Spell RPG

The Alexandrian escreveu:Thought of the Day: Re-Skinning
July 10th, 2011

My current layout project is taking much longer than I anticipated. (It always does.) I should have some more recycled material posted to cover the next few days and then hopefully it will be done.

For today, I’m going to just briefly reflect on just how powerful and effective re-skinning can be. It’s an important part of the DM’s toolkit. And although it’s often talked about in terms of saving prep time, I think it’s arguably more important that re-skinning can so trivially take something familiar and recast is as something mysterious, enigmatic, and evocative.

Although re-skinning has become something of a hot fad over the past couple of years, I first encountered it way back in 1990 when I read an article in Dragon Magazine that dealt with re-skinning spells. (Magic missiles are great for this: You can describe them as pretty much anything.) I think it was issue #162, which would have been my very first issue, but I won’t swear to it and I’m away from my Dragon collection at the moment.

What brought this particularly to mind today was a recent re-skinning I did in my Ptolus campaign:

The creature rears up, plunging its clawed hand into its own chest. It rips out a gob of flesh and hurls it down the length of the chamber. It strikes the wall and spatters. Small globules of white, turgid flesh writhe and bound up into blasphemous creatures of lumbering, squelching flesh…

That’s an osyluth summoning 2d10 lemures. My players were so distressed by this unfamiliar ability that I actually had difficulty finishing the description due to the outcries emanating from the table.

Okay. That’s all I’ve got for today. More tomorrow. And lots more in the near future. (I hope.)

(...)So what did I do? Not much. I didn’t touch the numbers at all. I replaced the drow name every time it came up with “spitter”, and added a blinding effect to the poison, because the movie showed that this happened.

For game mechanic purposes it is the same monster, just reskinned to be a spitting dinosaur. Your players will never know that this was a drow sniper, and the balance of the game does not suffer(...)

Se eles conhecem mesmo que em um primeiro momento re-skin tire o foco deles do que é a criatura eventualmente eles vão sacar e passar a trata-la como tal.

Agnelo escreveu:(Magic missiles are great for this: You can describe them as pretty much anything.)

Hermes escreveu:Me parece uma ferramenta anti-meta game, uma que eu discordo do uso pois é acho mais simples e criativo criar suas próprias criaturas e mitos, desta forma os jogadores não vão saber de forma alguma o que você planejou. Obviamente no caso de criar seus próprios monstros pode trazer problemas de balanço.

Eltor Macnol escreveu:Daria até pra criar um tópico na mesma veia de "um gancho por dia", com cada um postando alguma ideia doida de reskin pra algum monstro dos livros básicos.

Eltor Macnol escreveu:Daria até pra criar um tópico na mesma veia de "um gancho por dia", com cada um postando alguma ideia doida de reskin pra algum monstro dos livros básicos.