D&D 5E (2024) Need a recommendation for polymorphing enemies

ECMO3 · Monday at 5:07 PM

MonsterEnvy said:
Turn enemies into normal Turtles and then just leave them alone until you deal with the active enemies

The problem is the other bad guys will hurt them to turn them back. I need something with more hps.

MonsterEnvy · Monday at 6:48 PM

ECMO3 said:
The problem is the other bad guys will hurt them to turn them back. I need something with more hps.

Well you could just grab a turtle and put it in a bag on your person. That should keep them safe for a while. Or give a turtle to a teleporter teammate to remove from the field dispose of, then come back.

MarkB · Monday at 7:02 PM

MonsterEnvy said:
Well you could just grab a turtle and put it in a bag on your person. That should keep them safe for a while. Or give a turtle to a teleporter teammate to remove from the field dispose of, then come back.

That's becoming a lot of actions to maintain a purely temporary debuff of a group of enemies.

MonsterEnvy · Monday at 7:05 PM

MarkB said:
That's becoming a lot of actions to maintain a purely temporary debuff of a group of enemies.

Picking up a turtle requires no action.

Teleporting a turtle or two away does require two actions to go away and back, but if done the enemies are permanently removed from the fight. Unless they have the power to teleport back

MarkB · Monday at 7:11 PM

MonsterEnvy said:
Picking up a turtle requires no action.

Picking up a hostile creature requires, at the very least, an attack action to grapple.

MonsterEnvy said:
Teleporting a turtle or two away does require two actions to go away and back, but if done the enemies are permanently removed from the fight. Unless they have the power to teleport back

And which teleportation spell are you using to take an unwilling creature with you?

MonsterEnvy · Monday at 7:56 PM

MarkB said:
Picking up a hostile creature requires, at the very least, an attack action to grapple.

And which teleportation spell are you using to take an unwilling creature with you?

It’s a tiny turtle

as a DM I would say you can just pick it up, it can’t resist.

Would a turtle even count as hostile anymore given the reduction in intelligence.

MarkB · Monday at 7:59 PM

MonsterEnvy said:
It’s a tiny turtle as a DM I would say you can just pick it up, it can’t resist.

Would a turtle even count as hostile anymore given the reduction in intelligence.

If the t-rexes the OP is intending to transform his party into still count as friendly, then yes.

Clint_L · Monday at 11:03 PM

MarkB said:
If the t-rexes the OP is intending to transform his party into still count as friendly, then yes.

The spell text specifies "the target retains its alignment, personality...", which I would interpret as them retaining their basic motivations, even if they are now dumb as a brick.

Mirrorrorrim · 2026-04-22T01:22:20+0100

MonsterEnvy said:
Picking up a turtle requires no action.

Teleporting a turtle or two away does require two actions to go away and back, but if done the enemies are permanently removed from the fight. Unless they have the power to teleport back

Why is picking up an unwilling opponent not an Unarmed Strike (Grapple) action? Can you pick up just any Tiny opponent with no effort?

humble minion · 2026-04-22T01:54:03+0100

Mirrorrorrim said:
Why is picking up an unwilling opponent not an Unarmed Strike (Grapple) action? Can you pick up just any Tiny opponent with no effort?

As a long-time wildlife rescuer who has a LONG personal list of Critters I Have Been Bitten By, I would laugh til I cried if a player in my game argued they could pick up any tiny (and in this case, hostile) creature as a free action with no attack roll required. I suspect cat owners would be of the same opinion...

As to the original question, there might be a different approach. The reason the OP is looking for a creature with high hp is so that the bad guy's friends can't just attack them and knock them out of the polymorph by wiping all the temp hp. Another way of going about it is to choose your polymorph target to make the polymorphed bad guys hard to find. It'd depend on the environment location of course, but if you're fighting in a dusty crypt? Turn him into a spider, then watch his friends try to work out exactly which of a thousand spiders in here they need to attack. Fighting in a rocky wasteland? Transform him into an oyster, then watch his friends have to sort through all the near-identical grey pebbles looking for the one that's their shellfish-ified friend.

Of course there's ways around it. If your bad guys can natively detect magic or have true seeing, then they'll be able to spot the target instantly. And of course they always have the option of dropping a big area effect damage spell in the general location. But in context, even doing this is probably a win for you, because they've spent a precious action and spell slot doing that rather than damaging the PCs, and because these tiny little mundane creatures probably only have 1hp, so all the rest of the damage goes directly on to the polymorphed bad guys' real hp total. And this is going to be a substantial amount of damage, because how likely is it that your lich enemy has a LOW-damage area effect spell prepared?