D&D General Do people like re-skinning?

[Flamestrike]

The only way those stats would be an accurate reflection of this new thing is if it was identical to the old thing; and if that was the case, then there's no benefit to adding it to the game.

Yes there is. There is a huge benefit. It:

• Enables player concepts (see my Hexblade examples above). This increases fun for the player involved who can play the concept he wants in his head.
• Cuts down on DM workload. I can grab a Fire giant, remove its fire resistance, and reskin it as a 'War Ogre' and describe it as a huge Ogre, clad in plate armor and wielding a giant axe. No-one would be the wiser.
• Maintains mystery. A DM simply describing his spells differently, maintains mystery and cool factor with his players. A Hold Person described as phantasmal chains or a Magic Missile as laughing skulls other than darts etc. Plenty of examples of just this have been provided in this thread.

Considering I can do all the above, with a DM workload of nearly zero, simply by reskinning or refluffing, it's a massive benefit.

 

[pogre]

I love throwing a miniature down that has no recognizable counterpart in D&D - you better believe my lazy rear is using a conventional monster's statblock for that mini!

 

[Var]

Speaking as a player who is pretty up to date on everything the books contain, reskinning helps getting the tension back.

On the metagaming level I know a young Red Dragon is CR10 but sucks at DEX and WIS saves, pretty sure 3-4 buddies and I can take one at level 5. Even when playing an appropriate character that could know what I know, like a Ranger that hates Dragons, I'd roll for myself to see if I'm going to use it, but odds are I am passing that check or someone else knows that Web and Command work pretty well to let the rest of the group lay into it.

The exact same statblock as a reskinned salamander thing that burrows instead of flying though? Never heard about it. Oh boy what is that thing.
How much damage did that breathweapon do? Oh damn, is that at will? It just casually hit the plate clad fighter with 3 attacks for how much damage? Consider me scared instead of confident.
It takes away my ability to prepare and preplan an encounter like that by abusing my memory to gain an edge, while roughly providing the same challenge.

Imho deadly encounters are fun, given the players have opportunity to gather some info, prepare, find out about a weakness and allow them to make it more manageable, even if they're a little banged up when they get there.
But sometimes you just want to use a cool monster/NPC statblock and it doesn't fit your game the way it is. Or just because you want to use 2 or 3 of a creature that makes 0 sense in a group. Or you want that roadside ambush to be a strain on the players without resorting to weirdly high level bandits or an entire army worth of them.

 

[Zardnaar]

You don't want to over do it but it's a great trick.

I got caught doing it this year tweaking a fire giant into an ancient war bot.

 

[akr71]

Yep, I reskin monsters a lot. Usually when I need something bigger & tougher than the base monster I want to use. I find something of the appropriate power level to either borrow from or model, in terms of HP, to hit and damage. If that's not enough, give it a bonus action or reaction.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Wholeheartedly in favor of re-skinning. To not re-skin is to waste time, and to incorrectly believe that everything in the game was statted so precisely that the new thing you've skinned wouldn't/shouldn't "fit" the stats of the old thing. The game is entirely made up, and the designers have no more a special look into the world of D&D as any of us (other than the fact they were chosen to do it). So to think that their decisions on the stats of a kobold is somehow the "one truth" is silly. You can use the kobold's stats, call it a whole different monster, and there would be absolutely nothing wrong with the game whatsoever because you are just as much of a gamer schmuck as Mearls, Crawford, Perkins and the rest are. Their design isn't special, and neither is yours.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Hold up. I think we might have different ideas of what reskinning means. In my book, a fireball that does cold damage isn’t a reskin, because fireball does fire damage. That’s either a rules change or a new spell that is very similar to fireball. You can’t reskin a rapier as a versatile weapon because it isn’t. You could reskin a versatile weapon as a rapier, but I can’t imagine why you would want to, since rapiers already exist without reskinning and also versatile would be a weird property to want on a rapier anyway.

Like... As I understand it, reskinning is just taking one set of mechanics and naming/describing it a different way than it was written. I guess changing the damage type of a spell is a gray area since most of the time damage type just amounts to description, but since it can make a difference for damage resistances and vulnerabilities, I would argue it’s just over the line of what I would call reskinning.

Likewise. If you're actually changing mechanics, I'd regard it as homebrew rather than just reskinning. (Although I'm generally in favour of both so the distinction is not usually an issue.)

Reskinning your handaxes as just a pair of humungous hunting knives? - Same stats - Reskinning and fine.
Adding the versatile property to a rapier? - Actual mechanical change. - Homebrew. - (And likely not going to by OKed in our group.)

 

[Fenris-77]

As mentioned upstream there are really two different definitions of reskinning in play. One is the straight refluff, like your axe to knife example above. Call that the player version, since it also includes the refluffing of classes for concept reasons. Then there's the DM version, which also may include various levels of changes to the actual rules to aid the fit of the reskin. You can call that homebrew if you want. Personally, I don't normally make that option available to players except in exceptional circumstances.

I tend to use the term 'homebrew' to refer to rules created from whole cloth to replace or add things to the game. Like when I make my own spells, or classes, or mechanics. Changing an NPC stat block you found in a module doesn't seem to be on the same scale though. Are we really saying that anything that isn't used as is from a printed source is homebrew? Because that sounds a lot like just run of the mill DMing to me. I only ask because 'homebrew' is a pejorative in some circles.

 

[TwoSix]

Hold up. I think we might have different ideas of what reskinning means. In my book, a fireball that does cold damage isn’t a reskin, because fireball does fire damage. That’s either a rules change or a new spell that is very similar to fireball. You can’t reskin a rapier as a versatile weapon because it isn’t. You could reskin a versatile weapon as a rapier, but I can’t imagine why you would want to, since rapiers already exist without reskinning and also versatile would be a weird property to want on a rapier anyway.

Like... As I understand it, reskinning is just taking one set of mechanics and naming/describing it a different way than it was written. I guess changing the damage type of a spell is a gray area since most of the time damage type just amounts to description, but since it can make a difference for damage resistances and vulnerabilities, I would argue it’s just over the line of what I would call reskinning.

I think there's a distinction between the reskinning a player does, where you describe class features in the "skin" of a new concept; and the reskinning a DM does whereas they create a new monster from the mechanical bones of a preexisting one, often with mechanical tweaks. Since the DM is assumed to have carte blanche to create encounters as they see fit, the amount of mechanical options available to a reskinned monster is much broader.

Equipment reskinning is interesting; I don't see an issue with a player describing one weapon as another as long as the stats stay the same. Creating a new weapon with a different combination of stats than what is currently available should loop in the DM, though, as that's firmly in houserule territory. If you want a weapon that's both finesse and versatile, we can work that out, but that has some possible balance interactions that need to be considered.

 

[Weiley31]

Yeah, I feel ya. Especially about Rapiers. I suppose that there could be some sort of fantasy weapon that could do a d8 damage and be both versatile and finesse, but even that sounds too much like the best of all worlds for my tastes, I tend to err on the side of underpowered when I'm doing this sort of thing.

A Feycrafted Longsword would have the Light trait, therefore allowing it to be just that: Finesse and Versatile.

A rapier can be refluffed into an Elven Thin Blade.