#Dnd 5e Statblock

[curse-of-dming-strahd]

hello welcome back to "god there's so much in Strahd's combat writeup", I want to talk about the Heart of Sorrow

because it's kind of weird

and at first I was like "why does he even have this" because if you're fighting him at 10th level and your party picked up their magic items, 50 HP is nothing. that's a trivial amount of protection. there are some builds that average close to 50 damage per turn at 10th level (and that's ignoring whatever insane stuff the 2024 PHB lets PCs do now).

so if I can't rely on this thing to keep this beautiful pipe-organ playing manicure safe from buffs and scratches in the final fight, what else is it good for

well I have some ideas.

mechanically:

this does mean Strahd can do insane stunts around 1st-3rd level parties, like just... let himself get stabbed or set on fire and just kind of laugh about it haha isn't this a fun time we're all having

mid-campaign this is a buffer for if I've fucked up and accidentally left Strahd somewhere the party can damage him

assuming the heart is still active, I'm in love with the image of Strahd opening the bossfight with fireball centered on himself and soaking the damage as an intimidation tactic

plot-wise:

the module kind of tucks the heart way out of the way, but I think it makes more sense to broadcast it to the party as a quest

make it something the party should go out of their way to destroy because for all they know, this thing will protect Strahd indefinitely

it's not like the party destroying it will change my tactics in the final fight because I already can't depend on it to protect Strahd

the party will get to feel like destroying the heart is a major accomplishment that opens a huge hole in Strahd's defenses and I can play along like YEP YOU DID IT, HE DEFINITELY NEEDED THAT HEART AND THIS WILL DEFINITELY NEGATIVELY AFFECT HIM IN THE FUTURE :)

if all else fails and they accidentally destroy the Heart of Sorrow way early by catching Strahd and eating through the damage threshold before he can disconnect from it, it'll be a great excuse for Strahd to be fucking pissed at the party for breaking his very expensive magical hit point rock

[bbubblerum]

BBED: Big Bad Evil Dudes

Hello I'm Ana and this is the third in the BBED series! Each installment is a different Homebrew BBEG of a different Challenge Rating that is as fleshed out(And hopefully cool and fun!) as I can make it. The art and statblock for each is made by me and I hope you have fun using them, either as they are or reflavouring them. Remember the lore info and stats are there to inspire you to do what you want to do, not as hard rules!

Lore: Xvarts are all servants of the demigod Raxivort. Acting as decoys for him as he is chased by servants of the demon lord Graz'zt after he stole a valuable object called the Infinity Spindle.

A Xvart Lord is a particularly favored servant of Raxivort, blessed with a powerful weapon known as a Raxivortian Blade that grants them abilities beyond a normal Xvart such as teleporting and summoning. A Xvart Lord is usually a leader of other Xvarts who worship them as high priests and even demigods.

Xvart Lords are noted as having a very notable stench, which is thought to be the reason why Rats and Bats seemingly flock to them and make nests on top of the Xvart's body. Xvart Lords are given the important task of sacrificing people to their god, which is the primary purpose of their blade. The Raxivortian Blade has the special property of transporting someone stabbed with it to Raxivorts domain in Pandemonium, in the hope that he will transform the sacrifice into a new Xvart. Gnomes are most easily transformed, so they tend to prefer sacrificing them.

Any Xvart that steals a Raxivortian Blade successfully becomes the new Xvart Lord, so Xvart Lords tend to be extremely paranoid.

Running a Xvart Lord: A Xvart Lord is still a Xvart, meaning that they will tend towards running away from a fight if it starts to look bad. This also means they will employ vast amounts of creatures to protect them.

I would recommend using a number of other Xvarts, Xvart Warlocks of Raxivort, Giant Rats, Rat Swarms and Giant Bats when planning an encounter with the Xvart Lord. I would also not say it is unrealistic for the Xvarts to have captured something like an Ogre, or to ride Worgs, but keep in mind Xvarts tend to dislike anyone larger than them.

I don't think the Xvart Lord is powerful enough to have lair actions, but in its place I made the stats for their weapon in case your players take it!

Raxivortian Blade: Uncommon Scimitar(Requires Attunement)

This short and jagged blade is embedded with crystals similar to those of Slaad Control Gems. When attuned, the wielder gains a +1 to attack and damage rolls with this weapon.

