D&D’s Huge Organizational Change In The 2025 Monster Manual Might Be Its Best Yet

Dungeons & Dragons’ new sourcebooks have been adding a lot of new changes, but perhaps one of the best is the changes made to how the new Monster Manual is organized. Although not a completely new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the new Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and upcoming Monster Manual have made some substantial changes to the game. This includes mechanical changes like new subclasses and playable species, as well as some changes to the game’s lore like the controversial changes made to D&D’s Orcs.

Whether changes to the rules or setting of D&D are good or bad is largely subjective, but the new Monster Manual changes are more clearly an improvement over the Fifth Edition (5E) version of the book. This is because the changes are more about how the book presents its information, making it easier for players to navigate. The new style of organization will easily save DMs a lot of time when they are quickly trying to look up stat blocks for specific enemies during a game.

D&D’s 2025 Monster Manual Is Fully Alphabetical

Previous Monster Manuals Were Not As Well-Organized

Dungeons & Dragons’ new Monster Manual’s best change is also possibly its simplest: it is organized alphabetically by monster. While this may not seem like a major change, it’s actually a huge improvement over the way 5E’s Monster Manual organized its stat blocks. Instead of being fully alphabetical, the previous Monster Manual was a mix of individual monsters and groups of monsters. This meant that the O section of the book could include one-off monsters like Owlbears, but also broad categories like Oozes which included things like Black Pudding or Gelatinous Cubes.

This meant if a player wanted to look up a specific monster like a Flying Sword, they had to first know that it was categorized under Animated Objects and head to the A section of the book, instead of simply going to the F section where it would belong alphabetically. By removing these categories, the new Monster Manual makes finding a specific monster a much quicker process than before. While the original categories could sometimes be nice, the way they were used was not very intuitive.

One nice thing that the new Monster Manual keeps from the 5E version of the book is groups that do make more sense to appear together. For instance, Orcs will still be organized together, be that a plain Orc or an Orc War Chief variant. This type of grouping still helps save time, because any type of Orc players are looking for can be found in the same place, and the grouping isn’t so obscure that it’s hard to identify.

New Monster Manual Appendices Make Sorting Easier

Appendices Help Categorize Monsters In A Variety Of Ways

The new Monster Manual hasn’t completely gotten rid of the categories for monsters, but instead put them in a more logical place: the appendices. The appendices in the new book will include a few different ways to organize its creatures. For instance, there will be general groupings like one for normal non-magical animals like cats, dogs, or birds. There is also an appendix that groups all the book’s monsters into different habitats, allowing DMs to populate specific regions of their world with the appropriate monsters.

Aside from thematic groupings, the book also includes mechanical ones like sorting monsters by their challenge rating. D&D‘s challenge rating is a number assinged to monsters that is used to gauge the difficulty of encounters and is necessary for balancing fights with different sized parties. This sorting allows DMs to quickly see which monsters make sense earlier in a campaign, and which should be used to challenge more experienced adventurers when planning a random encounter.

The book’s table of contents lists all the monsters in alphabetical order, allowing players to quickly find stat blocks for a given monster in a campaign. However, thanks to the appendices, it still retains the helpful aspects that came from grouping creatures in the previous Monster Manual. The new style is just much easier to understand and doesn’t require as much foreknowledge on where certain monsters may be grouped.

D&D 2024’s Organizational Changes Have Been Some Of Its Best

All New D&D Sourcebooks Include Helpful Organizational Tools

These organizational changes to the new Monster Manual are reflective of changes that were present in the new Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook too. For example, Appendix C in the 2024 Player’s Handbook was a handy collection of rules organized in alphabetical order. This allows players to quickly reference a commonly used term like Armor Class without having to flip through the combat section looking for how it works. Making it easier to reference specific rules or monsters helps streamline play by minimizing the amount of time players spend flipping through rulebooks.

Related

10 Best Classic D&D Adventures That D&D 2024 Should Bring Back

Looking back at adventure modules from previous D&D editions to find inspiration for the 2024 version of the game.

Looking at the new Dungeon Master’s Guide, it too has helpful and well-organized reference material. For instance, there is an alphabetical list of major figures in Dungeons & Dragons‘ lore, like Bahamut or Vecna, in the books Appendix A. This is good for DMs who are running official D&D adventure modules and need to quickly look up someone that was referenced.

Alternatively, it’s a good way to quickly give players a description of someone their character may know about when doing a History check. Either way, it’s a lot easier than having to pull up the D&D Wiki mid-game to try and find the relevant sections of a character’s backstory.

These new organizational changes are also essential if Wizards of the Coast wants players to continue buying physical copies of Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks. Searchable PDFs or online compendiums on sites like D&D Beyond or Roll20 are far easier to comb through than the previous 5E books. By making the newer sourcebooks more well-organized, Wizards is helping physical versions of the books to keep up with their digital counterparts.

Dungeons and Dragons

Original Release Date

1974-00-00

Publisher

TSR Inc.
, Wizards of the Coast

Designer

E. Gary Gygax
, Dave Arneson