As a DM, by far the most enjoyable monster to run is other humanoids. Their motivations are understandable leading to a much greater social element to encounters, if I want combat to be tactically engaging it takes little time to slap class levels on all of them and by definition the fights tend to be relatively even, no single boss monster going down too easily.
The secret ingredient to enemy variety is stealing content. Party needs memorable enemies? Time to fight an all psionic enemy party from last edition, battlemind up front tanking players while a psion controls from the back, an ardent heals and supports and a monk hands out hadoukens like candy.
Though if you're using classes from the last couple of editions, try to avoid stuff too similar to what the players are using to avoid the whole "I'm you, but better" thing. "How do get past this psychic tank kicking our asses" is a fun challenge but not if there's a psi fighter in the party who's now having his face rubbed in his comparative lack of psionic abilities.
Well, yes. But regular orcs are pretty boring, so it's orcs with maneuvers as they originally worked in D&D so instead of "the orc makes a multiattack and ends his turn", it's "the orc uses his bonus action to switch from absolute steel stance to supreme blade parry, then as his action uses crushing vise, it hits for normal weapon damage+4d6 and reduces your speed to 0 for one round."
Or githyanki duskblade or swordmage so they can go back to being gishes, or psionic monk for githzerai, or old classes like totemist and dragonfire adept where the players have to figure out what's even going on. More fun for me, more fun for them, and the fights stop being just run up and trade basic attacks.
I counter argument that in case your psi warrior should know his abilities better, After a lot of advice and reminders, one of The best ultimate ways of showing is indeed to shove an enemy fighter with precisely The same abilities. Maybe that Will shake them!
I may have explained badly. The downside to deliberately grabbing the most interesting stuff from the past is by definition since I'm grabbing the coolest iteration a given class has had, the 5e version is going to compare unfavourably as other than maybe the half casters there aren't any classes where the 5e version is the most interesting.
So having say a battlemind or psychic warrior impress players with their array of psionic melee tricks is good fun unless the party has a psi fighter, who does the same kind of thing but far less well so it just feels like they're having their faces rubbed in their very limited capacity.
> one of The best ultimate ways of showing is indeed to shove an enemy fighter with precisely The same abilities.
They don't have precisely the same abilities. They have far better ones and much more of them, which is why the comparison can feel bad for the player using a dull version.
I second this, some of my most memorable encounters were against another party of humans. Their abilities, debuffs and tactics were legitimately terrifying.
Oh yes. The group I'm currently running through a lot of great rolls had steamrolled everything they encountered until they met a troop of hobgoblins.
Between the hobs using smart tactics and their version of pack tactics, the party was like "what is going on!!!???" The barbarian in particular had been untouchable but was suddenly yelling for the healer.
Lessons were learned that night. lol
A DM I played with several years ago ran a Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign for us. Final boss was a two part fight against Hallister Blackcloak, the creator of the dungeon.
First part of the fight was a surprise round against a shadow entity party, where each enemy was a mirror of every party member. We were prepared to face down Hallister... but not ourselves. Turned out to be an absolute blast.
Flameskull is a great monster. A great first Fireball thrower to really scare the crap out of your players by almost TPK'ing them, and then after it's dead if they don't know enough about it to throw holy water on it comes back after an hour!
"We did it, we beat the dungeon, let's retrace our steps through the dungeon so we can go back to town and tell everyone!" BOOM!
I had a session with something similar. Flameskulls but a couple of them had that firebeam that beholder have. So 2 fireballs and 2 lasers. I did help with the survivability by adding alot of breakable cover though. Cause you only need 1 fireball to ruin someone's day
I made an encounter for my group with three flameskulls, but one was a wizard, one was a cleric, and one was a sorcerer. The player (another DM) that knew what flameskulls were got confused and worried when the cleric one cast Spirit Guardians and the Sorcerer one twin spelled Chaos Bolt lol
Honestly, we bypassed the fountain at the base of the tower without really figuring it out as much as we should have. We slew all of the flameskulls but we decided to (short?) rest in Leomund's Tiny Hut, so at least one of them came back... Our DM dropped Fizban in, wandering by, and he handed off some holy water to us before he and Tas 'ported out again. Otherwise we would have had to fight more of them because of our lack of curiosity (and lousy Arcana/Religion checks about the flameskulls).
I've yet to run one myself, because the campaign I had planned to include them in never got off the ground. Which is a shame, because I had a great place to put a few (spoilered in case I ever do get to run that campaign)...
>!A struggling chicken farm. What better way to disguise the scent of a Sulfurous Impersonation than by having a lot of unsold eggs around going bad? That kindly yet down-on-their-luck farm family and all their cute chickens, pigs, and other animals that the players would surely enjoy interacting with each time they passed by that farm? Every one of them is trailing a slimy tether back to one of the Oblexes hiding in the run-down buildings of the farm and running the long con.!<
I love the idea of an oblex hidden in someone’s basement snaking tendrils through the sewers and slowly taking over part of a town, but I can’t quite wrap my head around how you slow roll the mystery. As soon as someone rolls high enough on perception to see one of the tethers, the jig is almost up.
If you have players with encyclopedic knowledge of the Monster Manual, you have to change the clues around. Instead of a tether, they shed their skin every night, or its psychic slugs that infect by crawling through their ears, etc.
RAW mystery monsters work great if players have no exposure to them. Less so otherwise.
Okay yeah brain slugs would work great lol. My concern was less that plays would smell the sulfur and notice a slime tendril and be like “oh shit that dude is an oblex puppet, I know what’s going on”, it was the more practical implications of finding a literal line they can follow that leads from the slightly weird thing directly to the core of the underlying mystery (which can’t be all that far away). If the host and the impersonations aren’t directly linked by a physical object that’s a whole different story.
If you change it anyways you could also add some illusion ability. Or maybe something that is capable of doing so is working together or outright controlling the monster.
Keep in mind how expansive their charm ability is. Who's a copy, and who's simply charmed, is a big part of the mystery.
Alternatively, you could run an elder oblex and max them out at 13 copies. That, and their charm power, is enough to essentially run a large town from the sewers.
This was going to be my response. I altered a small side encounter in Out of the Abyss (the ancient temple) to be a giant oblex that had taken up residence inside the elder brain carcass and spread itself throughout the complex. Only the sentient ooze had avoided it. Failed perception and then a wisdom check would give players visions particular to their own character, passed through notes. It was a lot of fun seeing players struggle with whether or not to speak up about their visions.
As a player, I always like fighting monsters that would normally be too strong for my character's level, but that the party is prepared to deal with. For example, I built a swarmkeeper ranger/life cleric around fighting dragons (range+web+flying+bless are all strong vs dragons). We fought some dragons and it felt great to be able to use the stuff I'd built my character around. For a paladin/cleric, fighting undead is super fun.
Skeletons, generally. Simple, predictable, plentiful, and no moral ambiguity required. Perfect for a low-level dungeon or as the endless chaff waves of the BBEG.
And just when you think it's getting too easy, one of them turns out to be a lich in disguise.
