Making Variant Monsters

[the_brazenburn]

Hello all,

Occasionally it seems like players are too jaded. They get bored with the ordinary monsters, like goblins, orcs, dragons, et. al., and desire something more. Do you have any ideas to spice up ordinary monsters?

Examples are below:

Snake Goblin: A goblin is given a bite attack and some poison immunity.

Ogre Juggernaut: An orc gets full plate mail and the ability to dual-wield mauls.

Tunnel-Hunter Dragon: Young dragon loses Int points, gets 60 feet blindsight, and loses its breath weapon.

[DivisibleByZero]

Just re-skin stuff.
There are plenty of monsters in the books. Just use monster A and call it monster B.

[Asmotherion]

Sure, great way to make something more unique.

When I DM I usually either make a Humanoid with Class Levels as a Boss fight, or even a Monster with limited class levels (no more than 3) if I want to spice things up; if I do, I lower his minions considerably, or even remove them entirelly for balance.

An other great way is the Half Dragon template; ofcource, that's going to be a surprice only once every many sessions or you'll make it a running gag.

Tinkering the actions avalable to a creature is nice, but when you do so be aware of what that does to their CR.

[Demonslayer666]

Making encounters memorable and engaging can be a challenge.

I like to vary up the terrain (cover, concealment, hazards, etc), and I like to make the leader stand out by giving them a magic item or a mount (or something).

[Ninja_Prawn]

Some of my favourite homebrew monsters have been only slight tweaks of things from the MM. For instance, my selection of kobolds (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1u0jm3ysj495hky/Kobolds.pdf?dl=0), this hog of war (https://78.media.tumblr.com/6b4ce7cce027ceb81c3706bbac44ffde/tumblr_oy6amkGezV1w946k6o1_500.png), or the vampire shark on my tumblr (on mobile and I don't know how to link it).