D&D 5E Which common monsters/creature types do you exclude from your campaigns?

[Crimson Longinus]

The owl and the bear mixed as a single creature? Hybrid creatures and anthropomorphic animals are omnipresent in the mythology of many cultures and medieval iconography; something I can relate to.

Also:

The Owlbear doesn't even have poison claws!

 

[Vaalingrade]

Blink dogs really don't work for me. For some reason the full-on alien weirdness of Displacer beasts works fine, but Blink dogs are in a sort of uncanny valley where they're just too silly but also not silly enough. Also they're incredibly wasted as sapient Good-aligned creatures. Dogs who could teleport rapidly and continuously would be absolutely terrifying and creepy as hell if they were just vicious and only semi-sapient at most.

I feel like blink dogs could work if they, like so many other D&D creatures weren't fully sapient with their own whole unique language... and absolutely no cultures or society. They're just Very Good Boys who exist as a joke about Displacer Beasts being cats.

Pathfinder has an alternative teleport dog, which is a servant to the drunken god of adventurers that work way better.

Mythology has an ever better teleport dog who might be Actually Satan.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Also:

The Owlbear doesn't even have poison claws!

Please stop posting ridiculous made up creatures.

Next you're going to start claiming there's a tree that just burns the rest of the forest down by emitting flammable gas and attracting lightning, or a tool-using ape that can travel in space and communicate across an entire planet. We shall have none of that, sir. None OF THAT.

 

[Laurefindel]

I'm really just wondering where we're going to draw the line when the game was founded on goofy crap. Not indicting you for your tastes, just wondering where we go from not gonzo typical cocaine wizard fair that is the game's bread and butter to gonzo.

People often cite the flumph, but look askance when I (routinely, boisterously) defame the grell, which is objectively a Dumber Flumph; a big brain with a parrot head jammed in it with the requisite Lovecraft tentacles and often a hat.

People (rightly) don't like the Thomas the Tank Engine fever dream paralysis demons that are modrons, but will defend to the death (wrongly) a badly cast plastic toy that exists solely to annoy players by eating their armor.

Just saying gonzo, I feel is not helpful in terms of being a descriptor as the whole game is gonzo except the real animals and the humans with differing heights and skin color.

Again, not arguing what you do and do not like, just wanting to get a better feel for what exactly that is.

Gonzo is a slider, not a toggle switch between was is believable or not [edit] and a multidirectional slider at that! [/edit]. There are no clear limits and yes, we’re taking about fantasy so there is an assumed level of invented and made-up content.

So where is « too gonzo » on the gonzo scale? It’s vague and intentionally so. But on the scale between historical facts and acid-induced kaleidoscopic fantasy (two hyperbolic but evocative extremes) you can read that I prefer more down to earth or relatable monsters in my campaign. Some would even say « boring » and that’s fine; I’m not DMing for them. And even if I was, I trust that my enthusiasm for more relatable settings will give them a good experience, same as I would enjoy playing with an enthusiast DM in the most gonzo kind of game.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Fair enough. Thanks for your reply.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Half-Orcs. I just make them orcs. It gets rid of some nasty legacy baggage, and also normalizes them as not automatically being sword fodder. I'm not a big fan of half-races in general, and would remove half-elves, just making them fae touched of whatever species they are, but a few of my players love them, so I'm not going to let a minor issue of my taste deny their fun.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

In my Eberron game the only major exclusion is Halflings, got rid of them and gave their stuff to others. Mark of Healing went to Dwarves, Mark of Hospitality went to Gnomes, the Boromar Clan went to Goblins, and the Talenta Plains and dinos went to Kobolds.

In my homebrew world, there are only seven humanoid races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Sylph, Undine, and Salamander. I've recast some races as Narnia style sapient animals, like Orks as wild boars and Kobolds as pangolins.

 

[ad_hoc]

I tend not to use creatures I don't have a mini for.

I agree on the lycanthropes. I like them as creatures but not the way they curse. It is just not a fun mechanic for PCs to face unless it really is a horror campaign. And then I would have all the PCs cursed and be central to the story. I also don't like their immunity. It's weird as just about everything else only has resistance.

 

[delericho]

Half-Orcs. I just make them orcs. It gets rid of some nasty legacy baggage, and also normalizes them as not automatically being sword fodder. I'm not a big fan of half-races in general...

Yeah, I tend to think these would be better modelled as a racial modifier, or (perhaps better) a feat chain - that would allow for characters discovering a heritage later and/or allow them to lean in to one. Amongst other things, if they introduced the appropriate "X heritage" modifier each time they introduced the matching race, that would make it trivial for people to mix-and-match.

That said, IMC I only have half-elves and half-orcs. Half-elves are just the children either of mixed parents or of two half-elves, so nothing special there. But half-orcs are a little different - in places where human and orcish lands border one another, many children are simply born as half-orcs - most such children therefore have either two human or two orcish parents.

 

[Tonguez]

That said, IMC I only have half-elves and half-orcs. Half-elves are just the children either of mixed parents or of two half-elves, so nothing special there. But half-orcs are a little different - in places where human and orcish lands border one another, many children are simply born as half-orcs - most such children therefore have either two human or two orcish parents.

thats my approach too both half-elves and half-orcs are considered Human imc, one being ‘fey-touched’ and the other ‘beast*-spawned’ (Orcs dont exist)
*Beast spirits are worshipped imc and empower Savage Paladins

 

[Vaalingrade]

Gnome, Sylph, Undine, and Salamander..

