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The Monsters Know What They're Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters (The Monsters Know What They’re Doing Book 1) by [Keith Ammann]

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Keith Ammann

The Monsters Know What They're Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters (The Monsters Know What They’re Doing Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Keith Ammann (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Book 1 of 3: The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

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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.

Print length

559 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Gallery / Saga Press
Publication date

October 29, 2019
File size

37576 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“I’ve always said, the Dungeon Master is the whole world except for his players and as a result, I spend countless hours prepping for my home group. What Keith gets is that the monsters are the DM’s characters and his work has been super helpful in adding logic, flavor, and fun in my quest to slaughter my players’ characters and laugh out the window as they cry in their cars afterward.” —Joe Manganiello, award-winning actor/producer, author of Evolution, founder/creative director of Death Saves streetwear, and consultant/contributor to Dungeons & Dragons

“This book almost instantly made me a better Dungeon Master. If you’re running games, it is a must-have enhancement. I gave copies to the two others in our group who share in the Dungeon Mastering, and both of them came back the next time grinning rather slyly. Keith is a diabolical genius, and I say that with the utmost respect!” —R. A. Salvatore, #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than sixty-five books, including the Drizzt novels The Crystal Shard, Timeless, and Boundless

“The best movie villains are the ones you fall in love with. Keith’s book grounds villains in specificity, motivation, and tactics--so much so that players will love to hate ‘em. This book will enrich your game immeasurably!” —Matthew Lillard, award-winning actor, director, producer, and co-founder of Beadle and Grimm’s Pandemonium Warehouse

“I have to send this book to my DM!” —Hugo award finalist Max Gladstone, author of This is How You Lose the Time War

“I hope my DM doesn't read this book.” —Hugo award-winner Elizabeth Bear, author of Ancestral Night

“Every great DM needs a copy of this book like a player needs a D20 that rolls a lot of critical hits. It won't make the other side happy, but it will make the game more exciting.” —Two-time Campbell award finalist Stina Leicht, author of Cold Iron

"Is a conniving creature with a rational sense of self-preservation really going to take one last swipe at the fighter while on death’s door, or would it run away to fight another day? Depending on the monster, this book has the answer." —SYFY Wire

“One of the most interesting, thoughtful, smart RPG sourcebooks I've ever read. . . . The Monsters Know What They're Doing is a hoot just to read, and transported me back to my days of poring over the Monster Manual and the Fiend Folio."—Cory Doctorow, co-editor of boingboing.net and New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother and Homeland

“As a dungeon master, I am overcome with the sheer usefulness of Keith Ammann’s The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. This book is brilliant. It’s completely rewriting the way I think about encounters, and making me want to sick a pack of goblins on my players straight away. Highly recommended for any DM of any level of experience. And I fear it will become required reading when Live to Tell the Tale comes out this summer and our players all get smarter with their tactics too!” —Lou Anders, Hugo award winning author of Once Upon a Unicorn, Star Wars: Pirate’s Price, and the Thrones & Bones trilogy

“This book is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for any D&D DM, whether you’re running monsters straight from the book or not. This should sit prominently on every game shelf and should be pulled out for every session.” –Dice Monkey

About the Author

Keith Ammann has been a Dungeons & Dragons player and DM for more than thirty years. He has been writing his fifth edition D&D-focused blog The Monsters Know What They’re Doing since 2016. He lives in Chicago.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07P5F89LJ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gallery / Saga Press (October 29, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 29, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 37576 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 559 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

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Customer Reviews:
2,432 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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Jay

5th edition specific

Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2019

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The advice in this book is very specific to the crunchy details of 5th edition D&D. I was hoping to find advice that was relevant to my usual systems (various OSR, Pathfinder, and others), but there wasn't much of that. If 5th edition isn't your game, drop two stars.

85 people found this helpful

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Eric A. Smith

Utterly indispensable sourcebook for dungeon masters

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2019

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REVISED DEC. 2019:

After having read through a third of this amazing book, I have to say it stands head and shoulders above any RPG product I have ever purchased, including the first, second and fifth edition core rule books.

This book is utterly amazing, and a must-have for any and every dungeon master.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

I have already read a great deal of this book's content on the author's blog. He is, in a word, brilliant.

If you get ONE SINGLE supplement to enhance your D&D game, MAKE IT THIS ONE.

