Altered Bestiary
There’s a peculiar thing that happens with long-time players. After you’ve been playing in the same system for years and years, you begin to get a sense for the monsters. When you first started out you were properly scared by dragons. You said, “What the hell is that thing?” when you ran into leucrottas. You blundered into gelatinous cubes, stood in the beholder’s anti-magic field, and were actually surprised when the troll got back up and kept fighting. Your foes were new and interesting then, and you were never sure whether you were walking through a deadly encounter or a pack of low-level mooks. There’s a sense of excitement in that kind of uncertainty. When you’ve fought everything in the book though, the magic begins to fade.
You don’t necessarily have to be one of these guys that studies the bestiary like it’s going to be on the SAT to run into this issue. Simple exposure to a diet of CR-appropriate encounters will do the trick. If any of you guys have ever played L4D2 (one of my all-time favorite shooters), I think of this as the difference between getting slimed with bile as a new player (panicking and running around like a muppet) and calmly bashing away the horde as a pro. You’re no longer back-pedaling furiously and laughing at the hilariousness of the situation when you’re a long-time gamer. You’re trying to figure out how to most efficiently solve the encounter. The novelty wears off, and so you’re left with samey-feeling combats.
In order to solve this problem, some players turn towards Gygaxian Naturalism, a deadly style where high-CR monsters can be found even at “inappropriate” levels. Only clever play and quick thinking will save the day there! Developers try to solve the problem by printing new and different monsters, preserving the sense of novelty for as long as possible. GMs with a flair for home brew may try the solution in today’s comic, making classic monsters deceptively difficult by adding templates, class levels, or bizarre abilities.
This of course brings us to the question of the day. Have you ever dealt with the problem of players (maybe even yourself) knowing too much about the monsters? How do you keep the game fresh when you’ve already fought everything twice? Let’s hear about your clever strats and modified monsters down in the comments!
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I think in a previous comment I already mentioned getting surprised at zombies behaving “smart” and grappling instead of mindlessly flailing at my 20 AC fighter.
“Fortunately” for me, I don’t have terribly good luck with games staying alive for a super long time so there are tons of monsters I know basically nothing about and fewer still that I have the main bits memorized for.
Though I kind of figure trolls’ “surprise feature” is ruined for everyone by now, even people not part of the hobby.
The way I see things, if you’ve managed to play one system so much that you’ve memorized all the key bits about almost all the monsters and your GMs aren’t willing to alter them in interesting ways or make up their own…. It may just be time to try out some other systems. By the time you’re done with that your favorite system will probably have come out with a new edition and the new monsters and re-done versions of the old ones will likely hold some surprises for you again.
Alternatively, it may just be your turn to be the GM for a group of people new(er) to the hobby or system.
I wrote about this in another comment last week, but I think it’s relevant here too. I think my favorite time in the life cycle of an RPG is when no one knows what’s going on. People stumble into cool abilities, take flavorful options, and figure out new combos all on their lonesome.
There’s an Exalted 2e article about “paranoia combat” that really cemented this in my head.
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/10602/what-is-exalted-paranoia-combat
It “solves” the game, and in the process makes it an unplayable mess. I had much more fun before knowing that it exists.
But I think I agree with that last bit. The pleasures of GMing are much different than playing, and that’s a fine solution on an individual level.
Yeah… Even before I started D&D, I knew to set trolls on fire.
One thing that can be done, however, is to give the players enough description about a monster that they get an image in their minds, but little enough that they have a hard time figuring out what it is. This doesn’t work for things like beholders and mind flayers, but I do remember a battle against trolls in an older editions where we didn’t realise what we were fighting. We thought that we had killed them, and our sorcerer started cutting them up tomato into cloaks and daggers. Unfortunately, in this world, the ways that trolls multiply… well, suffice to say we had to run away very very fast when the trolls started coming back to life.
And the worst part? We spent ages wondering whether to cremate the bodies before deciding to just leave them.
You, my friend, have got tomato tourettes. 😛
I like that change to regeneration. It keeps the general lore, but makes it function differently enough that it remains a surprise. Well done that GM!
