Designing Monsters with a Story
Claw, claw, bite. That’s the normal attack pattern of many monsters. From dragons to modrons, you have boring monsters doing boring attacks inflicting boring damage.
It doesn’t matter if you call the attack a claw, a bite, or a slam - if all a monster does is the same thing over and over, just inflicting damage, and then you move onto the next creature—you have a boring monster.
But you don’t have to fight this way. Combat can be so much more interesting if you design monsters with a story, and then build the mechanics to help you tell that story. Today, we are going to go over my number 1 rule for designing monsters… they must tell a story in an encounter.
Story Driven Monsters
When your party fights a monster, what story are you telling with the combat? We already think about the theme of a fight, after all you don’t add flumphs into a fight against a tarrasque without a very good reason about how the flumphs are controlling the world eater, but how often are you thinking of the individual monsters and the story they tell as they fight?
If you want the players to fight an old mage, you’ll create the mage as a spellcaster - which tells the story that the mage casts spells, but what else can you do with that?
If you create an old mage that can consume magic, or use metamagics to provide different effects on spells, or causes bursts of confetti to appear in all of their area of effect spells, you are telling a different story in each one. If the spellcaster consumes magic, maybe they are an incantifer, if they utilize metamagics, they are probably a sorcerer, and if they cause bursts of confetti with their spells, they are a retired clown or performer of some sort.
Assistant stat block for 5th edition
This is a very simple idea of a story driven monster, but it goes much deeper than that. A story driven monster’s entire actions are about telling a specific story.
Let’s look at an example. I’ve designed a lowly CR 1/8 assistant (originally created for our Patreon). While the assistant is just a lowly desk clerk, that doesn’t mean they can’t have an interesting story to tell in a combat (no matter their CR).
First off, they have the First Impressions ability which shows that they are eager to get into a fight and want to make a good… first impression. In addition, they fight with a quill. While reflavoring a generic ‘slam’ attack as a quill isn’t super interesting, it still provides a sample of flavor to describe their attack (and is more interesting and true to a character than fighting with a mechanically similar dagger or club).
But those aren’t the main ‘story elements’ of the monster. Instead, it is the unique reaction is has called “Did You Know?”. This imposes disadvantage on ability checks or attack rolls (so also works outside of combat) by the clerk spouting off random information—kind of like some players I’ve had at my table.
Not only is this mechanically relevant for an assistant who does a lot of paperwork to have, you get to share lore about your world as a know-it-all assistant. Maybe they share random facts about your world’s lore like, “Did you know that there was an earl who lost an ear to a squirrel thirty years ago?” or maybe lean into actual useless trivia like, “Did you know that the dot above an i or j is called a tittle?”.
However you want to use it, the players should leave this fight with a very clear recollection of how the assistant fought, what was unique about them, and maybe even chuckle to themselves about the weird little assistant who told them weird facts about chickens that their character ended up missing with their axe and slicing a table in two.
More Than Mechanics
A story driven monster is more than just interesting mechanics. We’ve heard of things like action-oriented monsters, which is often focused on giving them unusual actions that transcend claw, claw, bite—but doesn’t always help to tell the monster’s story.
You want the story of the encounter to come through in the mechanics, not just create interesting mechanics.
Looking at the goblin Fire-Burner stat block, it wields a torch, which it can use to multiattack—or it can use its fire breath a few times in combat. While it is interesting that a goblin can belch out fire (and fights with a torch), the true story comes from its bonus action, Fire-Soaked.
This goblin is addicted to fire, wanting to set the entire world on fire (if it could). When the players fight this goblin, it’s story is about fire, setting creatures on fire, and even setting itself on fire. It’s bonus action is it specifically lighting itself on fire, which while it does give it extra damage, deals damage to it at the end of every round.
Whether or not that hurting itself is a good strategy on the battlefield, it is good for the goblin’s story. In addition, the players should be able to very accurately recall what it was like fighting this fire maniac. It burned, there was a lot of fire, and the players should have a very clear understanding of who they fought.
Let’s look at another stat block, this one is a transmutation wizard. Transmutation is all about change and morphing yourself, but beyond picking out a few transmutation spells, it might be difficult to really make your wizard feel like a wizard who specializes in transmutation.
Our transmutant is a wizard, look it even has spell slots!, but that’s not all this wizard is. They are capable of transforming and morphing their body, fully living the ‘transmutation’ dream.
They have the normal attacks that make them ‘wizard’ but their main ability is mutate themselves, turning into a Hyde-like monster, and this Hyde-monster isn’t just a simple slam attack, but a slam attack that deals damage while you are being grappled by them. Players should be able to tell that this wizard is a transmutationist specialist. The wizard is fully a transmutant, and it isn’t just because they have a few transmutation spells that no one ever remembers the school for. Instead, you provide a story with the wizard’s mechanics that they are a specialist in transmutating themselves.
Tell The Story With Monsters
You spend a lot of time figuring out encounters, planning campaigns, and thinking about your campaign’s story. Your monsters are more than just set pieces in an encounter. We all want players to remember our games fondly, and part of that is going to be about the monsters they’ve fought.
When you give monsters interesting mechanics influenced by their story and design, you give something for players to remember. You give your players a reason to remember your monsters. No one remembers the 10th goblin they fought and killed in a cave filled with other goblins, but players will remember a goblin that sets itself on fire and screams about giving worship to a fire primordial and belches fire.
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