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Why Owlbears are BEST for YOUR Monster Homebrew!
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- Опубликовано: 14 авг 2024
- Making Dungeons and Dragons monsters from scratch is a time consuming thing to do, and seldom adds to any memorable moments at the gaming table. Instead of building your own monster from scratch, just re-skin the stats of an owlbear. It's far faster and easier!
Want the Stat Block for the Brimstone Drake? Here it is: drive.google.c...
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I think "Just use a bear" is an axiom from the OSR community. It works exactly as here: if you want to create a monster but don't want to build a stat block from scratch, use a bear stat block. Just staple whatever custom features are needed onto it, and work from there.
I suppose using an owlbear stat block is entirely acceptable within this scheme. It IS at least one half bear, after all. The sequence of CR scales would probably go:
Black Bear (CR 1/2) -> Brown Bear (CR 1) -> Polar Bear (CR 2) -> Owlbear (CR 3).
What is it about bears that makes them such good vanilla creatures? Even outside RPGs, Magic: the Gathering Grizzly Bears is THE template for generic, versatile creatures in every set.
yeah, although I have found other simple creatures like quaggoths to work well also
I think the old version of this was reskinning a Cave bear. Same thing, swap stats, add in flight or breath weapons or resistance and it's that roc/drake/grey ooze. Funny how we've kept the bear part through the years
Lol 😂 where was this? I assume you mean a 2e/bx cave bear?
I once brought an owlbear into play that had survived quite a few encounters with adventurers. He was pretty pissed off by this kind of people and ambushed them in his forest. He just acted sneakily, watching the heroes and striking when they didn't expect it (hit and run). the group was frustrated at the end and happy to escape. it was a bit like jaws, only in the woods...
Beautiful
Terrifying concept for anyone to come across, if you have a great DM they can really run wild with it. My old DM used to do similar antics during a supposed "easy" session(and I'm sometimes tempted to do something similar one day). He had a variant that he tied into the story which operated under the same modius operandi. We escaped the first time we were eventually forced to fight them at disadvantage at a latter date( this all happened during 1 session.).
The differences being that these particular foes were 3 similar home-brew rouge Owlbear siblings press-ganged into working for the BBEG by guarding against and harassing intruders. Guy (our DM) played mind-games with us for the whole night by having them do rambo-esque stunts and fudging our perception rolls to identify their numbers or species. He really hammed-up the whole haunted forest atmosphere, made that fight one the best in the entire campaign just by virtue of pure genius.
Guy, the psycho, made them identical and then armed them with an assortment of random abilities(none of them had the exact same ones). Said abilities if translated into the current edition of D&D included: Pack-tactics, Vengeful Glares, Avoidance, Displacement, Dark-Aura, Shadow-Warping, Life-drain, certain Battle-Master maneuvers, and resistance to various damage types. Made them extremely challenging and fun for us(our characters were level 10 and 11 at the time). We lost our Edgy Draconic-Sorcerer in the 1st round(which I still chuckle about to this day). Our Paladin got knocked prone in one attack, dragged for 15 feet, then was pinned and drained. The Rouge(Me, being a squishy Assassin) was swatted into a tree hard enough to knock him unconscious for 2 rounds(Guy's homebrew rules for crits involving bludgeoning damage, had to pass a con save to snap out of it. Which I failed twice.). Thus partially crippling our frontline for the 1st quarter of the fight(we had a 7 person group, 6 players...)
God, the memories... Shame it had to end.
@@rysonperry8069 A brilliant and charmingly malicious game master I have to say.
It shows once again: the greatest terror Monsters can spread is the unknown. That queasy feeling when you don't know what you're looking at because the DM doesn't play by the books. 😈I think it's great!
I’m going to have to remember that “create a breath weapon” math.
This was super helpful. Just made a icecloud drake for my dragon based campaign.
Boom!
I've employed something similar to this, but a little more fun for the tactically minded DM. Basically, I've created a handful of "generic" stat blocks of various challenge ratings and fighting styles. Let's say I hadn't anticipated the party's bard trying to magically charm the king in front of his guards and court wizard (how foolish of me) which lead to an unexpected combat in the throne room. Say the party has four level 5 PCs, and we're trying to reinforce just how terrible of an idea this was, so we're going to grab four CR 3 generic infantry as the royal guards, six generic CR 1 generic ranged as common guardsmen on the balconies overlooking the throne room and a CR 7 generic spellcaster for the court wizard... aiming to arrest rather than kill, of course.
