winning creator of the blog The Monsters Know What They're Doing and author of a series of books by the same name, including the recent Making Enemies: Monster Design Inspiration for Tabletop Roleplaying Games and How to Defend Your Lair. He's been a roleplaying gamer and game master for more than thirty-five years. He likes to play outwardly abrasive helpers, out-of-their-element helpers, and genuinely nice, helpful helpers. Mostly, though, he plays non-player characters. And monsters.

Reviews

[Stewart Tame · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun! Yes, I could probably have read at least most of the content on Ammann’s blog for free, but the book was just too cool-looking to resist. I loves me some physical media …

It's intended for use with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition rules. But there's no reason at least most of the material couldn't be adapted to a previous edition if need be. My own personal take on D&D has always been that the Dungeon Master should feel free to adapt and improvise as necessary to keep the game from screeching to a halt. Just make sure your players are on board with this approach and you’ll be fine. The goal is, as always, to have fun.

It is also not necessary to be intimately familiar with Fifth Edition rules to get the most out of this. All of my D&D experience is with First Edition--old school gamer here!--but I had no trouble following the author's points.

Ammann basically goes through the Monster Manual and gives suggested fighting techniques for various creatures and beings based on their official stats. High strength and constitution scores mean brute force brawlers. High dexterity and stealth features mean ambush predators. Anything that can fly probably favors staying out of close combat range as much as possible, diving to attack and then swooping back up out of reach. And so on. Ammann goes into detail on his reasoning, as well as providing snarky comments on official details that don't really make any sense.

Whether you're a player or DM, current or otherwise, this book is worth reading. Ammann’s thoughts will allow you to breathe a great deal of life and variety into your game if that's what you're looking for. Recommended for gamers, as well as anyone curious enough to find this sort of thing interesting.

[Mark Muckerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must go with a mixed review on this one, and most of my negatives are centered on readability and usability.

The good: It's complete - written with care, expertise, commitment and "love" by the author. It's spectacularly complete; it's content and insights will absolutely make a committed Dungeon Master better at running encounters and combat, for an overall improved RPG experience. It's laid out well (conceptually) by entity type (non-humans, NPC, etc.), which enhances the usability and logical flow of a combat reference work.

Great info. Great insight. Great knowledge. Great research.

The bad: Format, format, format. . . it's a reference work written as a novel. All of my dissatisfaction comes from how it is structured - I would like to use this as a reference asset for pre- and mid-game play. As a standard sized bookshelf hardcover, it is inconvenient size and shape as a reference tool.

It's worth the price at $14, but it's not easy to use. My unsolicited $0.02 for the author is to rework it as a 8 x 11 hardback (DMG sized) or hardcover spiral reference tome: One encounter/creature combat per page, tabbed by type, and in a more table-format presenting key and common combat points so users can easily find and see key combat info points on the fly (such as: combat formation, leads with missiles the melee, "morale break factors?", etc.)

Again - great content and info, but difficult as a sit-down read. As a reference asset - good, but has utility challenges.

[Eric Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

BOOM!

This book - and its author - are amazing!

In forty years of gaming, this is the most inspiring, well thought-out, useful, interesting, exciting source book and RPG supplement I've ever seen. Author Keith Ammann isn't terribly forthcoming about his background, but a fierce intelligence shines through every sentence.

He draws from anthropology, military tactics, behavioral psychology, history, and an incredibly deep and broad wellspring of fantasy and mythic literature to lay out his case for the motivations and tactics of every creature in the game.

This volume goes a long way toward balancing 5e, which, IMO, coddles players far too much.

By implementing his carefully reasoned tactics, every creature the DM uses will be a significantly more formidable opponent. But even better, it will be much more BELIEVABLE.

Five unreserved stars for this masterpiece.

[Gilbert Stack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a revolutionary book about the creatures encountered in the game Dungeons and Dragons and it will appeal to two kinds of people. The first—that includes myself—are people who have years of playing the game under their belt (for many of us mostly in the distant pass) and enjoy nostalgically wandering through key events (like the creatures of the game). For those people, the audiobook may be the ideal method of absorbing the information.

