Maybe I could get a little help here. As the assistant DM the DM has asked me to help her build a NPC Monster. What she wants is a Monster Build similar to the "weeping Angels" in the Dr. Who episode "Blink". I need to go back and watch the episode myself to get all the information on the "Weeping Angels" because I'm not completely up to speed on them. I was hoping that someone here has seen the episode and knows more about them than me. I'm not sure what race or even what kind of magic they need. I've seen someone create a character from them on google somewhere (can't seem to find it now), and I was going to use that as a guide, but just can't find it now. I could probably figure out most of the stuff, but the problem I have is the movement thing. How much would an angel move if you blinked, and what happens when the angel does catch up to you? I know they can't move as long as you are looking at them, they are powerless until your either look away or even blink. That's when they can move. What kind of Monster (character) would they be?
So I know there are a ton of "Weeping Angel" monsters in the Homebrew section. However, looking through them (and knowing a bit about Dr. Who), I just don't really see the Weeping Angels as being a good D&D monster in 5e, and the reason is mostly tied to their movement.
A Weeping Angel will move blindingly fast when a creature is not observing it. Really cool for a TV show where something like "Don't Blink" can become iconic, however there are no rules in D&D for blinking, or even "facing". This is why rules regarding sneaking up behind a guard become mostly DM fiat, because according to the rules a creature in D&D is aware of everything around it unless hidden or invisible. There simply aren't rules for "The guard is facing this way, and so you can sneak up behind it because he is looking in another direction."
This is a problem for the iconic part of a Weeping Angel because so many things in D&D work on "line of sight", and so if the Weeping Angel was within your line of sight, regardless of direction, it wouldn't be able to move. There are also no rules for blinking. So really there is nothing innate to D&D to cause the tension you feel in Dr. Who because as long as the PC's don't become temporarily blinded then they would always be able to keep the Angels frozen.
The second issue comes from what the Angels do. They don't attack and do damage. They send people back in time and makes them unreachable by by time travel mechanics (ok, that is mostly specifically true to the Dr. and his companions for the sake of "why can't the guy with the time box just go back in time and pick them up" to add drama to the story, but there aren't any real backward-time travel mechanics in D&D so it is basically a mute point). So to be true to the show, as soon as a PC was touched by an Angel they would be basically dead and unrevivable.
So then the question is: why use a Weeping Angel in your campaign? You can't really make the monster like the one in the show, and reducing the Angels to "cool movement ability and then does normal damage on an attack" seems to miss the point of the Monster entirely. It's hard to do it right, much how it is hard to do true horror right in D&D because not much is scary to a level 12 Warlock who can already blast ghosts away.
I always love using fun fictional media for inspiration in my campaigns. However in this case I would probably suggest going in a different direction for the monsters. I feel like whatever you choose to do with the stat block, it will never really have the same feeling as the monster does in the show.
If you absolutely MUST use a Weeping Angel in the campaign, I would instead use this as a Skill Challenge, but the consequences would have to be real. If the party fails, maybe they get sent back far enough in the past that the campaign basically shifts and they have a new objective in a new world. The skill challenge could be needing X successes versus Y failures (depending on how hard you want to make it, maybe X is the number of party members and Y is 2X). Perception Checks to spot the Angels in time to freeze them, Athletics or Acrobatics checks to pull people who failed their Perception Checks away from the Angels, Slight of Hand to use a mirror or something else from the environment against the Angels, etc. You can even create special rules/actions, like Locking Gaze with an Angel requires an action, and you must do progressively harder Concentration Checks to maintain your gaze. Maybe Locking Gaze reduces movement speed to half-speed, etc. Have the stakes be high and there some kind of timer or scenario to ensure continual movement is necessary. Could be the door out needs two PC's to pull a lever or solve a door puzzle, and while attempting to open the door they cannot be looking at an Angel, so it falls on the other PCs to keep their gazes and their Concentration Checks up.
I think overall that sounds like a much more interesting way to use Weeping Angels as "monsters" than simply a monster stat block.
Or just use facing rules, make players decide on each of their turns what direction they're facing, and anything outside of that is considered unseen by that player. Also yeah, don't use the time travel thing. Make it something that moves fast and tries to kill instead.
Or just use facing rules, make players decide on each of their turns what direction they're facing, and anything outside of that is considered unseen by that player. Also yeah, don't use the time travel thing. Make it something that moves fast and tries to kill instead.
That could work, however without homebrewing some rules to force players to blink or a rule that you can only be focusing on one angel at a time, the players would simply all go back-to-back so they are constantly "facing" in all directions. The encounter could have things that try to pull PCs out of the circle or things that are meant to blind the PCs, but without those types of things just adding facing rules will mean the encounter is over pretty quickly. In Dr. Who the Angels cannot be destroyed (at least not easily, and not by the majority of the characters). If you're making them into stat blocks, they they would probably have HP, and thus as you are looking at them you could also attack them.
