D&D's Monster Manual is an empty, distracting feast

There’s a local Mexican restaurant that I frequent. It’s the standard thing: beans, rice, a mean margarita, the works. In this restaurant, there are huge TVs on the wall. Depending on the day, these are tuned to different things. Sometimes you get sports. Sometimes you get the local news. Most of the time, and in fact every time that I have been there for lunch for almost the past year, I have gotten something called “TheChiveTV,” which I have learned is a part of the AtmosphereTV device. The website gives a clear pitch: “Inspired by the lack of entertainment options available during the off-season, Atmosphere is designed to keep customers coming back when a lot of sports are nowhere to be found.” Its ease of use sounds legendary: “With a wide range of captivating content tailored to your business needs, playlists are designed to keep your customers entertained for hours so you can focus on your business.” This means that while I am eating my quesadilla, I get to watch (what I have learned) is a five-hour repeating set of clips from the internet – fails, feats of strength, amazing animal friendships, and all of the rest of the short-form video slop that is hammered into me any time I make the mistake of getting near TikTok or Instagram.

Of course, I am not at the restaurant for “entertainment.” I am there to eat lunch, mostly with people I know or want to get to know. The entertainment is mere distraction. It is a merry-go-round of visual static constantly blitzing me from the four corners of the room, trying to pull me out of my experience and into amazement that someone can blow glass in the shape of a star or jump very high on a trampoline. In a recent episode of the Doughboys podcast, the hosts noted that both Planet Hollywood and Chuck E. Cheese have been hollowed out by a similar maneuver, slathering these fun-oriented restaurants with screen-based random internet videos in a bid to fill up the visual field with imagery that someone might care about. I find it terrible. It is the interruption of life with distraction. It is the annihilation of linear time by a bird who messily eats berries. 

I’m not writing about all of this just to complain about it, although I truly hate it. This was the best analogue I could imagine when trying to describe the act of reading through the 2025 edition of the Monster Manual, one-third of the pseudo-relaunch of Dungeons & Dragons. Reading about these creatures, and how they were meant to be used, is a fracturing experience rather than one that seems to bring the world together into something coherent. I’m getting clobbered over the head by a database of creatures.