The other group are active Dungeon Masters trying to improve their games by making their monsters more interesting. They are going to want a paper or electronic copy as this volume will serve as a valuable resource to them in planning their next adventures.

What Ammann has done here is analyze key groups of monsters and created rational tactics for them given their strengths, weaknesses, and known proclivities. It makes for fascinating reading. I was shocked by how many times he suggests the creatures would break and flee after taking a certain amount of damage. When I was gaming, monsters rarely ran, which was convenient as they take their experience and treasure with them when they depart.

I thoroughly enjoyed getting into the mindset of creatures as disparate as a bugbear, a displacer beast, a dragon, and a common bandit. The book is conveniently organized by type of creature and just fascinating to read. D&D games are going to get a lot better if Dungeon Masters take advantage of this valuable resource.

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

An in-depth analysis of how to fight with D&D monsters.

Sticks faithfully to the stat blocks and flavor text, and to combat. Indeed, some of the discussions brush on what other uses a spell or power might have, but others simply dismiss everything not useful for combat.

Also, all the monsters are assumed to be operating at maximum efficiency. This may be mechanical if they are stupid enough, but on the satyr, he observes they have a cool attack but it's not really effective. As if you could not easily justify its use by declaring the satyrs are drunk.

A DM could absorb principles and adjust to handle other creatures; this does stick strictly to the creatures, not the general principles. A writer, even of Gamelit, would of course have to keep the readers from hearing dice rolling, but it's a branch of tactics not easily studied elsewhere.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book! Gave me a ton of ideas to use when building encounters for my players. Used goblins to their best capabilities in an encounter, and I could tell the players were actually nervous about them.

[Stephen Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of things I really like about this book, but there are also some drawbacks that impact my view of it.

First, it's very much a D&D 5e book. That's the current edition, of course, but it does impact the utility for other systems. Second, the content gets a little repetitive, and I think the author could perhaps have used a combination of text and tables, converting some of the more frequently-occurring text into quick-reference tables to make the text a little fresher from entry to entry.

The quality of the text is very good, though, and I like the care, attention, and thought that was put into this. While it is specific to 5e, a motivated GM should be able to use a lot of the information in non-5e games. Moreover, it provides a framework for thinking about monster abilities and tactics that can be applied much more broadly. It's also quite thorough; a large swath of the major monsters are included (and there's a follow-on book as well).

Can't say it's a must-own if you don't play 5e, and maybe not even then, but it's a quality book all the same.

[Mijo Stumpf]

I didn’t technically finish this entire book, but read the portions of it that are not just a reference but WOW I am impressed. Keith knows what he’s talking about, and I am so excited for his other book “Live to Tell the Tale” which focuses on PC combat tactics.

I’m gonna be one bang-up DM one day.

[Rob Marney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great, easily readable advice on how to make monsters behave realistically. Unfortunately, the book is laid out like a reference manual, so all the advice is repeated about ten times (once for each applicable monster), in addition to the introduction that explains how to make these judgments for yourself based on a few simple rules. Because everything is laid out per monster, the author also feels the need to include things that are obvious for completeness' sake, resulting in a lot of tips like "The detect magic spell is not useful in combat" or "This monster will flee when seriously wounded."

[Jeremy Blum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally didn't think I needed this book, but saw it in a bookstore one day and looked up its advice for some undead creatures in a game I was running later that week. After a quick skim, I decided I needed it. The Monsters Know What They're Doing is for DMs who already have a basic grasp on 5e's stat blocks and want to challenge their players with smarter opponents. Keith provides solid advice to help you get out of the mindset that every battle needs to end in monsters fighting to the death, and then proceeds to break down even the dullest creatures in the Monster Manual with XCOM-style tactics. It's all great stuff, and these days, I treat this as a pre-combat bible, quickly reading through a monster's entry a few minutes prior to running a game. Get it, especially if you're a DM who struggles to make 5e combat interesting and colorful.