This weapon has 3 charges. It regains 1d4-1 at dawn.

This charge can be expended on a hit to cause the target creature to make a DC 14 Charisma saving throw or be banished. While banished in this way, its speed is 0, and it is incapacitated. At the end of its next turn, the target reappears in the space it vacated or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied.

Alternatively as a bonus action you can expend a charge to teleport to a location you can see within 60ft. Alternatively you can switch places with a willing creature within 60ft, or an unwilling creature if the target fails a DC 14 Charisma saving throw.

If the attuned creature is a Xvart, neither option expends a charge.

[jotun-philosopher]

D&D monster: Vengeance Goose

This was inspired by a tumblr post which I've seen in screenshot form on imgur from time to time, though I'm having trouble tracking down the original post; the gist of it is, "don't wish death on your enemies -- wish geese on them. Infinite geese."

This appealed to my sense of humour, hence the following monster statblock (partly cribbed from the 'giant goose' from the 5e supplement Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, specifically some of the stats and the Actions section, especially the 'Thunderous Honk' move; it was the most goose-y statblock I could find) and accompanying summoning spell. Both monster and spell are deliberately overpowered jokes, so DMs, be judicious in using them with your table -- but if you do, definitely drop me a line because I'd LOVE to hear how it goes! (There's always one Big Bad Evil Guy who'd be soooooo satisfying to take down via swarm of cactus-wielding geese >:D Mwahahaha!!!)

In my mind, this monster resembles a Canada Goose (albeit larger), but feel free to sub in whichever type of goose you consider to be especially vicious b******s! :D

------

Long ago, a wizard specialising in transmutation magic (and not getting out in the fresh air enough) was seeking a more satisfying means than mere death for getting one over on his enemies. Remembering an incident in his youth and a plant from his homeland, he captured some local geese and magically engineered them to have enhanced aggression and the abilities to single-mindedly pursue a specified target and cast cactus-summoning magic.

Unfortunately for him, his original test subjects got loose and worked out their (very understandable) grudges against him, before escaping and mingling with the local goose population. Their descendants have lost none of their aggression or spellcasting ability, and are known to be violently territorial even by the standards of goose-kind, at least where non-avian intruders are concerned.

A group of adventurers who investigated the wizard's tower after his demise found his notes and managed to reverse-engineer them, creating a spell with which to summon one or more Vengeance Geese into temporary existence to assail an immediately present target. This spell is generally safe for adventuring mages to use; attempting to capture and tame Vengeance Geese from the wild is overwhelmingly discouraged by all reputable druidic organisations and any rangers with half an ounce of sense.

Vengeance Goose

Medium Beast, typically Chaotic Neutral

Armour Class: 16 (natural armour) Hit Points: 120 (16d8+48) Speed: 30ft., fly 30ft.

STR 18 (+4) DEX 14 (+2) CON 17 (+3) INT 12 (+1) WIS 18 (+4) CHA 12 (+1)

Saving Throws Dexterity +8, Constitution +6, Charisma +7

Skills Insight +7, Perception +7, Intimidation +7

Damage Resistances magical bludgeoning/slashing/piercing, force, poison

Damage Immunities piercing (own conjured cacti only), thunder

Condition Immunities blinded, charmed, deafened, exhausted, frightened, paralysed, poisoned

Senses truesight 30ft., darkvision 60 ft., tremorsense 30 ft., passive Perception 17

Languages Understands Common, Infernal, Celestial and Draconic but can't speak

Challenge 8 (3900 XP) Proficiency Bonus +3

Traits

Aggressive As a bonus action, the goose can move up to its speed toward a hostile creature it can see.

Magic Resistance The goose has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.

Action Surge (1/day) The goose can push itself through sheer vindictive aggressiveness to take one extra nonmagical action on its turn.