Bah! You think your spider-boar powerful? Wait until you meet my piece of home-brew, the acid-breathing lava shark! Lasers not included in standard lava-shark package. Please inform your local dungeon designer if you wish to add lasers to your acid-breathing lava shark.
I cannot tell you how long I spent scrolling through bestiary “animal” listings.
“Bear? No, that’s overplayed thanks to Sir. Bearington. Besides, it can already climb. Ostrich? Why would they be fighting an ostrich in the first place? Maybe a dire rat could– dammit, they climb too!”
Let me answer your question with a question: why wouldn’t they be fighting an ostrich?
I mean, given the craziness that some encounters tables have, it’s something that could happen. Plus, fighter would want to cut it open for loot.
I shall consider “dire ostrich” in my next encounter.
One thing I tried years ago was taking a creature and changing its type and name. Giant sea turtle? That’s a Coral Dragon. Dire Weasel? Bloodletter Drake.
Never got to use them, sadly.
That dire weasel better grow some wings… or start flapping.
As Pirates of the Caribbean once said: “They’re more like guidelines anyways.” I modify basically everything I find in the Monster Manuals, just to keep things fresh and keep everyone on their toes.
Examples from my most recent campaign:
Zoombies- Standard zombie with a 3 round haste spell that can triggered as a bonus action
Fairy Armor- A suit of plate that looks like animated armor, but is actually several quicklings hiding inside and manipulating the limbs
Werewolf Skeletons- Ancient undead werewolves that still shift in the moonlight
Boulder-riding, glaive wielding kobold monks in an avalanche- yeah, that.
Giant Vampiric spellcasting spider- with a deep and abiding love for phantom of the opera, hence the top hat and cloak
Gelatinous Cube, Cone Snail Edition- A cube that fires strength draining darts to immobilize its prey
I’ve had good luck with a recurring gelatinous cube. It has a malfunctioning teleportation circle stuck inside of it, so it behaves erratically and has a solid chance of making a getaway halfway through combat. It “levels up” by absorbing pieces of monsters that the PCs have left for dead in past fights, gaining relevant abilities as it goes. It’s like the tofu of monsters, taking on the flavor of whatever happens to be nearby. 🙂
Oooo I love it! If it doesn’t already, it should acquire fragments of its food’s memories. Have your PCs adopted a “cremate all monsters” approach yet, cause if not, you’ve got a golden opportunity for some truly horrifying “oh no” moments.
“There is a nausea-inducing schlorp sound from just around the corner. You peek around the corner and see what looks like a translucent… fruit cake? oozing out of the shadows, its edges wobbling with malice. Wait, those aren’t fruit and nuts suspended in jelly, but eyes. Eyes that look familiar… Remember that beholder you killed last week? It certainly remembers you…”
I guess it’s time to meet Fighter 40.
Wait… What’s your title again?
“Keeper of souls”.
A title well earned.
That’s one of the thing I like with Pathfinder : take monstruous humanoids, give them class levels, and voila! You’ve got a CR appropriate encounter with monsters that the players are very likely to underestimate and not know how to counter before the fight even starts.
I’ve actually planned something like that for my next session, where my players will meet a bunch of kobolds – and will be surprised to find they are among their toughest opponents yet.
This is also part of the reason I’m thinking about switching to Fate later. Since there are (AFAIK, I haven’t dug into the ressources a lot yet) no premade monsters, it’s all up to the GM to stat them, so the players can never really “learn” what they do.
I’ve only played a few Fate sessions, and nothing behind the screen. Is it very easy to generate antagonist stat blocks?
I actually haven’t played Fate yet, just read about it and wanted to give it a try, but from my understanding, yes, it’s easy.
Basically, antagonists are characters. That is, they have aspects, skills, and maybe a couple of stunts. There are four categories of enemies. Basic enemies, called Fillers (e.g random mooks, or regular wolves from a pack, etc) have one aspect, one skill at +1 to +3 depending on how strong you want them to be, and a couple of stress boxes (from 1 to 3, like with the skill). So yeah, super easy to generate on the fly.
