The Talking Bookcase

Reskinning: Because Nobody Wants To Fight A Grimlock.

It was a problem when 4th Edition and its single Monster Manual first came out, and it’s still a problem now if you don’t want your players to fight orcs again and again. Frankly, there are only so many monsters, and their habits and manners become pretty obvious after a while. Or maybe there’s a cool monster you’ve seen that just wouldn’t fit flavorwise in your campaign. What to do? Reskin, of course.

Reskinning is becoming something of a necessity in 4th Edition, mainly because each monster is so specialized and distinct. It’s much easier to wrap a new appearance around an existing monster to create the creature you need than fiddle with expanding powers or applying templates. It allows you to use the existing character as it is in the book without the need to write down any additional whatever to forget. Here’s some tips for put a new face on an existing monster.

Make sure you need to change the monster first

So you’ve seen a cool demon, but your campaign setting doesn’t really support demons, or you’re traipsing through the Shadowfell and you notice a cool aberrant that you want to build an encounter around. You just don’t want to drop the creature piecemeal into the adventure, like some pointless random encounter, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. A couple of clues can make the monster’s sudden out-of-place presence make sense. A paper on a desk mentioning a contract between the lair boss and some creature, a sidequest MacGuffin that would be of great enough value to an offworld raiding party, a last-minute and slapdash summon, bringing in whatever help the ritualist can possibly get. If there is a convincing reason, go ahead and build that up instead, because some monsters are just cooler when faced in their original skin.

Watch the types

When you change a creature from such and such a dimension to one more appropriate found in the current realm, you might have to switch the types. It might become a shadow creature, or lose the undead distinction. This is one of the more dangerous changes you can make, as there are a lot of powers that trigger based on the creature’s type, and may make a creature unnecessarily easier or harder to take down. The undead trigger is the most prevalent, and should be changed at your own risk. If your party lacks divine characters, it shouldn’t be an issue, but if you do, consider adding or subtracting 10-25 hit points to simulate the damage they would have taken from the inevitable use of turn/abjure undead or the missed opportunity. If your players have taken abilities that care about other types, like elemental or immortal, be careful when you change these to make sure the player doesn’t get a sudden power spike or screwed out of an advantage they were building for. Most of the time, they won’t care, and the problem won’t matter, but just make sure you aren’t sending a cyclops into a death trap by making it undead.

Watch for racial powers

In cases where you’re taking a monster from an established race and turning him into another type of creature, such as a goblin to halfling, or shadar-kai to a very gloomy human, make sure there’s a reason they can use their racial powers if you choose to. A halfling with advanced rogue training could probably get away with the goblin tactics ability, maybe even be wearing a pair of goblin stompers, but when a goth suddenly goes insubstantial, be sure to throw in flavor text about him quickly downing a potion. When it doubt, just says that some magical item gives them the ability. Check the glossary to see if any powers on your reskinned monster are racial features that a player might remember.

Make the source of the powers obvious

Let’s say you have a more dramatic reskin, changing an elemental creature to a insane eladrin, or a golem to a rough-and-tumble bartender. While it’s easy to hide behind the curtain of “It’s magic” and have the players assume the monster suddenly has access to a lot of powers that don’t make sense, just because, the monster will be more memorable if you describe how an enemy is using a power. An eladrin invoking the name of the Prince of Winter and clutching a rod of pure ice as snow falls around them makes a lot more sense than just a wizard who specializes in ice magic. Giving your hapless human bartender a ridiculously complicated-looking crossbow loaded with barbed bolts explains a golem’s area attack and gives him a bit more character.

Invoke experience

The biggest reason to do a reskin is to make an otherwise average encounter into something the players will remember. If the players have taken a particular shine to a specific type of monster, or are duty-sworn to oppose certain creatures, or are supposed to notice a disturbing trend of a certain race always being involved in certain deeds, it makes more sense for your miniboss to be one of these than just a random monster who comes from out of nowhere. In a previous campaign set in Monte Cook’s Ptolus, my players really liked the ratmen, finding the nonchalant attitude of the people towards the vermin hilarious and even having a character who cared about the state of the sewers, which lead to them fighting the disgusting creatures a lot. But when it came time for the campaign closer at level 20, there was no way to get a ratman, who capped off at level 4, into a combat…unless I fooled around. I originally planned for the party to be attacked by these absurd six-armed spectral baddies who meant nothing to them, but with a description change, they were suddenly facing the most horrible of all possible ratmen, the exarchs of the Rat God himself, grotesque six-armed monstrosities with deadly ghostly flails. It was a much more memorable experience for them, their final confrontation with the creatures they’d fought consistently from the very beginning. The same principle can be applied to notorious NPC’s, suddenly gifted with outworldly powers in their continued attempts to oppose the PC’s. Now it isn’t a random jackass from another dimension, but an enemy they have defeated before and want to defeat again. If it works in Final Fantasy, it works here.