Innate Spellcasting The goose's spellcasting ability is Wisdom (spell save DC 17). The goose can innately cast the following spells, requiring no material components:

At will: Primal Savagery (2d10 acid damage)

3/day each: Ensnaring Strike (3d6 piercing damage/turn), Conjure Barrage (piercing damage), Plant Growth (1-action version only, goose takes no movement penalty from conjured plants), Grasping Vine

Cactus Growth The goose's Plant Growth spell exclusively creates cacti. A creature who comes into contact with these cacti gets pieces stuck to them, which inflict 1d6 piercing damage at the start of each of its turns until it or one of its allies uses an action to remove the pieces, making a DC 15 Dexterity save to avoid getting cactus'd in turn. The goose uses pieces of the cacti for its Conjure Barrage spell.

Actions

Multiattack The goose makes one Beak attack and either two Wing attacks or one Wing attack and one use of Spellcasting.

Beak Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (2d6 + 4) bludgeoning damage.

Wing. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 9 (1d10 + 4) bludgeoning damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 17 Strength saving throw or have the prone condition.

Thunderous Honk (Recharge 5–6) The goose honks with ear-splitting volume. Each other creature within 30 feet of the goose must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. On a failed save, a creature takes 16 (3d10) thunder damage and has the deafened condition until the start of the goose's next turn. On a successful save, a creature takes half as much damage only. The honk can be heard within 300 feet.

Spell: Summon Vengeance Goose

Summon Vengeance Goose

1st-level conjuration

Casting time: 1 action

Range: 30 feet

Components: V, S, M (a goose feather and a fragment of cactus)

Duration: Special

You designate a target within range that you can see and that is hostile to you, and call forth one Vengeance Goose, which manifests in an empty space within range. The Goose shares your initiative count, taking its turn directly after yours, and attacks its designated target relentlessly. It disappears when either it or its target is reduced to 0 hit points.

At higher levels When you cast this spell with a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, 1d20 extra Vengeance Geese are summoned for each slot level above 1st. These extra geese can all manifest at once, or appear 1d20 at a time on each of your turns after casting until all of the bonus geese are accounted for or the designated target falls to 0 hit points (you choose when you cast the spell).

Classes: Druid, Sorcerer, Wizard

Note: I went for the limited-but-still-potentially-amusingly-high number of geese because infinite geese, while very much in the spirit of the post that inspired this homebrew, would have some potentially awkward consequences; see the What If xkcd article 'A Mole of Moles' for more information.

Happy dungeoneering!

[elderidgeart]

Once again I'm thrilled to share another manual from ConfluxCreatures that I got to do some illustrations for :)

Check out this nasty book of demons and fiends to terrorize your players with! PDF and homebrewery link free on their website :)

My sweet boy Desmond as Graz'zt on the cover.

[averyangrytissuebox]

The issues with Vecna: Eye of Ruin are foundational because they got Vecna himself wrong

If you either didn't know about this book or only vaguely looked at it because it is part of the content run that Wotc is pumping out before dnd 6e comes out soon, I can't blame you. A brief scan of *shudders* reddit shows that the it wasn't very well recieved by the die hard fans of r/dndnext and I've seen very little buzz about it in the general dnd zeitgheist. While I have lots to say about why this is probably due to lack of trust in Wotc after the OGL, official adventures being underwhelming and the community being fractured as all fuck, but I want to focus on one very specific thing to show what is wrong with the adventure: Vecna's statblock himself.

Here it is. If you downloaded the Vecna dossier a couple of years back, this will look very familiar and it isn't abundantly obvious where this goes wrong so I want to break it down.

The first is a flavour fail. Vecna in the lore is the archlich supreme, formerly a king and lich who ascended to godhood. Once considered one of the strongest liches to dwell in the Greyhawks setting, he has grown to be a scourge of the whole multiverse. An unmatched sorcerer and epic BBEG worthy foe (just ask Matt Mercer). Iconic to his appearance are four things: His eye and hand which were all that is left after he was betrayed by Kas, his right hand man. Just as synonymous to his appearance is the sword of Kas itself, the only blade capable of permanently destroying the hand and eye. Finally, Vecna created the most profane tome of them all, the book of Vile Darkness.

With all that established, there are some immediate flavour issues with this. Firstly, Vecna is not particularly intelligent as far as high level villains go. At 22, he is dumber than Auril (24), Zariel (26), Acererak (27), the demon lords and Manshoon (23), the guy who is well known for being paranoid enough that he created clones that turned on him. Notable wise guy. He isn't even the most intelligent character in his own book because Kas and Tasha are intelligence 23. Truly a bizarre decision for one of the greatest liches of all time.