[Willow Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me longer than I would like to admit to realise this is a reference book rather than a sit down and read at length kind of book. It is interesting enough that you could do that! But I got too many books on my list to read a resource cover-to-cover. This is an excellent tool instead. I wish it covered potentially different styles of humanoid races (like tieflings and elves), just to give you ideas that make them distinguishable, because I'm not very good at inventing tactics, but already I've found reasons to love goblin and troll encounters. My players are in for a pounding 😂

[BarbaricLesbian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a fun read!! It's such a good way to enhance the world for your players by making the combat encounters fit in your world. Very good for the DM's creative spirit, even if combat isn't your campaign's main focus (mine isn't). It allowed the few encounters to feel more real, more dramatic, drastic, more entertaining for the players, and gave me ideas on how to make interactable NPCs that are fleshed out just through combat. Must read for DMs!

[jedioffsidetrap · Rating 3 out of 5]

Browsed this book out of nostalgia, looking up some of old fave creatures: Beholders, Shambling Mounds, Githyanki, Xorn, Owlbears, Bulettes, Umber Hulks... heh heh. Great title!

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantastic reference book. But hard to read straight through. I got pretty far before returning this to the library. I expect I'll buy this for my kindle.

[Jeroen B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fijn naslagwerk om meer flair te geven aan monster NPC's in D&D

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very handy reference book for folks who run a TTRP game. The book is useful when dealing with the specifics of how certain DnD 5e monsters would behave. Drawing on the stat blocks, abilities, and flavor text Ammann does a very excellent job extrapolating how monsters and creatures should behave, how they would interact with the players, and what circumstances they should be encountered in. While obviously useful in the DnD context, its lessons and insights can also be applied to any other TTRPG by applying the same process to the system specific creatures and adversaries.

While I did read this front to back, it is likely more useful as a reference book, picked up when needed or when looking for inspiration. It will occasionally get repetitive when read traditionally, but not when used intermittently. Is also makes for a very fine coffee table book.

[Ryan Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing resource for any DM. I love how it really teaches you how to think rather than just throw facts at you.

[Tasha MCCORD · Rating 4 out of 5]

great tool for GM

[J.C. Pillard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an absolute delight. A must for both dungeon masters and D&D players alike.

[Gerry Sacco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good and useful, but could have had a bit less information for creatures used less often, and more for those used more often.

[Brian Wilkerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many monsters, so many choices, how does a Dungeon Master know what to do? They could read all the stats in the Monster Manual, crunch all the numbers, and brainstorm all the possible tactics for both practicality purposes and roleplay purposes, and then keep all that information handy for their sessions. Or they could read this book and follow its advice.

This is a third-play supplement for Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, and it is designed to help DMs run monster encounters in their sessions. It is specifically for combat encounters. The author is very clear on this point. He only considers monster traits that are useful in direct combat, so if a monster has something like Clairvoyance, which has no combat utility, he is going to ignore it. However, if a certain monster is set up so that it is likely to avoid direct combat, then he will mention that. Night hags, Rakashata, and Succubus/Incubus are mentioned to be more like sub-plots rather than single encounters. This is due to their written lore.

That's one of the great things that the author, Keith Ammann, has done in this book. He doesn't write purely optimize encounters. This is not a book of "the most effective way to kill your players with monster x". No, the book has the title that it does for a reason. The Monsters Know What they're Doing, because the lore states that they behave in a certain way. Mr. Ammann looks at the written lore, considers the stat block, and then deduces how a given monster will fight. Then, once he has the framework of the monster's mindset, then he looks for the optimized way the monster would fight from within that mindset.

Night hags, Rakashata, and Succubus/Incubus don't have much going for them in straight-forward combat. The lore states that they accomplish their goals outside of combat, and their traits support this perception. So, Mr. Ammann writes their entries that way. These monsters will avoid combat, only resort to it when cornered, and attempt to escape instead of fighting to the death. That, by the way, is another great thing about this book.