If we consider something the opposite, say a Medusa, the point is that you cannot look at them, and so attacks are at disadvantage and spell relying on seeing the target won't work. The Angels instead are totally at your mercy when you look at them, meaning as you attack them they would be frozen. If you make them totally invulnerable when they are "quantum-locked" (looked at) then the only way to destroy them would be to not look at them, which would mean they would do their attack and "send you back in time" or "kill you" I guess, at which point PCs would just be dead/gone.
Unless you gave them slower movement (something NOT Weeping Angel-like) and had them only do a claw attack when they aren't being looked at, at which point it is ran pretty much the same as a Medusa battle: you don't look at them, get disadvantage on attacks and can't use spells that require seeing the target. And now you've kind of lost all the things that make a Weeping Angel terrifying, which then begs the question: why use a Weeping Angel at all?
Yeah, I don't think D&D is the right system for Weeping Angels. Their main thing is that if you can't see them, they can attack you and if you so much as blink, they can succeed in their attack and you're effectively dead.
That's far too binary for D&D. Even with facing, it's fairly easy in D&D to set up fields of view such that when it's the Weeping Angel's turn, everyone is within sight and so safe. You could have things like Darkness, but then it becomes too hard...as I said, too binary. Add in their single-touch-victory attack and it becomes impossible.
To be fair, I don't think any of the game systems I play would handle them very well...they don't mesh well with turn based systems. Any attempt to represent them in D&D would necessitate removing the very aspects that make them interesting.
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Yeah, even though we do have some very controlled time travel in the campaign, I think using the angels would just not work. The sending back in time isn't a problem in our campaign, but that movement thingy is just too complicated and I even mentioned that to the DM. D&D just isn't going to work in the Dr. Who universe. Sure D&D does have a 'Time Travel" companion to it, but it is very limited, just basic time travel stuff we have all heard of. Magic does not fair well with Dr.Who. Too many variables, on that note, I have advised the DM against wanting to use the Dr. Who version of the Weeping Angels, but if she wanted to really use them, to come up with a more D&D version of them. She did this one time with the Daleks, and that worked out great, they were however defeated, at least we all think they were. Daleks aren't that hard to make using D&D rules. The Angels however, are a completely different beast.
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Maybe I could get a little help here. As the assistant DM the DM has asked me to help her build a NPC Monster. What she wants is a Monster Build similar to the "weeping Angels" in the Dr. Who episode "Blink". I need to go back and watch the episode myself to get all the information on the "Weeping Angels" because I'm not completely up to speed on them. I was hoping that someone here has seen the episode and knows more about them than me. I'm not sure what race or even what kind of magic they need. I've seen someone create a character from them on google somewhere (can't seem to find it now), and I was going to use that as a guide, but just can't find it now. I could probably figure out most of the stuff, but the problem I have is the movement thing. How much would an angel move if you blinked, and what happens when the angel does catch up to you? I know they can't move as long as you are looking at them, they are powerless until your either look away or even blink. That's when they can move. What kind of Monster (character) would they be?
Try
https://www.dndbeyond.com/homebrew/monsters?filter-type=0&filter-search=weeping angel&filter-cr-min=&filter-cr-max=&filter-armor-class-min=&filter-armor-class-max=&filter-average-hp-min=&filter-average-hp-max=&filter-is-legendary=&filter-is-mythic=&filter-has-lair=&filter-author=&filter-author-previous=&filter-author-symbol=&filter-rating=-11
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
So I know there are a ton of "Weeping Angel" monsters in the Homebrew section. However, looking through them (and knowing a bit about Dr. Who), I just don't really see the Weeping Angels as being a good D&D monster in 5e, and the reason is mostly tied to their movement.
A Weeping Angel will move blindingly fast when a creature is not observing it. Really cool for a TV show where something like "Don't Blink" can become iconic, however there are no rules in D&D for blinking, or even "facing". This is why rules regarding sneaking up behind a guard become mostly DM fiat, because according to the rules a creature in D&D is aware of everything around it unless hidden or invisible. There simply aren't rules for "The guard is facing this way, and so you can sneak up behind it because he is looking in another direction."
This is a problem for the iconic part of a Weeping Angel because so many things in D&D work on "line of sight", and so if the Weeping Angel was within your line of sight, regardless of direction, it wouldn't be able to move. There are also no rules for blinking. So really there is nothing innate to D&D to cause the tension you feel in Dr. Who because as long as the PC's don't become temporarily blinded then they would always be able to keep the Angels frozen.
The second issue comes from what the Angels do. They don't attack and do damage. They send people back in time and makes them unreachable by by time travel mechanics (ok, that is mostly specifically true to the Dr. and his companions for the sake of "why can't the guy with the time box just go back in time and pick them up" to add drama to the story, but there aren't any real backward-time travel mechanics in D&D so it is basically a mute point). So to be true to the show, as soon as a PC was touched by an Angel they would be basically dead and unrevivable.
