Bright blue with pink spots?

alsih2o · Feb 28, 2005

It seems that few predators would last being bright blue. We get monsters in some pretty silly shades of the rainbow, this is a fantasy game after all. It just seems that nature, even the gods, would create monsters that blended in better with their environment.

How often do you change the physical make-up of a monster to fit your world?

Bright blue critters, 20 foot horn spreads and bioluminescent skin all seem neat until you start looking at how they would change monsters OUTSIDE of encounters. What have you changed and how has it affected your game?

Voadam · Feb 28, 2005

What blue things are you thinking of?

The blues, psionic goblins, seem fine to me.

Blue Dragons don't really need camoflage, nor do reds, IMO.

And there are blue fish in the real world. And blue jays (one of my favorite birds).

Many creatures create flashy displays and have coloring for reasons besides camoflage.

And for huge antler wracks it is hard to top the real world extinct giant elk.

Umbran · Feb 28, 2005

alsih2o said:
It just seems that nature, even the gods, would create monsters that blended in better with their environment.

Nature might. But remember that in a magical world, the forces that shape natural selection can be significantly different from what you see on normal Earth. And the gods are in no way so constrained.

Blending into environment is important for a predator that relies at least partly on stealth in hunting. Fully grown dragons really don't typically need or use stealth on a standard hunt.

Also, you can be bright blue, so long as your usual prey (or predators) don't see blue very well. Remember that most standard animals don't see color as brightlyy as humans do.

azmodean · Feb 28, 2005

Ditto to what the other two posters said, if you take a look at what actually succeeds in the real world, it makes it kind of tough to criticise imaginary monsters, some of the stuff in the MM doesn't have anything on real creatures for weirdness (except that magic thing)

Platapus!

eris404 · Feb 28, 2005

alsih2o said:
It seems that few predators would last being bright blue. We get monsters in some pretty silly shades of the rainbow, this is a fantasy game after all. It just seems that nature, even the gods, would create monsters that blended in better with their environment.

How often do you change the physical make-up of a monster to fit your world?

Bright blue critters, 20 foot horn spreads and bioluminescent skin all seem neat until you start looking at how they would change monsters OUTSIDE of encounters. What have you changed and how has it affected your game?

One DM in our group changed drow elves to be completely albino, due to spending their entire lives in darkness. As players, we simply accepted the change as logical, because there are plenty of real-world examples. It didn't have much effect on the game mechanics or play, though, except that it made them rather creepy-looking (I thought).

I also remember a story I read in a magazine or on a forum (maybe here?) about a DM who changed the rust monster to look like a big hairy sheepdog and decided that rather than using its rusting power to eat metals, the oils in it fur were the cause of the corrosion. So the party finds this big dog and it's so friendly that they decide to take it with them. The DM went into great detail about how the dog rubbed up against the party members, including those wearing metallic armor, and they still couldn't figure out why their equipment was rusting so fast. Yes, it was a dastardly trick, but I have to admire the cunning behind it. And since I find the rust monster sort of silly, it was a neat way to reinvent it and make it more interesting.

One of the reasons I liked the ecology articles in Dragon so much is that they try to give an implausible creature a plausible reason to exist. Unless I think a critter is just too silly for words (see above), I think I'd rather come up with reasons it exists as it does rather than change it entirely - there's just something more fun about that to me.