Notable enemies (like the big bad’s personal bodyguards, or his hitman) have two aspects, three skills (around or possibly even above the level of the PC’s best skills), stress boxes that matches those of a PC with similar skills, and one or two stunts. They’re called either Threat or Hitters, depending on wether you’re focusing them on defense or offense respectively. A bit more detail but still something you can make quickly IMO.
And lastly, bosses. They have five aspects, just like PCs. They have just as many, if not more skills as the PCs, with their best one usually beating the PC’s. They also have from 1 to 3 stunts, and consequence slots in addition to whatever stress boxes they get from their skills. So basically, this one is like creating a new PC, albeit a strong one. Can’t really do it on the fly (unless you’re really used to it), but since it’s a boss, you shouldn’t have to anyway.
So yeah. Compared to games like Pathfinder, it’s much easier to make ennemies in Fate.
I think that, for me, Fate was an object lesson in the importance of actually reading the rules. It was pitched to our group is a rules light and easy-to-pick-up system. I skimmed the character creation and “what are aspects?” sections before diving in. It was enough to get along, but I never quite felt like I really understood the game. If I ever get another chance, I’m going to make sure I give it a proper once-over.
I think it’s rule light if, like you said, you just want to get by. If you really want to understand the system, it takes a bit more work.
I’d argue, however, that’s it’s still lighter and easier to pick up than Mathfinder. The most important things are what’s on a character sheet : aspects, skills, stunts, and stress. If you know how these work you can play Fate ; the rest is more secondary.
That’s why I’m thinking about switching from Pathfinder to it – when I see that my players aren’t really invested in the mechanical aspect of their characters, I think we might as well pick up a system that’s not as overwhelming so we can go straight to the parts we like. There are probably other systems that would fit the bill, Fate just happened to catch my eye.
I recommend giving “Tucker’s Kobolds” a read. You don’t need to scale them up, you just need to play them smart and obnoxious.
I have read Tucker’s Kobolds. And I’m not going to use them. My players are far from being good at the game ; using Tucker’s Kobold would simply result in a TPK.
I’d rather use stronger than normal enemies that don’t have hometurf advantage. It works for my group.
Dungeon Crawl Classics is great from this perspective, and is specifically designed to avoid “ho hum” monster encounters where the players know what the monster’s secret is. There are pretty much no “standard” monsters. It is always something new and exciting.
This is the case in the published adventures, and monsters don’t have complex stat blocks so it’s easy for the DM to generate new ones. It’s not a reskinned “X”, that faces the first level PCs. It’s just a strange, vile creature in the wilderness that nobody (player or PC) has heard of.
D&D’s position as the “standard” RPG I think forces it into a position where classic monsters are used over and over again. This has both positive and negative impacts on the game.
Does DCC not have a bestiary?
There is a collection of sample monsters in the core rulebook following the monster creation guidelines, but it is specifically presented as a collection of “benchmarks” used to help the judge generate his own creations (see quote below). There is no stand alone “monster manual,” though I’m sure there are third party books that offer pre-generated monsters (all of them as weird and unique as possible, I imagine).
Here’s the basic philosophy as described in the core book:
“The Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game dispenses with traditional monster assumptions. There are no ‘generic’ monsters. . . . A key element of player experience in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game is a sense of wonderment. Your job as judge is to convey ‘the sense of the unknown’ that was so easy to achieve when we were children who did not know all the rules. One way to achieve this is to make monsters mysterious. The less the players are able to predict about the specifics of an encounter, and the more they depend on role-played hearsay, legends, and lore, the more exciting their encounters will be—regardless of monster statistics.” P. 378.
“What follows is enough for the judge to have a good sense of ‘benchmarks’ for his own creations, as well as a number of examples of atypical creatures appropriate to a campaign inspired by the works on Appendix N. We encourage the individuality of each campaign by not presenting standardized versions of all monsters. Make your own stats for werewolves, liches, and devils!” P. 394
Its treatment of magic items is similar.