I feel like a little added granularity is useful when trying to add spice to combat, to force the players to ask difficult strategic questions where their standard combat strategy might not work...and it also helps to have the encounter as close to "prepared" as you can possibly make it while still being able to do it off the cuff.
Brilliant ideas. Will def use this in my current campaign
I think the key here is as long as DPR stays the same and survivability stay the same, then CR stays the same.
You can add as much flavor and varity/ utility as you'd like.
Very cool approach. I always found the owl bear kind of a silly kind of a monster and never used it. But this is a fascinating kind of discussion.
For new players, I usually have an evil NPC turn into an owlbear (with some consumable magic item) for the last encounter - new players love that and it's a suitably terrifying statblock to frighten them.
Great video. This is a really interesting concept, as well as an old one. It's signatory of the way the game used to be, and fortunately Wizards of the Coast is respectful of at least some of the original and long loved/hated features of the game. Some creatures, spells and abilities are downright 'broken' based on the current 5e cookie-cutter methodology. Take, say, the Owlbear, the Giant Frog, and Fireball. These are just a few of the not terribly many remaining things that punch way higher than their weight class suggests. Its been one of the oldest rules of the book for the DM to 'ruthlessly steal' from a favorite cannon, source of lore, game series, tv show, movie or theme to name a few... and reskin them to suit their purposes. This 'Just use an Owlbear' mentality is a close cousin of this trope.
I have long since abandoned the CR rating for Monsters in 5e, exempting as a general suggestion of what would be appropriate to deal with. 9 times out of 10 the party absolutely wreckshops any and every thing they come across because the biggest inherent flaw of CR is that it does not take into account PC class/spell choice/item consumption/scroll usage/magic item equipment/etc to name a few. With this chronic issues, what is a forever DM to do?
Truth be told I've been doing this long enough through enough editions that I can put out unique features or abilities from days past to breathe new life into some of the viciously lobotomized creatures in and around the 5e monster manual. It is one of the most despicable crimes, in my humble opinion, that Dragons strictly by the book dont really have magic anymore. They're big flying bags of hitpoints. I did like and enjoy your video about how to make dragons more dynamic and dangerous as the apex predator of the game (also that they're in the name of the game), but it missed the mark where dragons should have access to two things they in the strictest sense no longer do:
- Dragons have a horde of treasure, and often times will utilize some magic items in combat (happy coincidence that magical items just so happen to resize according to the person or thing they've been attuned to)
- Dragons are extremely old creatures intrinsically tied to the existence of magic as it was what made them able to go toe to toe with the God-like Giants of old, and so they should have a laundry list of spells or spells reskinned as abilities to get around those pesky counterspells (there is nothing more evocative or intoxicatingly enticing to immersion than having to go into the lair of an extremely dangerous and ancient dragon in order to learn a specific magic or spell from them as they're the only one who remembers how to cast it or knows of its existence
{i.e. Smaug and the Burglar})
In closing, I really did appreciate your video. In actuality you can take any 'broken' for its CR creature, like the Giant Frog or Owlbear to name a few, and reskin them as needed for some wildly provocative monsters, encounters, adventures or downright campaign settings. Your tip about adding relatively minor abilities that dont fudge the CR rating much at all is a great point for newer DMs (btw being able to see through magical darkness or really most all of the warlocks invocations can make for very thematic and interesting monsters, individuals, groups or cults). Its refreshing to see your kind of content, and I'm looking forward to future videos.
Sincerely, a newly-subscribed viewer
Cool and useful. I used the Blog of Holding table on CR for quickly brewing re-skins in prep but could work as an on the fly tool. Love it.
Now my players will face Orcbears in the campaign as clan champions
orcbears and goblinbears and gnollbears, oh my!
Well, you've got some fascinating ideas there. Since I don't do 5E I guess I'll see how well this translates to 1E, 2E, BX, BECMI D&D or the clones.
Use a cave bear in older editions!
@@DungeonMasterpiece Good call. As I'm an old grognard I feel ashamed as I should have known that.
What a handsome blazer!
I agree with a flying/drake reskin as the most likely r-skin I’d personally do. Along with a more powerful owl ear itself I think. Great informative video thanks.
i love homebrew monsters. I always end my dungeons with a completely new homebrew monster. its the only way to make it truly surprising
So, the algorithm pointed me toward this channel this morning, which notably improved my pre-coffee mood. About halfway thru the vid, I looked down at the channel title and thought, "This is great, it just needs the Masterpiece Theater theme music." ... and then I got to the end of the vid. I absolutely should have known that a man sitting in a chair wearing a coat and tie, calmly doing "Tell'em what you're gonna tell'em. Tell'em. Tell'em what ya told'em." about Owlbears, knows how to be on brand with their theme music.
