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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6490929" data-attributes="member: 58197">I dislike out-and-out reskinning, because I believe verisimilitude is served by creating THE ILLUSION of mechanics that map to actual stuff in the game world.(You'll notice that I put &quot;the illusion&quot; in great big bold letters, because I have the naive hope that I can maybe avoid turning this thread into another round of the tired old argument about simulationism in D&amp;D. Verisimilitude is not simulation. The goal is not to actually model the game world, but to create an illusion that the world is being modeled, good enough to pass at a glance even if it doesn't hold up under inspection. The mechanics are like the set for a play. Close up, they are obviously fake, but from where the audience is sitting, they look real enough to not distract from the play itself.)So, I don't like merely swapping out the name and appearance of a monster while using the exact same mechanics. That said, I often practice what you might call &quot;re-fleshing,&quot; where I take Monster X as a baseline and use it to create Monster Y with similar stats and comparable-but-not-identical mechanics. For instance, I might use a fire giant as the model for a half-ogre warlord; roughly similar hit points, attacks, and average damage, but with damage dice appropriate to the warlord's weapons and fire immunity replaced with some other middling-useful immunity or resistance. I expect to do a fair bit of that when I resume DMing 5E.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 6490929, member: 58197"] I dislike out-and-out reskinning, because I believe verisimilitude is served by creating [SIZE=4][B]THE ILLUSION[/B][/SIZE] of mechanics that map to actual stuff in the game world. (You'll notice that I put "the illusion" in great big bold letters, because I have the naive hope that I can maybe avoid turning this thread into another round of the tired old argument about simulationism in D&D. Verisimilitude is not simulation. The goal is not to actually model the game world, but to create an illusion that the world is being modeled, good enough to pass at a glance even if it doesn't hold up under inspection. The mechanics are like the set for a play. Close up, they are obviously fake, but from where the audience is sitting, they look real enough to not distract from the play itself.) So, I don't like merely swapping out the name and appearance of a monster while using the exact same mechanics. That said, I often practice what you might call "re-fleshing," where I take Monster X as a baseline and use it to create Monster Y with similar stats and comparable-but-not-identical mechanics. For instance, I might use a fire giant as the model for a half-ogre warlord; roughly similar hit points, attacks, and average damage, but with damage dice appropriate to the warlord's weapons and fire immunity replaced with some other middling-useful immunity or resistance. I expect to do a fair bit of that when I resume DMing 5E. [/QUOTE]

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