Crash’s Course Ep 10: Reskinning

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Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.

Today I’d like to talk about an invaluable tool in my arsenal: reskinning. The term comes from video games, but it’s essential to how I run my TTRPG sessions.

When I’m running adventures, I like to tailor encounters to match the theme of the session. While I frequently can find a monster stat block that fits the occasion perfectly, thanks to the number of source books I’ve purchased (no I don’t have a problem), sometimes that’s just not possible.

To fix this, I’ll find a stat block that’s more or less doing what I want it to do, and ignore the appearance and lore descriptions completely.

For example: In a recent session of my home D&D game, the party went to a farm where the resident kobolds ran daily sheep races and everyone was shocked to discover gambling was involved. When combat broke out, it was in the form of a giant sheep that… broke out of its pen. Enraged, it immediately attacked.

Now, “giant, angry sheep” is not a stat block I expect to find, so I didn’t even try to find it. Instead, I thought about the attributes that would be relevant to the situation.

1. I wanted something strong enough that it would be a challenge to the party at their current levels but not utterly crush them. If the damage, health, and armor of this thing are too out-of-bounds, it’s less a fun encounter and either a campaign-ender or a situation where the players ask why they had to roll for initiative.

2. I wanted it to be big. This implies larger damage and health numbers, surely, but sometimes size adds other features, like being able to swallow an adventurer.

3. Sheep aren’t known for being the most intelligent of animals, so I wanted something that also wasn’t very bright. It’s not to hard to take points off of a creature’s mental stats, but smart monsters frequently have supernatural abilities, and I really just wanted this to be a sheep, but big.

Naturally, I settled for a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Now of course, a T-Rex has nothing to do with a common sheep. In regards to fluffiness, it could even be considered an anti-sheep. The being you introduce if you have a sheep surplus, to even things out.

With that said, players don’t normally get to see the stat blocks you’re using. A T-Rex is not known for their intelligence, is a challenge for the party at their current levels, and its size adds some nifty attributes to its bite attack. None of these are things I needed to change. I kept the tail attack but changed the name to “stomp.”

If we were running theater of the mind, I’d have stopped there. As we did have a virtual tabletop (in this case, Foundry VTT). I went one step further and added a T-Rex onto the map before the game. (It’s in the SRD so this was trivial.) With that done, I changed the name to “Ovis Aries Rex” (ovis aries being the scientific name for sheep) and added art of the cutest sheep I could find on OpenClipArt.org.

This is far from the first time I’ve done this. Well, OK, it’s the first time I threw a giant sheep at the party, but I’ve reskinned a lot of monster stat blocks. I’ve used beholder stats for powerful wizards, Earth elementals for piles of enchanted gold, and once used a Stone Defender as a suit of magical power armor.

It doesn’t have to end there, either. Once, when someone wanted to play a goblin but the rules for goblins as a playable race weren’t available, we went with the gnome rules and changed the names.

That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast on Mastodon at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or subscribe to all my TTRPG podcasts at is.aaronbsmith.com/@cogwheel.

Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.

This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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