Looking at the 5th Edition SRD - part 8 - Monster Abilities and Defenses

    I hate the way my mind works on an almost daily basis.  That really includes this morning: after looking at the spell saves and damage types I knew I would have to do the same for the monsters.  Well, in the 5e SRD there is 130 pages of monsters, which it turns out comes to 198 individual monsters (wow, 2 short of an even 200, so close...).  Yeah, that means I went over them all, for about the last 4 hours.  So let's look at the saves and damage types monsters can inflict.
    First the energy types:

Fire  47  (24% roughly)
Poison  36  (18%)
Acid  24  (12%)
Cold  17  (9%)
Lightning  16  (8%)
Necrotic  10  (5%)
Radiant  4  (2%)
Psychic  2  (1%)
Thunder  1  (0.5%)
Force  --  (0%)

    Okay, Once again fire is the dominate effect, PCs need to get that resistance first.  Poison was one of the lowest for spells, but second-highest for monsters (which makes sense; if you can channel energy in a spell why poison something when you can just blast it out of existence?).  Cold and Lightning were tied for second in spells and 4th/5th for monsters, so they're pretty common effects.  I am surprised at Necrotic  I thought there would be more undead and negative planar monsters who would do it, but it's fairly uncommon.  Radiant is "good" divine magic, so no surprise there are not many monsters who do it (since the monster list mostly focuses on bad ones, only the few angels and the unicorn are "good guys").  Psychic resistance (again, for a player) is just about useless, only 5 spells do it and almost no monsters, which goes double for Thunder and Force.
    Bludgeoning, Slashing and Piercing are special since monsters can do them either as innate or weapon attacks.  the GM could easily change what weapon a monster is using, but since I'm sure most don't (hey, it's a lot of work being a GM :) I'm going to include them in the totals here:

Bludgeoning  86 innate + 18 weapons
Slashing  82 innate + 27 weapons
Piercing  107 innate + 46 weapons

    So if you can get Piercing resistance, do it.  Otherwise it's a fairly even spread.  And of course you're much more likely to run into a physical attack than an energy one, so they are more useful in general (only makes sense, just about anything can hit or bite or pick up a pointy stick after all).


Saving Throws
    The other thing I was looking at with spells was which kinds of saving throws they required.  Let's do the same for the monsters' abilities (listed by most common):

Con  84
Dex  71
Wis  42
Str  28
Cha  2
Int  0

    Wow.  Okay, so let's total monsters and spells, and get the percentages for all save-requiring effects (of which there are 340 I've looked at, listed in order):

Str  2 + 28 = 30  (9%)
Dex  32 + 71 = 103  (30%)
Con  26 + 84 = 110  (32%)
    total of 71% of saves are physical
Int  3 + 0 = 3  (0.9%)
Wis  37 + 42 = 79  (23%)
Cha  13 + 2 = 15  (4%)
    total of 28% of saves are mental/spiritual/psychic

    Okay, all illusions and illusion-effects need to be regular Int saves to make that actually worth something.  Likewise, I think that most to all of the charm saves should be Cha instead of the book's Wis.  The thing is, wisdom is often used as perception and people commonly do things they know they shouldn't - Cha seems better to me as a "contest of wills" (you're not going to tell me what to do...) and mechanically it would make a Cha save proficiency a little more useful (emphasis on 'little').  Really, out of 6 saves 3 are clearly better to have.  Of course, if you want to be totally precise you have to look at just how damaging each kind of effect is and weigh the numbers - I am not going to ever do that.  And, this doesn't take into account traps, environmental effects, poisons or diseases (all of which could force a save) - though those would only increase the Dex and Con leads I'd wager. [wow, looking at it like this I see that 5th edition does still have only the 3 saves - fortitude, reflex and will - of 3rd edition, huh]


Monster Resistances
    While looking at the monsters I had another question - how many monsters are resistant to each damage type?  So here's the list - and I'm not making a distinction between resistant or immune, this is just a general guideline on what kinds of damage types can be mitigated in some way:

Poison  64  (32%)
Fire  52  (26%)
Cold  39  (20%)
Lightning  35  (18%)
Acid  18  (9%)
Necrotic  13  (7%)
Psychic  10  (5%)
Radiant  4  (2%)
Thunder  8  (4%)
Force  0  (0%)

Non-magical/silver/something weapons (B/S/P)  57  (29%)

Spells (in whole or part)  28  (14%)

    Okay, so Poisoning monsters is not generally effective (it is mostly at low levels I think, it seemed like the higher level monsters like demons and undead that were poison resistant/immune).  Too bad Fire is the most common spell damage type since it's also one of the most mitigated by monsters.  Go magic missile, nobody mitigates Force, though some monsters are spell resistant.  And get a magic/silver weapon as soon as you can, a fair number can resist normal damage.  Quite a few Cleric spells seem to do Radiant damage, so they have a nice edge given how few monsters are resistant to it.  Psychic is like Force, would be a useful one for the PCs to do but not many ways to do it.  The 5 spells that do Psychic, 4 that do Thunder and 4 that do Force are all very good ones to learn and memorize overall.
    Again, the really interesting thing would be to break these down by level (or "CR" for monsters) and see how they develop over time, another thing I do not plan on doing however.



So what does it all mean?
    Ummm... I have too much time on my hands?  I obsess too much over little details?  Honestly, I'm not sure what great insights I have gleaned from this.  It's debatable that all damage types should be equally common, thus making them all equally useful - and while I do believe that in general, in practice it's not so clear-cut.  More higher-level monsters should be resistant to damage than lower-level ones, that's just because the PCs should be challenged as they level up to find new and more clever ways to fight the monsters.  Having a lot of monsters that could be hurt by Necrotic damage but only a few ways for the PCs to inflict Necrotic damage actually works well- Necrotic damage is associated with evil, which the monsters are more than the PCs, and it gives a temptation to "go to the dark side" to gain an ability that would be so useful.  Heck, I'm tempted to say that most really evil supernatural creatures should be vulnerable to Necrotic - "evil turns on itself" is a common theme after all, and that would make the temptation even better to mess with the players (assuming of course that there was some sort of down-side to gaining the Necrotic spells/abilities, which there isn't).  I kind of feel like more spells should be focused on mental effects, in the idea that manipulating minds and hearts should take less power than throwing fireballs - and I hate the "walking catapult" paradigm of the wizard.  The huge in-balance towards physical saves does benefit the fighter-types a lot, though you could argue that balances out the overall power of spellcasters and spells in general.
    My goal with dissecting the 5e SRD is to make my own game, which means knowing how to go along with the rules and what rules I might want to change.  From looking at this, I'm not sure right now what all I'd change - but I think I'm going to tweak at least a few things in the end.
    Of course to get to that end I need to finish looking at the rules, and there is a lot of the book to go.  So until next week!