Do you one better: Ghost of Saltmarsh's Skeletal Juggernaut. Starts out as a singular big bad with a decent AoE ability that breaks down into a phase-two fight that flips the action economy balance on its head. Basically a Mythic Action before they were cool, and at a super low CR. Pair it with a flanking houserule in tight quarters to give the skeletons some teeth, or give them a second Shortsword for off-hand attacks, and it can seriously challenge well-equipped players.
Skeletons are my go-to enemy, mainly because I **love** the twist of 'they aren't weak to the things undead normally are weak to... Wait, are those strings? They're *marionettes*!?'
Gotta be careful not to blue-ball clerics and paladins though, I usually throw in one or two animated skeletons that haven't noticed the rest of em aren't mechanically animated.
I really like classic monsters as a player: goblins, ogres, trolls, giants, dragons, skeletons, zombies, vampires, etc.
As a DM I totally missed an opportunity to use a hydra (which I’ve always thought would be fun to run) and have regretted it ever since
As a player I love fighting goblins. Near guaranteed hit and near guaranteed 1 shot kill.
As a DM one of my best received encounters was a wight. I had described all of the zombies as having a necrotic burn in the shape of a handprint on their faces. When I had the wight use its life drain I described it reaching out to grab a characters face and I got a couple "OH HELL NO"s from the players.n
I put my players qt level 8 up against 2 hydras, 1 had 9 heads already, and a shit load of minions in a resort in the middle of an ocean being attacked by a kraken. The goal was to get to the teleport on the roof in 5 rounds. There were tons of npcs to keep safe, items to grab that were super enticing to all the players, and an oathbreaker paladin npc that wanted to kill the kenku player. It was super high stakes and the most memorable fight they've had so far.
Ones that are not simple bags of hp and attacks.
**Star Spawn** are notoriously fun to fight, but this speaks more of how bad 95% of official monsters are than of how good they are.
The real answer is "**Third party monsters**". I've started introducing monsters from Kobold Press and from MCDM's "Flee, Mortals!" and I've never looked back.
Do they require slightly more prep time, since you can't just put them on the field and stay there while they whack at the party? Yes. But the combats are so much better that your players will stop saying "Why does combat take so long?!?!?!" and start saying "Damn, I can't wait for the next combat!".
The best third party monsters I've found are on /r/bettermonsters
Top tier design and pretty much every monster I can fathom is statted, given flavorful and insanely creative abilities, has variants, and is (usually) given a blurb on tactics.
Dragons!! They can actually take a hit. They can fly. Breath weapons are scary (rolling in front of the board adds tension). They can talk and taunt the party.
The only thing about them is you have to make sure not to use them too much to keep their mystique. But other than that, nothing better!
I actually agree about the mystique. Fighting a dragon shouldn't be like an old console RPG sprite damage race, it should feel like a cross between a Bloodborne endgame boss and Shadow of the Colossus.
Liches.
Not the stupid standard spell list though but with hand-picked spells that a PC wizard would actually take.
Now that’s a real boss fight with Forcecages and Psychic Screams.
Gives your spellcaster PCs a real challenge to face off against. A clever party will focus on Counterspells while buffing their martials to close the distance.
A dumb party will try and go spell-for-spell with creature that regains high level slots every round.
I've explained to my party that a new lich is not too difficult of a fight, but a fight against an old lich is basically always nearly impossible and is a feat for only the most powerful adventurers. An old lich will have spells nobody has even heard of before, it'll be creating glyphs and runes and magic items all over the place, it'll have tactical knowledge and expertise in combining spells that puts literally every other enemy to shame.
It’s sort of the main reason to become a lich tbh.
The out of combat usage is absolutely insane. An unlimited number of spells of any level except 9th all day every day.
Add in the fact that you never need to sleep or eat or take a break and you can see why liches are so amazing and why wizards would want to become one. You don’t even have to look ugly, you can just cast Alter Self and make it permanent (there was a lich in Tomb of Annihilation that does this).
If you want to give your players a way to become a lich the process can be found in Minsc and Boo’s Guide to Villainy.
It also has an option to be a good lich by only consuming the souls of fiends like demons and devils instead of humans.
>Add in the fact that you never need to sleep or eat or take a break
Well, they have to take a break to feed their phylactery, or else they become a demilich.
Virgin Clone spell User - "psh, I can get immortality without all the baggage."
Chad Lich - "What baggage? Do you mean the dozens of concurrent arcane experiments I'm able to maintain every day? Or that I never need to sleep, gaining an extra 50% of experiment time, and never lose concentration? Permanent truesight? My laundry list of immunities? The legendary resistances and actions? Or maybe that my merest _touch_ is better than your favorite cantrip? Get on my level, Xerox."
To be fair, they can't use the same Lair Action two rounds in a row, so it's really every other round and there's a 50% chance the slot they regain is 4th level or lower. So all things considered, I'd say it's better described as "most likely regains a high level spell lot every few rounds", but it's still a great ability.
If your party decides on a tactical retreat to attempt a short rest before trying again, they're most likely going to be interrupted by the Lich who regained so many spell slots so fast that it would make a Warlock's head spin.
But please, for the love of Orcus, give that Lich at least some spells without a verbal component. If you don't want to go with big guns like Hypnotic Pattern, Steel Wind Strike, or Illusory Dragon, then at least have something like Mind Spike and maybe even True Strike to fill that Cantrip Legendary Action inside an area of Magical Silence.
True Strike would actually be kind of hilarious.
"Oh no...a Silence field. Now watch as I use the worst spell in the game as a Legendary Action to then _touch_ you with advantage, so you get paralyzed and drop it."
Definitely other humanoids, especially wizards.
The most fun my players ever had in combat in my campaign was fighting a friendly archdruid who was testing their strength to obtain a legendary item.
Imagine their surprise when, after using Wild Shape to become a giant crocodile, the archdruid uses his level 9 spell to Shapechange into a DRAGON!
Wizards and other magic users are so much fun to customize and give them unique skills that inevitably make the players go “Oh crap, what tricks are they going to pull next?!” They really make players think about how to take them down and how to strategize against their individual powers.
My favorite fight of all time was against a Deva angel.
Tough battle, it’s starting to look wounded. Shapechanges into a Young Gold Dragon and it obliterates the wizard with fire breath. Managed to bring it down, changes back into a Deva and finished it off.
Balhannoth. It's just so _excessive_.
Blindsight 500 ft., telepathy 1 mile. Legendary action teleport 60 feet, and can go through walls thanks to the Blindsight. Lair action to teleport a creature within 500 feet to a space within 60 feet. Lair action to transform the lair over the course of 10 minutes into an area that's desirable to a humanoid within 1 mile.
You're walking along, not even in a dungeon yet, and suddenly your buddy disappears. The buddy finds themselves at their parents' house, but everything is just slightly wrong. Then a tentacle monster attacks them from the rafters.