D&D is not a video game. Not every monster will fight to the death in every occasion. Humanoids, for instance, will typically attempt to parley or retreat when their HP gets too low, as their lore dictates. This is because they are mortal creatures that have evolved over time, so they have survival instincts, and so they will try to avoid death. That is the standard Mr. Ammann uses, a mortal creature that has evolved over time. When such a creature becomes badly hurt (lost a specific percentage of their HP), it flees in a manner appropriate to it. Goblins will scramble in a disorganize rabble, hobgoblins will retreat in as organized a fashion as they can manage, and mind flayers will cast plane shift.

Avoiding combat, fleeing from combat, now we come to the meat of the matter, how the monsters will act in combat.

Each monster has a goal it wants to achieve. According to lore, few creatures will attack the party unprovoked just to kill them. Beasts and monstrosities will want to eat them. Fiends will want to corrupt them or use them in an evil plan of some kind, or they will come into conflict when the party tries to stop their evil plan. Elementals are forces of nature, and so the player party might just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I will focus on that last one because it is one where I have experience. I am a dungeon master myself, and so I've read this book thinking about how I could use it in an actual session. In one of those sessions, I attacked the party with a water elemental. I followed the book's advice on running elementals.

As forces of nature, the elementals don't have needs or desires like physical creatures. They don't need to eat, have no use for possessions, and don't have survival instincts either. In fact, fighting to the death actually helps them get what they want. They are creatures consisting entirely of supernatural energy from an elemental plane, so the only reason they would appear on the Material Plane is if some spell-caster summoned them to it and forced them to take on a physical form. If they "die", then they just go back to their home plane, which is exactly what they want. Until that happens, they follow their nature.

A fire elemental, for instance, will want to set as many things on fire as it can. So, it will use its full movement on every turn to run to creatures and objects so it can set them on fire by touching them. Not attacking, just touching them. They will ignore opportunity attacks to do this. Now a water elemental will attack differently. It wants to flow. So it will try to engulf as many targets as it can using its Overwhelm feature in its attempts to drown them.

I followed that advice for my session, and it worked out very well. The party failed their DEX saves, which meant they took damage and were at risk of drowning from the start of the encounter. By the way, they had an average level of 4 and lacked magical weapons. It was a dangerous situation. They desperately freed the trapped party members and then escaped before the elemental killed them all. It was an exciting encounter.

This book has great advice, and it is written in a friendly manner. Keith Ammann doesn't deliver his advice in a manner that suggests "my way is the best way" or that a DM should be antagonistic to the players. It is rather the confidence of someone who has crunched the numbers, read the lore, and considered long and hard about how a particular monster would behave in combat. The goal here is to deliver challenging, interesting and diverse combat encounters, so that everyone can fun playing D&D.

Trickster Eric Novels gives "The Monsters Know What they're Doing" an A+

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really hard book to rate. It isn't a book of stories or any narrative really. It is a collection of blog posts that provide a description/recommendation on how to run each monster in D&D. On that front this book is very successful. The insight and writing is very well put together and I really learned quite a bit on how to approach encounters.

The real complaint I have with this book is the formatting and layout. This is really a reference book. Unfortunately, the layout and formatting doesn't lend it to be used as a reference book. The book is laid out in "chapters" and a narrative style. I think if the book was formatted more in a dictionary format, two columns per page and with an in-depth index, this could be infinitely more useful for Dungeon Masters to utilize.

[Ogre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often very insightful, but he really gets hung up on stats over type of monster, assuming that low wisdom will never choose opponents or that low intelligence will never use disengage or that darkvision automatically implies underground or nocturnal only (hint: it doesn't.)

That said, this is a useful TOOL, but certainly don't use it as your only source of how enemies should behave in combat in D&D. Monsters are FAR more than their stats, and forgetting that leads to very forgettable encounters.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that advises DM's to annoy their players by having monsters use hit-and-run tactics, stealth, or just plain teleport away with all your loot. It's very D&D 5e specific, with entries for that version's various beasties, but easily generalizable to other RPGs.