Love the Brimstone Drake, and had not considered the "smoke used like a squid uses ink to escape". Perfect. As far as how I might interpret the stat block, it's likely something reptilian or amphibious. Heck, if I make it fully aquatic, and swap it's land speed for a swim speed. I might riff on your description and make it a bulky, semi-humanoid squid creature with barbed tentacles and which communicates through bioluminescence like a Humboldt Squid.
I've home brewed a LOT of monsters for my own writing, so this was a useful discussion. Thanks.
Area of effect damage counts as twice the amount of single target damage for the purposes of calculating CR. So a 4d10 breath weapon (avg. 22) should actually be considered 8d10 (avg. 44) for the purposes of calculating its offensive CR. My point is your brimstone drake does too much damage I'm afraid, at least by the book.
Not with a 5-6 recharge
@@DungeonMasterpiece Where is that in the monster creation rules? According to the rules I've read in the DMG, you take the tally of damage the creature could do over three rounds and divide by three to get the average damage per round - which is what is used to calculate offensive CR. If the creature has a recharge feature, it counts for only 1 of the 3 rounds, but it is still doubled. I am of course just discussing by-the-book calculations - we can all make monsters do whatever we want as DMs.
@@DungeonMasterpiece per RAW, Jason is correct. Pg 278 of the DMG under damage output. However when you go through the creating a monster your Brimstone Drake does still come out to a CR 3. Interestingly enough if you do the same for a base Owlbear it's a CR 2 according to those rules. Which is admittedly not uncommon for lower CR creatures in the Monster Manual. I'd really like to chat with the designers on the discrepancies there. Because from my experience the monster creation rules in the DMG do lead to fairly balanced creatures assuming you're not going insane and making something with offensive capability in the 10 range and defense in the 1/2 to come up with an overall of CR 5.
Annnnddd subscribed. Solid idea !
Do you ever start a video and realize: "This is some good crap right here, but I am just too tired to follow along. I'll finish it tomorrow morning."
This is my script writing in a nutshell
Id say the veteran is the humanoid version of a good base to scale on.
I would have called this video 'owl bares all'
Omfg 😍
This was interesting! I had no idea how to adjust monsters.
While I am DEFINITELY going to do this, it does raise a question; what monster, if any, would you use this for to make higher level bad guys?
Giant Gorilla!
What did you use to make that custom monster statblock in the style of 5e? I would love to be able to replicate that myself.
versitle?
Good stuff man, I love tinkering with monsters but something like this is SUPER helpful if you need something on the fly.
Gettin tired of saying it almost -- another great vid!
Mini-maxed? 🤨
I was wondering about that too. Maybe it's a regional thing, and it's said that way more commonly in his local gaming community?
"This is somthing that most lower level monsters, like orcs or kobolds, just don't have the luxury of." Only if you are a nice DM... The 5e encounter building rules are totally broken at higher levels when using lower level monsters. A _Deadly_ encounter of kobolds for 4 level 11 PCs is 144 kobolds, which only provide 900xp per player, and you can give them *11* such encounters with only 2 short rests. Split the kobolds into squads of 12 so aoe's can't take out more than 12 at a time, and you can pretty reliably gib one character per turn. For example, against an AC 20, your 144 attacks will have a 20% hit rate, 1/4 of which will be crits, for an average of 184 damage. The real number will be slightly less, as you can expect each of the AoE-capable PCs to have slagged 12, so really probably around 155 damage. That's enough to _gib_ the average barbarian in one round. And remember, when he drops, he becomes incapacitated, which gives advantage on attacks, which counters the disadvantage from being prone. Average of 12 attacks more (which will come from the same volley) and you better hope the cleric has revivify. Average survival time for most parties? 5 rounds, against the _first_ wave.
Good stuff
Is this the brother of Legal Eagle?
I like tacking subclass features onto monster stat blocks. Owlbears become really interesting when you give them warrior sidekick levels and the tricks rangers get from swarmkeeper or warlocks get from fathomless.
