Inb4 beholders

Playing OSR

>DMing
Basilisks and hordes of giant centipedes are common staples

>Playing
Vampires or purple worms

>Rust monster

I'm not usually that cruel to my players. Although it's a great way to take powergamers down a notch.

>whom have

That's not how whom is used.

Dragons are so incredibly cool ....wicked and egotisical, and rich and evocative and removed and interesting...with multiple attacks per round, and an area effect weapon. Dragon's horde for a reward, but hooooboy...you gotta watch out, because if it gets airborne, you're toast. Love dragons.

Rust monsters: quite cruel. A necessary bug to put in a game of power gamers. Remember they can crawl on walls and ceilings. Never apologize.

Behir: a dragon that can swallow players with two good rolls HAW HAW HAW

I think my favorite is phase spiders. They're neutral, they can ethereal jaunt. They're as weird as a monster can get. I love them. They're so strange and weird, that I could easily overuse them to mystify players.

I tend to mostly run low level games. So... Owlbear.

But not your run of the mill "I flail at it like a retarded cheerleader" owlbear. No, these bastards are cunning in that way that pigs and telemarketers are cunning. They'll play dead if a fight goes too sour, or flee. Then? Then they trail the party, nursing the nascent embers of a vendetta, something that saturates their already caustic minds and consumes them. They'll bide their time. Party has packmules? Eat one, scatter the rest. Party sleeping? Screech like an amorous proboscis monkey going to town on a coconut. John the Paladin wanders off to drop a Holy Roll in the woods? You can bet that Owlbear's gonna shit on him from above. Then... Then. When the party is as shellshocked as a bunch of Nam vets and rambling like Stallone in Rambo... Then the owlbear strikes, swooping down like a 2 ton freight train to tenderly love their collective skulls.

>No, these bastards are cunning in that way that pigs and telemarketers are cunning
Damn, sir. I like the cut of your jib.

Please tell me you haunt the PC's in their sleep with low and menacing sounds of "HhhoooOOOOoooo...!!!"

It wouldn't be proper if I didn't.

DM: the voor. My players hate that critter, it is a walking death machine and smart enough to know how to best murder everything.

Player: anything played highly intelligently.

As a GM: Genies are great for fuckery and sadly underutilized

As a player: Orcs because I'm just kinda sick of fighting them all the fucking time

Goddamn owlbears are fucking amazing

I need to use these things

> Genies are great for fuckery and sadly underutilized

This is tragically true. I think my own problem with them is that I don't like their aesthetic. I'd have to find a way for them to be a BBEG of an arc or something and they just aren't in the front of my brain when planning.

Land Sharks

Ghosts

Sphinxes. For their riddles I just make up some vague bullshit on the fly and then when a player says something clever I pretend that was the answer all along

>As a GM
Skeletons. They're a good introduction into resistances and vulnerabilities for new players. And since a lot of things have a skeleton, they tend to stay viable as enemies for a long time provided you're willing to homebrew.

>As a Player
Recently it's been lycanthropes. The combined factor of regeneration/immunity and the fact that once you fight one there's always gonna be that one guy in the party that intentionally gets cursed. The last game I was in ended up with a party where only one character wasn't a shapeshifter.

10/10

When I am pissed off I usually throw at my players a combo of disenchanters and rust monsters being ride by pugwampi gremlins.

>As GM
Can I cheat and say "environments"? Giving a monster home field advantage, or at least some battlefield conditions, prevents "battle to the death in the empty matrix" syndrome.

More specifically I'd say things like ogres, trolls, fairies, giants - typical fairy-tale things. It preys on firmly established preconceptions of "big ugly monster in the dark" that even new players have. Or giant bugs. Giant rats have some degree of ick, but bugs evoke a smash-first reflex.

>As a player
Anything swarm-y
Mechanics-wise, once we get the upper hand it becomes a chore to finish them all off. If they run, it becomes a story problem. Depending on the enemy we might have lingering threats, a soiled reputation, an information leak, or just general loose ends.

Came here to post this.

These fucking cunt monsters are the reason we all have specially treated elven armour made of wood.

Then suddenly out of nowhere Dire Woodlice

Mimic
Gelatinous Cube

As DM, my favorite official stat-block creature that I throw at my players are Liches, especially ones with different spell lists, escape plans, and a few wizard school traits. Sometimes, if my players are really strong, I'll even put the lich's phylactery inside of an iron golem, so that when they destroy the lich's body, they have to kill an iron golem with spellcasting powers that drops from the ceiling to finish the job. If I can find a legitimate reason to actually do it, I like pitting my players against Solars too.

As a player, I definitely hate opponents with hard crowd control abilities. Although I can teleport out of a grapple, things that cast Hold Person and the likes of are a scary thing.

Other PCs for both.

Anything with an effect that has a massive effect after the battle- creatures that inflict serious illnesses, curses, or damage to equipment. They fuck you up good.

I like your style user. Have a pancake manta ray.

This is a Rune Quest beastie called a Head Hanger.

It steals people's heads and "eats" them - pushing them into the gnashing stump at the front-end of it's body that passes for a mouth, and extruded onto the tentacles that line it's back.

The heads retain their former knowledge, from spells to the locations of their nearest loved ones, which the Head-Hanger has access to while the head is still attached - the heads are slowly digested, losing one POW a day from the head's original total as a living creature, until it reaches 0, at which point the creature's soul has been completely devoured by the head-hanger.

A soul can be saved from digestion by the head-hanger by cutting off the captive head - this does not save the life of the person who's head has been taken - they are already dead, but it can save what is left of their soul.

The Heads themselves are puppeteered by the head-hanger and shriek and bite and spit at anything that comes near.

Once a Head-hanger loses a captured head it immediately loses access to the head's memories and spells - as if it never had them.

Honestly if sphinxes don't actually make shit up on the fly too..

DM: Demons, probably

Player: Anything with the Blink rule. Had a GM who abused the fuck out of blink once.

I like using a coven of hags for a good low-level villian. From levels 1-5 the PCs encounter all sorts of plot hooks and minor underlings that points to displeased fairy witches. Plus, they are the kind of monster that clever or sociable PCs can bargain with or at least talk to, since they might have motives that let the players discuss other resolutions than just killing everything. They can even defeat or kill a few members of the coven before facing off against the more powerful and vengeful leader.

Grells are sweet

DM: Goblins or other mooks in droves, and tough locations.

PC: Anything that stuns/paralyzes/forces you to lose an action. It's no fun not acting, and it's even less fun waiting 20 minutes for the other four chucklefucks to find their base attack bonus on their sheet, goddamn.

In after beholder

>not using dragon scale
the answer to this problem is older than most Veeky Forums posters.