I think I’d like to buy the DCC guys a beer. The sound like cool dudes.
My excessive knowledge aboot the mechanical side of monsters has actually helped my GM more than it’s hindered.
GM: “Ah shit, she’s got too many spells, what do I do?”
Me: “If she is what I think she is, then she’s got that special unique fear thing.”
GM: “You see a manifestation of your worst fear. What is it? regardless, make an Intelligence save.”
Or another time…
Me: “Can I make an intelligence check to see if I know aboot the Flameskull’s ability to get back up?”
Intelligence skills are how you determine if your character knows things. Separating them from what you know can be cumbersome, but it works.
I think it helps when you play a stereotypically knowledgeable character. It’s a lot easier to justify a wizard knowing monster lore than a barbarian, for example. I remember rolling off to decide whether my 12-Int beefcake knew enough about incorporeal creatures to suggest hitting them with magic arrows as a solution to the rogue’s, “My daggers do nothing!” dilemma. Your solution does work, but from personal experience it felt pretty bad when clever play got plowed under by bad a “knowing things” roll.
In practice, I prefer letting players justify why their character knows some bit of lore. You run the risk of metagaming getting out of hand, but I think that self-policing is the ideal here.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“My sword glows. It hurts the ghost. Your daggers don’t glow. They don’t do anything. Stab it with glowy arrows. Rawr.”
I could actually see a 12 INT Barbarian being reasonably knowledgeable about weird monsters. What do Barbarians in Barbarian Villages do at night? Tell stories about the killing of weird monsters. (“Thok smashed troll into mush, but troll kept getting up, so Thok set troll on fire!”) It won’t all be 100% accurate or applicable, but the knowledge could easily be there in the same way that a Bard gets it.
I like to imagine “dumb” martials as actually being “extremely knowledgeable about weapons, anatomy, things related to killing and NOTHING ELSE.” Never ask a Barbarian to do trigonometry. It will not end well.
Now I want to do a Captain America barbarian that specializes in trigonometry.
“Am very simple. If shield ricochet off monster at 35° angle, striking ceiling at 145° angle….”
His people sit around the campfire at night discussing math and NOTHING ELSE. Occasionally concussed birds fall out of the sky and directly into their cook pot.
First! My group fought leucrottas the session before last. Ha!
Second! I was really hoping you would reference The Gamers. I was not disappointed.
Finally, to answer your question, I shall put it into prose.
The team gathers round, each with freshly bought item,
They’re raring to go, and you just want to spite ’em
So you bring the party along the Old Road
And make them complacent with fights, but no goad.
The random encounters feel wight-washed and drab
And they even have stats for Oberon and Mab
But that all disappears in the blink of an eye
When you raise the portcullis and earnestly lie.
The veterans have monster fights all calculated
But here in the city, they’ll be remonstrated
No pulling of steel at the first sign of trouble
They have to play smarter, or bounties will double!
And even more so, their opponents are hidden
They’ll strike from the shadows and engage unbidden
What’s worse, they have CLASS LEVELS! Oh my dear lord!
You can’t know those beforehand! The DM has scored.
So the party, from here, must maintain their A-game
For the bum down the street, one eye blind, one leg lame
Might just be a sword saint of cunning and skill
Or a warlock, empowered with keen force of will.
And the shopkeeps are always retired old mercs
If you try to steal product, they’ll give you The Works
So the players will learn and adapt, or they’re toast
And you didn’t need hydras, just humans, to boast.
So for all you DMs there who want to be beast
What you do
You yourself!
Keep your daredevils fleeced.
First: Leucrottas are hella creepy, yo. That lure thing is all manner of frightening in the hands of a skilled GM.
Second: I have the 4th gamers movie sitting un-watched in its cellophane. I badly need to make some time.
Finally: “Wight-washed.” I see what you did there.