Keith Ammann logically pieces together the motives, instincts and drives of D&D's most iconic creatures, and uses it to logically lay out the tactics each would use in battle.

Incorporating this in your game will make it tremendously more fun, deeper and challenging. THIS is gonna be a CLASSIC.

39 people found this helpful

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Robert Herzog

This book even breaks up a monster's combat actions before combat begins and as combat progresses.

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2019

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I per-ordered the hard cover book months ago since I was feeling that my encounters weren't challenging my players. I'm still reading entries in this book, but I'm already finding myself thinking differently about monster combat tactics. This is for sure going to be a game changer in my campaigns. As others have mentioned, this book is for D&D 5th edition, I knew that when I purchased it since I also had been reading Keith's blog. This book will always be within reach when I'm designing encounters as well as when I'm in the middle of running game. I never played tactic type games, so this book is helping me learn how some monsters look at the threats player characters pose and know when and how to escape if they're in over their head.

21 people found this helpful

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Austin

Almost perfect

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2020

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This book overall is fantastic. It has amazing advice that is a huge help in making monster battles in D&D just feel smart, rather than like a game of Diablo with endless mobs that never flee or use abilities in smart ways. If you want a sample of the book's contents, check out themonstersknow.com.

My only complaint, which is big enough to cost it a star, is the order of the sections. Why, Keith? Why the completely random order of monsters in each section? Why are will-o'-wisps listed before crawling claws, and magmins before dao? It just doesn't make any sense, and the book would be more useful if it were in any more logical order (preferably alphabetical) so I didn't have to look at the table of contents every time I was searching for a monster to practice before a session.

14 people found this helpful

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Austin H

Made me rethink combat.

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2019

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Using this product is really only useful for D&D 5E, it can be used for pathfinder a little bit but drop the rating a star or 2 then. Overall though just the first 12 pages alone made me re-think the combat encounters I throw at my players. This is definitely worth the read. Plus it is 500+ pages of front and back page information, yes please!

16 people found this helpful

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Entertaining and useful book for Gamemasters everywhere

Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2021

Verified Purchase

This book is a collection of the best of Keith Ammann's blog on how to better gamemaster combat by "monsters."

I recommend this book for those starting their journeys as gamemasters who want to increase the joy of the game for their players.

In the early days of role-playing, many gamemasters (GMs) would read through musty tomes of military history and books on strategy and tactics to create more imaginative battles for their players. Somewhere along the line, role-playing became mainstream, and some of the intense study that went into it as niche hobby went away.

Enter Keith Ammann who revived some of the art in conducting melee encounters.

Keith has literally hundreds of descriptions of potential monster tactics divided into 14 categories: humanoids, humans, monstrosities, dragons, giants, undead, aberrations, fiends, celestials, fey, elementals, constructs, oozes, and beasts. (The hardcover version weighs in at almost 550 pages.)

In each case, Keith looks at the description of the monster and uses both basic characteristics as well as special abilities to divine out an interesting and suitable strategy. He looks at alignment (to determine goals and disposition), strength, agility, and constitution to determine base fighting style, and then, special abilities help determine the fine points of tactics.

All in all, this is a fabulous book for the aspiring GM that wants to up his or her game and make the game more challenging and fun for the players.

I'm not sure if Keith and I have met, but his philosophy is a good one. Actions by the monsters should have some level of predictability, and it should make sense in light of the monsters' goals and objectives.

If you are a very experienced GM then you probably already have a well established way of bringing your creations to life.

6 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Mr. Richard Hansell

Probably the best "non-source" source book for D&D I have ever bought

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 29, 2020

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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.

7 people found this helpful

Nazarene

Massive Tome, but still very concise

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 27, 2020

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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.

Shuggie

Not Just For New DM's

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2020

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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.

One person found this helpful

Mouse

I love this book....

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

My party not so much 🤣
Full of principles, motivations & even scenarios this book is brilliant. Don’t for one second think it’s a D&D book, this can be used or adapted to any setting.

One person found this helpful

Mr. C. Reynolds

Practical, accessible and easy to understand.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2020

Verified Purchase

A truly excellent read, monster combat tactics and practical rationales you can use in your games. Covers monsters by type and specific kind, and has an overall introduction / philosophy that’s accessible and logical. Top resource for any DM.

One person found this helpful