Monster Abilities by CR
IT’S HERE. A THING THAT I MADE. I DID IT.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EiGQ23aFA_h5wS4ZfaCtueRR7cIIW7m5/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=107104011628851139383&rtpof=true&sd=true
“What is it?” I took all monster abilities from official sources and slapped them in a spreadsheet.
(BIG thank-you to 5e.tools. If you don’t know what that is, go there, use it, and thank me later. It’s basically D&D Beyond but more exhaustive and better organized, and doesn’t try to fucking bleed you dry because they secretly hate their consumers. Oopsies, opinion slip.)
“Why? Why did you do this?” It’s okay, I asked myself that same thing. A lot.
Not gonna lie… I’m not 100% sure what to do with this information yet. I kind of just did this in a two-week-long obsessive burst. For now, I would use this as a kind of pick-and-choose modular monster-building resource. For example, you have an idea for a homebrew monster, and you know a couple things you want it to do, but there’s no official monster that’s an easy reskin – nothing where you can just pump up the stats and change the elemental damage. And you have no idea what CR this monster should/would be. You look at this table, find the closest ability, pick some other abilities of the same CR or lower, hop on over to Monster Manual on a Business Card to calibrate the stats, and bada-bing you have a ready-to-go monster (hopefully).
If nothing else, this experiment might call 5e's monster balance into question! Yaaaayyyyyyy!
A couple notes on formatting/content:
I didn’t include basic melee attacks (so anything that’s just roll to hit, then bludgeoning/slashing/piercing damage) because they’re all the same thing with slightly different numbers.
Until I get around to italicizing the spells, they’re denoted with an *asterisk. The only spells listed here are innate spells – or “Spell-Like Abilities,” as they were called in editions of yore. So I didn’t include every spell from every caster.
If the ability is listed unmodified, assume there are no limitations – so it’s a standard action, bonus action, or passive ability.
Sorry if this is rough around the edges. In the coming weeks, I’m going to follow up this post with observations and updates to the list. I’m going to go back and fix formatting for many of these entries, but I needed to just post this dang thing.
Should I have written down reference monsters for all these abilities? Yes, 100%.
~
Anyways, that’s enough out of me. I hope you get some use out of this!
Once again, the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EiGQ23aFA_h5wS4ZfaCtueRR7cIIW7m5/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=107104011628851139383&rtpof=true&sd=true