D&D 5E What Are Your Favorite D&D Monsters (MM Edition)?

What are your favorite D&D monsters? The ones you go back to time and time again? The ones you love to use to terrify your players, or the ones you love to slay with wild abandon? They don't have to be the biggest, or the most awe-inspiring; they might just be something you find incredibly useful, thematic, or which appeals to you directly. Perhaps they've been the ones you use from every edition. Perhaps you used one recently and just had so much fun with it.

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This is a poll. You can choose as many monsters as you like. Let's find out what are D&D's most popular monsters! We'll be using the D&D 5E Monster Manual for this list, more specifically the main monsters section of that book (not the animals or NPC sections).

Will dragons, demons, and devils rule the roost as expected? Or might there be some surprises in there?

 

[duneguy]

Was it you who ruined empyrean’s perfect round score?

Empyreans are great! Super-powerful godlings, capable of great good, great evil, and even, in a pinch, great moral complexity. In a high-level game, use them as thanos-style villains or as dangerous allies with temporarily aligned goals. Can also be used as the chassis for a divine avatar. The actual mm stat block may not be perfect but there's a lot of meat on the concept. Besides, I want to save you from potential divide by zero errors

 

[Tonguez]

Sure takes a while to click every monster except stirge.

Whats wrong with Stirge? giant mosquito-bats harrassing the livestock as the swamp expands are great little beasties

 

[Deset Gled]

Elementals are scoring lower than I expected.

Are unicorns and pixies so low on the list because people don't think of them as monsters?

 

[Tonguez]

Elementals are scoring lower than I expected.

Are unicorns and pixies so low on the list because people don't think of them as monsters?

I personally cant think of many scenarios where Unicorns are a must have, theres nothing about them that cant be substituted for some other creature.

I voted both pixie and sprite but can see how they might suffer from fey having too many options to choose from, which might also be the case with elementals (I voted for Galeb Duhr and Water weird instead)

 

[TarionzCousin]

Ok. Which ones of you said you use tarrasques often? Really?

 

[d24454_modern]

I noticed that I favored monsters with elemental affinities and environmental variants.

 

[jeffh]

(WARNING - ZEITGEIST SPOILER BELOW)


Not much mind flayer love in the comments, yet they're winning the actual poll by a nose, or rather tentacle-tip, and the only one over 50%, at this writing... I'm biased, they're my personal favorite, though I don't actually use them much.

One of my groups is in the third Zeitgeist adventure and not too far from encountering the totally-not-a-mind-flayer in that adventure - making them exist partially as thought was inspired, makes them even creepier than the straight D&D version. That said I'll be making the Gidim visually more similar to the original in my own game...

 

[JEB]

Poll's been running about a week now, and the bottom 11 - the truest underdogs of the list - are interesting:

6 votes: aarakocra, blights, galeb duhr, piercer
5 votes: merrow, quaggoth, satyr, sprite
3 votes: darkmantle
2 votes: magmin
1 vote: empyrean

No clear pattern here, either.

 

[Mezuka]

My favorite monsters are 'humans'.

 

[pacnw.owlbear]

Obviously Dragons but I've been playing since AD&D and the iconic ones for me are Beholder, Mindflayer, Owlbear, Purple Worm, and Umber Hulk. And because I love the Dark Sun setting, Thri-Kreen.