Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 43 - Reskinning Monsters

Episode Date: October 18, 2020

Want a Roc that can teleport giant rocks to drop on the players?  How about an alien with acid for blood found on a crash landed ship.  That's completely unique and no one else has ever thought of it.  In this episode Jeremy gives some tips for customizing monsters and mostly encourages you to be creative with your creatures!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 43, Reskinning Monsters. This week's sponsor is the Dustin Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Company. You've heard of riding lawnmowers, try our new zero-turn radius riding vacuum cleaners. Fair warning, this episode may seem like a big duh for veteran DMs and GMs out there, so my apologies to you amazing veteran game masters. First things first, when I'm talking about reskinning monsters, by monsters I mean any antagonist to the PCs. It could include beasts, elementals, constructs, even NPCs and the big bad evil guy. So don't get locked into thinking this episode only applies to behirs or wolves or something similar. When we're DMing, we all get in ruts. Running the same

monsters over and over again can get so boring for the players. Oh look, it's an orc. Let me guess, he has a battle axe and he's angry all the time. Or, ooh, it's a dragon. Okay, yeah, flying, breath weapon, got it. We play this game to have fun, and fighting the same thing over and over and over again is boring. We DMs need to mix things up a bit, vary the characteristics and play styles of the monsters the characters are fighting. This keeps the players from immediately knowing everything about the creature, and it keeps the players on their toes. Listen, some players have a hard time separating player knowledge from character knowledge. The player knows that a basilisk can turn you to stone, so they play the character assuming that they have that knowledge,

whether they actually do or not. Some view this as cheating, but it's more likely a lack of player and character knowledge separation, and they're not actively trying to cheat. How do we as DMs combat this? First things you can do, and the purpose of this episode, you don't have to stick to the monsters that are listed in the manuals. If you do use those monsters, you don't have to stick to the statistics that are supplied for those monsters.

For the lion's share of this episode, I'm going to focus on how to change the way monsters behave in combat, and at the end, I'll talk about non-combat ways you can change monsters. So first things first, monsters listed in the manuals and modules represent average examples of creatures of that type, species, ancestry, and race. Yours don't have to be like that. If you have time to prep, don't make every gnoll a carbon copy of each other. Now if you're busy with limited time, I get it. Make them copies and be done with it. But you can change them in any way you'd like. To quote Digital Underground, do what you like. The hit points listed over a monster are generally listed as

the average amount. The armor class listed as a typical representation wearing typical armor with a weapon being a sample weapon that that creature could be wielding. You don't have to stick to that. So how can you change those creatures? Any way you could possibly want. The easiest is to change just the numbers that are given. Give it a higher armor class, double the proficiency bonus, give it better ability scores, a higher attack bonus, saving throws, hit points, but be careful about this. You don't want to just throw extra hit points on because that just lengthens existing fights and it can turn fights into a slog. Boring, long, repetitive. Hit damage next.

Hit damage next. Hit damage next. Because the monster is just a hit point sponge. You can add abilities to existing monsters. Give them additional or special actions and reactions. Let them counter and riposte. Give them action opportunities that maybe players don't have. Give the creatures additional movement types.

Maybe they can fly. Who's to say that that gnoll didn't stumble upon some ring of flying somewhere along the way, and oops, it can hover 60 feet off the ground and pepper you with arrows. Give that standard monster, maybe it's a variant of it that can teleport, or dimension door, or shunt into the ethereal plane something give it additional movement options especially if it's a spell caster give it the ability to get out of danger and then reappear somewhere so that it can cast those spells again add attack types give it claws when it previously didn't have one give it a bite attack you want to surprise players

take us something that's a nice friendly little little ooze, and suddenly it grows teeth. Give it multi-attack. Give it additional capabilities and attack types that maybe it didn't have. Give it advantage on trip attempts, or shove, or give it a bonus to overrun. Give creatures additional lair actions and then place them in their lair. Give creatures additional lair actions and then place them in their lair. The characters will have to deal with the fact that the creature is a lot tougher when it's fighting on home turf. Give creatures additional feats. Power attack, point-blank shot, mage slayer.