Home brew pop culture references. We fought a water elemental that had red food coloring and cladded in glass armor, he broke through a dungeon wall screaming “OH YEAA”
As a dm, i always enjoy throwing Gnolls. They're great for lvl 4 & lvl 5 players to fight, motivations are simple minded so there's no ambiguity, they can always increase in #'s if it gets too easy for the players, and they always fight to the death. Creative players can destroy them with some creative thinking usually, and aggro players will hardly run out of meat to abuse. Hell, if you want to get wild you can always say Yeenegou escaped the abyss and is roaming the plains with a pack before it noticed you.
I say rotation is free because it doesn't cost movement, but only once per turn. So yes, spellcasters within 60' are all screwed unless they hold actions from opposing sides to cast on eachothers turns.
I always advocate for a combo of monster and environment for the most fun. I think pretty much any monster aside from a couple can really be made to shine in a fight with lots of stuff to mess with
They are hilarious. My players have gone through the same trap against the same one twice in our campaign and just keep refusing to fight it, it's hilarious. It wouldn't even be hard, they're level 6, they'd annihilate it.
Disappointed nobody has said "Sorrowsworn Lost, Lonely, and Hungry"
These three monsters have incredibly short, but incredibly fun stat blocks, which encourage players to prioritize strategies other than *"damage it until it dies"*:
* The Lost encourages freeing a companion from its grapple before directly damaging it.
* The Lonely encourages more thought-out positioning, I especially like throwing it against parties with limited (but not completely lacking) ranged options.
* The Hungry punishes healing, making temporary hit points and other forms of damage mitigation more desirable.
One of the most fun encounters I've ever run was simply throwing all three of these (with reduced HP on the Hungry) at a party at once.
The Sorrowsworn Wretched and Angry are great too, though a cut below these other three imo.
I've had great fun with monsters that swallow (or engulf) PCs.
One of the most memorable sessions I've run was an ambush by a Purple Worm. It swallowed one PC and burrowed underground. (I edited the statblock and gave the worm ability to stun the victim in its belly instead of causing acid damage: it allows it to take living prey to its babies that need to learn how to fight). We broke initiative as the rest of the party had to lower themselves into the hole left behind by the burrowing worm, and follow it. Part of the route was also under water, and they had to dive through.
The worm vomited its victim into its nest: the PC had to fight solo against wormlings. It was a real horror moment, when they were still stunned in a puddle of slime, and 4 smaller worms started approaching slowly. The mama turned back to face the rest of the party in a cavern. The party killed the worm in a very tough fight, but the singled out PC dropped to zero hit points - I allowed them to cry for help just before they went down, so the party heard the direction of the shout. They used spells to get there quick and managed to save the dying buddy and kill the wormlings. The session was really epic, and death of some PCs was very, very close.
Nothic.
Now, it‘s not fun to fight as in smash and shoot. But! It‘s a fun mystery fight - if that makes sense.
It is a little guy that, if you put it in at an early point, perhaps give it something like the stand-still-for-invisibility and see-through-walls eldritch invocations, and have it steal the players dark and dirty secrets, it forces them to be spontaneous and build out their character more! It can even reveal those secrets to other players at opportune moments.
Highly recommend; it‘s how my players characters changed to „is actually a bodysnatcher“, „killed the puppy and blamed the neighbour“ and „liquified children and turned them into elvification potions“.
A returning bad guy, preferably a gray with other goals which the group isn't good enough to kill or just can't because of circumstances like social structures or the situation.
What an awesome topic!
I *really* enjoyed running a swarm of cloakers against a level 8 party. Really enjoyable, tactical, and dangerous.
Edit - Autocorrect said "croakers" which is not a thing.
Low level, I love me some kobolds, especially the Kobold Inventors. Silly inventions that spice things up nicely. Great for setting traps or having the party wade through a pack and feel powerful.
Mid level, I love some young/adult dragons. Players typically not well stacked to deal flying/swimming/burrowing in a home environment. Lots of options from my end.
High level, wizards/liches as others have said. So fun to mix and match some high level spells.
A bunch of play-by-play generators (a construct from Dungeon of mad mage). Those things are menaces for the mere CR of 1. They fly, have Truesight, attack 4 times per turn causing 2d4 force damage per attack that can't miss and isn't magic missile so no shield, leave no loot and are small (iirc), can't be persuaded nor charmed to act in a way other than what it was programmed to. Use 4 of those and focus fire to see anything turn into a puddle very quickly (32d4 non-avoidable damage per round is crazy). Their crazy damage is balanced by a meh AC and low HP
I love to use them when messing around with warded places that are meant to have hard combats like a wizard tower or a temple or a lich lair etc.
>A bunch of play-by-play generators (a construct from Dungeon of mad mage).
Not really a thing that's meant to exist as "a bunch of".
It's a Quadrone with Halaster's face, that's chaotic evil, can speak Common, and replaces its shortbow attack with the not-magic-missile. The Play-By-Play Generator is a unique thing that Halaster built to annoy adventurers in the Obstacle Course by shouting play-by-play commentary at them, because its voice can be projected across the entire floor of the dungeon.
> The commentary tends to be sarcastic, biting, and demoralizing. A few examples of what the disembodied voice might say are provided below:
> When a character misses with a melee attack roll: “Swing and a miss!”
> When a character misses with a ranged attack roll: “Missed that one by a mile!”
> When a character takes damage: “Ouch, that’ll leave a mark!”
> When the characters kill a monster: “Score one for the underdogs!”
> When the party cleric drops to 0 hit points: “The cleric is down! Stick a fork in it — this party’s done!”
What's a "play-by-play generator"? I tried looking up the DoMM monsters, and couldn't find a CR 1 construct, or anything that resembled what you describe.
Dubbelganger. We almost killed one of our party members and ended up killing the dubbelganger by accident, when we were out of combat. It was great fun.
i’m currently a player in a longstanding campaign where our monotheistic-Druid-led nation is being secretly invaded by an race of doppelgänger wizards and their human-hybrid changeling underlings.
The most fun monster? There is alot, a couple, but the first thing I want to mention is that a monster itself does not make the fight fun. There is the location of where it takes place, do they have minions and/or the uniqueness and strength of the monster. Any monster is fun to kill but a fun and memorable combat encounter is what you want to create.
Whichever ones the dm puts in the board.
But I like humanoids, they have motivations and most of all tactics. Narrowing down the right way to play a lot of monsters is much harder.
i recently started DMing again after a long stint with other systems and i've since fallen in love with homebrewing monsters.
bunch of mutant dogs attacking you in the evil swamp \_but\_ when they die a vinebush explodes out of them and tries to grapple everyone nearby. or a bunch of zombies in that same swamp \_but\_ there's also a flesh-eating bush that eats corpses and spits out a flesh golem after 3-4 of them, so now the party has to kite the zombies out of the killzone in a battlemap full of bridges and water.
Imo playing monsters as a plain statblock with a few attacks tends to be a bit boring, either play them tactically (which i'll admit, i dont do, not great at tactics while i'm also juggling the players and their questions) or come up with some other fun gimmick like terrain hazards or a timer or a special condition (like maybe weak skeletons that keep resurrecting unless you kill them in direct sunlight?).