Secondly, he isn't actually that good of a spellcaster. He is an innate caster and not a wizard for ease of use I assume but as far as spellcasters concern, he is lacking a lot of fire power that a CR 26 god should have. He doesn't have any 9th level spells, making him an inferior wizard to both Acererak and the humble CR 12 archmage. He doesn't have counterspell, instead having a non spell version (But I will come back to this later) and he doesn't have shield. He is not so sturdy that he shouldn't have it and there is no in lore reason why he doesn't have basic spell casting.

Finally, there is no mention of his eye or hand in the campaign itself. The blade of Kas gets an honorary "However, if the characters wish to find it and use it against the warlord, you might place the artifact somewhere in this adventure for them to find" in the introduction and can be acquired at the very end on an extremely high roll. The book of Vile Darkness is buried in his chest which is very cool though, I will admit.

The second and arguably bigger issue with the statblock is that it is bad to fight and lies to the DM because it is the wrong CR. Actual CR is calculated by averaging defensive CR (which is effective hit points and armour class) and offensive CR (damage dealt per round). So lets fact check those CRs to confirm the maths. [A quick side note before we continue, the closest approximation of Flight of the Damned is a dragon's breath weapon which assumes it hits two targets for offensive CR].

Offensive CR = 2(7+9+9) [From two attacks with afterthought] + 96 [Rotten Fate] + 10 + 10 + 10 [For all three reactions] + 10 [Vile teleport used offensively] = 186 dpr.

A very impressive but decidedly not CR 26. In fact, his offensive CR is only 23. Vecna's attack bonuses are higher than average which can increase CR by 1 but not that much. Also he never wants to cast a spell unless he has to because it is a massive damage loss on Vecna

Calculating Defensive CR is trickier. Effective health is calculated by taking his actual health 272 and multiplying it by 1.25 because he has immunities to poison and non magical bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage. Then we add 30 to that total for each legendary resistence. (272 x 1.25) + 150 = 490 which is CR 22. Averaging both of them gives you 22.5

The issue with this is twofold: It means the DM doesn't actually know how strong Vecna is and if they take it at face value, they might nerf them or pull punches when they shouldn't making the fight feel cheap. The second and much bigger one is that Vecna's defensive tools allow him to dispatch a party of spellcasters with ease because of 5 legendary resistance, impressive saves and dread counterspell which cannot be countered but he gets easily overwhelmed by any martial. This is further compounded by the fact that players win the encounter by reducing him to 50hp or less so two fairly optimised martials (e.g. took the relevant combat feat and have maxed out their main stat) can kill him on the first turn, ignoring magical weapons which this adventure has a lot of. This makes the fight swingy and not fun because the martials get to party like there is no tomorrow but if you are a full caster, you do not get to participate.

Overall, the stat block is a failure of flavour and balance, feeling like it was thrown together after the fact because they needed Vecna here. Ultimately, Vecna: Eye of Ruin is less about Vecna and more about going through the most iconic places in d&d's history to get the rod of seven parts, which is perfectly fine but then why put Vecna on the cover when he isn't even the main villain. It feels like they shoved Vecna into this book because recognisability from stranger things and Vox Machina rather than him being an integral part of the adventure and that is reflected in the stat block.

I have a lot more to say about d&d balance, official adventure design and homebrew fixes including how to make a Vecna that doesn't suck but this post is long enough as is so maybe another time

[hiscursedness]

I made a very stupid wizard statblock

Created for the Guild of Icons campaign, but it never got used. Maybe you can find a use for him?

[that-house]

Dnd 5e. Given only a repitoire of basic weaponry (a collection of the most simple weapons for each weapon type) what do you think could be the lowest possible level for an adventurer to beat a tarrasque. Random cheese strats are allowed but the tarrasque cannot go down in a single move like via casting wish and sending it into the sun.

well it’s a terribly designed statblock with no flight or ranged options. so given 20 minutes or so it loses to any level 1 character with an innate flying speed and the mind sliver cantrip. god i loathe WotC

