D&D General Do people like re-skinning?

aco175 said:

Dragons were the original reskin or refluff.

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I believe that is a combination of the tropes Underground Monkey and Colo(u)r Coded for your Convinience

Reskinning is great. I do it all the time.

Some Hexblade Blade Locks I've played/ tinkered with:

• A Drow 'Sword Dancer' of Elistraee. Patron refluffed to Elistraee, weapon re-fluffed to Moonsword. The curse is reflavored to 'Blade focus.'
• A Gold Elf Hexblade [Moonblade scion] - his patron and pact weapon is his own families Moonblade which grows in power as he does (gaining thirsting blade, improved pact weapon, eldritch smite etc). The 6th level Spectre abilitiy is simply re-fluffed as the Elfshadow ability common to Moonblades.
• A Gith 'Antipaladin'. Patron refluffed to the Lich Queen, and weapon re-fluffed to a Silver Sword.

Ive also seen Draconic sorcerers re-fluffed to Fiend bloodlines (take red dragon, and the scales, wings etc are all your demonic heritage shining through).

Refluffing is awesome. I'd always allow it as DM - it helps players get concepts on the board. There are zero issues with changing fuff as long as the mechanics stay the same.

Heck, I'll even allow slight mechanics changes. The 'Infernal' draconic Sorcerer gains Infernal as a language instead of Draconic at 1st level; Monks use a 'Monk weapon' with the same stats as a spear or quarterstaff, but called whatever they want (lajatang, dragon sword, nine ringed broadsword, jian, three sectioned staff or whatever) and doing their choice of S, B or P damage, a PC can have a 'Sabre' (same stats as a rapier, but dealing Slashing damage), your Samurai can have a Katana with the same stats as a Greatsword etc.

Id be relutant to play in a campaign where the DM said 'no' to the above. There simply is no good reason for saying no.

Fenris-77 said:

Yeah, that would work fine, and is an excellent example of a successful use of reskinning.

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Yeah that’s how I’m handling the special Dragonborn weapons in my FR game. They’re basically finesse longsword that do 2d4/2d6, but it just happens to be that they are magic weapons.

Asisreo said:

Re-skinning is one of my first tools when exercising Rule of Cool. It lets me create a cool scenario that canonically happens without breaking the game. Ice Exposion, for example, is a fireball that does cold damage.

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doctorbadwolf said:

I can’t reskin a rapier as a versatile weapon. There are versatile weapons, and they do things the rapier doesn’t, thus it isn’t versatile.

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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.

Take a Bulette, add a Sonic, (Thunder), Breath Weapon, and a Turn to Stone gas Breath Weapon.

Rock Dragon Design, complete.

This is much easier then the custom monster tables in the DMG.

Take Magic Missile, change damage type and description. Play up the unerringly hit part.
I’ve used this trick for 40 years, it almost always works to freak out the players.

Not knowing what it is, they are facing, scares the bejesus out of Powergamers!
Even if it is just the lowly Magic Missile spell described differently.

Scare your players, Re-Skin today!

Reskinning is one of the best tools, especially for inexperienced DMs:

You never ever break balance with it, like in zero chances.

And to counter the OPs argument: I do not believe someone, just from observation of a gameplay, could easily analyse a reskinned class for its origins. I mean, yes there are cases where it might be easyer, but still if the players stick to RP/game talk and try to avoid mechanics in their gameplay talk other than attack/casting damage or whatever other effect and armorclass /saving throws I think it gets very difficult.

When you got a reskinned caster, how do you even know whether its a sorcerer or a favored soul or a mage or some bard? You could not even tell easily if a char is multiclass without uncertainty, just from watching a game.

In a base way, I've done a lot of "reskinning" in my game, but not in the normal sense. I don't like the visuals of a lot of creatures (including PC races) that have changed over the decades. I've gone back to the original appearances, which is kinda fun, as many of my players can't automatically recognize them (especially when their characters can't).

As for reskinning in the traditional sense... I'm really not a fan. I might occasionally do it for monsters, but only when it's easier than making a new one I need.

When I reskin I just take something like an orc, halfling, or even a bugbear and describe them as something else. It keeps players on their toes because most of them know exactly what an orc can do but they might not know how tough a Sea Person is. I've also done the old trick of reskinning spells like magic missile. Tell your players a magic user casts magic missile at them and they'll shrug. Now tell them the necromancer just unleashed three screaming flaming skulls flying at the PC like bats out of hell and you get an entirely different reaction.

Reskinning is an excellent tool.

Sometimes there's a monster you really don't like the story or description, but maybe it has a special ability or two which would be great to see in play. Change the narrative to suit your tastes, and you can still use the "crunch" you paid for when buying the book.

For player characters it is more challenging to pull off but only because the players know, but assuming you ARE the player who wants a different narrative, you only need to see how much the details of the RAW are getting in your way.

Coroc said:

Reskinning is one of the best tools, especially for inexperienced DMs:

You never ever break balance with it, like in zero chances.

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That implies the game was inherently balanced to begin with, which is not something an inexperienced DM should rely on.

Personally, I'm not a fan of re-skinning, because it's bad practice. My job as DM is to determine accurate stats, which best reflect the thing I'm trying to represent. The monsters in the book are useful in teaching us how the mechanics of the game are used to express various realities within the game world, but once we're fluent in that language, re-skinning something into something else is very likely to create errors in representation.

If I'm going to create a new thing, be it item or spell or monster, there's no merit to using the stats of an existing thing. 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.