D&D General Players: Do You Care From Whence Your DM Gets His Monsters/Challenges?

And many of them I never used because of that nor did I think of them as very "D&Dish" (medieval fantasy). 🤷‍♂️
I follow. Some of my players are exactly the same and we all started in 81 so that interests me. I think many people may have been exposed to medieval fantasy first as kids. For example, many of us encountered the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings prior to Lovecraft at our young ages in 1981. I was raised by a Lovecraft obsessed father and older brothers. I also remember Gary Gygax spoke a bit on the topic. But it's odd when half my group thinks of a Mind Flayer as D&D and I always saw it as Lovecraftian, thanks to my father and upbringing lol.

But it is funny to hear a guy my age we played with all out lives finally figure out aberrations are pretty much cosmic horror and many of the planes are akin to outer space or alien worlds.

It's an interesting rabbit hole for sure with all kinds of tangents. I love this stuff and these games.
 

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I prefer it if my dms use at least some monsters from non-standard sources. I know too much about the monsters in the MM and other official monster books; I love surprises and not knowing what might happen or what tricks a creature might pull. One of my dms even loves using Chat GPT to make monsters for him.
 

I think so long as the DM is good at evaluating monsters, dndwiki can be a good resource. While I agree that much of the design there is bad or overpowered, as a resource for ideas though, I think it's great due to all the content there. I've used it for design ideas on subclasses in the past and found that some of the classes/subclasses were actually fairly well designed that they might only need minimal updates. Others are complete power trips though, I saw a saiyan class where you're effectively an unstoppable powerhouse that gets ridiculously powerful even within a few levels.
Oh, sure. If it's "I got an idea from dandwiki and built a monster myself based on it", I couldn't care less. It's only using material directly from it that would be Concerning™.
 

D&D Wiki and other spaces with supposedly unbalanced monsters will still work perfectly fine for those of us on the "Don't have a problem adjusting mechanics mid-combat" side of the fudging ledger. I know we are in the minority of folks around here, but I'll tell you it does save a whole lot of time. Rather than finding a cool monster in some place but then spending all kinds of time before the game trying to "re-balance" the monster's stats using whatever metrics we think we know about monster design... we can just make our tweaks as needed as the encounter goes on if things seem a little off. Why waste all that time beforehand adjusting all kinds of stuff we only think is unbalanced, when it could turn out the monster might have been fine for what we needed all along and it was us that was wrong?
 

I’d be surprised if players even know let alone care. I don’t tell my players which book each monster cone from, or which I made or altered myself. (Or which I just made up on the fly but that’s another story….)

It’s not a dissertation where I have to cite my references!
 

Just an idle curiosity.

If you are playing D&D (any edition, but 3e on have more options in this regard), do you care about where your DM is getting their monsters and stuff? in other words, do you expect or desire your DM to use official monsters? Do you have concerns if they are using 3rd party monster books? Homebrewing monsters? Does it matter if they are using Grimtooth's traps or similar?

If so, why?

If not, is that universal or are there sources that would worry you?

Thanks.
I’m fine with it but there was definitely a time where if I heard D&D Wiki as the source for anything, I was immediately hesitant due to the amount of badly designed content there, but then that was primarily subclasses and items, not monsters.
 

If I grab a monster from some other source I typically do a quick double check to see if things are out of line with more standard monsters (I use Monster CR on a Card). But that's true of any source and I'm assuming it will be the same with the new MM. Even for published 3PP like Tome of Beasts I'm now careful to read through them because they are much, much more dangerous than similar monsters from WotC. That's not a bad thing, but I do sometimes tweak them or ignore specific abilities. So I don't think getting anything off of the D&D Wiki or any other source is necessarily bad, you just have to be careful.

I do a fair amount of custom monsters or modifications to existing monsters so my players have always known not to expect an orc to be just an orc. Especially if they seem to be larger than normal and are breathing smoke while holding an iron mace that's glowing red hot. :devilish:
 

I follow. Some of my players are exactly the same and we all started in 81 so that interests me. I think many people may have been exposed to medieval fantasy first as kids. For example, many of us encountered the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings prior to Lovecraft at our young ages in 1981.
Yeah, for me I watched The Hobbit in Elementary school back in the late 70's and early 80's every year (it was shown in the Library along with Charolette's Web and a couple others).

I was raised by a Lovecraft obsessed father and older brothers. I also remember Gary Gygax spoke a bit on the topic. But it's odd when half my group thinks of a Mind Flayer as D&D and I always saw it as Lovecraftian, thanks to my father and upbringing lol.
I was never into anything Lovecraft (honestly, I couldn't tell you what is and what isn't in most cases LOL).

But it is funny to hear a guy my age we played with all out lives finally figure out aberrations are pretty much cosmic horror and many of the planes are akin to outer space or alien worlds.
The only aberrations I use are (in order of frequency):

Beholders (and kin sometimes)
Mind Flayers (no variants!!!) and Intellect Devourers (on occasion)
Slaad (very rarely)
Otyugh (very rarely)

For me, these are the classic "nightmare" creatures for D&D and when used bring that slight aspect of "alien" which is appropriate but not overboard.

Honestly, in most campaigns, the above creatures might just show up once or maybe twice (if they are the focus of part of an adventure).

It's an interesting rabbit hole for sure with all kinds of tangents. I love this stuff and these games.
It is for sure! With everyone having slightly different backgrounds and exposures I'm sure we all have different creatures which feel D&Dish and ones that dont.

For myself, I only use about 150-200 of the 750+ creatures WotC has. Most of the ones I don't use don't feel D&Dish to me generally.
 

I follow. Some of my players are exactly the same and we all started in 81 so that interests me. I think many people may have been exposed to medieval fantasy first as kids. For example, many of us encountered the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings prior to Lovecraft at our young ages in 1981. I was raised by a Lovecraft obsessed father and older brothers. I also remember Gary Gygax spoke a bit on the topic. But it's odd when half my group thinks of a Mind Flayer as D&D and I always saw it as Lovecraftian, thanks to my father and upbringing lol.

But it is funny to hear a guy my age we played with all out lives finally figure out aberrations are pretty much cosmic horror and many of the planes are akin to outer space or alien worlds.

It's an interesting rabbit hole for sure with all kinds of tangents. I love this stuff and these games.

I read Edgar Rice Burroughs and RE Howard before either Lovecraft or the Hobbit so maybe I’m a lot broader in what I accept as DnD-ish Pulp monsters, afterall Conan and Krull feature Unspeakable horrors and ERB had his share of aliens (and four-armed carnivorous apes).

I do use Otyugh regularly and have used things like Gibbering mouthers and Grell. I havent used Beholders and dont like Mindflayers.

That said I played a game in a party which featured both my Druid and an Abberant Scorcerer, it did get a bit weird having a summoned Starspawn following us around. Trying to reconcile my pet hawk and a couple of summoned wolves alongside a massive tentacled horror was a little discombobulating.
 
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Source doesn't matter for me or the other DM in our group. However we tend to reskin stats and change lore as we see fit with any monsters we use (though we keep any changes consistent within a campaign world). It keeps the game exciting for the old hats in our group and the newer players don't tend to care one way or another as long as they are having fun.
 

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