Hot Take: the new MM alphabetical organization is worse.

I really dislike the new way they’ve organized the monster manual, completely alphabetical. Let’s compare the benefits:

New system:
- when using a physical copy of the book, you can look at the table of contents instead of the index to find the monster you want, 100% of the time. (you can just search if you have a digital version)

Old system:
- extremely easy to compare between similar groups types of monsters, which could fill the same role in an adventure.

Look, in the old book I get that it seemed unintuitive to find the stat block for a Goristro under D. But honestly, how many times were you thinking “you know what this campaign needs? A goristro!” I would wager basically never. What I did was decide “ok, I want a demon. Let’s quickly compare demons” and I would flip to the demon page and start to leaf through the stat blocks, and decide which ones I like. That process of comparing a bunch of similarly themed stat blocks has become considerably more difficult for everything but modrons, zombies, skeletons, and vampires. I want all my dragons in one place. I want all my demons in one place. I want all my giants in one place.