Does that make them too tough to fight? I wouldn't know. During character creation I ban variant human and the Tasha's origin that gives a free feat. Then I tell my players they can either start the game as students of the adventuring academy in my setting and get all the benefits of variant human in addition to whatever race they pick. Or they can start as adventurers the students meet during their graduation dungeon crawl and they start the game with either a +1 weapon, a +1 armor set, or an equivalent wondrous magic item.
After 4 levels of adventuring and auditing classes the students earn +1 weapons and the non students get all the variant human stuff. So my power scaling may be out of line with what happens at other tables.
Versitle ❤️
Sweet
Something most dms don’t want to hear, but your players will almost always think encountering actual owlbears is cooler than encountering your homebrew monster.
What does it mean: Recharge 5-6 ?
Breath abilities can't be used every round. At the top of initiative, the dm rolls a d6. If the breath weapon was used already in the combat, it can only be used again once a 5 or 6 is rolled. This cuts the breath weapon's damage output for the purpose of Cr calculation in to one third. This is why the cr it doesn't change.
after they use the breath weapon they can only use it again if you roll a 5 or 6 on a d6
I home brewed my own game system and have never ran any other game.
I don't even understand why monster have stats like that when they really only need :
-Health
-Action Count
-Attack(s)
-Special Abilities
And when put into either a Dramatic Scene, Interactive Environment, and/or a Swarm of varied Enemies you can make any encounter a blast!
Will you be making a video about the thralls, partners, and environments you can make to create a more interesting game?
I'm adding this to my Trello board. Excellent suggestion!
i made a lava beholder via owlbear
or you could use a quaggoth lol
Man stats blocks are just stats block, just change the skin.
I use Orcs stats blocas are used for “Tribesnman”
Kobold stats blocks for smal swarm of undeads
Turtle for heavy armor guards with low attacks.
Just change the discription
Versatile*
What is with the pronunciation in this dude's videos "minimaxed"? KeBOLDS?
Goblins with shotguns
Be careful with that! Goblins with shotguns turn into players with shotguns once they kill them 😂
😂 Chaotic Good
@@DungeonMasterpiece Then again, a shotgun is only a shotgun for as long as you've got ammunition. Then it becomes a glorified cudgel.
Open a portal and drop some futuristic goblins on the party. Once they're dead, the PCs will have whatever ammo the goblins had on them when they died. Indeed, giving PCs limited uses of a strong item is acceptable, as it turns it from game-breaking into a resource they need to ration carefully. Do they use the shells to quickly demolish the next dungeon? Or do they save the precious shells, in case they _really_ need them later?
There's a reason the DMG lists ammo beyond the Renaissance level as "Priceless".
@@DungeonMasterpiece special goblin shotguns. you need to be a goblin to use them safely.
@@Ezberron I'd be down. OSHA means nothing. I'll risk it for a biscuit!!!
There is no reason why you cant use these same methods for other monsters as well if you want higher CRs. Really making homebrew monsters is just knowing how to use and change monster stat blocks with out creating something that is broken or stupid.
Giant gorillas are my other favorite monsters to do that with
CR is dumb. What does a balanced encounter mean? 80% chance of party success? 70%?
My group knows all too well that sometimes I’m gonna throw things at them that they can’t beat. Successfully fleeing something can be just as much fun.
What Baltic country did you say your family were nobles in?
All of them
@@DungeonMasterpiece So your family were German or Swedish colonial overlords rather than locals, right?
@@bobmcbob9856 saxon-teutonic
@@DungeonMasterpiece Yeah, I assume you’re referring to the mainland Saxons who were absorbed into the overarching German identity, hence why I used the simpler term “German”, especially given the weird Nazi eugenics implications the word Teutonic has taken on. After all, the Teutonic in Teutonic Order is just how the English translated Deutsch.
I’m glad the Soviets kicked your ancestors out and reversed the push to the East. Though Russian domination that followed obviously wasn’t ideal for those countries getting rid of foreigners who treated the locals as second class citizens and lesser beings was useful. Hopefully now that they’re free of both the Balts can rule themselves (though some might argue economic domination Eastern EU members by Germany might be a problem, I’m not quite informed enough to know how strong an effect that has had on the Baltic trio so far so I won’t make any conclusions about it)
@@bobmcbob9856 considering my ancestors bent the knee to the Russian Tsar in 1721, and resisted Novgorodian-Rus aggression throughout the 13th century, I have honestly no clue what you are talking about.
Meowls > Owbears.
.... do you play dnd? I'm catching a lot of things that make me think you're reading a script that you don't fully understand
Which things don't you think make sense? I was following along fine, but maybe I missed something.