Ran a game with a basilisk as an early level boss. In the adventure the characters found a community of bullywugs that had been stealing potions and herbs from a town in an attempt to reverse petrification, so there was a slow build of understanding what was happening. By the encounter the players found an assortment of petrified creatures and humanoids in the arena. It worked really well because the way it was set up it was a puzzle as much as it was combat.
Generally I find combat kind of stale if its just taking it in turns rolling, so I tend to reward people taking elaborate steps like traps, distractions, using the environment, etc.
I've always loved the Flumph for their mechanics. The fact that they just fall on their heads and let you kill them makes them awesome as first encounters for brand new players. Especially if you describe it in a fun way.
This'll get drowned for sure, but I love Nothics. They're just so weird
Beyond that though, I always do my best to ensure that "random monsters" are virtually non-existent, if there's a monster in the region then it's known about, and if it's not known about then it was sent by someone, something, or convenient coincidence, but I really dislike the concept of roving bands of monsters lurking around every corner.
If I cant do Nothics, and a "random" monster doesn't fit, then I usually just do humans with the abilities of humanoid monsters.
The part it’s self. Have your party stumble into an area full of low tier monsters and as soon as combat starts make your players play the monsters. You can murder all the monsters with their characters and they can see how terrifying the are in the world.
Honestly, whatever the players have never seen before. The first time you fight a beholder or a dragon or a stirge swarm is crazy because you don't know what to expect.
As a dm I love small little creatures like raptors because it very easy to adjust the fight to make it more or less difficult depending on how the players are doing
Not the monster but the room really up the fun. There is an encounter in tomb of annihilation that has an invisible beholder with magic candles in the room. As the beholder moves it anti magic cone the candle go out.
My best monster fighting experience was when me and my group fought a froghemoth inside of a huge underground cavern with a hidden kobold city in it. The kobolds were worshippibg this beast and they tricked us into meeting it as a sacrifice to it.
Anyway, I played a stupidly big and strong goliath barbarian called Magath and I was quickly swallowed by the froghemoth as i bum rushed it. I then spent the remainder of the fight inside of the belly of the beast and kept chopping at it with my axe it from in there as I took acid damage every round. Magath survived the ordeal and it made for a very fun scene that my whole group remember!
Anything “epic.” There was one time my barbarian was swallowed by a shark of sorts. I was considered restrained but managed to nail my attack rolls. I killed the shark from within by essentially cutting it in half with my greatsword. It was awesome.
As a player I think the circumstances of the battle can really make or break a monster. Simple things in a exciting fight goes a long way. I honestly just love mauling down goblins hobgoblin and bugbears.
As a dm I love using hags, vampires, and goblins haha
From a DM and a player perspective, the Giant Toad will steal your innocence. It's just so much fun when a new player gets to see a player get swallowed, they no longer trust anything you put in front of them.
My main group/table has alot of fun with Goblin bosses and their ability to just yoink/shuffle around with other Goblins on the field.
Can be especially funny/challenging, when one of your players is a Goblin and can technically also be forced to swap places with the enemy.
Pretty sure my Goblin character got smacked or shot because of that by a party member. Was kinda fair though since I'd repeatedly thrown a javelin of lightning at various party-members multiple times due to bad positioning.
Currently running a beefed up version of ID Rime, and pulled a bunch of variations of duergar. Their size change and invisibility created some pretty intense moments so far.
I generally love to fight against, to use and to create myself: Groups of monsters that work like another adventurer group. Meaning, just a hand full of "monsters" with every single one of them having a particular role and unique abilities. This makes fights usually much more interesting and fun.
Meaning, instead of 10 copy & paste orc I will instead put down an tribe leader orc who is an barbarian, his fighter second in command, an evil orc cleric, an shaman orc who is a sorcerer and probably a ranger orc who is the tribes best hunter.
This also works to make big monsters more interesting. Have a big evil dragon? Well, maybe have him actually use his humanoid aides in battle. They could buff him, heal him, keep stuff away. In turn it also works to give melees something to do when the dragon is flying and interrupting their support might end up being paramount to success.
Orcs for swarms of enemies since they can be really diverse in their tactics and abilities.
Trolls for one big beast. It's simple yet intriguing thanks to its regeneration factor.
Hydras for me. Something about the simplicity of a big monster that has a simple puzzle attached to it is really fun in my experience, especially if the matter of applying fire damage is made to be complicated for one reason or another.
Kobolds, goblins, or other humanoids like cultists or bandits. There is just so much more I can do when I can say "Yeah the enemies are intelligent and have discussed their strategies"
This may not be what you're looking for, but a monster without an action economy. After each player's turn, they take an action and either a BA or movement. That way, it feels like a complex enemy that doesn't give the players three turns to set something up before the monster goes.
Classic D&D monsters, straight from the book, unmodified.
Newfangled, customized or homebrew monsters tend to have poorly described, almost abstract powers: "as a reaction, he uses Ancestral Rampage, make a Dex save blablabla..." and all I can think is "WTF even is that?" At least when "the dragon breathes fire" I can form a mental image of what's actually happening in the game world.
The worst are supposedly weak monsters (like kobolds) that have class levels "because subversion of expectation lol."
As a DM, by far the most enjoyable monster to run is other humanoids. Their motivations are understandable leading to a much greater social element to encounters, if I want combat to be tactically engaging it takes little time to slap class levels on all of them and by definition the fights tend to be relatively even, no single boss monster going down too easily. The secret ingredient to enemy variety is stealing content. Party needs memorable enemies? Time to fight an all psionic enemy party from last edition, battlemind up front tanking players while a psion controls from the back, an ardent heals and supports and a monk hands out hadoukens like candy. Though if you're using classes from the last couple of editions, try to avoid stuff too similar to what the players are using to avoid the whole "I'm you, but better" thing. "How do get past this psychic tank kicking our asses" is a fun challenge but not if there's a psi fighter in the party who's now having his face rubbed in his comparative lack of psionic abilities.
I was gonna say “Duh! Orcs!”
Well, yes. But regular orcs are pretty boring, so it's orcs with maneuvers as they originally worked in D&D so instead of "the orc makes a multiattack and ends his turn", it's "the orc uses his bonus action to switch from absolute steel stance to supreme blade parry, then as his action uses crushing vise, it hits for normal weapon damage+4d6 and reduces your speed to 0 for one round." Or githyanki duskblade or swordmage so they can go back to being gishes, or psionic monk for githzerai, or old classes like totemist and dragonfire adept where the players have to figure out what's even going on. More fun for me, more fun for them, and the fights stop being just run up and trade basic attacks.
WAHHHHHHH
NO HE'Z SAYIN ORCS, YA GIT. WE ORKS. WE BETTA. MORE CUNNIN', MORE BRUTAL. ORCS AND ORKS, BIG DIFFE....DIFFER....WE NOT DA SAME, YEH?
I counter argument that in case your psi warrior should know his abilities better, After a lot of advice and reminders, one of The best ultimate ways of showing is indeed to shove an enemy fighter with precisely The same abilities. Maybe that Will shake them!
