Stream Results—January 30th, 2019: Alucard, Pikmin, and Clefable (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

It's time again for another batch of stat blocks from my weekly Twitch monster making stream!

As always, stats and descriptions are down below, and the GM Binder doc is right here.

But first, this week—as with every week—I really want to thank everyone who watched the stream with us. Y'all are the best.

And here are some monsters for you to see:

Alucard

THIS ONE WAS A DOOZIE! Suggested by Discord veteran @kleinroux, based on the character from the Castlevania franchise.

There was a lot to accomplish with this one. In the Castlevania mythos, Alucard is the half-vampire son of the immortal vampire lord Dracula, and has inherited a great deal of his power, without any of the inherent vampire weaknesses.

This means that there was a lot of stuff to fit into a single stat block.

Without spending an eternity going over each individual item, I'll say that I started with the statblock for the vampire lord Strahd as a basis for comparison, then just kept adding onto it from there. Unfortunately, while I've played a few of the Castlevania games in the past, I wasn't not too familiar with Alucard himself other than the vague concept, so I had chat feeding me a lot of details from the games and the Netflix series.

A lot of the challenge came from the spells, and specifically, determining which of his established abilities should be approximated by spell choices, or statted out as special actions or traits. You can see that I ended up doing a mixture of both, and really, there's no problem with going either route—part of being a GM in general is trying to do the most you can with as little work as possible, so for your own games, do whatever works and makes your life easier! :D

Pikmin

This was another big one! Suggested by viewer and Discord regular @PuppyTheUpdog, it's the Pikmin from the game franchise of the same name.

While this one also appears to be very large, it's a little deceiving in that, as a first step here, I created a base, "blank" pikmin to start with, then simply copy-pasted it a bunch of times before giving each one its characteristic abilities.

The base pikmin of course has Pack Tactics, Plant of Burden (a blatantly-reflavored Beast of Burden), and the custom-made Whistle Commands, in order to replicate the way they are commanded in the games. I started out wanting to have the pikmin be able to be—and it pains me to use this word—"used" in the same way they are in the games: that with the right whistle, you could call them to you and command them at-will.

You'll notice that I specifically left the actual specifics of the whistle undefined though. This then doesn't preclude a GM from using them against the party, since they could easily decide that an NPC possesses the only means for reproducing the correct whistle, ensuring that they remain the swarm threat that they are intended to be. 

Clefable

And yet another that—yeah, really all of the stat blocks this week were quite large. This one was suggested by viewer and Discord regular @MrCelophane, based on the fairy-type pokemon from the video games and TV show.

I've done a few Pokemon stat blocks before, but I went and tried some new things with this one. First off, I tried a little bit harder to incorporate some of the less-convenient type-effectiveness pairings.

Now, one of the biggest design problems with replicating pokemon in D&D is that the damage types don't all translate over super-cleanly. Obviously, damage types like fire, poison, psychic, and some others are easy, since they exist by name in both systems, and their concepts are also pretty clearly aligned.

However, what happens when—as was the case here—you try to replicate dragon damage? Fairy damage? What's considered dark damage? It's not necrotic, which is likely the first instinct, since in the Pokemon games, most of the dark-dealing moves are simply "vicious" or "sneaky" attacks, like Bite, Foul Play, Thief, or Throat Chop. Honestly, a lot of the dark-type moves sound more like rogue class features than any specific damage type.

For that matter, fighting, normal, rock, and a few others are also problematic, though for the opposite reason: almost every D&D monster has sources of bludgeoning, piercing or slashing damage, which is what you'd expect all of those types to deal. 

Previously, I've just ended up applying type effectiveness where I could, and ignored the rest. What I ended up doing here however, is granted special traits for resistances and immunities that pointed out specific sources in D&D that I think better align with the Pokemon damage types in question. Specifically, I equated unarmed strikes and the monk's Martial Arts feature to fighting type, and the rogue's Sneak Attack to the dark type. I also just specified any standard damage from insects or spiders to be of the bug type, and granted immunity from spells and breath weapons from dragons and dragonborn as being of the dragon type.

WHEW. With that out of the way, I could just plug away at the other characteristic Clefable moves: I was pretty proud of how Disable and Double Slap worked out especially, even if they didn't quite conform to regular D&D monster conventions. Yes, from there, things were pretty straightforward...

...until I got to Metronome.

Now, there are certainly easier ways I could've done this, but I really wanted to capture the breadth and unpredictability of metronome, including the one-in-a-thousand game ending shots that can potentially come about.

To achieve that, I spread the ability out to a full d20 table of possible outcomes (I originally had some of the inner results condensed together to make everything shorter, but later scrapped the idea). What I ended up doing was making half of the results be an iconic spell from each spell level from Cantrip through 9th level, capping off with wish on a natural 20 (IADnDMN Note: GMs! For the love of the gods, be kind if this comes up in your game! Use a powerful effect or spell, but don't just make it an insta-TPK; that's not fun for anyone...). The other half of the results were then filled with signature moves from Pokemon of a lot of the more popular types. This one action ended up taking up half a page, causing the stat block itself to fill up an entire page, but after all that, I honestly think it was worth it.

Aaaaand that's all o' dem.

Again, thanks a whole heap for tuning in and watching me mess around with D&D stuff live, everyone. It's kind of a dream come true, and I'm glad I can do it.

Until next time, cheers!

~IADnDMN 

Updates:

09/19/2019—Fixed minor formatting inconsistencies.
02/07/2019—Corrected misattribution for the Alucard suggestion. Sorry :/