D&D 5E Fight at the Fishmongers: reskinning your D&D Next playtest

[Piratecat]

We had a great lvl 5 playtest last night, where I sent the PCs up against a degenerate elven thieves' guild deep in a tropic jungle. They were warned that an entrance was "under the northern snows, where the sea met the street." Not a lot of that in a jungle city, it turned out, until they were in the marketplace and saw human fishmongers placing teleported-in ocean fish on ice.

Snow. Sea. Street... Check.

They were nosy enough to start a fight. The joy here is that I used the stats for carnivorous apes to represent the fishmongers, and I used the stats for a giant carnivorous ape to represent the huge 7' tall burly fishmonger. Since the apes normally get two attacks each, each fishmonger picked up two huge ocean fish and waded into combat, using the fish as clubs to try and beat the characters senseless. It was a fantastic fight. The visuals were great, what with pike and tuna being used as clubs by angry laborers/thieves, and the PCs were (mostly) loathe to use lethal attacks until the bad guys had.

Better yet, the druid shapeshifted himself into a fish to put himself in a position to spy, only coming out of it (by wildshaping into a huge dire cat and leaping off the display rack) to finish off the last bad guy.

Are other folks doing this sort of thing, reskinning monsters to match your needs? Tell me about it. I'll probably gratuitously and blatantly steal.. err, be inspired by your ideas.

 

[Ebon Shar]

I've re-skinned some monsters myself, even using the carnivorous apes as you did to simulate higher level warriors. I've recently adapted White Plume Mountain for 5E, liberally re-skinning to populate the dungeon as close as I can to the original. It works great and the players never know.

 

[hbarsquared]

This reminds me of a thought I had months ago, and never expressed...

Why not build "reskinning" unto the Core descriptions of monsters?

D&D is all about modularization, house ruling, reskinning, and building your own game. Why not reinforce this further by offering inspirational suggestions along with the rules text?

Carnivorous Apes
rules text
Alternative Ideas!
a rudimentary, wandering golem
animate vines dangling from a tree
human fishmongers wielding trout

I would definitely not mind a couple lines of text that might spur my creativity on how to use monster entries in new and interesting ways.

 

[GX.Sigma]

a rudimentary, wandering golem
animate vines dangling from a tree
human fishmongers wielding trout

I read that three times before I realized it wasn't a haiku.

 

[hbarsquared]

I read that three times before I realized it wasn't a haiku.

... he said.

 

[Rhenny]

I just add hp, change armor, add abilities/attacks, change damage as desired to recreate any past monster or new monsters. D&DNext (bounded accuracy) makes it much easier for me to eyeball what would be easy, moderate or difficult challenge. I would love for WotC to eventually make a module/resource that would be a "How to Build a Monster" resource.

I reskinned some skeletons to make them flaming skeletons...they were on fire, fire resistant, had 27 hp and threw tiny fireballs that exploded to hit target and adjacent foes -- 2d6 damage(DC 12 Dex save for 1/2 damage). When they attacked in melee, they had 2 claw attacks +5 to hit, and they did 1d6+1d6 fire damage. Just 4 of them against 3 level 10 PCs, and because there was a trap between them and the PCs, the skeletons actually did sizeable damage to the group before the fighter just decided to run through the trap and engage them.

 

[Li Shenron]

Done that many times in the past... you can go a long way and a long time with just one Monster Manual if you want to

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

This is very creative, but it would irk me a little that a fishmonger can achieve better damage than me when two-weapon fighting with fish

 

[Piratecat]

Too bad! Are you even proficient with fish?