The advice is indeed pretty sound, as it makes the simple but easy to overlook point that each monster comes with a personality that will play to its strengths. So encounters should not all feel like similar exercises in dice rolling with different skins. Just remember to give your players loot some other way.

[Jason Bergman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good reference book for running Dungeons & Dragons. That said, it's best for DMs who like to run heavily tactical games. I don't, and more specifically, my players don't want to play that way, so this is of limited use to me. But I do like Ammann's approach, and it made for an interesting read, even if I won't be applying all that much to my own games.

[Reid Landay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this both as a reference book and a way to learn strategy. I’ve been a DM for a long time and even this taught me things. I think it’s a wonderful reference to have on hand, not the best straight novel read.

[Timothy Doyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very textbookish, hard to read at times, but informative for those who want to DM a D&D game

[Greg Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a riveting read but has good ideas, though I am critical of a lot of them

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I'm saying that I'm finished, but alas, I am not. This book is awesome for what I've read so far though! Let me explain by saying that this is a personalized reference book written by someone that has been a GM for a LONG TIME, runs a blog powered by personal experience and the experience of GMs from all over the world, and therefore, he understands the ins and outs of reading CR Rating, spells, and creature stats; through this data, he translates the numbers into personality or a modus operandi for your the agents of your PC's demise! BRILLIANT!! As a long time RPer, but noobish D&D DM, this book was perfect for me as I am able to look at my story, learn in a short time what long time fans of the game already know and change it to make GREAT STORIES. Which is what a DM is supposed to do isn't it? Last week in a game, I had a group of miners who "aqcuired" some cursed coin from a long dead Dark Paladin's secret tomb. My PCs encountered 4 skeletons walking towards them under the moonlight drinking in revelry... My rogue opened fire shooting the left side skelly with his hand crossbow, then moved to the shadows on the street (15ft), bonus action hid, then moved the last 10 feet to stealth... However he damn near choked on his drink (along with the other two players at the table) when I told him that the skeleton screamed in pain... Oh you should have seen the looks on their face, and mine as I used information gleaned from this book in my game, making my story better!! And when they ventured out to investigate the tomb, I had a better understanding of what skeletons do, which means I also know what they don't do, allowing me to drop hints in the middle of action to my players because some mobs were skeletons and some were humans cursed and in the middle of combat they had to figure out which was real and which were only an illusion. It was great, it was fun, and I'm NEVER going to be finished reading this gamer's bible. So a BIG 5 stars, and a serious recommendation to anyone that wants to enhance their DMing skills or pick something up to get the information needed to become a great DM!

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty good primer for what it is. As an introduction to battle tactics for roleplaying games, it's nice and it's well laid out for new DMs.

If there were some things I'd take issue with, here they are: it's pretty repetitive, for one thing. You get a lot of the same advice for some of the monsters. Quite a bit of it boils down to "do you know how a predator works?" Some of it would have been better served by streamlining things into some tables (simple, quick checks like, how injured a monster will be before it retreats, whether it's smart enough to Disengage, etc). I also feel like some of the repeated phrases come from these sections initially being from blog posts, and not intended to be read straight through.

The last thing that is sort of a personal peeve of mine is that I didn't personally like the way tactics were treated for humanoids, but that I think is one of my fundamental peeves about Dungeons and Dragons itself rather than a flaw of this particular take on it. They were fine as a sort of shallow overview of their most likely tactics, but I've always felt weird about saying things like "ALL orcs will do this" or "ALL lizardfolk will think like this," because I've always preferred to view these nonhuman humanoids as far more individual rather than painting them with broad strokes. Again, though, that's more of a function of D&D's base shortcomings rather than this book's fault.

All in all, though, I think it's worth it if only as a reference guide for those of us newer DMs who are a little leery of running combat. You might only need to dip in and out, though, because once you read a couple of the sections before you start to get the hang of how the author encourages you to read between the lines of official stat blocks, and you can probably start planning out how a monster might work yourself.