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| I always liked this concept of slime monsters from World o' Warcraft. Why not transfer this to D&D? |
Every edition has these gloopy monsters and I think ,many of them, they are as iconic as goblins and orcs. I mean green slime, yellow mold and gelatinous cubes have been there forever. Yet I really don’t bother with using them, well unless you count one occurrence with a grey ooze, a cleric of Bane and a 1st edition module………….
So why no love from me?
Well they aren’t really cool or fun. They just gloop and
glop around the game. They are pretty boring as a monster. I mean they can be
easily avoided. Well unless you force the party to have to deal with it in a
blind hallway/locked room type scenario, but that is kind of a dick move to use
against your party just to shoehorn in a slime creature.
They are usually lone gunman encounters too. I mean it isn’t
like you can have the party face a horde of slimes, molds or jellies. That
would be stupid. So, they are easy to ignore and avoid. This is common when I
have thrown them out for the party to face. Sure, I almost caught our
dragonborn rouge with a gelatinous cube full of shiny objects, but the rest of
the party pulled him back to safety and then avoided it. Yeah, avoidance of
these evil puddles is too easy, so they make for a drek random encounter.
These amorphous blobs of goop confuse my players too. They
never know if they eat metal, eat flesh or both. They have no idea about their
strengths and weaknesses either. They are kind of an enigma. I think that is a
problem for most player groups. They just generally scare and confuse the party
and this just leads to them once again being avoided.
It is hard to base a game around a big pile of pudding. I
mean you can work a game or campaign with a ton of monsters as the threat. How
do you make an entire game about a threat from yellow mold or ochre jelly? Even
if you did how do you make it fun? I have never come up with a scenario that
wouldn’t end with the party just leaving to do something else instead.
There is no charisma there. We are more of a roll playing
group with a smattering of role playing. Still there is always that bit of
banter and bad impressions for a lot of enemies. What witty banter can a pile
of slime give? How does a ooze give a diatribe before attacking the party? I
mean outside of some gurgly fart noise there is nothing for a slime or ooze to
say?
They have a very niche feel like low level dungeon crawl
encounter. After about three or four levels they seem pretty useless as a
potential/viable threat. Well without making them gigundus for the sake of
making them gigundus so they can be a threat. Well, outside of trapping the
party with them ( same dick move as above ) or
a threat that will be avoided (I can’t say this enough can I) anyway.
I would love to use these gloops and glops more often, but
they are just over shadowed so much by other monsters. Then there is the fact
they can be easily avoided. Hell, the party can safely flee by slowly waking away.
I mean what kind of hazard is that? I guess these are iconic monsters (
personal opinion ) that I can just never use effectively with forcing an
encounter. That means the mobile goo puddles and spore producing molds are just
left wanting.
I love The Blob and the remake movie, but it doesn’t
translate to my D&D games.
Next is a long favorite of mine. An amalgam of avian and
ursine. The owlbear!
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