Any feat that's common in your world. Players don't get to have a monopoly on feats that improve their characters. Monsters can take these feats too as they start to advance. A lot of gaming systems have things called templates, a suite of changes that you can make to change the overall appearance and capabilities of a creature, like the dire template or celestial, plain-touched, advanced, hyper-intelligent, mana-wasted mutant version. Apply one of those templates to one or more of the combatants. Add the capability to cast spells. Give it the ability to cast maybe just a few damaging and debilitating spells, and it'll make the players check up a little bit and say,

wait a minute, there's nothing like an occasional Ettin shaman to keep combat interesting. Give creatures the ability to heal teammates and be support to stronger creatures. In other words, drop a monster cleric on the other side. One of the monsters I have queued up for the next campaign I run is going to be a tiny flying atomy cleric that keeps healing the fey creatures the PCs will be fighting. The PCs now have to decide on a tactic. Do they go after the tiny fragile cleric or do they keep fighting the incantados with their debilitating spears? Give these creatures additional or better equipment. Who's to say this kobold isn't wearing studded leather or ringmail armor?

Maybe this skeletal champion died wearing plate mail plus three instead of a breastplate. Suddenly that AC-21 in Pathfinder becomes AC-27, and it theoretically drops the player's chance to hit by 30%. Give monsters additional weapons. Does every single goblin in your world fight with a scimitar and shortbow? If so, why? Just because it's the default stat block that way, is that why you're doing it? Why wouldn't at least one learn how to use a whip, a polearm, a rapier, something? Give your monsters scrolls and potions, other one-time use things. One group I've played with since college loves the phrase, kill him, he's drinking the loot, whenever a baddie drinks a potion. If the opponent is intelligent, give it some of those one-time

use items that it's collected maybe through the years. That way it's been saving it up for a rainy day or a really tough fight, but guess what? The PCs are going to be a tough fight. And certain campaigns give it advantages with technologies. Maybe it doesn't know how the technology works, but it knows that when it pulls this little button, there's a loud boom and whatever it's pointing at usually dies. Another way you can change monsters is changing their primary attribute that a lot of their abilities are based on. Instead of making them a lot of their abilities are based on. Instead of making them agile where all their abilities are based on dexterity,

maybe make them charming and all their abilities are based on charisma instead. Maybe an intelligent morgue that isn't strong, but it's very smart, and its damage bonus is based on intelligence because it knows exactly where to hit and how to make it hurt. Another thing you can do is change the fundamental makeup of the creature. Make it a ghost giant, a water-based gibbering mouther that hunts in the ocean, a phase-shifting orc that can teleport short distances and constantly vibrating between this plane and another like a blink dog. The one caveat I'll say is that when you're adding abilities to a monster, make sure you are careful about adding abilities that can lock down an entire party. Things like mass paralysis, mass blindness, and the like.

Just be very careful with those. Another thing you can do that seems like a very simple change, but it can have very wide-reaching effects, is changing the creature's size. Either an item the creature has or something in the creature's history has resulted in a much, much bigger or much, much smaller version. Imagine the look of horror on your players' faces when they've been hearing something crash through the forest for three rounds of combat, and then suddenly a flesh golem the size of a greyhound bus bursts into the clearing. Or imagine a creature that doesn't rely on physical might but makes mental attacks, and it's the size of a flea. It's hard as hell to find, harder still to hit.

Meanwhile, the party's taking psychic damage round over round as they just can't kill this stupid, freaking... What is this, a gnat? Ow, my head! You can always just make shit up. Base creatures on something that you read, like if you can find the legend of the Mongolian death worm. It had acidic yellow saliva. It stunned victims with a shock attack.

Create some sort of worm and give it a bite with acid damage and a recharging shock action. Maybe it smells like undead creatures because it spawns from the intestines of those who die from ingested poisons. There you go. Bang. Mongolian death worm. Roll that shit out and watch your players say, Uh, excuse me, it does what? Borrow stuff from another gaming system. I love Stormvermin from Warhammer, but I can't find anything similar in Pathfinder.

Great, grab an ogre and change it. Give it, I don't know, poison resistance and a bite attack. Maybe it uses pole arms as a weapon instead of a club. Give it extra abilities or actions when it's attacking in a pack, because maybe that's the way it hunts. Maybe bump the challenge rating by one and roll it out against the party and let's see what happens. Or you can always make up your own nightmare fuel. A swarm of zombies spawn from an ancient battlefield that moves like an ooze but has arms sticking out of it clutching weapons.