Some enemies LOOK intimidating at a glance- dragons, giants, a skeletal knight riding a flaming horse, etc. But IMO the hardest threat to parse is typically humanoid spellcasters. Unless your GM drops hints like “a creeping sense of dread fills your soul”, then the only way to tell if they are going to be a pushover or chew through 90% of your healing potions is when they open the first round with either Burning Hands or Meteor Swarm.
In my current 5th edition game, we recently had our 4th encounter of the day as a caster who opened with Flamestrike and then turned Invisible, and our group collectively wondered what we did to piss off the GM.
Invisibility can wreck you so hard if you’re not prepared for it… Usually I find that it’s the initiative role that matters most with casters. If they have the chance to pre-buff or if they can start layering defenses while their minions lay down some cover, you know you’re in for a long fight.
We’d better not risk another frontal assault, that piggy’s dynamite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnOdAT6H94s
I almost canned this script when I realized how close it was to Monty Python, lol.
In this case I was the problem player. I liked DnD 3.5 and monsters in general so much that i had readed every beastiaries multiple times. We were young, the GM inexperienced and metagaming was hard to avoid when youre overenthusiastic and inexperienced. Made things annoying sometimes
What was your eventual solution?
This spider-pig reminds me of the genetically altered super-sheep from Shadowfire. To quote directly from the source document:
“Teleportation and spontaneous cold generation are the least weird things this creature can do – did it really have to be able to generate illusion duplicates? What do you mean its wool stores so much static electricity that it can shoot lightning bolts!?”
Best. Sidequest. Ever.
Found a pic:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSPrdcB69WPrH_bIN_J6fG104nuTSfHVZ4fuE1fRqjWxnrrphmLsYOtGls
Still making my way through the doc. It remains open on my browser, waiting for a few minutes of free time.
Whenever I actually do GM, there are two things that can trip up thenplayers even when they’re appropriately strong enough to face them; cheap tactics and character levels. This is when my zombies grapple you underwater when you’re slogging through a swamp, or where wolves actually make use of hit-and-run tactics to force the melees out of formation so they could gang the wizard. While I tell my players not to metagame most have experienced the Mage enemy star block before, but they’re in for a surprise when I gave that same Mage effective Sorcerer levels, throwing out metamagics and bloodline abilities. Even just upgrading a simple guardsman from NPC warrior to level 1 Fighter can suddenly make them go from forgettable mook to fierce enemy.
I was furiously googling for “mage enemy star block,” wondering what kind of esoteric arcane battle formation you were describing, when I realized it was a typo. >:[
Fortuitously, I’m now considering the implications of known battle formations. If the enemies shout to one another, “Bear trap! Go go go!” what information does that give to the career soldier of the party? Could be a fun way to make martial professions and backgrounds more valuable.
Incidentally my players have learned to take notice of my bad guys formations, one which is called the Death Star. It has less to do with lasers and more to do with being specifically spaced far enough to avoid being struck by most forms of small AoE (10-20 foot radius) as well as intentionally positions themselves to force other players to move or waste an action dashing in order to reach the enemy.
I love to hear the party Paladin or barbarian groan because the bear shaped Druid is blocking all the space for them to get an attack off, or for the rogue to be stuck in a corner because of a well placed grapple. Just as well, I’ve eaten up more of the wizard or sorcerers turns where they “wait” for the enemy to gather into a cluster that will never happen since the party tends to go up against trained soldiers, and not bandit thugs. Granted in these instances they’re more tedious then they are dangerous, but I did manage to kill a PC, in party Barbarian in fact, by exploiting their usual “charge ahead of the group” tactic and then isolating them long enough for their rage to drop. Then they killed him. Didn’t even have a Mage in that group, just lots and lots of orcs and pikes.
I’ll sometimes “take the gloves off” as a GM when I want to model smart enemies. It can seem like a bit of a metagame move when enemies stand in exactly the wrong position or ready to dispel (“Watch that one! She usually opens with haste!”), but there is no better way to model well-trained soldiers in game terms.
As a DM, GM, and other kinds of two-letter combinations in all caps to signify the “omnipotent leader of storytime games”, I never run the monsters as seen on TV.
