D&D 5E DM Confessions: What monsters do you overuse?

[Agamon]

According to my players, most of my baddies are a-holes. I never feel like I overuse them, though.

 

[steeldragons]

I fall into most of those already listed.

#1 [by far]: Evil Humanoids, in general. Kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, ogres, bugbears a bit less so, evilly-disposed lizardmen, troglodytes, etc... Generally speaking, evil humanoids are always the mooks/minions of evil, found everywhere in seeming unending numbers.
#2: I have noticed a pension, particularly at lower levels (where a great deal of my games occur), of overusing faye beings. Dryads, pixies, nixies, redcaps, leprechauns, etc... Generally speaking, these are not antagonistic encounters, often even being helpful influences for the party. But they do "show up" quite a lot in my games. In all fairness, satyrs and sprites might make such regular appearance because they exist as a PC race in my campaign world.
#3: Undead. Easy peasy, no moral ambiguity. It's undead. It's evil. I use skeletons, zombies, shadows, and, particularly, ghouls vastly more often than "free-willed" undead, so there isn't even any moral/ethical question of it as a 'thinking" creature. Nothing makes for completely guilt-free hack'n'slash like hordes of undead.
#4: Someone mentioned stirges...yeah...I use stirges a lot. But, let's be real...you can never have too many stirges. boowa. ha. ha.
#5: mmm...this is a toss up between Demons/demonic creatures or Dragons/draconic creatures. Not really sure which I use more of, but both (moreso the type-of-creature than full-on demons or dragons) make an, I'd say, "above average" amount of use in many/most games/plots/campaigns.

There's my top 5.

 

[AntiStateQuixote]

kobolds, dragons, goblins, undead (rarely vampires), mind flayers

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Goblinoids, wizards, vampires, and dragons are about the only creatures that manage to show up in basically every campaign - or at least those are the only things which when a campaign didn't include them the players stated something along the lines of "Wait... we didn't run in to any [blank] in that campaign... weird."

I'm about to complete flip the script on them, so to speak, because sometimes in the near-ish future we are switching over to using a campaign setting the players aren't all that familiar with and it has a whole host of monsters of its own that they've never encountered in all their years playing, so I am going to use as many of them as I can to make their introduction to this new world as distinct from other worlds as it can be.

 

[arjomanes]

Giant spiders. They're so simple yet iconic. And can cling to the walls or ceilings above. And several of my players really really hate spiders.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm honestly having trouble recalling the last time I ran a medium- to long-term campaign that didn't involve a lich on some capacity. I'm almost, but not quite, as bad with mind flayers. I just really, really love building plots and schemes around those guys.

I'm curious what monsters other DMs find themselves using as go-to options perhaps more often than strictly necessary. (And I don't just mean "This creature appeared briefly in a random encounter" or the like, but as actual plot-centric or adventure-focused antagonists or NPCs).

Hobgoblins.

 

[Gradine]

I do have a tendency to work Yuan-Ti and Illithids into more situations and settings than it probably makes sense for them to be.

 

[Ancalagon]

Goblins, and not always as foes. In my soon to end campaign, the heroes discovered that the goblins *love* silver and once hired a goblin group to harass enemies. I think that one PC said that it was the best 500 sp he ever spent.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think creepy children are becoming a signature of mine. Homebrew adventure featured a young girl whose wish to the goddess of night killed everyone over the age of 12 in her town. I modified Hoard of the Dragon Queen to include a subplot about turning hatchling dragons into necromantic engines of undeath. And now I'm running Death House, which, in my version, is featuring the soul of a stillborn child that manipulates a heap of plant matter with an unholy faerie power.

 

[MechaPilot]

I love the traditional gothic baddies: vampires, werewolves, mummies, flesh golems, ghosts, creatures from the black lagoon (I've used various monsters for this over the years: skum, bullywugs, etc).

I also have an affinity for other film monsters such as the blob (various oozes), Jaws (I've done both land and sea versions of this with dire sharks and Bulettes, although the Bulette is a little bit more like using the "graboids" from Tremors than using Jaws), and the Thing (I've used a modified Doppleganger to create this one).