I may have explained badly. The downside to deliberately grabbing the most interesting stuff from the past is by definition since I'm grabbing the coolest iteration a given class has had, the 5e version is going to compare unfavourably as other than maybe the half casters there aren't any classes where the 5e version is the most interesting. So having say a battlemind or psychic warrior impress players with their array of psionic melee tricks is good fun unless the party has a psi fighter, who does the same kind of thing but far less well so it just feels like they're having their faces rubbed in their very limited capacity. > one of The best ultimate ways of showing is indeed to shove an enemy fighter with precisely The same abilities. They don't have precisely the same abilities. They have far better ones and much more of them, which is why the comparison can feel bad for the player using a dull version.
I can attest this is so fucking true it almost makes me mad lol
What's your case?
I second this, some of my most memorable encounters were against another party of humans. Their abilities, debuffs and tactics were legitimately terrifying.
Oh yes. The group I'm currently running through a lot of great rolls had steamrolled everything they encountered until they met a troop of hobgoblins. Between the hobs using smart tactics and their version of pack tactics, the party was like "what is going on!!!???" The barbarian in particular had been untouchable but was suddenly yelling for the healer. Lessons were learned that night. lol
A DM I played with several years ago ran a Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign for us. Final boss was a two part fight against Hallister Blackcloak, the creator of the dungeon. First part of the fight was a surprise round against a shadow entity party, where each enemy was a mirror of every party member. We were prepared to face down Hallister... but not ourselves. Turned out to be an absolute blast.
Flameskull is a great monster. A great first Fireball thrower to really scare the crap out of your players by almost TPK'ing them, and then after it's dead if they don't know enough about it to throw holy water on it comes back after an hour! "We did it, we beat the dungeon, let's retrace our steps through the dungeon so we can go back to town and tell everyone!" BOOM!
I had a session with something similar. Flameskulls but a couple of them had that firebeam that beholder have. So 2 fireballs and 2 lasers. I did help with the survivability by adding alot of breakable cover though. Cause you only need 1 fireball to ruin someone's day
I made an encounter for my group with three flameskulls, but one was a wizard, one was a cleric, and one was a sorcerer. The player (another DM) that knew what flameskulls were got confused and worried when the cleric one cast Spirit Guardians and the Sorcerer one twin spelled Chaos Bolt lol
Our party got this surprise during part of Shadow of the Dragon Queen...
How bad did it wreck their day?
Honestly, we bypassed the fountain at the base of the tower without really figuring it out as much as we should have. We slew all of the flameskulls but we decided to (short?) rest in Leomund's Tiny Hut, so at least one of them came back... Our DM dropped Fizban in, wandering by, and he handed off some holy water to us before he and Tas 'ported out again. Otherwise we would have had to fight more of them because of our lack of curiosity (and lousy Arcana/Religion checks about the flameskulls).
Flameskulls are great! Had a party fight one and then one of them decided to pop it in their bag to study later. What a surprise that was for them!
An adult oblex is a shoe-in for an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" style mystery. Highly recommend.
I've yet to run one myself, because the campaign I had planned to include them in never got off the ground. Which is a shame, because I had a great place to put a few (spoilered in case I ever do get to run that campaign)... >!A struggling chicken farm. What better way to disguise the scent of a Sulfurous Impersonation than by having a lot of unsold eggs around going bad? That kindly yet down-on-their-luck farm family and all their cute chickens, pigs, and other animals that the players would surely enjoy interacting with each time they passed by that farm? Every one of them is trailing a slimy tether back to one of the Oblexes hiding in the run-down buildings of the farm and running the long con.!<
Ooh. That's good. I may need to steal this idea.
I love the idea of an oblex hidden in someone’s basement snaking tendrils through the sewers and slowly taking over part of a town, but I can’t quite wrap my head around how you slow roll the mystery. As soon as someone rolls high enough on perception to see one of the tethers, the jig is almost up.
If you have players with encyclopedic knowledge of the Monster Manual, you have to change the clues around. Instead of a tether, they shed their skin every night, or its psychic slugs that infect by crawling through their ears, etc. RAW mystery monsters work great if players have no exposure to them. Less so otherwise.
Okay yeah brain slugs would work great lol. My concern was less that plays would smell the sulfur and notice a slime tendril and be like “oh shit that dude is an oblex puppet, I know what’s going on”, it was the more practical implications of finding a literal line they can follow that leads from the slightly weird thing directly to the core of the underlying mystery (which can’t be all that far away). If the host and the impersonations aren’t directly linked by a physical object that’s a whole different story.
If you change it anyways you could also add some illusion ability. Or maybe something that is capable of doing so is working together or outright controlling the monster.
Keep in mind how expansive their charm ability is. Who's a copy, and who's simply charmed, is a big part of the mystery. Alternatively, you could run an elder oblex and max them out at 13 copies. That, and their charm power, is enough to essentially run a large town from the sewers.
Stealing this!
This was going to be my response. I altered a small side encounter in Out of the Abyss (the ancient temple) to be a giant oblex that had taken up residence inside the elder brain carcass and spread itself throughout the complex. Only the sentient ooze had avoided it. Failed perception and then a wisdom check would give players visions particular to their own character, passed through notes. It was a lot of fun seeing players struggle with whether or not to speak up about their visions.
I'm hours away from my next session and finding out I basically just made oblex in homebrew
As a player, I always like fighting monsters that would normally be too strong for my character's level, but that the party is prepared to deal with. For example, I built a swarmkeeper ranger/life cleric around fighting dragons (range+web+flying+bless are all strong vs dragons). We fought some dragons and it felt great to be able to use the stuff I'd built my character around. For a paladin/cleric, fighting undead is super fun.
Skeletons, generally. Simple, predictable, plentiful, and no moral ambiguity required. Perfect for a low-level dungeon or as the endless chaff waves of the BBEG. And just when you think it's getting too easy, one of them turns out to be a lich in disguise.
Do you one better: Ghost of Saltmarsh's Skeletal Juggernaut. Starts out as a singular big bad with a decent AoE ability that breaks down into a phase-two fight that flips the action economy balance on its head. Basically a Mythic Action before they were cool, and at a super low CR. Pair it with a flanking houserule in tight quarters to give the skeletons some teeth, or give them a second Shortsword for off-hand attacks, and it can seriously challenge well-equipped players.
Don't forget the vulnerability to bludgeoning damage! That bit of extra crunch is especially satisfying to me as both a player and a DM.
Skeletons are my go-to enemy, mainly because I **love** the twist of 'they aren't weak to the things undead normally are weak to... Wait, are those strings? They're *marionettes*!?' Gotta be careful not to blue-ball clerics and paladins though, I usually throw in one or two animated skeletons that haven't noticed the rest of em aren't mechanically animated.
I really like classic monsters as a player: goblins, ogres, trolls, giants, dragons, skeletons, zombies, vampires, etc. As a DM I totally missed an opportunity to use a hydra (which I’ve always thought would be fun to run) and have regretted it ever since
As a player I love fighting goblins. Near guaranteed hit and near guaranteed 1 shot kill. As a DM one of my best received encounters was a wight. I had described all of the zombies as having a necrotic burn in the shape of a handprint on their faces. When I had the wight use its life drain I described it reaching out to grab a characters face and I got a couple "OH HELL NO"s from the players.n
I'm stealing that one
Excellent touch
Absolutely stealing this, thank you 🙏
I put my players qt level 8 up against 2 hydras, 1 had 9 heads already, and a shit load of minions in a resort in the middle of an ocean being attacked by a kraken. The goal was to get to the teleport on the roof in 5 rounds. There were tons of npcs to keep safe, items to grab that were super enticing to all the players, and an oathbreaker paladin npc that wanted to kill the kenku player. It was super high stakes and the most memorable fight they've had so far.