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest in your formative years?

At least that's where I got my idea for the elemental peoples in my setting. They're not playable species, but summons and companions.

 

[grimslade]

Savage pack tactic blink dogs would be wonderfully terrifying. Would their baying and howling randomly cut out and emerge while they blink? Even scarier...
Gonzo is ok with some things. I don't mind Giff or Space Whales, but modrons leave me cold. I don't mind tentacly weird creatures like aboleth, illithid, or beholders, but flummphs are right out.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest in your formative years?

At least that's where I got my idea for the elemental peoples in my setting. They're not playable species, but summons and companions.

Mostly a fascination with alchemy, both Western and Eastern. My Dwarves and Elves are metal and wood aligned, respectively.

 

[Baron Opal II]

So which creatures do you exclude and why? And is it something you decide on ahead of time or something you decide as you prep events/adventures?

Let's see...

Elves and Drow. They chose their last battlefield and I don't have to deal with them anymore.

No "half" races (kinda), you can have a halfling and a dwarf for parents, but you favor one over the other. I do have half-elves, sort of, but they are people (humans, dwarves, whatever) who happen to have an elvish blood line that manifests. No dragonborn, lizardfolk instead. No gnomes.

The only non-corporeal undead are shadows and ghosts. The scary undead are nazgul types.

The only giants are stone and cloud, and they're obvious cousins.

The only dragons are basically red and black, and they can be any alignment. Vengeful greedy, usually. I just stopped being jazzed by a variety of color-coded breath weapons. Two that I came to appreciate and could run with was fire, because that's just what dragons do. I could also see a lesser sea dragon version that coughed out a noxious bile.

I don't have a lot of humanoid opposition. The vatborn are reskinned orcs and ogres. Goblins are fae, hobgoblins are humans from a parallel dimension, no bugbears. I use gnolls, minotaurs, and skaven as the "wizard did it" magical races, with lizardfolk and kobolds as the scalely folk. That's about it for humanoids. I don't need 30 humanoid races, a dozen will do.

No cursed lycanthropes, and people with that as a heritage are very few and far between. I always appreciated Eberron changelings, but they don't quite have a place yet.

Anything that could fit into an ecosystem, magical or otherwise I can use, although I give morkoths and ixtixiclixal the pass. No tritons or sea elves. Sahauguin and locathah are enough.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I feel like blink dogs could work if they, like so many other D&D creatures weren't fully sapient with their own whole unique language... and absolutely no cultures or society. They're just Very Good Boys who exist as a joke about Displacer Beasts being cats.

Pathfinder has an alternative teleport dog, which is a servant to the drunken god of adventurers that work way better.

Mythology has an ever better teleport dog who might be Actually Satan.

Blink dogs are perfect. I’d rather have more fully sapient magical animals, than less. And why should they have complex social orders? You think every sapient species would always follow a path similar to humanities? Especially a magical Fey canid?

Yeah, I tend to think these would be better modelled as a racial modifier, or (perhaps better) a feat chain - that would allow for characters discovering a heritage later and/or allow them to lean in to one. Amongst other things, if they introduced the appropriate "X heritage" modifier each time they introduced the matching race, that would make it trivial for people to mix-and-match.

That said, IMC I only have half-elves and half-orcs. Half-elves are just the children either of mixed parents or of two half-elves, so nothing special there. But half-orcs are a little different - in places where human and orcish lands border one another, many children are simply born as half-orcs - most such children therefore have either two human or two orcish parents.

I kinda go the other way, and let all these magical weirdo races mix all day. Wanna play a mino-centaur? Sure. We just kinda list all the traits of both races, and of any races that fill an overlapping narrative space with the races being mixed, and Lego together a new race writeup out of those parts.

 

[Tonguez]

Sure. We just kinda list all the traits of both races, and of any races that fill an overlapping narrative space with the races being mixed, and Lego together a new race writeup out of those parts.

because then we’d be playing Gurps

 

[Yaarel]

Generally, I prefer to exclude all creatures from the setting, and then cherry pick say 5 sapient creatures/races to focus on, that the setting will revolve around. If a player wants to a play a different race, I "soft-ban" that race by making it a unique creature or from a remote periphery. As the campaigns evolve, the players tend to discover more races, but I am still cherry picking them.

 

[Voadam]

Also:

The Owlbear doesn't even have poison claws!

Hey, where's Perry?

 

[Yaarel]

Has anyone written an adventure set inside an oversized gelatinous cube and/or hypercube yet? It seems like that should probably happen.

One of my earliest D&D adventures was in a hypercube demiplane. The form was building whose rooms lacked windows, but had doors leading to other rooms. The furnishings were of a mansion. It took us sometime to realize we were in a hypercube, when we unwittingly circled back to an earlier room, but this time around we were walking on what turned out to be the ceiling.

 

[Vaalingrade]

You think every sapient species would always follow a path similar to humanities?

It's not the sapience, it's the unique language they've developed despite not having a society or culture that would have necessitated such. If they just spoke Sylvan, I would question it.