Give it multi-attack of any creature within range and maybe tremor sense, it doesn't rely necessarily on vision. any creature within range, and maybe tremor sense. It doesn't rely necessarily on vision. New monsters, monsters with new abilities, and changes to existing monsters keep the game fresh, exciting, and new. Last week in my Wednesday night game, the DM rolled out a custom monster. It was a large sandworm, and at first I thought, oh, well, somebody saw the Dune trailer. It could swallow you whole, but then it vomited you out covered in what can be basically called napalm. It's a worm swallowing pieces whole, nothing new. Breathing fire and vomiting swallowed creatures up, partially cooked, love it.

If you play a game system for any extended period of time, eventually you're going to start memorizing details about common monsters. It just happens, it comes with playing the game. So varying things up can keep players on their toes and keep things very fresh for the players. A lot of times this is a high technology world or a high fantasy world or even a low fantasy world maybe that's been destroyed by some sort of radioactive apocalypse. Who's to say creatures wouldn't be horribly mutated versions of what's actually in the monster manual? So let's take a CR2 D&D monster, the gargoyle. You like the monster and think it would make a great encounter outside of castle

However, the castle was built to honor the god of venoms and poisons. So let's say the gargoyles have had, I don't know, poison seep into their body over the decades of being connected to the castle. So how do you add poison to a gargoyle? Well, if you look at their stat block, gargoyles have a bite and claw attack. So it would make sense that they would have a secondary poison damage to those two attacks. So let's figure out a good poison difficulty class or DC for the saving throw. Now, 11 feels about right for a CR2 creature. Their bite attack now does 1d6 plus 2 piercing damage and their claw does 1d6 plus 2 slashing damage, but now both have a dc11 constitution saving throw or the character takes 3d6 points of poison damage, half on a successful save. That means on average a character who fails their save will take about 10.5 points

of poison damage. Characters who make their save will be taking out an average of 5. The last thing you need to decide is would your monster modifications change the appropriate encounter level or challenge rating of the creature. My initial impression is that a DC-11 should be relatively easy for level 2 characters, so I still think they'd probably be a CR2 creature. But keep a close eye on your combat first time you roll it out. If your creature is too powerful, it can cause problems and maybe even wipe the party what we call a TPK, total party kill. If you've listened to other episodes, you know I advise tweaking encounters behind the screen as needed to make sure the challenge is real, but isn't a TPK if you accidentally over-strengthen the creature.

Okay, so let's do another one. You want to create the witch from Left 4 Dead 2. For those of you who have never played Left 4 Dead 2, there was a special undead called the Witch. She was always female, or at least had a female form, and you could usually hear her crying. If you saw her, she was usually sitting or kneeling on the ground. As long as you didn't disturb her, she'd stay just like that and wouldn't attack. But if you shone your flashlight on her for too long or stayed too close to her, she'd begin to growl and then would jump up and attack you to devastating effect. She would attack her chosen victim who disturbed her until she or it died and then would move to another target.

For giggles, I'm going to start with a, I don't know, a Revenant from 5e. We give it a female form instead of the skeletal form it has with more flesh, so we change the visual description of it. We make it easily noticeable with a perception, especially using the auditory trait. You can hear it very easily. Give it a bonus to shove attacks and bonus to damage on prone opponents. Give it the barbarian rage ability for, say, 10 rounds at a time, and it can do it after, say, a short rest. Crank the strength up to 20, drop the

intelligence and charisma to something like 5. She was really fast so let's increase the speed to 35 feet and maybe she can dash as a bonus action. The fist attacks now are claw attacks that do slashing damage instead of bludgeoning and let's up the damage by a d6 to maybe 3d6 plus 5. Now based on my estimates here this feels maybe like about a CR7 creature, give or take, but obviously you would want to test that. What we've made is a new creature, different from what the party's used to, and you just unabashedly stole it from a game you played in the past. From behind the door of the burned out ruin, you hear the sound of a woman crying. When the party opens the door, you see an emaciated

looking woman with her face in her elongated, red, bloody hands on her knees, sobbing. When the party tries to talk to her, she begins to make a growling sound, and eventually she looks at them through cloudy, hate-filled eyes. Growls. Leaps. Roll initiative. Let's say you like goblins as a creature, but players are going to be adventuring in the plane of fire. You would love to bring goblins in, so how can you change them? Well, okay, let's make the goblins fire-touched. They're native to that plane, and they can breathe air and lava just like it's air. Sounds like fun.