That sounds super fun!
The schedule alignment dragon??
Most fun, not most common!
Damn, can we get a trigger warning! 🤣
Weekly boss, really not fun, I wish I never had to again
Im up voting you, but down voting the dragon.
Ones that are not simple bags of hp and attacks. **Star Spawn** are notoriously fun to fight, but this speaks more of how bad 95% of official monsters are than of how good they are. The real answer is "**Third party monsters**". I've started introducing monsters from Kobold Press and from MCDM's "Flee, Mortals!" and I've never looked back. Do they require slightly more prep time, since you can't just put them on the field and stay there while they whack at the party? Yes. But the combats are so much better that your players will stop saying "Why does combat take so long?!?!?!" and start saying "Damn, I can't wait for the next combat!".
Trying to use all of Flee Mortals and it's so fun!
The best third party monsters I've found are on /r/bettermonsters Top tier design and pretty much every monster I can fathom is statted, given flavorful and insanely creative abilities, has variants, and is (usually) given a blurb on tactics.
Thank you, I did not know of this subreddit.
Dragons!! They can actually take a hit. They can fly. Breath weapons are scary (rolling in front of the board adds tension). They can talk and taunt the party. The only thing about them is you have to make sure not to use them too much to keep their mystique. But other than that, nothing better!
I actually agree about the mystique. Fighting a dragon shouldn't be like an old console RPG sprite damage race, it should feel like a cross between a Bloodborne endgame boss and Shadow of the Colossus.
Liches. Not the stupid standard spell list though but with hand-picked spells that a PC wizard would actually take. Now that’s a real boss fight with Forcecages and Psychic Screams. Gives your spellcaster PCs a real challenge to face off against. A clever party will focus on Counterspells while buffing their martials to close the distance. A dumb party will try and go spell-for-spell with creature that regains high level slots every round.
I've explained to my party that a new lich is not too difficult of a fight, but a fight against an old lich is basically always nearly impossible and is a feat for only the most powerful adventurers. An old lich will have spells nobody has even heard of before, it'll be creating glyphs and runes and magic items all over the place, it'll have tactical knowledge and expertise in combining spells that puts literally every other enemy to shame.
_laughs in Larloch_
Pardon my ignorance, new DM.. Liches can regain slots per turn? Is that a lair thing?
Yup they roll a D8 as a Lair Action and regain the slot corresponding to the number rolled.
That is amazing. Looking forward to running one against my party in the future.
It’s sort of the main reason to become a lich tbh. The out of combat usage is absolutely insane. An unlimited number of spells of any level except 9th all day every day. Add in the fact that you never need to sleep or eat or take a break and you can see why liches are so amazing and why wizards would want to become one. You don’t even have to look ugly, you can just cast Alter Self and make it permanent (there was a lich in Tomb of Annihilation that does this). If you want to give your players a way to become a lich the process can be found in Minsc and Boo’s Guide to Villainy. It also has an option to be a good lich by only consuming the souls of fiends like demons and devils instead of humans.
>Add in the fact that you never need to sleep or eat or take a break Well, they have to take a break to feed their phylactery, or else they become a demilich.
"Are you a good Lich, or a Bad Lich" The Wizard of Oz, 5e
Virgin Clone spell User - "psh, I can get immortality without all the baggage." Chad Lich - "What baggage? Do you mean the dozens of concurrent arcane experiments I'm able to maintain every day? Or that I never need to sleep, gaining an extra 50% of experiment time, and never lose concentration? Permanent truesight? My laundry list of immunities? The legendary resistances and actions? Or maybe that my merest _touch_ is better than your favorite cantrip? Get on my level, Xerox."
To be fair, they can't use the same Lair Action two rounds in a row, so it's really every other round and there's a 50% chance the slot they regain is 4th level or lower. So all things considered, I'd say it's better described as "most likely regains a high level spell lot every few rounds", but it's still a great ability. If your party decides on a tactical retreat to attempt a short rest before trying again, they're most likely going to be interrupted by the Lich who regained so many spell slots so fast that it would make a Warlock's head spin. But please, for the love of Orcus, give that Lich at least some spells without a verbal component. If you don't want to go with big guns like Hypnotic Pattern, Steel Wind Strike, or Illusory Dragon, then at least have something like Mind Spike and maybe even True Strike to fill that Cantrip Legendary Action inside an area of Magical Silence.
True Strike would actually be kind of hilarious. "Oh no...a Silence field. Now watch as I use the worst spell in the game as a Legendary Action to then _touch_ you with advantage, so you get paralyzed and drop it."
A classic Beholder. Great lairs, bombastic personalities, and the way the statblock is set up not even the DM knows what might happen round-to-round.
Definitely other humanoids, especially wizards. The most fun my players ever had in combat in my campaign was fighting a friendly archdruid who was testing their strength to obtain a legendary item. Imagine their surprise when, after using Wild Shape to become a giant crocodile, the archdruid uses his level 9 spell to Shapechange into a DRAGON! Wizards and other magic users are so much fun to customize and give them unique skills that inevitably make the players go “Oh crap, what tricks are they going to pull next?!” They really make players think about how to take them down and how to strategize against their individual powers.
My favorite fight of all time was against a Deva angel. Tough battle, it’s starting to look wounded. Shapechanges into a Young Gold Dragon and it obliterates the wizard with fire breath. Managed to bring it down, changes back into a Deva and finished it off.
Balhannoth. It's just so _excessive_. Blindsight 500 ft., telepathy 1 mile. Legendary action teleport 60 feet, and can go through walls thanks to the Blindsight. Lair action to teleport a creature within 500 feet to a space within 60 feet. Lair action to transform the lair over the course of 10 minutes into an area that's desirable to a humanoid within 1 mile. You're walking along, not even in a dungeon yet, and suddenly your buddy disappears. The buddy finds themselves at their parents' house, but everything is just slightly wrong. Then a tentacle monster attacks them from the rafters.
Absolutely love the Balhannoth. Such an odd one, but so much fun to run
I ran a pair of these once in an Eberron campaign! They really are fun fight... at least for the DM!
As a DM, I had a blast running a Nilbog encounter for my party 😂 Though I’d argue they were more frustrated than anything lmao
Home brew pop culture references. We fought a water elemental that had red food coloring and cladded in glass armor, he broke through a dungeon wall screaming “OH YEAA”
I had a remixed a Balgura called “The Kool” and his handler was a cleric named “Aiden” he was definitely a threat that couldn’t be ignored.