[toskarin]

unofficial 5e supplements/conversions are often physically exhausting to read because they're trying to do pretty dramatic things within their scope, but they're made by people who have been playing Exclusively dnd for so long that even the things that really should warrant stapling on a custom system wind up getting handled as weird statblocks

anyway I'm thinking about this because I remembered a conversion with 300 distinct mecha, all of which are statblocked to say "immune to poison" instead of just saying that mecha categorically can't be poisoned and trusting players to understand why that's the case

[txttletale]

having thoughts about your point that players/the gm shouldn’t have to design anything for a good ttrpg and wondering if i’m thinking of the gm’s role using inaccurate terms. what would you call the gm’s responses to uncertain mechanical situations in a given game (e.g. a mixed success in pbta - the onus is on the gm to come up with what that means, following some guidance from the rules.)

it seems like something that people find comforting about d&d is that even though the rules are overly complex (and often confusing), many of the common mechanics have clearcut (and boring) outcomes (such as save or suck, hit or miss, etc), meaning the gm doesn’t have to produce/interpret a result themselves. is the other approach (i.e. rules-light) putting more “design” weight on the gm? or is that thinking of it too formally?

otherwise, good design being the gm’s responsibility seems like it just falls under the umbrella of playing in good faith - whatever the situation, it’s bad faith to create untenable/insoluble scenarios that the players can’t meaningfully navigate

yeah, i mean--PBtA games have a list of GM moves, right? when a player has a mixed success, usually that means they succeed and the GM makes a GM move. and obviously those moves have choices and stuff the GM needs to come up with -- something like Monster of the Week's "Put someone in trouble" or "Separate them" definitely require the GM to think of how that works in the fiction -- but that isn't game design, right? the mechanical aspect of that has been handled by the game's rules text. so i think that if there's more weight on the GM i think it's strictly creative weight rather than design weight, unlike the 5e GM who is forced to mechanize anything they might want to make up and is often left without any mechanical guidance

and i mean, i think in general 5e (and dnd more broadly) give the GM absolutely fucking nothing to work with. there are literally no GM-facing mechanical levels other than enemy statblocks (which also, unlike something like Lancer or even fucking 4th Edition, come with no guidance on how to use them or how to assemble combat encounters with them). it's much, much easier to GM a game with GM moves, because then you have an actual set of mechanical levers available to you--and of course, like the aforementioned "Separate them", these levers automatically lend themselves to telling the sort of stories the game advertise for their genre. here's some GM moves from other PBtA systems that, just by seeing them as a mechanical lever, can push the story into the genre and tone directions the game wants to emulate:

Put innocents in danger (Masks, teenage superhero drama)

Reveal an unwelcome truth (Fellowship, high fantasy adventure)

Make honour and shame real (Sagas of the Icelanders, saga-era viking drama)

Bring their gender into it (Night Witches, Soviet airwomen war story)

Make them teach a class (Pigsmoke, magic-school cutthroat academia)

and one of the absolute best things about GM moves (and similar mechanics, like BitD's consequences, or BOB's setting sheet moves) is that because they are clearly delineated and restricted, there's no self-policing. because a dnd 5th edition DM can, rules as written, say at any point "100 ogres appear and beat you to death", they always have to be navigating a series of unspoken social contracts, creating threats but never threats which can win, introducing problems and consequences at a rate that keeps stakes up but is also fundamentally winnable, make everythign feel 'fair'. and dnd players have learned to accept this all as just the table stakes of a GM role, but it doesn't have to be. because all that is game design, and in a better game, that design is taken care of. GM moves say 'look, we've already thought about pacing and fairness, here's the levers we've pre-designed for you to pull, go nuts and tell a story with them'.

so in my opinion PBtA mixed successes represent a lot less onus on the GM to design the game for the designers than anything that happens in 5th edition outside of individual clearly resolvable combat actions--and it's one of the reasons i started having much more fun with TTRPGs once i stopped GMing 5e and realized that other games gave me actual tools and support to work with instead of expecting me to do all that bull shit

[osteoptimist]

About two months after I graduated from college, my friends and I finished a 2 year campaign of D&D 5e that went for 42 sessions.

It was amazing. I'm super proud of all of them, it was a fucking blast, and I still consider it one of the greatest artistic accomplishments of my life.