The reskin is a valuable tool if you’re struggling to keep a coherent narrative throughout the campaign, with recurring enemies but decent threats. 4th Edition has already taught us that it isn’t that uncommon to see the same creatures filling up the entire level spectrum. Sometimes you have to fill in the blanks yourself, but it makes the experience that much more evocative.

Combat Communication

Welcome to the Talking Bookcase! I’m Todd, and I’ll be one of your… librarians, I guess? Over the next few days the four of us will be posting up our first articles, and telling you a little bit about ourselves as well.

I’m relatively new to the DM side of D&D. I played my first games back in junior high, before Second Edition was even out, then took a long break from the game, picking it back up about 3 years ago for a romp through Monte Cook’s Ptolus. Our group switched to 4th Edition when it came out, and early this year, I started to feel like I could handle the role of Dungeon Master. Player’s Handbook 2 was just about to come out, and a lot of players in my regular group were itching to try out some of the new classes. So I started looking through all of the available modules and decided to set our group (which ended up being an Avenger, Bard, Druid, Warden and Shaman) through the Scales of War campaign. I also decided to pick up the campaign midway through, and had everyone roll up 6th level characters. We trade off that game with our original (and now a third), and the players in my campaign are now 9th level.

I soon learned an important part of pre-packaged adventures was the Enemy Tactics sections. If you’ve never run a premade Wizards of the Coast module, each encounter has a paragraph or two detailing how the monsters should fight back. Do they gang up on the caster? Do they fight till they die? Etc etc. I bring all this up because in one of the first fights I ran (through the Lost Mines of Karak), the party faced off against a group of 4 harpies. The tactics as written said that if 2 of the harpies died, the other 2 would give up the fight and fly off. Well, the party managed to somehow whittle down each harpy’s hit points practically simultaneously. Late in the fight, I think all 4 of them were in single digits. But none of them had died yet. As I recall, the harpies were at the bottom of the initiative. A new round started, and they proceeded to kill each harpy, one by one.

Looking back on that fight, I could have made it go much more quickly. (One thing I’ve realized by now, of course, is those Enemy Tactics sections are great guidelines, but they’re not set in stone. I could have just had them run away anyway.) The party should have been able to figure out the harpies’ tendency to gang up and only feel confident in battle when their sisters were fighting alongside them.

How do you, as the DM, communicate this type of information to your players, without simply telling them “Oh yeah, just kill 2 of these guys and the other 2 will go away”? Looking back later, I thought maybe a skill check in the middle of combat would have been the answer. “A successful Insight check tells you that these harpies are bloodthirsty in packs but cowardly alone.” Or maybe a Nature check? Perhaps one of the PC’s has some experience fighting these things. What it really boils down to, though, is much simpler, and it solves some other problems people have with combat in 4th Edition:

Just talk it out.

With every attack an enemy makes, describe its tactics to the players. And don’t forget that battles are very rarely silent. Do the monsters have the ability to speak? Then make sure they do! Get as much role-playing done in combat as you can. Orc captain comes up in initiative?

Which is more interesting if you’re a player?

“Okay, it’s the captain’s turn… he moves up here and…*clatter* OK, that’s a hit. You take… 17 damage, and you’re dazed.”

OR!

“‘CRUSH THE WEAK! IN GRUUMSH’S NAME!’ The Orc Captain raises his warhammer to the sky and thunders toward you. With a mighty swing, he brings it down on your head! The impact leaves you reeling. ‘Ha!’ he spits. ‘Bet your ears are ringing NOW, maggot!’ Take 17 damage, and you’re dazed.”

I don’t know about you, but that second fight is the one I wanna be a part of. And keep that talking up, even when the PC’s are taking their turns. Encourage the players to do the same. If I had done similar in that fight with the harpies, my players would have figured it out. And even though the role playing and dialogue takes a little longer, the fight would have ended much more quickly. And it would have been a ton more fun.

Obviously each encounter is going to be different. But no matter what the situation, revealing important information as part of the action will always be more immersive than stopping the flow to make a knowledge check, or simply revealing it out of character. And if it ends up being a nugget of information that’s important to the story down the road, the players will be much more likely to remember it, because it’ll feel like they fought for that knowledge instead of just having it handed to them by the DM, or by the luck of the dice.

Welcome!

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