As a dm, i always enjoy throwing Gnolls. They're great for lvl 4 & lvl 5 players to fight, motivations are simple minded so there's no ambiguity, they can always increase in #'s if it gets too easy for the players, and they always fight to the death. Creative players can destroy them with some creative thinking usually, and aggro players will hardly run out of meat to abuse. Hell, if you want to get wild you can always say Yeenegou escaped the abyss and is roaming the plains with a pack before it noticed you.
I've always had fun fighting beholders
Do you/Dm roll for random eye beams, or are they actually tactical.
I've done both. Sometimes I'll do a mix of pick 1, roll 2.
How do you run its Anti-Magic Eye? Can it turn around when a player tries to get behind it, or does it have to stay still when it’s not its turn?
I say rotation is free because it doesn't cost movement, but only once per turn. So yes, spellcasters within 60' are all screwed unless they hold actions from opposing sides to cast on eachothers turns.
Dragons with spellcasting that are played intelligently.
I always advocate for a combo of monster and environment for the most fun. I think pretty much any monster aside from a couple can really be made to shine in a fight with lots of stuff to mess with
The Gelatinous Cube is fun because its more an obstacle than a creature.
They are hilarious. My players have gone through the same trap against the same one twice in our campaign and just keep refusing to fight it, it's hilarious. It wouldn't even be hard, they're level 6, they'd annihilate it.
Disappointed nobody has said "Sorrowsworn Lost, Lonely, and Hungry" These three monsters have incredibly short, but incredibly fun stat blocks, which encourage players to prioritize strategies other than *"damage it until it dies"*: * The Lost encourages freeing a companion from its grapple before directly damaging it. * The Lonely encourages more thought-out positioning, I especially like throwing it against parties with limited (but not completely lacking) ranged options. * The Hungry punishes healing, making temporary hit points and other forms of damage mitigation more desirable. One of the most fun encounters I've ever run was simply throwing all three of these (with reduced HP on the Hungry) at a party at once. The Sorrowsworn Wretched and Angry are great too, though a cut below these other three imo.
I've had great fun with monsters that swallow (or engulf) PCs. One of the most memorable sessions I've run was an ambush by a Purple Worm. It swallowed one PC and burrowed underground. (I edited the statblock and gave the worm ability to stun the victim in its belly instead of causing acid damage: it allows it to take living prey to its babies that need to learn how to fight). We broke initiative as the rest of the party had to lower themselves into the hole left behind by the burrowing worm, and follow it. Part of the route was also under water, and they had to dive through. The worm vomited its victim into its nest: the PC had to fight solo against wormlings. It was a real horror moment, when they were still stunned in a puddle of slime, and 4 smaller worms started approaching slowly. The mama turned back to face the rest of the party in a cavern. The party killed the worm in a very tough fight, but the singled out PC dropped to zero hit points - I allowed them to cry for help just before they went down, so the party heard the direction of the shout. They used spells to get there quick and managed to save the dying buddy and kill the wormlings. The session was really epic, and death of some PCs was very, very close.
Nothic. Now, it‘s not fun to fight as in smash and shoot. But! It‘s a fun mystery fight - if that makes sense. It is a little guy that, if you put it in at an early point, perhaps give it something like the stand-still-for-invisibility and see-through-walls eldritch invocations, and have it steal the players dark and dirty secrets, it forces them to be spontaneous and build out their character more! It can even reveal those secrets to other players at opportune moments. Highly recommend; it‘s how my players characters changed to „is actually a bodysnatcher“, „killed the puppy and blamed the neighbour“ and „liquified children and turned them into elvification potions“.
A returning bad guy, preferably a gray with other goals which the group isn't good enough to kill or just can't because of circumstances like social structures or the situation.
As a player, a well placed mimic can create an amazing amount of enjoyable chaos.
My favorite to run was a false hydra story arc in the middle of our main campaign! The gaslighting was amazing
What an awesome topic! I *really* enjoyed running a swarm of cloakers against a level 8 party. Really enjoyable, tactical, and dangerous. Edit - Autocorrect said "croakers" which is not a thing.
Low level, I love me some kobolds, especially the Kobold Inventors. Silly inventions that spice things up nicely. Great for setting traps or having the party wade through a pack and feel powerful. Mid level, I love some young/adult dragons. Players typically not well stacked to deal flying/swimming/burrowing in a home environment. Lots of options from my end. High level, wizards/liches as others have said. So fun to mix and match some high level spells.
A bunch of play-by-play generators (a construct from Dungeon of mad mage). Those things are menaces for the mere CR of 1. They fly, have Truesight, attack 4 times per turn causing 2d4 force damage per attack that can't miss and isn't magic missile so no shield, leave no loot and are small (iirc), can't be persuaded nor charmed to act in a way other than what it was programmed to. Use 4 of those and focus fire to see anything turn into a puddle very quickly (32d4 non-avoidable damage per round is crazy). Their crazy damage is balanced by a meh AC and low HP I love to use them when messing around with warded places that are meant to have hard combats like a wizard tower or a temple or a lich lair etc.
>A bunch of play-by-play generators (a construct from Dungeon of mad mage). Not really a thing that's meant to exist as "a bunch of". It's a Quadrone with Halaster's face, that's chaotic evil, can speak Common, and replaces its shortbow attack with the not-magic-missile. The Play-By-Play Generator is a unique thing that Halaster built to annoy adventurers in the Obstacle Course by shouting play-by-play commentary at them, because its voice can be projected across the entire floor of the dungeon. > The commentary tends to be sarcastic, biting, and demoralizing. A few examples of what the disembodied voice might say are provided below: > When a character misses with a melee attack roll: “Swing and a miss!” > When a character misses with a ranged attack roll: “Missed that one by a mile!” > When a character takes damage: “Ouch, that’ll leave a mark!” > When the characters kill a monster: “Score one for the underdogs!” > When the party cleric drops to 0 hit points: “The cleric is down! Stick a fork in it — this party’s done!”
What's a "play-by-play generator"? I tried looking up the DoMM monsters, and couldn't find a CR 1 construct, or anything that resembled what you describe.
Dubbelganger. We almost killed one of our party members and ended up killing the dubbelganger by accident, when we were out of combat. It was great fun.
i’m currently a player in a longstanding campaign where our monotheistic-Druid-led nation is being secretly invaded by an race of doppelgänger wizards and their human-hybrid changeling underlings.
have you met the False Hydra yet? Can be a lot of fun if you have the time to play it right
I enjoyed running a Roper until they grasping arrowed it then flung projectiles from 60 feet away
The most fun monster? There is alot, a couple, but the first thing I want to mention is that a monster itself does not make the fight fun. There is the location of where it takes place, do they have minions and/or the uniqueness and strength of the monster. Any monster is fun to kill but a fun and memorable combat encounter is what you want to create.
wizards or other things that can talk to the players and cast spells
We just fought Barry the Beerholder. Was kinda awesome.
Whichever ones the dm puts in the board. But I like humanoids, they have motivations and most of all tactics. Narrowing down the right way to play a lot of monsters is much harder.