So start with a basic goblin, make it immune to fire damage, give it water-breathing or lava-breathing, however you want to call it. Its weapons will either be hot if they're metal or maybe made from obsidian. Let's say metal weapons do an additional d6 of fire damage when wielded by these creatures and obsidian weapons are considered keen and double the critical threat range. Have them surge out of a lava flow to attack the party. Tell me that won't freak out your characters. Orange green figures emerge from the lava pool, the lava solidifying and sliding off their enormous heads as they grin at you with

yellow teeth and draw obsidian blades. Roll for initiative. Now there's some caveats to creating your own monsters. Number one being it's time consuming. You guys know just as well as I do that being a DM or GM is time-consuming to begin with. Creating custom monsters just adds to the time required or pulls time away from other activities that you could be doing for your campaign or adventure. If you have the time, great. But if you don't, there's nothing wrong with using the default stat block and being done with it. 2. When you create your own monsters, you need to be very precise with the numbers and abilities you give to monsters, or you need to be very willing to adjust things on the fly behind the screen to give the players an appropriate level of challenge. 3. Keep abilities consistent with similarly leveled creatures, or if you give it a really powerful ability, offset it with a weakness of some sort. Offset it with a weakness of some sort.

Those fire goblins, let's give them a weakness to cold damage. So maybe they take 50% more cold damage than they normally would, or double the cold damage they normally would. Give creatures abilities from other challenge ratings that are very close to the creature that you based it on. Or if you want to give it a more powerful ability, scale it back. Make the saving throw against the powerful ability lower, so it's easier on the players. Give it a long recharge time or very limited number of uses. That dragon frog you

just made up can breathe a 20 foot line of 66 acid but only once per long rest. Make it a glass cannon creature with great damage but it's really fragile. In that case it's probably an ambush hunter. It likes to hide and use its one powerful ability to try to kill prey. A lot of game systems use sample tables for creature abilities by challenge rating. You can always use that as a guideline. The fourth caveat I would say is before you roll it out against your players, grab four sample characters at the appropriate level from the internet, run test combat against your new creature. Play both sides. Try to kill it. Tweak the creature as necessary. But enough about combat. Let's talk about other ways you can change monsters. One of the things that you can do is give monsters a culture.

An important thing that happened fairly recently is that Paizo and Wizards of the Coast have really started taking a look at the concept of creatures, races, and ancestries always being evil. And I'm doing air quotes with my fingers when I say always being evil. Now we're taking a more nuanced view as to the way these creatures and characters and races and ancestries interact. Very few creatures as a commonly available race or ancestry are now described as universally evil. That's hardly ever the case. I mean, just look at society. Think about the friends that you know.

You probably have friends that are goody-goody two-shoes, and you may also have friends that are fairly pretty much out for themselves. The real world is a smear from chaotic evil all the way to lawful good. Why couldn't most of the creatures be the same? So roll out that chaotic good drow, that neutral evil blink dog. Maybe it's had unique experiences. Another way you can change monsters is give the monster a unique method of reproduction. Imagine a dragon that reproduces by budding instead of egg laying. So the party is hired to go try to kill its young,

but they don't realize that the young are growing off of the dragon's back. So to kill the young, you've got to kill the mom. Make creatures omnivorous or carnivorous that usually aren't. Oh, look, it's a cute little goat standing at the crossroads chewing something and staring at the party with those weird horizontal pupils. Suddenly it spits out what it was chewing on, and it's a hand with most of the flesh gone. The goat grins impossibly wide as rows of shark-like teeth are revealed. Roll for initiative. Reskinning monsters is a type of homebrewing. It can be very rewarding.

It can scratch that creative itch. On top of that, it keeps the players on their toes. It keeps the game feeling fresh and new, and it allows you as a DM to make an adventure, an area, a world, or even an entire solar system feel different, unique, and yours. So roll out that chupacabra that feeds on radioactive waste. Have a giant gingerbread golem. Your players may initially be freaked out, but they won't find that in the Monster Manual, and they'll probably love you for it. Thank you so much for listening. I once again want to thank our sponsor, the Dustin Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Company. Our vacuums suck, but our service doesn't. This has been Taking 20,

Episode 43, Reskinning Monsters. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.