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Pleh
2018-06-07, 05:49 AM
For most of my D&D career, Vermin have been throwaway monsters, being commonly mindless ambush encounters. I just had them attack til the adventurers squished enough of them.

But recently I've discovered an official Youtube channel for "Monster Bug Wars!" It's been changing how I think of these bugs and their RPG statblocks.

For one thing, D&D really undersells Centipedes. They should be faster, Scent through their antennea, give them improved grapple, then each round they add another pair of legs to add to their grapple bonus, all while making free poison bite attacks that can Rend creatures smaller than them.

Spiders should actually have 3 or 4 types that have different stats. Jumping spiders have improved grapple, too, though they just try to be faster than prey and instantly paralyze them with venom.

That's the other thing: most of these venomed animals tend to use their venom to rapidly paralyze their foes. It makes sense that a smaller spider is unlikely to have enough venom in a single bite to paralyze a larger animal as they tend to prey on smaller insects, but this suggests that venom creatures should have much more aggressivr venoms as size and CR increase. Most fights with these creatures are over once the first creature makes a bite. I get that the game designers didn't want poison to dominate the game, but one thing that can counter a spider's blitz poison is outnumbering the creature. Most spiders are not social animals and many are intensely cannibalistic, meaning a party of heroes would be challenging to a jumping spider as it would be hard to land a paralyzing bite without the allies attacking while the fangs are busy attacking.

Web building spiders should be by far the bigger threat, since a party could get simultaneously entangled, giving the spider the upper hand, but at this point, CR should be based on what the spider tends to prey on. "Natural" spiders, even of monstrous size, will probably stll prey on animals, so their webs may be strong enough to entangle humans, but shouldn't necessarily be hard to spot or avoid for creatures of higher intelligence. However, spiders that prey on sentient creatures like adventurers should probably get more magic tools, like webs that interfere (even supernaturally) with attempts to teleport out, increase tangled penalties for attempting to break free and failing, apply energy damage over time, etc. Meanwhile, many web building spiders tend to not simply try to bite entangled creatures, many will race down to begin throwing a cocoon around live prey to keep them from fighting back when the bite is finally delivered. They tend to have long legs that would effectively provide reach so enemy creatures lacking ranged attacks would have to focus on breaking free before they'd have much chance of defending themselves.

There's a lot more, but before I get too deep in monologue, I wanted to check see if anyone here has been down this road before, or if anyone else might like to be.

Keridwyn44
2018-06-07, 08:14 PM
Awesome ideas! As Loremaster for a Middle-earth campaign, I totally appreciate things that could make Mirkwood tougher and scarier for my mid- to higher- level adventurers. Thank you!

Keridwyn