If I describe what sounds to my players like a Kobold, they usually know now that it DOESN’T mean kobold. It means “whatever stat block I mashed up today, described as a kobold”. They also know (isn’t gaming with the same people for yeara until you “get” each other great?) that I always, ALWAYS leave a clue. There is always a vulnerability, because I think nothing should be without weakness, so that clever play, knowledge checks and proper preperation are always rewarded.
There was this one time, though, when I described a creature. The table was introducing a new player, the barbarian’s irl friend and in-game ol’ pal, a rogue who styled himself with two hand crossbows all Diablo-style. We’ll call him Brand. He played D&D 3rd for a few years back in highschool, and though we were now playing Pathfinder, he assumed it would be pretty close. Sigh, the folly of youth.
This creature I described was large, and had heat radiating from it’s body. Now, the original statblock belonged to another creature entirely, but I liked the stats, and stole shamelessly. However, I described it much like a troll. I never said “troll”, though, and no one asked. The resident alchemist was all set to make a knowledge check to try and discern what this thing was capable of, but Brand the rogue was up first. He promptly announced that he “got this guys, just hit it with fire!” and lobbed a potion of alchemical fire at the beast.
Well, you probably get where this is going. The thing was a race called salanri, a rare breed of giant-like salamander kin, native to the souther area of this very land, as the alchemist would soon tell the party, and utterly embarassed rogue. While it looked like a troll in face, body and even smell, the rogue must have missed the “brick-red skin” and “heat radiating from it’s spike-covered body”. Oops.
Well they beat it, the alchemist scolded the rogue in-character for not doing “proper research”, and we moved on. The player of Brand was, to be fair, apologetic and got better at not taking things for granted. In the end he followed the party to the abyss. I would say to the abyss and back, but…. Brand, the character, is no longer with us.
All good points, but I think it may be possible to go too far the other way. I mean, there’s a reason we’ve got trolls and giants and unicorns in the bestiary. It’s good to have some familiar fantasy elements to point towards as shorthand for “here’s the kind of creature we’re dealing with.” Giants are big and dumb. Trolls regenerate. Unicorns may offer healz to the pure of heart. You can create some interesting encounters when you play against type, creating big dumb unicorns and regenerating giants. If you do that too much though, it can begin to seem arbitrary and counter to the spirit of a given setting.
What I’m saying is that sometimes the kobolds should just be kobolds. You can still make interesting and unexpected encounters without resorting to the surprise reskin. Traps can be weird and different, unusual monster motivations can come into play, and magic items can throw any party off-balance. In my mind, the larger point is to keep the players on their toes, not to negate all of their in-world knowledge.
Ah, that’s where the beauty comes in. I don’t slam down new stuff each day – bear in mind they discovered these salanri were native to the area they were going into. They encountered them again. And again. They learned about their enemy, adapted to the tactics they used.
If you ever watched supernatural, it’s a bit like that. Each new campaign starts out with the “monster of the week” and they have to research and learn. However by the next season they’re slaying the old monsters with ease, knowing their weaknesses and working like a real team.
I agree, it’s important to get that “oh, we’ve got this” feeling sometimes.
I can get behind the Supernatural model. Half the point is to investigate the monster and figure out what it’s deal is. Then you go on offense. As I think about it, that might be the ideal way to make a bestiary more interesting. 🙂
I’m sure everyone’s first response to it eating Fighter was a flat “Oh noooooo…this is the woooooorrrsssst…” before it started laser-eyeing at the rest of them.
Their second response was to get out the “Fighter deaths scroll” and mark another tally.
The GM of the game I’m currently in likes making new monsters. And by god are some of them terrifying. Like the antigravity jellyfish. A large flying jellyfish-like monster with avian beaks at the end of each tentacle, each one shrieking a different note, and with a poison that makes you float 10 ft higher into the air with each failed save.