After the finale, we had an epilogue session where we met at a local fantasy themed tavern and talked about the whole thing. I answered some questions about loose threads and unsolved mysteries, and we discussed what their characters and some of the NPCs might get up to in the aftermath. Good fun.

I also told them that it was my intention to never run D&D again.

They were all understandably a little confused. Hadn't we just had an amazing time playing D&D?

And so I explained that yes, while we had lots of fun playing D&D, almost none of that fun was derived from D&D itself.

We had fun because we were all friends hanging out, telling a story together, getting to share a world and see these characters change the lives of each other and the people around them. None of that is unique to D&D, and D&D is actually worse for facilitating some of the things we had the most fun with than a lot of other games!

Moreover, I know D&D 5e about as well as someone reasonably can. I've written a massive amount of homebrew for the game, a lot of which we were able to seamlessly integrate into the campaign. I've written two classes, hundreds of spells and magic items, dozens of subclasses, and with a handful of exceptions nearly every monster they fought in that campaign had a statblock I modified or wrote from scratch.

And so by the end of that campaign, I could see exactly how it was holding me, and my players, back from what we might be able to do in a system more conducive to the kinds of stories we wanted to tell.

I love big setpiece fights that drive an overarching plot, intense social encounters with complex NPCs, and stories that shape the people in them as much as they are shaped in turn.

Now, it might sound like I just described a bunch of things DND is great for! But DND doesn't help me make any of that happen, at best it has nothing to say on the subject and at worst the system is actively working against me.

I also like to play other games, since those aren't the only kinds of stories I like to tell, and I enjoy learning new games and gaining new perspectives on how to use TTRPGs to tell stories in the first place.

Currently I think my next "main" game is going to be Draw Steel by MCDM. It is designed with the express purpose of facilitating all the things I mentioned loving above, and it isn't being weighed down by any of the legacy ideas that make a D&D game a D&D game but now mostly just get in the way.

Anyways, I say all this as someone who has poured countless hours into 5e, there really is so much to gain by branching out. I heartily recommend trying some new games with your group, and spending some time to really figure out what you want from your time at the table and which games are the best to help you do that. If that's DND, great! But even if that's the game you end up coming back to, you WILL be a better player and GM for having tried.

[shirojikimattari]

Saw your selenite (monk?) Tav and shadowheart comics. Instant follow.

Browsed through your blog and saw you also play DND and DM ??

-bows down to your greatness-

Out of curiosity how long have you been DMing ?? And do you DM homebrew or do you have a preferred world/setting ?

!!!! I have been DMing for 6 going 7 years!!,

1 year in Faerun (as a player)

2 years in potterverse (as a DM) I homebrewed the world for DnD including 5e compatible Harry Potter Spells, Fantastic Beasts statblocks, currencies, potion brewing mechanics, and so much more. We had to leave after JKR went krazy

And finally

3 (going 4) years in our homebrewed world of Wrosdour!!

Here is the map I made and character portraits I painted as gifts for my players putting up with my BS

[probablyuselessstatblocks]

Do you think a silkworm would be similar to the earthworm?

I'd say you sure could. If you were going to run it, I'd give it a climbing speed for plants rather than a burrow speed since they seem to eat leaves and plant their eggs in them.

[therpgconnoisseur]

Theres a fairly popular ttrpg mechanic that every system calls by a different name: talent, edges, merits, perks, abilities, techniques, advantages, and probably like a dozen other ones. Feats (especially in 3rd edition) is dnds take on this trend but the system is not built as heavily around them as most others that use it.

The idea is that you have a basic set of mechanics (usually along the lines of a standard skills and attribute system) and then you have this little packets of special things outside of that that you can get as part of your progression. "normally a character moves x much in a turn, but if you spend a talent point you can move x amount more" and that sort of thing.

I like this systems, theyre simple to understand and in games that are built around them make characters endlessly customizable.

BUT 🍑

When the system unifies this with pre made npc statblocks i.e. makes npcs use the same rules and then gives you things like a creature codex it CAN be daunting and unfriendly for a GM to use past a certain point as more powerful creatures become massive list of keywords to look up and juggle in your head as youre running a combat encounter.

