Let Your Statblocks Tell the Story

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how much a statblock can do beyond just running combat.

A good statblock doesn’t only determine what a monster can do in a fight. It can also reveal something about that creature before the story does. In one session, my players fought someone they believed to be Malar. Looking back, I initially felt like I should have done more to foreshadow that this was not actually Malar, but an imposter named Nanyx.

But when I talked to my friends about it afterwards, they pointed out something interesting: the foreshadowing was already there. It was in the statblock. The enemy they fought had very few magical abilities. It had a hunter-like mark effect, a shadowstep-style trick, and otherwise mostly fought with a normal rapier. It was a solid enemy, but it did not feel like a god. That was the first clue.

Then, within just two rounds, the party had already bloodied the enemy. That was the second clue. Something felt off before I had even started worrying about whether I had telegraphed the reveal strongly enough. That made me realize something important: sometimes players pick up on story through mechanics faster than we think they do.

If a supposed god fights like a skilled assassin, that tells a story.

If an ancient monster is strangely fragile, that tells a story.

If a villain relies on tricks, movement, and deception instead of overwhelming force, that tells a story too.

And it can work in the opposite direction as well. Earlier in this campaign, the players fought Riven Blackthorn during the Red Parade storyline. Before the campaign began, Riven had lost an arm while barely escaping a fight that he should not have survived. That piece of backstory shaped how I built him mechanically.

Since he had escaped a brutal two-against-one battle, I leaned into the idea that he would have trained himself to never be in that position again. So when I designed his statblock, I looked at the Echo Knight subclass and adapted some of those ideas into something more fitting for a major villain.

In that case, the story came first, and the statblock grew out of it.

That’s the part I really like: it works both ways. Sometimes the mechanics help foreshadow the truth before the reveal. Sometimes the history of a character tells you exactly what kind of mechanics they should have. Either way, a statblock can carry narrative weight. I think part of this also comes from the kind of characters I naturally gravitate toward in games. Whether it’s TTRPGs, video games, or even some board games, I almost always lean toward martial characters. Warriors, fighters, tanks, weapon-focused builds — that’s usually where I feel most at home. That definitely carries over into my DMing and encounter design. Writing martial statblocks comes naturally to me. Strong warriors, dangerous duelists, brutal frontliners — those are usually the easiest for me to make feel fun and threatening.

Spellcasters are a different story. That’s still something I want to get better at, because a lot of the spellcaster-style enemies I’ve written so far have ended up feeling a bit too easy to shut down.