So then the question is: why use a Weeping Angel in your campaign? You can't really make the monster like the one in the show, and reducing the Angels to "cool movement ability and then does normal damage on an attack" seems to miss the point of the Monster entirely. It's hard to do it right, much how it is hard to do true horror right in D&D because not much is scary to a level 12 Warlock who can already blast ghosts away.
I always love using fun fictional media for inspiration in my campaigns. However in this case I would probably suggest going in a different direction for the monsters. I feel like whatever you choose to do with the stat block, it will never really have the same feeling as the monster does in the show.
If you absolutely MUST use a Weeping Angel in the campaign, I would instead use this as a Skill Challenge, but the consequences would have to be real. If the party fails, maybe they get sent back far enough in the past that the campaign basically shifts and they have a new objective in a new world. The skill challenge could be needing X successes versus Y failures (depending on how hard you want to make it, maybe X is the number of party members and Y is 2X). Perception Checks to spot the Angels in time to freeze them, Athletics or Acrobatics checks to pull people who failed their Perception Checks away from the Angels, Slight of Hand to use a mirror or something else from the environment against the Angels, etc. You can even create special rules/actions, like Locking Gaze with an Angel requires an action, and you must do progressively harder Concentration Checks to maintain your gaze. Maybe Locking Gaze reduces movement speed to half-speed, etc. Have the stakes be high and there some kind of timer or scenario to ensure continual movement is necessary. Could be the door out needs two PC's to pull a lever or solve a door puzzle, and while attempting to open the door they cannot be looking at an Angel, so it falls on the other PCs to keep their gazes and their Concentration Checks up.
I think overall that sounds like a much more interesting way to use Weeping Angels as "monsters" than simply a monster stat block.
Or just use facing rules, make players decide on each of their turns what direction they're facing, and anything outside of that is considered unseen by that player. Also yeah, don't use the time travel thing. Make it something that moves fast and tries to kill instead.
That could work, however without homebrewing some rules to force players to blink or a rule that you can only be focusing on one angel at a time, the players would simply all go back-to-back so they are constantly "facing" in all directions. The encounter could have things that try to pull PCs out of the circle or things that are meant to blind the PCs, but without those types of things just adding facing rules will mean the encounter is over pretty quickly. In Dr. Who the Angels cannot be destroyed (at least not easily, and not by the majority of the characters). If you're making them into stat blocks, they they would probably have HP, and thus as you are looking at them you could also attack them.
If we consider something the opposite, say a Medusa, the point is that you cannot look at them, and so attacks are at disadvantage and spell relying on seeing the target won't work. The Angels instead are totally at your mercy when you look at them, meaning as you attack them they would be frozen. If you make them totally invulnerable when they are "quantum-locked" (looked at) then the only way to destroy them would be to not look at them, which would mean they would do their attack and "send you back in time" or "kill you" I guess, at which point PCs would just be dead/gone.
Unless you gave them slower movement (something NOT Weeping Angel-like) and had them only do a claw attack when they aren't being looked at, at which point it is ran pretty much the same as a Medusa battle: you don't look at them, get disadvantage on attacks and can't use spells that require seeing the target. And now you've kind of lost all the things that make a Weeping Angel terrifying, which then begs the question: why use a Weeping Angel at all?
Yeah, I don't think D&D is the right system for Weeping Angels. Their main thing is that if you can't see them, they can attack you and if you so much as blink, they can succeed in their attack and you're effectively dead.
That's far too binary for D&D. Even with facing, it's fairly easy in D&D to set up fields of view such that when it's the Weeping Angel's turn, everyone is within sight and so safe. You could have things like Darkness, but then it becomes too hard...as I said, too binary. Add in their single-touch-victory attack and it becomes impossible.
To be fair, I don't think any of the game systems I play would handle them very well...they don't mesh well with turn based systems. Any attempt to represent them in D&D would necessitate removing the very aspects that make them interesting.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Learn something new every day. I haven't watched much Dr. Who.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Yeah, even though we do have some very controlled time travel in the campaign, I think using the angels would just not work. The sending back in time isn't a problem in our campaign, but that movement thingy is just too complicated and I even mentioned that to the DM. D&D just isn't going to work in the Dr. Who universe. Sure D&D does have a 'Time Travel" companion to it, but it is very limited, just basic time travel stuff we have all heard of. Magic does not fair well with Dr.Who. Too many variables, on that note, I have advised the DM against wanting to use the Dr. Who version of the Weeping Angels, but if she wanted to really use them, to come up with a more D&D version of them. She did this one time with the Daleks, and that worked out great, they were however defeated, at least we all think they were. Daleks aren't that hard to make using D&D rules. The Angels however, are a completely different beast.