As an extreme example lets take signature bad guy jasper stone from deadlands

this guy, the most baddest of asses, possibly the strongest creature in the game. His statblock should just say "YOU LOSE" and not bother with minutiae honestly, his statblock is every attribute maxed out, most skills that makes sense for him to be vaguely familiar with maxed out or very high and then

47 special abilities

Most of this are a single keyword that youd have to either memorize what they do or look up to check if its relevant to a situation (some are kinda self explanatory like "quick draw" tho) some of this are in the same book and some of them are in another different book. Im very familiar with savage worlds as a system, i know what most of those edges do at a glance and I would find it harrowing (pun intended) to run an encounter using this mf with any degree of competency, just by virtue of forgetting half the time that he could have done something that he should know he can do.

Is this bad? idk its a matter of taste to a degree i suppose, it has its advantages, but it does strike me as something that can be off-putting to a lot of prospective gms. It doesnt become that much of a problem for players because they are the one building the character with dozens of special abilities over a period of time so they become very familiar with their own little guy and can juggle the number of things they can do, but a gm running several npcs each one with say a dozen of this qualities? yeeesh

A lot of this games could benefit from a bit of asymmetry in statblock design, having the npcs use different simpler rules for how they work (to mention the elephant in the ttrpg room, yes i think 5e probably feels more approachable than 3rd because it did exactly that) And gms are always free to build specific characters using the full pc rules, nobody's stopping them

[onehobgoblin]

Whenever you feel useless, remember that this shit literally has no attacks in its statblock other than falling on top of someone's head. If the attack misses (+3 to hit) they can't do anything for the rest of the combat other than move 5ft per round.

(Piercer DnD 5e)

I'm posting this because I remembered the time when I used a bunch of these to make a trap. There were 6 of them. I think 2 hit something, but the damage is not that high, so no player died.

Combat started. I looked into their stat block to see how much they had to hit normal attacks (which I just assumed they had, like any other monster). Nothing. In the end I just said they died and skipped the fight. I thought that not being able to fight back was the intention, so there must be a reason behind it (this was 6 years ago I think).

No. It's just dumb.

[fiercepain]

dnd 5e homebrew kobold pyromancer (statblock)

[rrhodes25]

So my brain was in a DND rabbit hole as per usual and I found a sort of unique gripe I have with the system. It doesn't have to do with mechanics or anything like that, but with how the game categorizes sizes in monsters. So I'm gonna yap about that for a little bit, this is my opinion, not the rule of law, it's just how I've decided to change it at my table and why I chose to do so.

I'll just deal with the greatest offender here: the Tarrasque. In the 5e monster manual it is stated to be 50ft tall and 70ft long. It's lore describes it as a cataclysmic event, a force of nature, it is supposed to be DND's Godzilla. Even the official art makes it look titanic. So why is it smaller than a blue whale??? Or even several titanosaurs??? This is a fantasy world not limited by the parameters of real world biology, so a titan class monster should be TITAN CLASS. It should at least be on the same scale as Godzilla Minus One, if not bigger. An immediate thought from this is how do small humanoid adventurers fight it at that scale? The answer: they probably shouldn't. If I were to put a Tarrasque in a campaign it would BE the campaign. It would require the united effort of the world as it was brought together by the adventurers to pool all of their resources together to stop it. Maybe it's a superweapon that can bring it down fully, or maybe it's something that can bring the beast down to a reasonable level to be fought by tiny, very powerful specks. I dunno, but if you want something to feel cataclysmic, it has to be of an otherworldly scale in my opinion, not something smaller than what is possible in reality.

I use the size classes listed at the top of monster statblocks for their mechanical purposes, such as how big the mini should be for example. But for the sake of worldbuilding and description, I change the details a lot. The 'Huge' size class consists of all manner of things from elephants to giants to Tyrannosaurus Rex to adult dragons, who I imagine are actually about 70ft in length in their adult stage. An ancient dragon can easily be more than double that it my eyes. Something in the 'gargantuan' class is something that would exceed the reasonable scaling of the huge class, such as ancient dragons and purple worms, but do not classify as titans. And the 'titan' size class, (listed as a subclass of gargantuan in the monster manual) is it's own class, and consists of beings too large to be described by any other word than titan.

That's my little rant, not too much of a point just wanted the thoughts out of my brain, so I put em here. If you have thoughts, feel free to share, just be nice. I am simply a little guy.