How to Customize Creatures! (GM Tips w/ Matt Mercer)

Critical Role's Dungeonmaster Matt Mercer is here with another installment of GM Tips!

Customizing the creatures and characters in your campaign can add a nice flavor to the experience. How you customize is dependent on many factors: party size, mobility, recovery ability, story relevency, and more.

[LuxLuciferVT]

His first suggestion is literally a bandit shouting POCKET SAND.

[LadyLunarSatine]

A surprise encounter for low-level PCs: a necromancer animates some skeletons whose rib cages happen to be the anchor point for a wasp's nest. Once the skeletons are animate, they gain what amounts to a non-magical damage "aura" at close ranges that only worsens as the PCs strike the skeletons. Or scale it up by pairing the necromancer with a despoiler/blighter (other name for an anti-druid) who hijacks the stinging vermin after the initial shock of irregular skeletons wears off.

Also, the "albino red dragon" is only funny once. I had a DM go the extra mile and place it in an ice cavern.

[splinte]

I personally really wants to be a GM and this series really helps me to prepare and remove some of the anxiety i have leading up to the first session. Keep up the good work.

[NBvagabond]

did... did matt just recommend pocket sand as an attack?

[Landis]

I love the "cutaways" where Matt just shows how evil a GM can get.

[TheLaughingReaper]

Love all the faces Matt makes when he gives suggestions

[valritz]

Another tip for if you want to have a flavorful enemy that isn't immediately identifiable, or if you need to come up with a unique foe on the fly as the result of... Fun:

It's always an option to just take the stat block of an existing monster and "re-skin" its abilities into the flavor you want them to be. So, for instance, if you want dragons to be these colossal engines of destruction, existing for millennia without challenge, you can take a red dragon wyrmling and rehash it as a fire-breathing velociraptor instead of a true dragon.

For a high-tech war machine from a bygone civilization, lost and buried until the villain found it and reactivated it, you can use a beholder's stats and abilities, with each eye beam being a different weapon in its arsenal. Some of the beams might need to be retooled to make sense in the new context, but that's just a storytelling problem.

[ebonstone]

Love those Literally Sinister shots of your left, when you evil-chuckle!

[shmatts]

When I get that feeling

I want Clarota healing

Clarota healing, oh baby

Makes you feel so fine



Please don't flay my mind

Clarota healing, baby, is good for you

Clarota healing is something that's good for you

[DragonKnightJin]

When creating or customizing things for your game.. Treat it like cooking!
You can always ADD things, but it's very hard to REMOVE things once they're in there.

This goes for enemies, but also for items you want to reward your players with. Err on the side of caution. It's easier to buff something that turns out to be less powerful than you intended, than it is to take away damage or abilities the players have already come to love. And probably abuse.

[Dreadtle]

Absolutely loving this series so far! :D

[Nerdarchy]

0:45 I always like to consider my party make-up to be *faaabulous*! 😂 -Nerdarchist Ryan

[dante]

One of the final bosses of my most recent campaign was a Mutated Remorhaz. A tribe of various Merfolk and Triton were working together to create more aquatic creatures that they could use to defend themselves from a Dragon Turtle that threatened their peaceful life. They created a Remorhaz that could see, breathe and fight underwater, but it was in immense pain since it's skin still wasn't made for the pressure of the depths. It was enraged because of the pain and ran from the Merfolk, who couldn't stop it. I tried to keep it as similar to a normal Remorhaz in battle as possible, but the whole thing went down underwater, it made for a very interesting encounter.

[paddy_black]

I am not good at these types of games and don't really like to play myself, but I find it absolutely fascinating how creative people can be and love watching others play
idk it's just so amazing to me how people really dive into these adventures it's so cool!

[feliciasteele]

ive been GM'ing for little over a year now, and thoroughly enjoying it; just started watching these clips, and its helped me so much with how I GM to people. It's helped me to change my style of GM'ing to match the tone, and has made a lot of it more relaxing and fun-filled, so thank you Matt!

[JadeyCatgirl]

A fun creature I made once was a coal dust mephit. It mostly has the same stats has a regular dust mephit. It had a weakness to fire damage. but it could light itself on fire damaging a player character, and itself. I also let it choke people on its dust making them have to pass a constitution saving throw, or lose a turn.

[soulkutu]

I always add some sort of item that can help massively in boss fights because I trust in the players' bad luck. Unless it's d&d 3.5, there I am confident because I have a 7 page long banlist.

[tmcdon]

Hey Matt, I'm a new viewer of your show and I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the content that you produce for DMs and for the content made by you and the entire cast of players! Thank you!

[deltablaze]

I really appreciate this series, thank you all for your hard work & time!!

[PrimeHylian]

I was just looking into this stuff, and BAM the wise Matt Mercer answers my prayers.
...yuss