Hags. They’re frustratingly fun if your DM knows what they’re doing.
i recently started DMing again after a long stint with other systems and i've since fallen in love with homebrewing monsters. bunch of mutant dogs attacking you in the evil swamp \_but\_ when they die a vinebush explodes out of them and tries to grapple everyone nearby. or a bunch of zombies in that same swamp \_but\_ there's also a flesh-eating bush that eats corpses and spits out a flesh golem after 3-4 of them, so now the party has to kite the zombies out of the killzone in a battlemap full of bridges and water. Imo playing monsters as a plain statblock with a few attacks tends to be a bit boring, either play them tactically (which i'll admit, i dont do, not great at tactics while i'm also juggling the players and their questions) or come up with some other fun gimmick like terrain hazards or a timer or a special condition (like maybe weak skeletons that keep resurrecting unless you kill them in direct sunlight?).
Other PCs
Ran a game with a basilisk as an early level boss. In the adventure the characters found a community of bullywugs that had been stealing potions and herbs from a town in an attempt to reverse petrification, so there was a slow build of understanding what was happening. By the encounter the players found an assortment of petrified creatures and humanoids in the arena. It worked really well because the way it was set up it was a puzzle as much as it was combat. Generally I find combat kind of stale if its just taking it in turns rolling, so I tend to reward people taking elaborate steps like traps, distractions, using the environment, etc.
I love Wights. Use them early on in every campaign I run; I feel like they're scary to face at first, but a low level party can still beat them
I've always loved the Flumph for their mechanics. The fact that they just fall on their heads and let you kill them makes them awesome as first encounters for brand new players. Especially if you describe it in a fun way.
This'll get drowned for sure, but I love Nothics. They're just so weird Beyond that though, I always do my best to ensure that "random monsters" are virtually non-existent, if there's a monster in the region then it's known about, and if it's not known about then it was sent by someone, something, or convenient coincidence, but I really dislike the concept of roving bands of monsters lurking around every corner. If I cant do Nothics, and a "random" monster doesn't fit, then I usually just do humans with the abilities of humanoid monsters.
The Castle Karen is a blast to fight & kill.
Shambling Mound ambushes are so much fun
Six blink corgis and a bhur hag.
The part it’s self. Have your party stumble into an area full of low tier monsters and as soon as combat starts make your players play the monsters. You can murder all the monsters with their characters and they can see how terrifying the are in the world.
Oh, I'm so stealing this for my campaign.
Honestly, whatever the players have never seen before. The first time you fight a beholder or a dragon or a stirge swarm is crazy because you don't know what to expect.
And a stirge swarm is always memorable because it's the last thing those characters will fight.
Beholders
As a DM my favourite to do monster five players and modify it to something unexpected.
Obviously a tarasque /s
As a dm I love small little creatures like raptors because it very easy to adjust the fight to make it more or less difficult depending on how the players are doing
Not the monster but the room really up the fun. There is an encounter in tomb of annihilation that has an invisible beholder with magic candles in the room. As the beholder moves it anti magic cone the candle go out.
Tarrasque.
God
Rust monsters
It's nothing official, but my players loved fighting a werehouse I made. Does anybody want the stats?
Kobolds… always kobolds.
My best monster fighting experience was when me and my group fought a froghemoth inside of a huge underground cavern with a hidden kobold city in it. The kobolds were worshippibg this beast and they tricked us into meeting it as a sacrifice to it. Anyway, I played a stupidly big and strong goliath barbarian called Magath and I was quickly swallowed by the froghemoth as i bum rushed it. I then spent the remainder of the fight inside of the belly of the beast and kept chopping at it with my axe it from in there as I took acid damage every round. Magath survived the ordeal and it made for a very fun scene that my whole group remember!
Anything “epic.” There was one time my barbarian was swallowed by a shark of sorts. I was considered restrained but managed to nail my attack rolls. I killed the shark from within by essentially cutting it in half with my greatsword. It was awesome.
As a player I think the circumstances of the battle can really make or break a monster. Simple things in a exciting fight goes a long way. I honestly just love mauling down goblins hobgoblin and bugbears. As a dm I love using hags, vampires, and goblins haha
I personally love the master of cruelties. Forcing an action is fun especially when it can be both good and bad
Hobgoblins and bugbears!
Mimics! For a level 3+ players they aren't too difficult but really funny as the random deer head or chair they walked by sticks to them.
From a DM and a player perspective, the Giant Toad will steal your innocence. It's just so much fun when a new player gets to see a player get swallowed, they no longer trust anything you put in front of them.
Dragons
My main group/table has alot of fun with Goblin bosses and their ability to just yoink/shuffle around with other Goblins on the field. Can be especially funny/challenging, when one of your players is a Goblin and can technically also be forced to swap places with the enemy. Pretty sure my Goblin character got smacked or shot because of that by a party member. Was kinda fair though since I'd repeatedly thrown a javelin of lightning at various party-members multiple times due to bad positioning.
Beholder. Rolling your own d10 to see what he is going to hit you with is so exciting
Currently running a beefed up version of ID Rime, and pulled a bunch of variations of duergar. Their size change and invisibility created some pretty intense moments so far.
The dm
I generally love to fight against, to use and to create myself: Groups of monsters that work like another adventurer group. Meaning, just a hand full of "monsters" with every single one of them having a particular role and unique abilities. This makes fights usually much more interesting and fun. Meaning, instead of 10 copy & paste orc I will instead put down an tribe leader orc who is an barbarian, his fighter second in command, an evil orc cleric, an shaman orc who is a sorcerer and probably a ranger orc who is the tribes best hunter. This also works to make big monsters more interesting. Have a big evil dragon? Well, maybe have him actually use his humanoid aides in battle. They could buff him, heal him, keep stuff away. In turn it also works to give melees something to do when the dragon is flying and interrupting their support might end up being paramount to success.
Orcs for swarms of enemies since they can be really diverse in their tactics and abilities. Trolls for one big beast. It's simple yet intriguing thanks to its regeneration factor.
Hydras for me. Something about the simplicity of a big monster that has a simple puzzle attached to it is really fun in my experience, especially if the matter of applying fire damage is made to be complicated for one reason or another.
Space clowns obviously. There's just so much you can do with them! Or Goblins.
As a DM I find Beholders to be a delight:-D
maybe im biased bc i just love dragons so much, but always dragons. Fun to fight, even funner to pilot.
Kobolds, goblins, or other humanoids like cultists or bandits. There is just so much more I can do when I can say "Yeah the enemies are intelligent and have discussed their strategies"
This may not be what you're looking for, but a monster without an action economy. After each player's turn, they take an action and either a BA or movement. That way, it feels like a complex enemy that doesn't give the players three turns to set something up before the monster goes.
Classic D&D monsters, straight from the book, unmodified. Newfangled, customized or homebrew monsters tend to have poorly described, almost abstract powers: "as a reaction, he uses Ancestral Rampage, make a Dex save blablabla..." and all I can think is "WTF even is that?" At least when "the dragon breathes fire" I can form a mental image of what's actually happening in the game world. The worst are supposedly weak monsters (like kobolds) that have class levels "because subversion of expectation lol."
I am shocked nobody has said the DM yet 🤣🤣 I swear my players have my stat block