I love aerial jellyfish. They’re suitably otherworldly and creepy for unconventional encounters, and can work in all kinds of contexts. Last time I used them it was floating above a bottomless pit, trying to pick off climbing PCs. I believe this is the art I referenced:
https://magic.wizards.com/sites/mtg/files/image_legacy_migration/mtg/images/daily/arcana/289_gomazoa.jpg
Well, that’s all sorts of horrifying. My contribution for custom monsters that I never got to use was a sort of cybernetic undead thing for Starfinder, half-undead half-construct, sort of a combination of a lich (without the magic) and a kyton, but with all sorts of fun effects depending on what kind of energy damage it was hit with.
Anyone else have players whose first reaction to encountering anything non-humanoid is still to try and talk to it/figure out what quest it might have/ see if they can create a brand new trade/customer base?
It’s all very well for them to recognize the type of critter you’re describing, but most bestiary entries don’t cover things like, “Does the ability of my familiar to talk to avians mean he can roll a linguistics check to try and communicate with the baby jubjub bird?”
Some things are pretty obvious; if you get too close to the dire eagles’ nest they will drive you off with fury. But what if you come across a young unmated one, out randomly scouting for unclaimed territory? Are there any guidelines on how long of a memory it has for the character who used prestidigitation to shine up his feathers and pointed the way to a lonely female eagle?
And when they face off with an enraged axe beak, beat it to unconsciousness with nonlethal damage then drug it into prolonged sleep, heal it up, spend the time and resources to Awaken it and give it the magical equivalent of plastic surgery (they’d picked up a special “permanency” option a few sessions earlier that let them do superficial cosmetic changes) so that it had peacock coloration, and giftwrap it for a local fey because they needed a favor from the fey….
and then want to know, later, what god the axe beak picked to follow….
Somehow it’s hard to worry about them recognizing the creatures. They never really seem to care about the usual stat block stuff anyhow.
(I realize all these examples are bird-related. It’s because I came in to read the comic after having had to bury a window-bombing bird earlier today, and birds are therefor on my mind somewhat)
Your window-bombing birds reminds me of the explodey bird flocks from Exalted. Flying cluster bombs those things….
I think this issue is more to do with combat than the RP side. I mean sure, if you specifically recall the bit in the giant eagle bestiary entry that mentions how they loves to give halflings free rides, it can still come up in that context.
For your dudes though? It sounds like they aren’t interested in meeting the critters on their own terms. The wacky interactions you describe show players more interested in expressing their own characters through RP than “solving the puzzle” of the monster. And that’s not a bad thing.
This all reminds me of a post I saw on reddit once, where someone mentioned that in DnD 3.5 there were Mammoths (or maybe elephants, or dire elephants, or something of that nature…) that naturally had a Climb speed. As in elephants that could ambush you by dropping on you from the trees above… terrifying really…
On another note, reflavoring monsters is something that can easily change a PC’s perspective of a monster… Like a mindflayer reflavored as a flying demon who screams, stunning those around it, giving it time to kidnap the prince and bring him to the abyss before anyone can do anything.
The other option is make small changes to monsters and see how players react. Take a gibbering mouther, but make it large sized instead of medium. Can you imagine how terrifying a 10 foot pile of flesh and mouths and eyes is?… My players can, as they watched it consume numerous members of the city watch before they managed to destroy it. (Those same players have since joined the cult responsible for creating that gibbering mouther, though it’s a different sect as the actual summoners got eaten… they claim it’s infiltration, but they are now connected to the entity the cult worships so… we’ll see how this plays out)
What I like to do is use PCs as enemies. Not necessarily the PCs of the players (though that can be pretty funny), but just some 3rd level monks or whatever. They see an orc, they expect him to be a smashy-smash Barbarian, and get surprised when he’s actually a dashing Arrow Champion Swashbuckler.
I get what you mean, but I’m still sitting here like, “The player characters… But not the players’ player characters. The other people’s player characters. Who aren’t players.”
It was sort of a zen koan moment.
I need to find a way to give Mick laser eyes. Give him something he can attack with when he can’t get into melee right away.
I like to play with templates a to come up with critters that will haunt my players’ nightmares.